RE: Bid Bots - Let's Talk About It
'Trending' literally means 'being the subject of a trend'. Trends involve multiple people supporting / doing something. If you put posts into the trending section yourself through payment, you are denying the real function of Trending. Vote buying, in that sense, to reach 'trending', is like designing a new hat and then paying people to wear it.. then saying that your hats are important as a result. If people are going to buy their way onto the front page of Steem sites then site designers need to do something to maintain the integrity of the system - maybe just renaming 'trending' to 'most rewarded' or similar is a good start. There are so many scams in crypto world, it's very important for upstanding projects to not lead people to think they are being misled.
Good point here. My goal would be to find a way to keep the integrity of the system while allowing people who want to advertise do so. As a community, it is our responsibility to make sure we are bringing in as much value as we can, this is a decentralized network run by volunteers. Content creators bring value to Steem by bringing in eyeballs, if we can capitalize on that by people needing to buy Steem to get space.
Maybe even a UI, the declined payouts + bot let me know that this is a promo post, so I could skip it if I wanted. For people who send funds to null, maybe we can make a little icon that shows on their post that they burned, maybe a fire emoji.
I have posted on this topic many times. One option is to remove the 'promoted' tab and integrate the built in promotion system that steemit has into the blockchain itself, so that promoted posts appear inline with the other posts - but are known by all to be promoted. UIs can then inform users of that situation. It would be up to the design of the promotion system to elegantly ensure that it is a superior option to using bid bots. I did previously suggest using some of Steemit's ninja mined steem to create a vote selling service that undercuts the bid bots and that sends profits to the reward pool - or something like that. I haven't done any hard maths on it but I think something like that could work.
Agreed, just put a red box around the post with a cartouche that says promoted. Inject them every few organic posts. Seems like you could scrape the post or an automated bot comment to determine if it's promoted. This also wouldn't require downvoting to blast the post off trending if it's abusive or rejected by the community, because you could just flip a switch on the front end, so it would conserve the DV pool. This would at least mean these posts would have some passive curation attached to them, and not simply be the pull-an-upvote and blast it later model of curation we are all so used to seeing.
It's not really possible to guarantee that all bid bot services are caught since they could just operate quietly without advertising to avoid being flagged as a bot.. Although they would definitely be less successful that way. As long as there are top witnesses who are getting rich from bots, you are unlikely to see much shift in a truly positive direction in this regard.
The bots have to advertise in order for the masses to use them. I don't think it would be difficult to heuristically identify them. Sure they might leak a few through after they go live.
You pretty much have to agree to build the solution, implement it, and blast the non-conforming posts, declined payouts or not. Assuming they are having a preventive influence on this sort of progress, that is an argument for blasting declined posts as well.
i can think of fairly elaborate ways that vote selling platforms could anonymise their activity and advertise in discord servers, for example - similar to the way that large pump and dump schemes work.
It would not be possible to track their activity in a totally automated way. This is part of why they are allowed to operate so freely currently.
What people don't seem to understand is that the longer the bots are allowed to run, the more steem gets centralised into the hands of a few bot operators. Those operators can then put more and more of their team into the top 20 witness positions, which then guarantees that the platform will not make any decisions that go against them financially. Currently, the perception that 'bots are good' has many people voting for these witnesses without understanding that it is hurting them.
Very good points! .. i would like to point out though that trending posts on any and every site out there is subjected to people manipulating and using their tricks to be popular. Youtube for example lets you advertise your videos, thereby raising its profile.. so with hf21 in place i think were pretty on par, if not better, at representing the community than most. Im happy to say my recent post hit #6 spot on trending 100% organically, no bid bots used. That never happened before in 2 and a half years!
Yeah... but every successful social network on earth places ‘promoted posts’ or ‘sponsored posts’ amidst trending or feed content. We need the feature to compete realistically for ad revenues and advertiser retention.
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Typically other sites label the posts as sponsored or as 'ads' - Steem cannot do that so reliably because the 'advertising' is being powered by third parties. The intended design of Steem was for advertisers to hold their own steem power - pushing the price up. It wasn't really originally envisioned that the system would rely on ads or that people would sell votes. It was envisioned that the network would be populated by engaged, creative people rather than people just trying to look for loopholes to exploit.
I feel the only way to "police" it as a community is with are upvotes and downvotes. We have zero control with what people what to initially do with their stake, but as a community, we can DV stuff we feel is abusing the reward pool.
The closet we can come to a sponsored label would be the declined payout, or an icon if they choose to burn, or even an icon that relies on the poster to say it is promoted if they lie the community can retaliate with DVs.
I agree with your view though, I believe it will be harder to have legit promotions on Steem because it is decentralized and the SP is controlled by private parties that will do what they will. I am just shooting from the hip my idea on the situation and how to maybe turn something that is perceived as bad to a positive for Steem. We are not getting rid of promotion IMO, nor do I believe we should. But finding the best way to go about it will require our collective Proof of Brain.
I also put out a design for a feature that the Steempeak team were thinking of creating - I'm not sure I've seen that they have though. The idea is to give each user a 'voter mute' list, so that we can all create custom trending lists that remove the effects of specific upvoters. So if there are upvoters who continually annoy us, we can just remove them from our experience. I think that's a pretty empowering feature in general, but it also has the effect of minimising the power of the more visible bidbots since people can easily stop their effectiveness on a personal level. It's not perfect, but I think it would have a similar or even bigger effect than free downvotes if widely adopted.
I'm all about empowerment rather than control of others. We have the ability to empower, but don't seem to be using it in a fully imaginative way yet. All that said, I just realised that I now run a Steem powered site at ureka.org - which I didn't when I first though of this idea.. So maybe I'll integrate it in there and see how it works out :)
And I agree, advertising investing and powering up Steem to then upvote their post is a good use case. Right now 150k USD worth of Steem gives about 20$ upvote. That is a tough sell for someone trying to promote a product that may be cost them 5k to make in the first place. I do feel we need a "hit and run" type ad space where people can put 100$ up if they want to get more exposure to their post.
Yeah, it really shouldn't be too tough to build a decent advertising system into the blockchain - I suspect that part of why we haven't seen it is that without it certain parties can become very fat from the bid bot marketplace.