The wild west flag wars: Should we target the buyer or the seller?
Most people don't flag one and another for buying bots, but we do see people who use the bots for "low quality" posts and comments to earn some extra steem and unsurprisingly, some parts of our community have decided to go after these people.
To me I am split in my opinion of this action: On one side I understand that this kind of "abusive behavior" should in some way be punished. (or as some people call it: "educated")
But in the other hand, why would we punish people who clearly are just using a flawed system that we created? Why are we fighting thousand of people instead of just a few?
Fighting the endless war
To me, the decision of targeting the people who use the system is like trying to fill up an unplugged bathtub. If there's a hole in the bottom, why don't we just fix that instead of increasing the water flow?
Maybe a bad metaphor but you get my point: We don't focus on the source of the problem: The sellers.
Fighting the buyers is like when the police go after the drug addicts instead of the drug sellers. It doesn't matter how many addicts the "educate", the problem will remain.
"The abusive sellers?
It is hard to target these guys, I know. Many of them are powerful here on steemit and they can do whatever they please. But I believe if people are brave enough to put a flag on somebody who used a flawed service. Then they should be brave enough to go to that service and start a dialogue with the sellers.
I mean, why in the world are there not more focus on the small handful of sellers than the endless amount of buyers? Put pressure on the sellers and we reduce the problem much more. They should try to make a system where vote selling has a system that works and not the wild west. I'm talking blacklist, whitelist, algorithms, vote limits.
We already see a bunch of sellers doing this (I believe the best, in my opinion, is @smartsteem founded by @therealwolf. But until those who are selling a voting service are not trying to control it on their end, we can keep fighting the buyers as long as we want, it is not going to change.
So, the buyers or the sellers?
So with that being said, I guess creating awareness in the community is a great and just as much needed as targeting the sellers. But I truly believe the sellers are having too easy here and their "business" should be a bit restricted to the wish and health of steem and the community? Or just remove voting service altogether, I don't care honestly. As long as we can find a solution to this problem i'm all for it.
Just take a look to who is the main delegators to the most powerful bid-bots. Is not this the STINK associated accounts? For example
The similar picture for other strong bid-bots. You can check on steemreports.
It makes me think of bid-bots as a kind of social experiment. And if its organizers do not care about the consequences, then why should I spend my $0,06-worth vote in order to remove the value by flagging one side or another, instead of adding value to someone who does not use bid-bots?
bit-bots does indeed seem like a experiment but more importantly it is a business. A business that got allowed. So I guess we could either fight it or just got along with it and use it to our advantage.
I believe we will see some change to how these bid bots are having effect as time goes on:) Currently it creates a lot of trouble and the community tries to find how it will fit the right way.
I support
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I do some (limited) vote selling, but ensured that no posts with the tags "funny", "food", flower" etc are upvoted, good that this option is available. By this one can reduce maybe 90% of the trash-posts. At least better than nothing.
Are you running a bot service or how are you doing your selling? I am also selling my votes but through a service so I'm not the one in control except I trust in the person who runs it. (for example blacklisting abusers etc.)
I use smartsteem.com, under settings-vote-selling you can whitelist and blacklist users and also can blacklist tags!
I use exactly the same! Although only when I hit 100% steempower(a rare case but do happen mostly when I sleep lol) I did not know you could blacklist tags, that could be useful!
@therealwolf, founder of Smartsteem did just ban one of the bigger abusers, which just proves the point that some people even choose to ban their biggest customer for the health for steem!
Good choice man!
Thanks,
by the way, if you set the treshold too high (100%!), then the system will make only 1 upvote per day. I recommend to lower the treshol in the settings menu.
It's at 99% so i guess I lied a bit. Is that fine? Thanks man!
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votong bots are always earning money because of large bids in bid bots
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