RE: Why Are Steemit Users Powering Down and Leaving?
I have been on steemit for over a year now so i have watched the rise of bidbots and it has definitely caused a few problems u fail to see because of when u got gere.
Here is the problem I see with bid bots. They steal rewards from every user on the platform, you have to understand between all of the bidbots there are millions upon millions of delegated SP.. this SP use to be split up between thousands of everyday users who used steemit like most of us, upvoting and curating eachothers posts daily. SP was cheap to buy (delegations) then, almost half the price it cost now because there weren't a bunch of bot owners buying up all the supply.. Upvotes were spread across the entire platform for good content not just paid for votes.. Everyone tried to write better content because of this, now basically most of the newbs who come here get discouraged because they can write months of good articles and never see any decent upvotes unless they are lucky enough for @curie to spot them.
The truth is vote selling was considered illegal on steemit but all of the whales are witnesses and helped to change this because they make exponentially more by selling votes than delegating and this way they still get amazing curation rewards, its really a win win for them.. (this is one of the main reasons one of the founders left steemit). But truth is that it is decimating the lower class steemians.. This place use to be much more active on every level before bidbots became such a force, now its a game for so many and buying ur way to the top is incredibly easier than earning ur way there..
Don't get me wrong, I agree that the crypto price does also play a huge part in activity on steemit but since the bidbots showed up in force driving up delegation prices and lowering normal upvotes (because they delegate to bidbots). I have seen so much change for the worse instead of the better.. I use to get $10-$20 posts once or twice a week without ever using a bidbot before 2018, now i am lucky to see a $5 upvote on 1 article a month so i have stopped putting in a lot of effort because whats the point?
I generally don't use bidbots because i refuse to make the rich richer. The only time i do is when i want to turn my sbd into steem, because i can get a lil return on it but i use minnowbooster and smartsteem only in my conversion. And now that i am recieving 1/10 sbd as steem and sp it doesnt even really matter anymore..
Sorry bout the long reply! But i did enjoy the read so i am now following u. 😎
Excellent perspective, @moderndayhippie. But I'm a little confused. When you say bidbots steal rewards, I'm not sure I follow that. Now, I understand that if I buy a bidbot vote first thing after posting, then that bidbot will get the lion's share of curation rewards. But, If I have 100 humans upvote me in the first two days, then I buy a bidbot vote, I get 75% of the reward from that bidbot vote and everyone else who upvoted me before the bidbot will get 25% of the bidbot's upvote. If that was $10, then $2.50 of it will be split between the curators of the post. Do I understand that correctly?
I didn't mean it from a curation perspective at all, I meant that since they buy up millions of delegated SP that is now only used for paid upvotes instead of being spread around to steemians like me who now find it to expensive to pay for it (because prices spiked with supply and demand). There is no longer enough return on renting the delegation (just to hand out bigger upvotes) unless i basically upvote all my own posts and comments, which defeats the whole purpose of buying the delegation in the first place..
Example: like everyone when i first started on steemit my upvote was worth literally nothing, but i could rent a delegation for cheap and then upvote my posts (my own post promotion) and other steemians post with a vote that actually counted. I could upvote my post just once a day and use the rest of my upvotes to curate other steemians posts and i would still break even at the end, the love was spread around and I didn't have to upvote myself 10 times a day to break even (which is basically what u need to do now if u rent delegations). This literally helped every steemian and encouraged new people to stay on the platform because they got bigger votes (without having to pay for them). It also helped me to grow my following even though i was a red fish and new to the platform.
Now all that delegated SP is bought up and sold to the highest bidder, it no longer is used to support steemians, it is used to take their earnings. Sure u may make 10 to 20 percent return sometimes but wouldn't it be better if good articles (ones that deserve it) just made more money from upvotes? No paid post promotion needed? I think so.
This has also caused the trending steemit feed to be covered in garbage and people to fly thru the profile ranks even though they dont deserve it because they have shit articles.. it has literally ruined most everything when it comes to how steemit is suppose to operate.. now some people have been on steemit only a month and have 65+ profile scores and have never wrote even one decent article, its all spam bullshit which is annoying to go thru.. this drives away the people who are actually trying to add value to the platform, and encourages people to game it which makes steemit so much worse..
Does that make sense? It is quite hard to explain now that im typing it lol.