BID-BOTS: a not-very scientific experiment & considerations
INTRODUCTION
As many of you (3/4 people at max) have noticed, my latest four poems have a regular modus operandi:
- upvote by @smartsteem
- upvote by @buildawhale
I decided to test whether there was any ROI using these two popular bid-bot services.
Let’s get to the numbers:
| POSTS | POST PAYOUT | SBD INVESTED | PAYOUT SBD | PAYOUT SP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poem 1 | 39.685 | 20 | 14.918 | 4.986 |
| Poem 2 | 42.201 | 20 | 15.972 | 5.503 |
| Poem 3 | 36.078 | 20 | 13.738 | 5.074 |
| Poem 4 | 33.391 | 20 | 12.711 | 4.798 |
| TOTAL | 126.588 | 80 | 57.339 | 20.361 |
CONSIDERATIONS
We can say that the investment is pretty much recovered, without any ROI, at least in this period of SBD price that is smaller than the STEEM price.
Is it worth or not using them? I still don't have a firm answer to this question. I read plenty of mid-to-big accounts complaining about bid-bots, and I agree with most of them on the tag-feed saturation.
However, as a small account, I don't have time and social motivation to invest into Discord channels and chitchat for the entire day to create acquiescences (followers) that will likely upvote my posts. Hence, the majority of my posts will vary from 0.03$ to 0.9$ if I won't use bid-bots. It sounds a bit depressive on a psychological level but also regarding SP growth side.
The real limitations I find on steemit are the content propagation and the difficulty to discover new exciting accounts. I don't see other significant issues over bid-bots if the UX of the whole system will be amended.
WHAT NEXT?
I don't know if I'll use bid-bots again for my next posts or not. What I do know is that I will be tempted to grow my SP faster and become more desirable within the blockchain.
What's your analysis of those numbers above?
Have you ever tried using bid-bots?
Do you have a firm answer about their use?
Photo by rawpixel
OBSERVE | CONTRIBUTE | PROPAGATE
Typically because of winner's curse for first price auctions you would lose on bid bots.
I don't use bid bots.
Part of a team making a new front end with better search and features, and advising on another front end. Suggested post value convoluted by number of upvotes in a window of a day or two as one nice way to rank. (What do you think about that?)
Even if you have 300 upvotes, unless they have large stakes ...
This is one thing that keeps popular creators off the platform ... that numbers matter not so much. Stake is needed to balance out bot rings where a single person has thousands of accounts with small delegations.
Hi and thanks for stopping by...yep looks like a downward spiral! Curious about the new frontends you are working on, I don’t really remember convolution...but it’s a way to weight posts within a certain timeframe considering both $ and number of upvotes? I don’t really know if the solution is only on that side but definitely the search/visibility is important...the whole UX should go along with it. Ciao!
There's also SteemLookUp.com which has word count based search.
Good news. Also bad news. Most long posts are copied from elsewhere I observed. Not original. Or very general and pointless tutorials along the lines of how to make a sandwich: 1. Buy bread. 2. Put a plate on the table. 3. Remove bread from packaging. 4. Put a piece bread on the plate. 5. Put another piece bread on the plate. ...
No single search variable will be sufficient. That's possible. ...
Our front end will support pdf and webm, plus a few smart ways to sort. We're focusing on new features. There is also a nice redesign of the Steemit front end called SugarSteem. While our will have some new features but otherwise be minimal.
We are currently adding JS people to the team to work on it. @Yallapapi is talking about it a bit on the trending page at the moment.
Ahah word count is lame to be honest. We have plenty of tags to play with with some machine learning, imagine creating an algorithm that prompts you posts with tags related to your upvotes and tags you usually use. I don’t really like that sugarSteem is a redesign of a wrong design, for things like these you need a ux treatment from scratch.