Explaining the Vote-Bot Abuse and @Grumpycat Ultimatum Situation

Guy's premable: In case you are not aware, @grumpycat made an ultimatum for vote-bots owners that their bots will not upvote posts older than 3.5 days. There's a lot of misunderstanding on what this is supposed to accomplish and how. Many people in the comment section also suggested that the voting window be made lower, not just the bot-vote window. This post is meant to try and explain to people the logic behind these things, what the logic is not, and also to a much lesser degree, what I think about it. Steemit wisely, everyone.

Let's take as a suggestion that you could only upvote posts for the aforementioned 3.5 days. What would people gain? Who would lose? How would it change matters?

The long and short of it is that those who write posts that take longer to consume, and that draw an audience over an extended period of time will suffer, as their window to get paid in shrinks.

All those shitposters? They won't lose anything, if anything, they'll gain due to their pay-out being mostly dependent on the short-term anyway, and not being harmed due to how quickly it is that you can consume their content is.

So, what about the so-called stated goal of this, to curtail vote manipulation, especially by buying votes? That's nonsense. It'd do no such thing.

Let's start with this, suppose you could cut down the voting period down to 3.5 days, or even 2 days, wouldn't those people just vote at that juncture? Answer: They would. So what would cutting down the time-frame do? It's not that it'll do nothing, but all it'd do is make it easier for more people to see that this post has been massively upvoted by a bot, and give them the option to downvote it.

But if people really want to do that, they can just follow the upvote accounts and monitor them directly. It's also, sadly, not too relevant to most users, whose downvote power is too small, and who need to keep their voting power to upvote relevant stuff.

But here we see the real reason the whales want it, because if you upvote something 1-2 minutes before it locks out, then the whales can't really be expected to downvote it. So indirectly, if you limit the vote buying window, whales could do something about it. But there are two important things to note from how this works:

1. If you simply shortened the upvote period, it won't really help, as the whales (or whoever's on downvote duty) need there to be a period of time between when the upvote is cast to when the downvote is given. If you simply make it all happen, in say, 24 hours, then it couldn't happen.
2. The voting window has nothing to do with the reward pool directly, it's more that voting by bots as a whole is disagreeable to @grumpycat here. Just that if the upvotes happen early enough he and others in his position could decide what to do about it.

I'd also like to note that while I understand why Grumpy is threatening to downvote the upvote buyers, because he can't really threaten the upvote bots themselves, I don't think it'd work out too well, because most people buying those upvotes, quite likely, don't even understand the situation, and to them, the downvotes will come out of nowhere. If the downvotes won't even be accompanied by a message explaining the situation, they will think they were just randomly downvoted. A thing to keep in mind for the downvotes you handed yesterday to people who bought votes from Blocktrades, Grumpy. If you want to spread the lesson, then people have to know why they got downvoted, which quite likely will make them spread the lesson around on their own.

Now, I want to throw a word or two to people buying upvotes. You're not actually earning money. At least not liquid money. I saw someone yesterday who spent 16 SBD to buy upvotes from two bots. Their takeback? 12.25 SBD. So they just spent some SBD. They basically got back what they paid for.

If you don't think your content is good enough to attract more people, either to upvote, or follow your following content and upvote it organically, then just don't bother. You're not actually making money out of it. You're just basically recycling the money. And the money you'll get back from the post you just had the bot upvote? You got it, you're just going to pay the bot to upvote your next post.

So what and who is bot-voting good for? To be blunt? The person you're paying. They're just flat out getting the money you pay them, and due to the way in which Steemit works, they essentially get it "for free". They'd get the same curation rewards no matter what it is they upvote, but you also paid them extra. And you didn't really get nothing out of it. How does that feel?

There are "upvote trading/collecting" groups, which are different. That's not too different from a group of friends pooling their upvotes to help one another grow.

How can the whole situation actually be fixed? To be frank, I don't see any real option. So long those with the power can just upvote, and those without are at their mercy, this sort of situation will continue. One thing is for certain, cutting down voting time won't really change anything, and Grumpy's suggestion is a bandaid that will be used to punish those who buy votes, rather than actually directly handle the situation with the reward pool itself.

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_{^{This comment originally appeared on grumpycat's post as a comment.
Image taken from Pixabay.}}