RE: Why Using Bid Bots Is Becoming Unprofitable on Steemit
Hi @gandhibaba thank you for your post. I am sure a lot of people on Steemit feel the same way. I am also new at Steemit and the very first post I wrote was a question on "Why a bid bot wouldn't vote for itself?" Guess what? I didn't get answer. lol. Weird I though, as most forums I am on people are very helpful.
Your first example was the question I was asking: Why would a bid bot that has a value of $200 take only $60 from bidders and not just vote itself up? Well after being on Steemit for a month I have realized that this is frowned upon eg. @berniesandars vs. @haejin and if everyone self voted their comments or posts the Steemit platform would breakdown.
There are some upvote bots that want to help others with low SP but I feel the vast majority do it as a roundabout way of self voting and also to make a profit. The bid bots make a profit when the total bids are greater than the vote value which is very common these days and the bid bots may be taking advantage of the ignorance bid bot users as you mentioned in your post. If the bid bot didn’t want to make a profit and the bid bot really wanted to be altruistic they could easily stop accepting bids at a certain point (fixed upvotes as you mentioned) or refund users if not profitable.
I have used bid bots as I wanted to see what they were all about. It seemed like a really weird concept to me and hence my question on why they don’t vote for themselves. I don’t think bid bots are profitable to most users but as @themarkymark said, they can serve a purpose as you can use them as promotion in the form of paid advertisement for your post.
Cheers!
ian
It's really great reading your contribution on this subject. Particularly, I appreciate the dynamic perspective you introduced into the discussion which is why bid bots don't vote themselves. It is, really, a tough question.
However, I don't think bid bots refuse to vote themselves because of rules against self voting. In fact, whales such as @adsactly and @sndbox self vote. The only reason why a bid bot would refuse to self vote is because it is less profitable than receiving bids from users. Don't forget that whatever they get from bids is 100% profit unlike pay outs which involves spliting pay outs into SBD and SP and paying at least 16% to curators.
It is a pleasure to have your contribution to this subject. Thanks and be great.
Thanks for your reply. Having been on Steemit I do see why bid bots can be profitable to the bots especially when many times the bids are worth more than the vote. But lets say a bid bot says I will only accept bids up to 50% of my vote value well then in this case the bot would "loose" money as it could have just voted for itself with full value. To me if a bid bot is really trying to help minnows or promote good content then it should not take profit and put such a limit to what bids it takes. But in this case people would just be at their computers trying to get in a bid as early as possible which is what i think is happening to MinnowBooster upvote service now.