The end of an era - the last truly profitable vote-buying service dries up.
I was worried this was coming when I saw the public announcement of @ocdb. While OCDB was semi-stealth and whitelist-only, it was the last vote-buying service that was worth using, up until three days ago when it became public knowledge — and the vote amount was drastically reduced.
For all the talk of it being a new kind of bot, OCDB is now a less-functional carbon-copy of Minnowbooster and Smartmarket, returning a fixed 150% of the send, which is marginally profitable in theory and not really worthwhile in practice.
This has been coming for a while. Profitability fell drastically over the summer with the price of Steem, or more accurately with the price of SBD. The market's been driving money away from voters, but not the market for votes. Instead it's the market for delegation, as the bot owners have been in a full-force price war giving higher and higher returns to keep their delegators.
It's been eating the bot market alive, slowly, clandestinely. I did a haphazard profitability check not too long ago and the conclusion I came to was that unless you're postpromoter or Smartsteem, operating a bid-bot is at best a proposition of buying yourself a drastic overtime tech-support job.
The discounters haven't come off better. Minnowbooster has cut profitability repeatedly and is still struggling, with delegation less than one-third of when I started using it. Tipu had to cut profitability and force votes later to get curation rewards before the fork.
It's still possible to make money off of some of these services, but it takes a lot of work. Just getting the bigger votes from Minnowbooster requires skill, watching the account's voting power, and sending at just the right time. And once you can get them, you have to constantly be aware of what the price of Steem is doing, because a drop in the feed price can wipe you right out.
All that for a dollar or two per post. I've been pretty well convinced I was going to stop buying votes after the hard fork anyway, and this just reinforces it. When SBD was $3 and it was making me $50 a post, putting 45 minutes or an hour into being good at buying votes made a certain amount of sense. Now there's maybe five dollars per post to be had, and those skills aren't useful anymore, at least for me in the US.
Some people – maybe those in poorer countries – will still push at them. @paulag showed us some stats today that indicate the vote-buying market is consolidating into a small group of very-high-volume users. Which makes sense as it's getting less and less user-friendly to buy a vote and actually get anything out of it, and matches what I'm seeing as a Minnowbooster affiliate. I've invited more than 4000 users, but there are only about five who are making me any noticeable money right now.
We may actually be on the verge of seeing bots being used for promotion only, and the thin veil of respectability becoming the service they really have to rely upon, which would be pretty funny.
This could all come back, especially if an SBD pump injects a bunch more money into the system, but I don't think the delegators, having worked their way up to returns this high, are going to allow the market to come down again. My prediction is that vote-buying as a means of making money is in its death throes, and it's time to move on to something else.
In the words of John Gorka: "If the world ended today, I would adjust."
Ocdb was unreleased for a long time due to it being non-profit and development on it being a bit slow, this is not to blame the people maintaining it as we were not in a rush to get it released ourselves the same way as we were not in a rush to restart the normal curation of @ocd as we wanted to align it with the account creation fix with HF20.
You're right that it has dried up a bit recently but that is to be expected, our delegators are not in a rush to receive max profit (at least not the original ones) same way as they decided to delegate to ocdb instead of other bid bots when it was unreleased knowing that during the testing phases the bot was giving out way too high ROI at the cost of the delegators. This can easily be fixed by increasing the percentage of votes people can buy.
Our primary concern has been with bid bot services serving mostly the owners and that's why we created ocdb to work alongside our curation initiatives. We like to think ocdb is a lot more than just a bid bot but it is understandable that at this time it might not seem that way. We are going to try our best to make this a author friendly bid bot and not leave too many people out of it that we feel deserve to use it to grow on this platform. Entitlement is something strong in the community so there will always be people crying foul but much like everything around here all is voluntary.
If anything we hope ocdb will raise the bar of bid bots and we hope to see similar competition arise.
This isn't to blame OCDB for anything. And in terms of your projects I was delighted to hear that main-line OCD is coming back. We've missed you.
I certainly don't mean to blame the people maintaining it, especially since the long beta period kept you as a relic of really useful vote-sellers well beyond the entire rest of the market. It's unfortunate that has changed now, but you have to be responsive to market realities just like anybody else. The idea of a user-restricted service that gives more value to positive community members is a strong one, but Minnowbooster and Qustodian have shown it doesn't really work for the delegators. Maybe you can market it better than they have, and make it work. I hope so. But I think the market is working against you.
Well we're not going to be that strict on the restrictions and unlike one of the others you mentioned @ocdb will forever remain non-profit. We can't make delegators delegate to ocdb if they get more profit from a for-profit bid bot, that's why we had to go down on the ROI but with additional curation on good posts that happened to use @ocdb we want to strive for increased quality and making it worth everyone's time and money.
I've quit using them also unless I think I have something important to say.
It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to demand when customers really are just paying for promotion they way they've liked to pretend. Or will people just not notice that the numbers don't add up? Either way could happen.
hiya poly so is ocdb then not a good dele? itook mine away from smartseem, steemua and a few others. thoughts?
In terms of return it should be essentially on par with any of the others. Their whitelist is probably the most exclusive if that matters to you, but I'm not sure they're maintaining it, so someone who got curated by OCD six months ago and has completely changed their posting could be on it. (Like me.)
If you want return + community benefit I'd look at the special promos at the top of the Minnowbooster leasing market and lease to somebody like Dustsweeper, though at 500 SP+ right now those might be bigger than you want.
i’m whitelisted and on the list. 500 is a bit high since im
helping out a few planks and upvoting alot/dele for their RC. i’ll keep with ocd for a couple of weeks and see if the roi is any good.
I've been arguing most of this year that the rise of bid bots was because of the imbalance between curation reward and author reward, exaggerated by SBD premium. With actual rewards divided so unevenly, smart curators figured out how to capture part of the author reward.
I think the collapse of vote buying services in the face of SBD premium compression is strong evidence, but what do I know?
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Curators try to get author rewards, and vice versa, because humans are like that, not because they're "imbalanced." It doesn't matter what you set the numbers at, people will always try to optimize.
I have seen this coming for a while too, It's a topic I discuss all the time with @cryptosharon... While bigger users seem to still be resorting to bid votes, users with smaller stakes seem to be going for community bots, those that you can delegate to and recieve a daily upvote based on delegation or you pay for a monthly subscription and secure an upvote a day for your posts for some visibility.
Yeah, I didn't really want to go into that part since I work for SBI, and navigating my opinions on various services in that light is more trouble that it's worth sometimes. But they definitely seem like the next big thing, along with curation services like @nfc on the delegators' side.
I think these are the future too... at least for while the Steem price is down and SBD is on the peg...
this has been the case for awhile and many times the community ones arent paying very well ... ove been in quite a few for awhile and othees not so long because the value isnt worth it.
@steem-ua seems to be worth it. For now, at least, and for those with high UA ranks. I've been getting more than I would if I were to delegate it to @minnowbooster, for example.
yeah minnowbooster hasnt been good for me, that ive seen. i have tried ua and it did not work for me. bah
Hmmmm. We'll have to keep looking. UA has been decent enough for me, but it's just as effective as your influence is big, and with bigger influence comes a greater income, so it's always just as ineffective in my opinion. I'll have to do some calculations before I keep my delegation there.
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they all do seem to have the same roi depending on the amount delgated. 🤷🏽♀️
miss ya girl and hope you are okay.
Yeah you're right. Nowadays, I see more dedication to community bots.
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@lunaticpandora
services like @ua-steem @qurator and @silvergoldbotty offer daily upvotes if you delegate SP. I think @kiwibot does it too but you have to send SBD or SP not delegate.
I prefer the delegation based services too instead of having to pay sbd/steem.
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He uses @steem-ua and @qurator already. We should look into the @silvergoldbotty. Thanks for the recommendations.
We offer upvotes for sending Steem or SBD.
So, like the old @randowhale or distributed votes during a period of time?
@cryptosharon
They have a breakdown on their blog: https://steemit.com/kiwicommunity/@kiwibot/in-an-attempt-to-be-more-transparent-3-or-kiwicommunity-weekly-update
Their highest tier is 1 KiwiVote per day, 5x as large as tier basic upvotes per post.
Id rather delegate to them and get upvotes that way and not have to pay out my earned SBD/SP every month though.
At first I was not sure I liked SBI, have gotten used to it now, but did not go hog wild on buying, (if I had more steem I could change my mind), I also was not sure on the new startup inciniboost (i think that is how it is spelled), 5 steem was a lot to save up at my levels. So far I am pretty happy with them, and I do not need to figure out how to use a bid bot, although I keep forgetting how to get more sbi's and incinboost, but I can find the info when I have the funds. I am still not sure on steemua, I am not sure I like their level/rep system I really have some issues with some of the rankings. But will try to not let it bother me to much as I do get an okay vote from them.
I think the scaling back/consolidation of the bid bots is going to actually be a good thing for steem and steemit, especially when/if SMT's do become a reality, as a promotion tool it would work good, I think.
Lack of profitability is a good thing, but until delegation to these false curation bots declines, the problems with trending will remain. False curation keeps eroding the intrinsic value of the platform with early uncurated upvotes while real curation initiatives such as utopian are delaying upvotes to the last few hours, keeping that content out of trending. I think that if we want STEEM to grow, it should become socially unacceptable to delegate to false curation services of any kind. Especially now with G+ about to end, there is a lot of potential for growth that might need some new initiatives for delegation. I think with a lot of advocacy and community delegation G+ fugitives have the potential to boost the platform by growing the user base significantly and by bringing in new good content. False curation and more importantly funding of false currarion through delegation I believe goes 180 degrees against that potential.
At this point the bidbots are mostly improving Trending, and that's been true for a while now. While there's still some crap there, the decline in profitability is allowing notable projects – which actually benefit from the advertising – to get to the top and stay there more often.
"Organic Trending" is well-used elsewhere and has proven to be a process that leads to Kanye. It's not better.
I've been experimenting with some scripts that create an alt trending page, filtering out known bidbots, known delegator vote bots, self votes, votes by accounts linked through witnesses voting proxy settings and account recovery settings and votes part of an upvotes burst and clockwork votes. The result, a trending list more closely representing true curation looked a whole lot better than the real trending at each test I ran. I'm seriously considering an automated This is what Trending should have looked like this week weekly post. The idea that false curation, in whatever form, is in any way beneficial can easily be shown incorrect. We should be bidding for curation time, not for false curation. Get a real person in the loop.
Is this not what @ trufflepig does?
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Yeah, those services are dying. A couple of months ago I used minnowbooster but it did not go so well because by the time of payment (7 days later) the price had dropped so much that there was practically no profit.
Thanks for your opinion on the state of bid bots, seems the days of 200% bid to vote ratio is gone unless the price rises.
If you are a Qurator member you can use @qustodian though the upvotes are limited for less than a dollar it seems.
Qustodian got a disappointingly large drop in profitability over the summer, too. Restricting users doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the market forces here.
SBI has always been the better option to vote buying IMO. It's a lot less flashy since you don't get a 50.00 vote but in the long run more profitable. And I think this site needs a lot more long-run attitude so we break free of the pump and dump mindset afflicting every crypto project. I used to buy buildawhale votes but only because it is owned by another veteran whom I felt alright supporting, and because it was leveling my account, which despite being a worthless endeavor, looks better to some people, and I was trying to look more respectable before I started running contests. Since vote buying is at the level where only those with huge amounts of free cash can squeak any kind of profit or visibility out of them, I personally see it just going back to the original Steemit problem of the biggest accounts vote swapping each other. What's more concerning to me is a trend I'm noticing in the top curation groups is the circle of upvoting being drawn tighter and tighter, specifically to the content being posted by their own curators or friends of those curators. Which again brings me back to thinking that SBI may be the last saving grace of this platform, where users can earn/buy their own ongoing rewards for activity.
The pump-and-dump mindset is certainly getting to me this week.