RE: Steemit's biggest ever experiment extravaganza!
according to many, the bidbots aren't really the ones that are lowering the price of other posts
Who is saying these things? The relative value of votes on the system has nothing to do with voting bots, it's just a % of how much SP is used to vote in total.
Of course voting bots comprise a very significant amount of the SP used for voting, but all that SP would still be used for voting even if bots didn't exist!
Do you think that if bots didn't exist all the whales that currently delegate to them would just say "ok i guess we'll just let our SP sit and not do anything!"?
I really don't understand why people think getting rid of voting bots would solve anything. I guarantee that if all the voting bots disappeared that nothing would change with regard to the problems they are blamed for.
The rewards pool share for votes would remain the same. Large stakeholders would still sell their votes, it would just be done in a non-transparent manner that's not available to the majority of users. And trending would still have the same "issues" that it does now. It might just not be as obvious what's going on to the average user.
Well, I know one huge user, the biggest account in fact that wasn't voting before leasing out its SP to bid bots. There were also a lot of other big ones that were curating instead and only earning curation rewards. You are right though, they were at a disadvantage to those that were selling votes off-site.
Of course, it has gone to the point where there is no going back anymore due to delegation, currently the people that are losing out are the ones that are not buying votes since the rewardpool is finite. What this means is that you either have to also start buying votes to compete with other users or you will be left with a smaller piece of the reward pool pie.
It seems to me that the only solution at this point is to encourage everyone to buy votes on their quality content and to eliminate the easy rewards just for running a bid bot.
This.
The Catch-22 situation of the so-called promotional element bot operators have tried to use as PR has been reached.
It's "Do or Die" mostly nowadays. Do throw your earned SBD away at somebody who just is slightly more connected and more apt at maintaining code.
If there were no bid bots grey operations would still happen but on a much lower scale and, finally, we could hope for investors with a mid- to long-term focus again, rather than the quick buck grab Wild Wild West this has become. But, obviously, that's logic the short term profit grabbers are not interested in.
Manual curators needed and a bot that will overpay to out support the maximisation bots. If a manual curator thinks it is worth more than the bid, bump it higher. Be picky and with enough SP, trending would have quality content providers that deserve the payouts, bidbot or not. Not that Trending matters anyway.
This is not going to go anywhere is it... wild wild west is the law of code.
Yep. Last year before mass bidbots, when rando whale was the only real game and good for newbs who outgrew it eventually, it was a very different place here. Can it return to that now that they ate the "apple"? Uncertain, but why we don't just turn off self voting and end at least half our major grievances? That never flies and i get a million reasons why back, but its undeniable, kill self voting, and then people will have to work a lot harder to do those back door whale sales and shit. We can't really effectively kill bots ever no matter what anyway, we'll just make them less accessible, I suppose. and deterrents stop a large percentage of lazy people. The truly determined will find their hacks anyway, but lots less will.
Self voting, is a huge problem in terms of pool drain, why do we NEVER discuss that, and lean on the old trope, *well the investors, and their stake, and they can do whatever and well, after all those same whale investors are or "own" the top 20 who could make any of this true anyway..." blah blah blah
turn off self voting, watch magic happen. That's my prediction. (Oh but they will make sockpuppets!) and yep they will, some of them. But less of them.
Or you know, figure out communities, implement something like eos constitutions and turn people loose to screw it up for themselves in their own houses...
Basically, just do something already. Because looking at the roadmap, and talks at SteemFest(2), this place is always more becoming vaporware roadmaps bc.
2016 open
2017 open
2018 "more info about smts, the next thing we wont finish or do right here:[link]"