Another OCDB Review, and why I have chosen to use it
I made a pledge in June 2018 to never use bid bots ever again but recently have broken this and sent some STEEM on several occasions to @ocdb.
To be honest I have been wrestling with this for some time and I though I don’t have to explain myself for such partaking in ‘dirty deeds’ I will endeavour to anyway.
What’s different about OCDB?
Not anybody can expect to use it. You need to be manually white listed, there’s currently 2900 people on the approved list and no more are being added…. Yet.
It’s a non-profit bot, which means if you send 10 STEEM to it and the link to your post, you will get a vote back that is larger than this value, and that is still true minus the curation cuts which the author does not receive.
Who runs OCDB?
@acidyo is the brain behind OCDB and his team of curators who add people to it depending on the quality of their work. You can’t apply to become a member of OCDB even when applications are open, but you can recommend others.
OCDB looks like an exclusive club
Yes, it is; it’s exclusive for writers who have proven themselves. Want to join to club?
Don’t bemoan that you’re not part of it, start typing and write something that you might feel has some value. It just isn’t that hard and they may notice you.
How did you become a member of OCDB?
I have no idea, I wasn’t even aware of its existence until I noticed the OCDB whitelist page and that I was included.
Why are you now using BOTS again?
It was a difficult decision and I really don’t need to use OCDB to gain myself any attention. If I’m being honest, I find them a temptation, not to see my post with a pending reward of $40 but simply because this one returns a guaranteed profit with the bonus of boosting my reputation quicker.
Who gives a shit about reputation?
It makes a difference when it comes to flagging. I am an active member of @steemflagrewards and we often get retribution in the form of vengeance flags.
The can come from bad content creators who may have a higher reputation than yours truly due to bid bot abuse that has gone on long term.
I would rather have a higher reputation than these people if possible and this will help me achieve that and avoid any reputation loss via their retribution actions.
You are using a ‘bid bot’ now, so what the difference between you and them?
I have never had a problem with bod bots, but when someone’s content is five words and a picture with a pending reward of $40 then I do.
If you can find any of my posts that come into my category you will be looking for a long time.
An argument I heard recently is of the size of the daily reward pool. @ocdb is a large account, have a look and you will see what I mean.
It hands out paid rewards to people who have proved themselves worthy of a slice of the pool. I would rather see this chunk of the pool handed to the proven than the abusers.
Your arguments for using @ocdb are thin and sketchy.
I can take that, and they are not as credible as I would like them to be. Part of me is still rebuking what I am doing but when I see more and more established authors doing it, should I really abstain from doing it myself?
Am I on the @ocdb list?
Have a look, if your mugshot is here, then you are on and eligible to use it's service.
The queue for an @ocdb vote is long and this ensures that everyone who votes up my content will gain a nice curation reward for doing so. The growing length of the wait for a vote is a concern to me.
The number of members is not increasing but I think @acidyo has plans to re-open the gates in the future.
Without more delegation or a more severe restriction on the value of bids it may just get out of hand. I see some bids are now over 100 STEEM and the wait time can be over 28 hours.
The longest wait is currently 1273 minutes but I have seen it in excess of 1600 minutes recently.
What I am seeing is more and more people using @ocdb and this post may result in more looking at it and potentially wanting to use it.
Is this going to change how things are, and is it going to isolate new people from what they see as the ‘reward bubble’?
I noticed @revisesociology has recently posted about @ocdb again and maximising curation rewards.
There is something in that and the timing of your vote on posts that you know are going to gain a @ocdb vote.
Source
While I’m not going to target posts that I know are headed for @ocdb his post makes for interesting reading. The trick is to get your vote in early to gain more in curation rewards than you vote is worth.
I would say make your own decisions about the ethics of @ocdb. I personally like the fact that there is a ‘club’ and that the writers that are ‘in’ have been vetted on a personal level.
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.
I get your reasons, but its personally not for me. I was here before there were bidbots. Back then whales didnt have any bots to delegate to, so they upvoted others. Now that has totally changed. You are not going to be a whale upvote, except for @blocktrades once in a while. I think bidbots have fundamentally and permanently hurt the intrinsic value of the coin, yet I have many friends that use them. Hell I may be the only person on the site not to use them and I am ok with that.
I think your arguments make good sense and actually made me go and check if I am on the list which I was surprised to find I was, I have never used it for an upvote, I to generally stayed away from upvote bots but now you have me wondering if I should reconsider in this case
I doesn't surprise me, you have been around forever, are a frequent poster and a member of @thesteemengine. There's few of us left and I remember it being tough to join and tales about many being rebuked.
I'd be willing to bet most current TSE members are now white-listed on @ocdb.
It's still tough to join. When we first got started, anyone could join -- and OMG, you should have seen some of the crap I had to wade through every night. 80+ posts and most of it just dreadful!! (You can just imagine the TIME it consumed every day!! Seriously!!)
So, we put some basic standards for quality in place -- and found we were rejecting over 80% of applicants on that basis alone. (One of those "standards" was the ability to follow simple directions in submitting your membership application. Amazing how many people just couldn't seem to do that. The "killer question" seemed to be, "List 3 - 5 posts which you think are outstanding examples of your work." An astonishing number of people just couldn't be arsed to even try. We'd get answers like "All of them." So we'd look at the latest one -- and find it wasn't anything to write home about. So ... out went the "thanks-but-no-thanks" letter, and that was the end of that.)
I spent the next several months weeding out the most dismal of the bunch. (It was quite an exercise in personal growth, frankly. I don't think I'd be as timid and polite any more. If your work is crap, it's crap. And if you've made it into adulthood without learning how to write a basic sentence someone who speaks the language can understand, there's not much hope you'll improve.)
I personally tried to help two different people who I thought showed promise. Both of them wound up leaving Steemit -- fairly quickly. So, I consider that time wasted.
We do have a terrific group now. I'm proud of all of them. I also have my eye on a list of others to add sometime soon. So, you should see some new faces before long. We'll see how it goes. It makes me really proud that so many of our members made this whitelist. It seems to mean something.
LOL, I was laughing while reading the top part of this.
Hmm, the british way of saying this word, I see the cat has had some influence over your wording choices!
Just when was this time when the doors were all opened? they most defiantly were not when I tried.. around April 1st 2018 or thereabouts.
The STEEM Engine started the day after Christmas 2017. By April, I'd got a handle on it. The experience of a lifetime, I promise you.
That’s true I guess TSe is such a strong group of active members :)
Ach - I'm not on the whitelist, which is a shame as I would love to use this service. (Neither is @meesterboom - maybe they have something against Glaswegians, hmm?)*
I read and commented on @revisesociology's post about this, and I'll say the same thing again - I don't use bidbots, but that's not so much for "ethical" reasons as because I think they're a mug's game. Personally speaking. However I see OCDB as an investment in quality and effort.
Ultimately, Steemit is a game, not a religion, so if people want to abuse it, that's up to them. But it makes it less fun for the rest of us. I love seeing how the community tries to police itself, in a decentralised way. I want to encourage things that make Steemit more of a quality platform. If OCDB does that and produces financial rewards in the process, I think that's great.
*Please don't take that comment seriously :)
There's a couple of comments on here from those who dont like it, and thats OK.. everyone has their opinion. It wont replace manual curation, or at least not with me.. I still do plenty of that.
The 'boommaster' is not on the list, I dont know why..
It's a sort of bid bot compromise - and as more people get onboarded I guess the rewards will be distributed more widely.
I'll recommend you next round!
Also as @slobberchops says it's one way to increase the return on yr investment when you've bought most of yr steem.
I don't think anyone's that aware of where people come from to hold anything against them!
Posted using Partiko Android
Thanks for recommending me to @acidyo and OCDB @revisesociology. I now seem to be on the whitelist - yay! I'll try using it for my next post.
Excellent! You'll probably find it encourages you to buy more steem too!
Posted using Partiko Android
Thanks @revisesociology! That's good of you. I have had a few OCD upvotes, but maybe you need a certain number to get included.
The Glasgwegian comment was just a joke - definitely not intended to be taken seriously!
I don't think your arguments are sketchy at all, they make sense.
It all holds together because you say you're not against bidbots, just against bid bot abuse.
And a very fair point about rep, I hadn't anticipated such a dramatic effect on my reputation for using @ocdb, it's a nice perk.
I think as I said in my original post on @ocdb last month, when I discovered it, it's not the most ethical thing in the world to be part of, but in the context of steem with bid-bots and vote circles, it's a pragmatic compromise to make 'POB' work.
I think the reason you're on it is because you would have been @ocd'd back in the day.
Handy to have an off the peg post ready to go.
Cheers!
Karl.
I have been a long bid-bot veto person, and using this may look to be hypocrisy to some. I see so many people using it that have not used the usual smartsteem, therising etc.. that it made me look a little closer.
The fact that it waits to vote until it is 100% and that it guarantees a positive return made me want to try it. We cant eradicate the bots, that's a fact.. so why not support one that is doing something different than the rest.
I'm not using it to appear on Trending.. as well all know that nobody looks there anyway. I will still manually curate things, nothing has changed in that respect.
I was struggling with this too and to be honest, I haven't been using it because of you. You know that though :) I could just see the disappointment in your crazy wild eyed face! I like the fact that they roll the curation rewards back into the account and don't take a profit from it. @acidyo has something really great going and you are right, it is a very exclusive club. I realize it might kill my chances at a @curie if I use it, but I am getting big enough that they will probably start ignoring me soon anyway.
I'm not sure if it will make a @curie difference. The wait is so long, you may get both.
We shall see!
I was in your same shoes previously, I only used bots a handful of times before I stopped as I figured it was all poinless. However, I never went as far as making a pledge not to use them ever again,
Then a few months ago, despite my efforts I figured I wasn't really getting anywhere. My rep wasn't high enough to attract the whales, I didn't have a wealthy community behind me, I don't blog about profound or crypto stuff, and I don't engage enough (ok the last one is on me, I know). So I figured the best way forward was to help myself. I didn't want to use bots for the sake of using bot as anyone with tonnes of money can do that, and that would take me back to square one. The OCDB was a bit different, like you say it's a 'club' where members have been vetted.
If I can't resist a bag of crisps, then the best I can do is to get some baked and not deep fried ones. It makes my feel better and that's what matters in the end.
I guess you have used it a few times then, I cant say I have really checked to see who the regulars are.
Yes, its is different from the rest and my vow will stay in place regarding the other ones.
We don't seem to cross paths much, though I often see you on the Steemitworldmap.
But yes, I'm with you on the other bots
Aww, I've been hoping to get added to their whitelist, but no luck so far. I don't think I would ever use their bidbot though, so maybe there isn't a real benefit for me.
I won't look at you any different if you started using it though :)
I'm surprised your not on there, in fact there are several prominents who are missing. I know this is a touchy subject with you, and I'm not going to use it for every post I make.
Don't worry about it, I have a love/hate relationship with the bidbots. Someone using bidbots on a good post won't prevent me from upvoting it ;)
I'm on the whitelist. I don't remember getting a great return but you know what I have 10 steem waiting in my wallet so I'm going to use it on my latest post and see what happens. I might report back and I might forget because I'm probably going to do something else and forget.... let's be honest.
Do you know how long it takes them to upvote you? I still haven't received that upvote. Now that I think about it I don't think I got voted last time either even though I'm on the whitelist. I wonder what's up with that?
Congratulations! This post has been chosen as one of the daily Whistle Stops for The STEEM Engine!
You can see your post's place along the track here: The Daily Whistle Stops, Issue 445 (04/01/19)
Ooft, you had me for a moment. Then I saw it was April the first!