Bid Bots

• You can bid any amount, mostly in SBD even though some bid bots accept Steem, so even if you are a minnow you can still probably afford an upvote, even though one that will give very little payback.

• You nearly always get back more than you bid so there is a chance for profit.

• Your post gets more attention because since it has a higher payout people will probably look more at it, this is just expected not necessarily true.

• If you spend enough money you can send your post into the trending posts.

• Some bots are helping out some good projects with their profits.

• Delegators are assured a profit of curation rewards without doing anything, the bot does everything for them, so you can just sit back, relax and know your SP is working for you.

Cons:

• To me the main problem is that some mighty shitty posts have become trending posts because their authors are able to buy enough upvotes to get up there, this has a lot of people upset.

• People don’t have to worry about the quality of their work because they can always buy upvotes.

• It is getting very difficult for people to get upvotes without buying them because a large amount of people don’t curate as it is just easier to delegate their SP to bid bots.

• Even though you do get back more than you put in, you will probably end up losing or just breaking even because once the curation rewards are taken you only get at most 80% of the money.

• Most bid bots are by now saturated, they are just not giving back as much per vote to make it profitable.

• Despite bid bots giving back money to delegators they just give back a percentage so delegators are actually losing curation money.

• I am starting to see flag wars starting because people upset with this turn of events are flagging people who are on the hot or trending pages because of bots.

• Again this is making authors lose rewards as the votes that could be given for quality posts is being used up on flagging bot upvoted posts.

So the problem with bid bots is quite similar to that of other bots, they actually make the reward pool not accessible for people who don’t have the resources to tap into the bid bots because they don't have enough money to get a nice upvote, so again only people with money can make more money, hey, like in the real world. I for one would like to see these bid bots disappear, I think it would even out the playing field a little. On the other hand while they are still operating I guess everyone has a right to use them as they see fit and flagging posts that use them “too much” should stop. After all there is no rule that says how much bid bots I can use for one article.

Unfortunately I think bid bots are here to stay, they are too profitable for the owners for them to willingly stop operating them and since Steem is supposedly a decentralized platform I don’t think anyone can do something about them. Also there are a lot of people using their own bots to upvote their own posts, which is similar, and there is no rule to stop this either.