Bot (mainly focused on bidbots) Usage on Steemit: How We Can Make Steemit Great (Again)!!
Hey guys! This post was inspired by this article regarding bots and will focus on a few things related to bots, mainly the effects bidbots are having on this platform and ways we can combat it.
Table of Contents
- Personal use of bidbots
- Effects of bidbots on the platform
- A world without bidbots
- Solutions for this problem
Personal Use of Bidbots
Long story short, I use them a lot! I find it very difficult to get any sort of audience unless I use bidbots.
These days I sometimes don't get any comments even when I DO use bidbots, but the chances of people seeing my work increases a lot with the use of bidbots. I'm tempted to go back and do some regression on the effects of bidbots, but that can wait until after my exams...
I usually use bidbots on things that I want lots of people to see (like my weekly follower contest), or things that I reckon deserve to be in hot or trending because I put in a lot of effort, OR I think what I said is quite thoughtful/profound/others might want to see it.
Effects of Bidbots
The effects of bidbots are pretty clear, just look at hot and trending and see how many of the biggest upvotes are from bidbots, chances are most if not all of the top 5 biggest votes are from bidbots. Below are the votes for the currently ranked #1 and #2 trending posts.
As you can see, the top 6-7 largest votes on both posts are from bidbots, these posts aren't actually the 1st and 2nd most valuable posts on the blockchain right now, these posts are simply the most advertised. Essentially, using bid-bots are paying for advertising, thus sometimes profitable and sometimes not so profitable.
Imagine a World Without Bidbots
In the perfect world, whatever has the greatest "value"(subjective) should rise to the top. For example, I have put in a lot of effort to write this post but I see other people's articles that literally look like a thesis, with obviously a lot of time put into it so I DON'T think this post deserves to be top of all trending or anything, but I do feel this post should at least be in "hot" for some of the tags. However, with the current state of Steemit, I know that's not a reality. I will need to purchase bidbot votes to push it to hot, then hope some big whale sees it, resteems it and upvotes it and pushes it to trending (as I lack the funds to push a post to trending).
Realistically, I reckon we'd still be seeing the same few people always at the top of trending, however they'll probably be different people. I think with bidbots, we're actually increasing the diversity of people on trending as there's more people who can afford bidbots than people who have enough popularity/connections to rise to the top. The point is that if you produce consistent high quality content, you'll get there someday. However, there are too many bots and not enough manual curators for that to happen!!
Solutions to the problem
There are many. Some more feasible than others, some more short term and some more long term.
For today, I'd like to focus on two solutions: increase EFFECTIVE curation rewards and limit trending posts.
Firstly, increasing effective curation, but what do I mean by effective? Simple, this means being more adequately awarded for upvoting posts that are genuine, thoughtful and provide value in some sense to the ecosystem. How do we measure that? I think that'll be easier once SMTs are out, but for now we can just increase the weighting for curation rewards. This will discourage people delegating to bots as they will earn less ROI compared to manually curating, but of course this leaves the problem of vote selling services. Overall, I think this is a problem that SMTs will be able to solve!
The second idea is the main idea I'd like to talk about. It's simply having a limit on the number of articles on the hot and trending pages for authors. For example, only one article per author for every 50 articles on the trending page can be seen.
So, if someone has an article that should be number 3, number 7 and number 12 on trending, the article at number 3 will stay at number 3 but the article at number 7 will be pushed to 51 and the article at number 12 will be pushed to number 101. This should decentivise authors from spamming trending and hot pages with bid bots and help give more authors a chance to be in the top!
If the article at rank 7 decays down to rank 19, but the rank 12 one stays at rank 12, then the 2 articles will swap positions (51 and 101). Of course, this just means the top 50 will have a lot more variety, but how many people scroll past the top 50 anyways?
I think this solution will have a larger impact on vote buying, as theoretically if you buy enough votes, only one article will be in top 50 every ~3 days.
Thanks for reading!
What do you feel about these ideas and opinions? Feel free to discuss your view on bidbots below!
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Hi im 2 months old in steemit i have used muy time im doing xperiment wih bots or rentirng SP... Until now i have noticed using BID bots its more usefull for y yo grow because all the efective grow comes by getting audience And the only wsy l get notice its by using the bots as publicity And anyways if u dont have good conten you wont get audience anyway
bid bots are pretty effective if you know how to use them correctly. I don't see them going away.
It's true, that's why we need to make sure it's not as effective anymore!
They arent going away until there is some support from the witnesses but atm alot of them have them and make massive profits - they need to think long term because bots arent good for the platform.
I think if bots are here to stay then there should be some type of auditing of quality control where if you bid and your content is crap then you dont get a refund - and maybe the vote is donated to a community like msp or curie. This would hopefully make people think twice about promoting sub par content
These are great ideas! But as what I always say, it is up for those who are in the top to hear the silent screams of the plankton. 😂 A little upvote from them makes a plankton like me feel like I've topped in the trending page though. 😂 Great post by the way. Hoping for the better Steemit community as the days go by!
Thanks! I reckon there needs to be a wider spread of wealth for this to really happen, which is why minnows rising up through the ranks is a very good thing for the platform!
Maybe 1,000 minnows will be able to match a whale vote someday!!
Welcome! I'll be looking forward for it. 😊
This post has received votes totaling more than $50.00 from the following pay for vote services:
rocky1 upvote in the amount of $45.13 STU, $64.91 USD.
therising upvote in the amount of $37.83 STU, $53.81 USD.
For a total calculated value of $83 STU, $119 USD before curation, with a calculated curation of $5 USD.
This information is being presented in the interest of transparency on our platform and is by no means a judgement as to the quality of this post.
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Most of us are using bots to gain some promotion and upvotes .Its not simply to earn some money on steem in organic way(upvote by real steemian).If steemian stop ignoring some people post and support each other it would be great
Bid bots also make it easier for shitposts to get better payouts. I've seen plenty of people with high reps just posting any old shit, upvoting themselves and slapping a bot vote on top of that hit the trending page and reap the reward pool. Its as if since they 'made it" they dont need to put the required effort they had to in the beginning or like many of the smaller accounts are required to do in order to become succesful
Hola @crytoeater
Gracias. Lo necesito mucho.
Saludos
Particularly I see with more concern the cronyism among the whales, the bitbots are often necessary for more people to see the publications because if you do not have whale friends they never or almost never vote for you