Sticky fingers in the Bidbot jar...
example for illustrative use only:
bidbot investment $50 ~ $100. payout ~ user payout: $75, -$50 inv = $25 gain
11 followers following no one Joined a month ago 29 votes
Last night I was poking around Steembot Tracker in hope of finding a good return for a modest upvote. I'm not proud of this. I don't like to rely on bidbots to make a decent payout, but most of my posts only make a few dollars after three months on the platform, and that's with the MSP upvote. It doesn't matter if I spend two hours on a post or twelve.
Neither am I greedy - I don't upvote my posts beyond a reasonable value, even though I can. That's why I was shocked last night to see a bunch of different accounts dipping heavily into the big honey bidbot money. I'd seen this before but never really understood the significance or looked into it, but apparently it's quite common.
Step one: save or buy a sizable hunk of spd - let's say 100sbd to get started.
Step two: place a $25 - $50 bid on your post in a bot that has a huge chance of returning a double profit margin. This is best done late at night, when there's little competition.
Step three: do this with another bot with similar payout, and maybe a third, thus inflating your post that had a four cent payout to something over $200, with a net profit of $50 or more. don't put a lot into creation. a photo or a youtube clip will do.
Step four: take your payout and reinvest it into subsequent posts over the period of two weeks. Result? A modest earning of about $250-$500 per week, depending on how much you post.
So why isn't everyone doing this? Can the system sustain it? Is it ethical?
Everyone can. If they have the sbd to spare. The trick is making sure its profitable. In fact, for all you unethical people out there, I urge you to do this as much as you can. I want to close that window that makes huge payouts profitable and risk free. I want to make the method unsustainable.
My question to the Steemit community is -
Is this ok with you? Is this how a free unregulated market looks, where the honest people get a few dollars and the people willing to sacrifice ethics for profit get a huge net gain?
When I talk of ethics I mean it like this. If one person started to litter or steal, that's a nuisance. If everyone decided to litter and steal because those other guys did it and got away with it, we have a pollution issue and a governance issue.
I won't judge whether these people "deserved" the immense profit they got based on their work, but I will tell you one of them gets paid to copy articles off a website onto steem.
Another guy I saw posts art with no proof of work. Just a sketch or computer graphic image. Could be anyone's work. Yes, the work is consistent, to an extent. Does it merit a $50 self vote when the guy hasn't even bothered, after three months on the platform, to network or follow more than a handful of people? Or is this considered abuse?
And the sad part is... they arent the only ones. During any given bot run, chances are I find at least one mega upvote for $50, usually from someone with deep pockets. It's apparently something the platform (or the people that are actually aware of this shit) let slide. But why?
Why don't the bot owners have an ethical bid cap or a system of oversight on their bots?
Some do, I know this for a fact. The truth is, it's work to oversee, and the bidbot owners can make a modest profit if no one complains. If not enough people vote during any one payout period, the bot owners lose money. Oversight takes time and money. There is no incentive for the bot owner to find the shit posters who monetize until there is a cost to the owner in terms of reputation or money.
I talked this over with a few community leaders. Most seemed to feel that theres not much anyone can do about it that wouldn't take a huge amount of investment, in either flagging or prodding bot owners to rescind the upvote.
Flagging is only feasible for a very few people at high levels. And who knows if that one new account with no followers worth close to $10k is a shadow account of someone you dont want to piss off? To me it seems many people are afraid to piss the wrong people off for fear of a huge downvote from some dolphin or whale that doesn't like what we have to say. My view is, I only make a few dollars anyway. What do I have to lose?
Is this an issue that needs a method of addressing, like steemcleaners? Or should we use community pressure to flag and poke the bot owners into acting ethically and responsively?
We need to be discussing this and voicing our opinion instead of shrugging shoulders, like we do with our corrupt government, in a "What can I do, it's not my back yard" hand off. I don't have any easy answers, but I want to be part of the solution. The best way to a solution is discussion.
Feedback? Dissent? Bring it on.
theses bots are wasting in time and money
they are. they are giving people who have money a loophole to make more without much work. and the people who suffer are the minnows.
Ding ding ding ding! The issue of bid bots and people claiming that they are stealing from the reward pool, all wrapped up in a neat little bow right here. Forget all the little arguments about good bots vs bad bots vs whatever- this is where the problem lies with selling votes. I believe it was @lexiconical who asked the question during a radio show- what can we do about it? How do we stop bots? Will community pressure stop it from happening? What would it take to get bid bot owners to put a cap? And how can we get people who have power involved in fixing this, if they even want to fix it?
what we need to do is keep the discussion happening, to put pressure on these abusers til its not worth the cost of working the system.
Probably one of the only ways to control this problem right now would be to have a cap on the bidbots. That limits how much can be pulled from the bot. Getting all the bot owners to do that, well, that's another problem. If they normally make money from big bids, they don't have much incentive to put a cap on it.
Amber I suggested that. Capping bots would mean the bidbot owners would lose money. The only way they do make money is to have no caps, because the users who keep bots alive are the abusers who pay $50 at a time. Its a perpetuating system. The other method might be to allow only small bots that are user supported thru delegation. The bidbots in effect have set up a system to not only make money, but siphon off the reward pool. The rest of us are screwed.
I certainly can't argue that.
How do we keep a tutorial of how to use the bots to max profitability,that the average person can understand ,keep it on the trending page,or constantly in view,and get the common poster to the point were they have the $ (steem/sbd) to use them...
I have very little tech,and very little sp.. guess no tech/wealth privilege for the poor average person (poster) ... it's not a rat race anymore,it's a bot war.. and I can't keep up w/ the rats... lol..
:-)
upvote and resteem treat to the puppy!
Namaste
jesse at this point im doing research that indicates the majority of people that support the bot fall into one of two categories. shadow accounts of people rich enough to dump $5k-10k into the account. they dont vote, dont network, dont comment and write shit posts that they upvote for $50-$100. they are pretty much mocking the platform. then theres the group of foriegners i discovered working in a chain of accounts that pass each other currency. mind you they try to write decently, but they still upvote everything by $40-$50 and pocket the profit. then they upvote each other, and oddly enough have some other big names voting for them too. so... conspiracy among thieves?
I applaud your efforts. Greed is a weed that is strong in this platform,well rooted.
But I see so much hope and positive here! I do believe that things will get better,or that we will create something better.Maybe something where 90% coins were not pre-mined?
I don't understand a lot of this stuff,but I read about things,know that we have the ability to do it! Seems most of the development is done by users not steemit, from app's,ext, to training groups like PALnet,ect. , MSPsteem,and the new Utopia one... we have a great platform to transform to, or from and thought.
Thanks for helping guide the way!
Fully upvoted. But...
"Why don't the bot owners have an ethical bid cap or a system of oversight on their bots?"
Because it would reduce profit. Appeal to their profit motive, or we will get nowhere.
"Is this ok with you?"
Perhaps more importantly, can it be feasibly stopped without asking bot operators to take losses? Because, they won't.
yes, that i gather. I understand the profit need. but we can monitor and deal with abusers who shit post for profit. but will we? we need a way to close the loophole that makes huge profits a possibility, or start going after potential abusers. imho
I don’t use any bots and I don’t approve of those who do. People should write for pleasure and for the enjoyment of others. No harm in getting paid where the quality and content justifies it.
However buying votes is just a money making scheme that destroys the value of the platform.
The sooner steemit starts rewarding the top curators to downvote, the better. Or maybe theres a bot to downvote other bots....
that might be coming...
Perhaps we should look at this issue from an entirely different angle. Instead of placing the focus upon what people should do, instead consider what they are able to do based upon the rules and regulations placed upon us by the blockchain service known as Steemit.
Currently, there is nothing stopping the participants from engaging in such activities as contracting for upvotes, upvoting their own material, or forming alliances with others to upvote each others material, regardless of its individual merit.
Why place the focus solely upon the user for engaging in activity that is tacitly approved by the technology?
This isn't to say that no responsibility rests upon the users, but since the activity is "allowed", it's hard to assign fault solely upon those that are simply using the rules to their own advantage.
If Steemit, and those that engage within this community, permit, through these rules, these activities, then we all tacitly approve them.
If we choose, through our support of the witnesses, and developers, to change the rules, and some then transgress them, then we truly have an axe to grind. Short of that, if it's legal, then we have little standing, other than social pressure, to object to behaviors that we deem to be unproductive or otherwise in appropriate.
Objection is fine, but it carries little weight in the eyes of the rule of law.
The majority of people who want to keep the bots are the bot investors so they can make money. fair enough. but the majority of people who use the bots are the ones abusing the system. What you are suggesting is we use our own money to even out the system until the bidbots are no longer profitable for abusers. but then they are no longer profitable for us so why use them? the only people who profit? the bidbot owners. and since they are already well off i am not inclined to give them more.
I've revoted your post up to 100%. It's sad that bidbots are being abused by some when they can be so helpful to minnows. Fortunately we Qurites have @qustodian, it helps all members of @qurator and can't be abused by the greedy.
:)
There are a few of us who help a curation account. The account owner has very high ethics, and also, like most of us, a full time job, a family, and a life, but still manages to work extremely hard to weed thru the slush pile and find quality to benefit Steemit.
One of us found a member who was translating foreign language posts to English and making a good profit. Quite a few a day as this user also had multiple accounts.
It took diligence, time and effort with translating these posts to their source, finding all his fake accounts, then presenting to steemcleaners- who rather quickly banned all said accounts.
I watched this transpire. It took a lot.
And this was just for one user.
What I am getting at is in my opinion there needs to be more people paid by Steemit to do this kind of work. If change is going to happen, if we wish for it to be so, then we need more police- people empowered with sp for downvotes and a bit of an income to justify the time. People who's sole job is cleaning up Steemit and making it safe, comfortable, and equal for all.
yes, we need more good curation efforts. which one do u do? Im on a few different ones and keep on meaning to drop a post about curation... i agree, more cleaners, but as so many here are anarchists, not a popular idea. some want no rules. i think they just want a free ticket. where will the money come from for workers? if it paid even minimum wage i'd put in hours. better than working in the outside world..
You asked the question, " Is this how a free unregulated market looks, where the honest people get a few dollars and the people willing to sacrifice ethics for profit get a huge net gain?"
My answer is, yes, this is how unregulated free market capitalism looks, because there are always unscrupulous people waiting to take advantage of every little trick and method to make money, no matter how unethical it might be. A lot of them don't care if it's illegal, as long as they can get away with it. That's why sociopaths usually rise to the top of corporations and politics. They're willing to do whatever it to takes to get there. And the psycopaths help them, for the reward.
Scamming the system seems to be relatively easy right now if you know what you're doing and have some money to throw at the system. You know that old saying, it takes money to make money, well, that works on steemit also, apparently.
agree. the question is do we allow it to continue, or create a way to penalize the people who abuse it? the only people winning right now are the investors and abusers. read it this way: banks and corporations. same old shit, different platform. yes we need the banks. but should we let them dictate terms?
i;m pretty ok with alienating every investor who doesnt want to work with us. or hopping over to utopian. i dont want unscrupulous bankers who bottom feed off the system. screw that. there are enough strong minded ethical people that we can make a system free of bid bots.
Ohhh my I read all!!!! the robots was something that I always had in my head !! is it good to have one robot cleaning the floor??? or have 1,000,000 robots at your disposal and make a war? now I see it more clearer thanks @torico
