Bid Wars: Can Bidding On Steemit Get any Better?

You could choose to avoid post promotion in your early days on Steemit but without the right community or support base, gaining traction will be an uphill climb. Bidding for post promotion is a necessary evil for Steemit writers (or maybe it's not and could be easily disregarded).

I decided to do some investigation by tracking bid bots activities on the bot tracker by @yabapmatt for about 5 hours to see what was really going on. As minnows (or planktons as busy.org would have it), we need to make sure every promotional investment have a commensurate return but this only happens about 10% of the time. Here are a few things I think users, and bot owners should know or consider to create a better bidding environment for everyone,( you know, Make Bidding Great Again);

BID BOT USERS

• Every bidding round usually lasts for about 2.4 hours, it's easy to track on the bot tracker mentioned earlier. People need to stop sending blind bids because 94% of the bids I watched for about 5 hours ended with negative ROI or very minute positive and most of the bids that tipped the balance came in the last 5-3 minutes in most cases. I don't understand if there is any incentive to throw in a big bid or an extra bid when ROI is already low but I saw this happen a lot and it hurts the existing high and low bidders. But even if there is no moral consideration in bids, there should be at least a logical one and since everyone loses at the end, then it makes no sense.

• Stop sending above the amount stated by bot owners. I have seen bots with $3 vote value get a couple of 2sbd bids (If you're itching to send money, you might as well send to me). Check the picture above, people are sending $36 to a bot with a vote value of $3 in a single voting window, it makes no business sense for either the owner or users, sooner or later, the users become frustrated and stop and spread the word. It is not a sustainable relationship as no value is being offered.

• Stop jumping on an overloaded bus. It's common to find bid windows that were at a decent positive ROI in their last few minutes run into negative ROI quickly. It's funny, I believe a few people would be waiting for closing to jump in but this spoils the fun for every bidder in the window with an already beaten down ROI

• You can bet on the less popular bots as they produce some decent ROIs the best I saw so far was about 29% ROI.

BOT OWNERS

• There is only a single thing I hope bot owners would consider and that is creating a win-win situation for themselves and for us, their bot users. How? The best way I think is having a cut off point in their bot's code. Once ROI falls beneath a level in any bid window (say 20%), a refund should be done immediately to every new bidder and they can wait for the next window. This will be fine especially if it doesn't increase the overhead of running the bots.

Of course, these are simple suggestions that I believe would create great results for both owners and users as I believe if prospective users were informed about the current bid situation, a lot would opt out and that will be a good thing for those who decide to stay in but who's to determine who goes or stay?. Well, maybe this how bidding is meant to be anyways but I believe there must be other great ways to get more visibility for your posts.