Bot Bids, Bot Tracker, and You
Today's topic is about bidding bots. What's fascinating about them is that they allow a crowd to decide the multiplier for the vote that the crowd receives. These bots are voting accounts that vote every time their voting power reaches 100% (in most cases, some go to 50%, etc), and the votes are allocated to bidders that bid during this recovery time, in proportion to the bid amount.
The main purpose is to boost a post's visibility soon after a post is published in the hopes of sending to hot or trending sections. The secondary purpose is simply to turn a profit, or to tip other posts when your voting power is exhausted. We know what most people use it for, now myself included on this list.
In any case, I wanted to list out a few observations I had concerning the bid bots now that I have played a bit with them.
Bid Bot Multiplier
Here's the deal. If the vote value is V, and the total bids total to J bids (in SBD), then the multiplier that everyone in the pool will receive is V/J.
It's that simple. Bot operators may cap what J is allowed to be to determine a “minimum multiplier” for the service, and refund any bids taking the amount over that cap. Though I do not see these caps publicized anywhere. Also, if that minimum multiplier is too low, at a time of high demand for votes, users may end up at a loss relative to the market.
The appeal is clear: if you don't have a friendly whale to vote you, you can choose to spend a little to get the same effect.
When to Bid
Given the math behind the bot, the key is to use the bot when it isn't busy, and such times you would be able to use larger bids to get a much higher multiplier compared to less busy times. I won’t have guidance here, but there is some inklings from Google search, like this post from 4 months ago that did some analysis.
It should be interesting to see what the total historical bids received in SBD / upvote size was in terms of the multiplier. That gives an idea of at what time the multiplier is largest for a given bot. I do not have this data though. Seems like a great feature to add for the Steem Bot Tracker of @yababpmatt !
Bid Amounts
As for the question, “How much should I throw as a bid?” The answer is, if it’s not busy, feel free to put as much as you need, though the usual caveats apply (Others may disagree with what you have given yourself).
And if you put the minimum bid allowable, you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck. Best case, you get the entire 100% vote for yourself for a pittance (ha! not likely). Worst case, too many bidders bid, the bids fill up and you get the minimum multiplier set by the bot, which hopefully should be set to something reasonable. And no other bid amount would have changed that multiplier.
However, there is one other consideration: timing the vote so that it hits as early as possible after your post is published. This means more of the vote will go to the author, due to the reverse auction aspect of curation. If you are able to get a vote at 0 minutes, you get the entirety of that vote’s value. If you get a vote at 15 minutes, you get 87.5% of the value, and so on. This is a point that I do not have confirmation on other than a few other posts on the subject. I’ve took a preliminary glance at code and was not able to find the relevant parts. Will make a further update about this if I find where it is, or some other post that confirms this behavior.
Did I make money?
See this post about the profit calculation, given curation percentage, the vote value, and the input. The bot tracker also shows this computation in various forms which is useful as well. To compare the computations done, set everything to be in terms of SBD.
Summary
The multiplier on the upvotes that go to bidders is simply the total upvote value divided by the sum of bids in SBD amount.
Studying how busy the bots are is the secret to getting the largest vote multiplier on your bids.
Everyone should be using Steem Bot Tracker to track current bids, and bids in the past round, as well as the profit computation.
A few suggestions that might augment the bot tracker:
- If it's possible to determine what the minimum multiplier is (when bid bots start to reject / refund bids).
- Show breakdown of historical multipliers by time.
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Greta post I do understand the logic behind a lot of people using the bid bots, but I just have a meantla block against using them for myself, but I do occassionaly use them to help someone who has done a good post and hasn’t got much recognition
That is a very nice gesture! I have done that in a few cases as well. As for myself, well... Let's just say that one can get addicted and greedy...
The idea just came to me while trying to help some alliance members who are new on here, as for you, if it works for you nothing wrong with that :)
One thing I've noticed is that because the bots are so busy lately it has become quite difficult to find times when you'll receive a positive ROI. It can still be done, but you end up spending quite a bit of time watching the bid bot "market". Of course there are some that don't work on an auction system, and those are nice, if they aren't sleeping.
Another consideration for some is that the higher reputation bots will help boost your reputation. Obviously you can't put a value on that, but it does have some utility for some.
Yeah I make use of the immediate non bidding services minnow booster and smart steem when I want to time a vote.
To me reputation has no value, but I can see it having it for others possibly.
And as for watching the bots, just having a historical roi would be something to use as information. I wonder if I can get this information in other ways.
Having a historical roi would be very useful, especially if it was charted so you could see when it is increasing and decreasing. I've also thought front running some of the smaller bots could be profitable for curation, but I'd need far more SP than I have now to make that work. And if I had that much SP it wouldn't be worth my time to do so anyway, unless it could somehow be automated.
Front running large bidders sounds like a genius idea, why didn't I think of that before? Might be worth seeing if you could get some valuable curation SP cents from it :)
I thought it was a genius idea too, but I tried it and got very little SP curation cents from it because my SP is so low that the big hitters end up taking most of the pool. It's been far more profitable and useful in many ways to simply post and interact with the community. More fun and satisfying too.
i have been using steembottracker and it has added value to my vote and vote value, getting the bidding right and how much the bids are is crucial. thanks for the enlightment
That's interesting. Thanks Eon. I didn't know timing was a factor. Learning something new here every day.
When I clicked on the steem bot tracker link. Is this something to worry about?:
![privacy warning.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmY1FmcZsMjmrWiyYWekUfxKLUTazHp93ojQoqCoNaABGX/privacy%20warning.jpg)
Thanks
Anj x
That's weird... Maybe try without the https?
http://www.steembottracker.com
Awesome. This link ^^ worked.
Thanks
Anj x
Nice post Eon.
Guess we're all thinking about bots these days, since they're being the topic of tons of publications including mine and yours.
I am guilty of using bid bots myself.
Cheers!
Yeah that's true. Maybe the more people that know about it the less they will all pay and that kind of works out too lol.
Nicely done! I have used, they work well as long as you are careful .... follow me @lurehound
thanks for sharing bid in style :D
Thanks for the enlightenment, will start bidding wisely.
Thanks for the enlightenment, will start bidding wisely.
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