RE: The Daily Coverup -- Transparency Under Attack.
bycoleman I hope you really do understand this answer. It is because you have created an Anti-Spam "SpamBot" You have not even looked at the posts that your Bot spams on, you just leave BIG, HUGE, COMMENT-SPACE-TAKING messages that get in the way of the great conversations that people are having. I use bidbots... not hiding and let me let you in on a secret... I'm not profiting, I'm losing but getting the desired effect by reaching a larger audience. Let me offer some transparency because try as you might you CAN NOT follow my paper trail. Lets say you buy Ethereum as well as mine it. You bought in at $960 but it drops below $400. You "believe in steemit" but you need to reach your audience so you trade your eth into btc (transaction fees) to purchase sbd with (yep, more transaction fees) to send it to steemit and be put to use (You guessed it... more transaction fees) all with your $400 eth that used to be worth over double but you figure "If I work really hard and get the article where it can be seen, I will reach my audience and hopefully it will be the kickstart that I need but wait.... who is this person spamming my post saying that I used bidbots (so what.. turns out the creator of the transparency bot has used bidbots more than I on a level i didn't even know was possible but moving on) It seems like people who have not spent a single dime investing into steem are just having a sucker-attack because you are mad that you came here, got a FREE account and didn't start making $100's per post. We are investors and I find it HILLARIOUS that nobody on here seems to know what will happen if the investors say "f steem, I'm pulling out and taking MY money with me and with that ALL OF THE VALUE that this platform has gained from my dollars and lets watch the steem and sbd drop till it leaves a burning hole in the bottom of the market charts and THEN you guys can fight over a sbd that is worth about 5cents and steem can return to its original price of 2cents then lets see how big of a problem this is shall we? You know what makes steem valuable in dollars?? Our money, investors.... even the witnesses get paid and if they didnt care about getting paid then riddle me this.... WHY ARE THEY THE ONES WHO OWN ALL THE BID BOTS BATMAN!? (that alone should tell you how this war will end for you and it will be fun to sit back and watch) queue music And another one gone and another one gone... another one bites da dust HEY, we're gonna get you too! Another one bites da dust!
Here's why:
37 whales own almost all the Steem that exists, because they mined it before Steemit existed.
Stinc and the witnesses serve their market, and their market is 37 whales, because those whales have the vast majority of Steem. The witnesses are elected by stake, and if they don't serve those whales, they won't be witnesses anymore.
So all the top witnesses are those most servile to mammon, by design. That's why many of them own or profit from bots.
You're pretty right about how this will turn out, as substituting advertising for the honest opinions of societal members will continue to degrade the society until it no longer has any value except as a mining scheme--and that only has value as long as there are people besides Stinc, the witnesses, and the miners posting and commenting.
Steemit has a ~10% YOY retention rate, meaning that about 90% of new users bail before a year is up. The reason they bail is that they observe that the rewards pool is being mined by those with the Steem, and they can't compete, because they don't have the Steem. They try to use botvotes to make up the difference, but sooner or later realize that just further concentrates the Steem in the accounts of those funding the bots, and not their account.
They bail.
Kill the social media by mining away the rewards that should be inuring to authors and attracting a wider market for Steem, kill the value of Steem.
Good luck. With a business plan like that, luck is all you have.
I can see where you are coming from to a degree. I personally would be making a decent profit if I was going for the profit and I'm not saying that I will not make a decent return eventually but I believe that this will turn out to be much more lucrative if I can reach my target audience in the long run. Most of the new users who leave expect to get something from nothing and feel heartbroken/butthurt that they don't write an article (well written or not) and voila! $1000 payout. They then turn to blame bidbots and those who use them because we realize that if you want to sell your product you must be willing to put something into your advertising or else you will be the only one who even knows that it is for sale. The very first thing I invested in when we (we are a team but this was my comment) joined this platform was delegations because if I want people to hear my voice you have to sometimes pay the cost to be the boss. I instantly noticed a difference when I began rewarding all meaningful comments on our posts. I feel that the witnesses who mined the steem earned it because I am a miner myself and have put forth thousands of dollars into my operations and I'll be honest, it was not for the good of mankind. I believe in Crypto but nothing is free and if I invest $100, you'd best believe that I will be getting $200 back but mining Crypto is almost like literally "printing my own money". I believe that the majority of the people who whine about bidbot usage arrived at this platform and seen the high payouts but never intended to invest ANYTHING into promoting themselves and while they spend all their time crying and hoping that a whale will notice them and give them an upvote, others are busy getting paid. The whales will eventually power down and drop the price of steem inwhich time I will gladly come and grab all that I can afford. Think about how the crash affected the price of steem and sbd since Dec.. We seen sbd go from $9/each down to $2 each but how many people invested? I wouldn't know because I was too busy grabbing everything I could like it was a clearance sale and when whales power down I will rinse and repeat. Anytime that we are dealing with a currency be it fiat or Crypto we are dealing with business and unless the business is a soup kitchen, I don't expect for anything to be free and neither should anyone else.
(This is only my opinion but "have-nots" will always disagree with the "haves" and waste valuable time arguing which could/should be spent getting their own)