Revisiting BidBots : A Necessary Evil?
I don't much like BidBots. There is something about selling votes that seems to run contrary to what I believe was the intended spirit of the STEEM platform design. Yet once again I acknowledge that maybe I have just been naive or ignorant to human nature to hope things be better. I've been here for long enough now to realise that BidBots aren't going anywhere. Many of them are run by powerful witnesses with substantial stake behind them and while there have been plenty of flag wars and controversies surrounding Steemit and proposed forks.....taking substantive action against BidBots has never really been on the agenda. Thus content creators are faced with a choice - Quit the platform or Accept that BidBots are here to stay.....
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Now I'll admit that I've been negative on STEEM for a while at times and there have been plenty of genuine content creators who have already given up on the platform. Whether that's because of some of the practises going on (such as vote selling) or whether it's just because of the Crypto Winter I won't speculate as it's a little bit irrelevant to what I want to talk about today. I have thought about Quitting the platform a few times and realised that I value the relationships I've built and the communities I've engaged with here to persist. I like blogging and while I've explored a few alternatives, nothing has jumped out at me as being better than STEEM so I have reached the point where I am accepting that BidBots are here to stay and that's just the way things are going to be here. So what now?
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The next question to ask myself is - Should I use these BidBots? When I first started on STEEM I bought into that great lie about BidBots helping new authors get exposure and thus get started on the platform, so I jumped in with both feet. The first thing that I learnt was that the whole "Get Your Post Trending" thing was mostly a waste of time. Most serious Steemians and communities rely on their feed and/or specific tags for content rather than the Trending pages which are often full of rubbish. Then after months of diligent, regular content creation and involvement in a couple of good communities I got a couple of thousand followers. I thought surely now I could consider myself established and exposed so I could rely on those followers to support me and I could stop using those BidBots.....
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Well here I am almost 2 years on the platform and I'd be lucky if my posts get a payout of 80 cents unnassisted. Are my posts rubbish? Or is this just the way things are now? Well I like to think that I'm not writing rubbish and even without getting paid I would probably persist with my blog anyway, so having already accepted that the BidBots are here to stay I thought I would have another look at them to see if there was a case to keep using them. As I often do, I started writing out the Pros and Cons.
There are a number of people who upvote my stuff regularly and maybe those upvotes only add up to 80 cents but regardless - I DO appreciate them. By giving them a chance to vote on my content and then boosting it with BidBots afterwards that gives them a greater curation reward and I do like the idea of supporting people who support my content.
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While I already debunked the "Get Your Post Trending" thing earlier there can be some benefit to showing up with a payout on a specific tag - especially if it's a community tag. New users are more likely to have not learnt the "Trending is Crap" lesson and are more likely to be scanning for new people to follow if they have specific interests. So there can be some marginal benefit picking up new followers with some modest bids.
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Many of the BidBots have put profit caps on their services to try and prevent abusers from exploiting this, but if you keep an eye on steembottracker.com it can be possible to get a tiny profit from arbitrage if you bid smart. At the moment I might average 5-10% so if I boost a post with $50 in bids I might get $55 worth of upvotes. Sure that's not much either but making $5 on a decent post I've put solid time into is better than making 80 cents.
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It kind of feels dirty to be supporting an industry that I believe is contributing to the decline of the platform. I do believe a lot of genuine content creators have left after realising they've been sold a few lies and that good content often goes unrewarded here. In many ways it feels like we're in a race to the bottom here on STEEM and there are people selling out and trying to extract every last dollar they can right up until the end. Maybe I am even becoming one of them though at least I'm still here and trying to add some value with content.....
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So how does it add up? Perhaps surprisingly I think the Pros outweigh the Cons. I might have to put some of my ideals and platform loyalty to the side a little bit, but at the end of the day the realist and pragmatist in me usually wins out over the idealist. It has been painful to see the value of STEEM drop by something like 95+% over the last year but I am hopeful that Crypto Spring is just around the corner and if STEEM can survive the Winter then this is where I'd like to be for the Spring. So if BidBots are here to stay then I guess I need to get with the program.
We've discussed this many times, so you know I hate bid bods as much as you. Steem seems to be morphing into more of an dapps blockchain these days, in which case it's competing with everything else (ETH, EOS, etc). It will be interesting to see how that pans out since steem doesn't offer anything amazing over the competitors. Since none of the problems around curation have ever been fixed meaning self upvoting and bid bots are the most profitable way to go (compared to curating genuinely good content) it's difficult to see how long it can survive as a blogging platform. It hasn't happened yet, but you'd think something better would come along.
Spot on as usual @choogirl
I agree that from a technology perspective STEEM offers nothing better for DApps compared to genuine smart contract platforms, but what it does have is a decent network effect and a social media type front end where DApps can be promoted and hyped. DApp hype is certainly the flavour of the month here during this Crypto Winter, but that can change. It used to be SMTs and we've seen that amount to nothing so far. The market is ficke when it comes to hype but anyone who's been around since at least 2017 should know that hype (and ignorance of the underlying tech) can easily drive a market.
From a blogging perspective I'd have thought something better would come along and I have been looking, but I haven't seen it yet. So if we get Crypto Spring soon (before a genuine alternative emerges) then there could yet be a run up for STEEM.
Yes, that's true re blogging.
So far I've been underwhelmed by the dapps. Nothing is better than the orgininal they are trying to disrupt. At least steemitworldmap is doing something original!
When I use bidbots it's generally to try get a bit more attention to a post, which rarely works, or to reward my upvoters with more curation rewards. Lately I can't really be bothered with them.
I do delegate to a few bidbots for some regular returns - though I guess I should review the actual level of returns and redelgate everything. I particularly like bidbots where you can buy the vote for someone else's psot. However, @steem-bounty and @steembasicincome fillful much of that role for me now.
Thanks for the mentions. I used to write extensively about bid-bots (right about the time I started @steembasicincome, so buried pretty deep in my feed now.
Bid-bots are driven by demand/supply equilibrium just like everything else in a free market. In this case, most of the conversation is dominated by demand (do you use bid-bots, and why?) with little attention given to supply. Remember that bid-bots arose during a period when SBD premiums meant that instead of the 'official' 25/75 split, the actual split between curation/author was more like 5/95. If you had a significant amount of stake, you were eager to monetize that and capturing the author side of the equation (by inducing authors to pay most of their rewards for a quick 105% ROI).
At that time, Supply far outstripped demand, and it was common for me to submit bids to bots that were less than 50% bid, in the last ten minutes. Then Steem Bot Tracker came (great service) and tracking and using multiple bots became orders of magnitude easier and demand skyrocketed.
Resolution of the bid-bot 'problem' will never be achieved through a focus on demand. Cut demand and if supply is still strong then higher profits will be made by the 'demand' that still exists- amplifying the profits (and eventual influence) of the people that ignore the moral suasion campaign against bots and keep using them.
Bid-bots will only go away when their are viable long-term alternatives at scale. Have you ever wondered why @steembasicincome only takes in 0.50 SP per new enrollment, but backs that enrollment with 2 SP of voting power? It puts us on a constant treadmill of needing to lease more SP and then cover its costs from our earning on that SP before each lease is due for renewal (explained elegantly by @ecoinstant) in our recent 'Sustainability' series.
And that's intentional. 'Curation' in @steembasicincome is crowdsourced- votes allocated based on how much support members have given to and received from their communities (you're literally the best example of this). But on the flip side... Steem Basic Income is now leasing over 300k SP of ongoing delegation through dlease's markets at rates that are comparable to self-voting APR (if not better). So while the SBI focus and marketing is all about the demand side of the promotion equation, the back-end design is all about the supply side: let's create an alternative passive income stream for high SP stakeholders that is less detrimental to Trending pages (because the demand is committed to a long-term focus by a 3-year earnback term instead of 3-5 days).
And this ended up about as long as I expected, which means that after some feedback from you and minor revision I will cross-post in a few days either to my page or to an SBI update.
Hi, may I add a few things. The so-called bidbots emerged when vote-buying was largely done manually; once it became automated it hit the obvious problem of the voting account running out of VP. So bidbots are one way to distribute a limited resource, the voting-account's upvote value, among more than one vote-buyer.
Why this even works is due to the mathematics embedded within the Steem blockchain. If user A transfers some STEEM to user B and then B upvotes A, then it is possible that both A and B profit from the dual transaction. Any two people can do the calculations and profit from this.
It is not "cheating the system" because it is encoded in the system and, from what I can see, nobody has the stomach to change the algorithm. One may have moral qualms, but the blockchain has no moral functions or commands. I'm not even being flippant here, the Steem blockchain has a built-in economic model that allows content-less profits. Steemit the website just uses the Steem model as is. What a website like SteemHunt has done, and to some extent SteemSTEM, is to add the social aspects of their social websites by having human curators and their own tokens with a different model to the underlying Steem blockchain. I am surprised we have not seen more take this route - perhaps we will with tools like SCOT and some well designed new tokens.
Like you, this got long :-)
As an afterthought, maybe SBI can go down that route :-)
When I read the SMT whitepaper (which SCOT also is using as their design specifications document - although as a layer 2 sidechain instead of at protocol level, obviously) a year ago, I had a lot of thoughts about how SBI could transition into an SMT and help build a different economic model. The pieces aren't all in place yet and we will have to evaluate and make the right decisions once they are, but that possibility is still there.
When I read that SMT paper the things I didn't like were the limited choices of upvote-curve and curation-curve. My understanding of SCOT is that those limitations are no longer there. On the one hand, one needs to keep the current Steem model but it also means that one's token could have a completely different model. Needs some serious dev tho!
One of the advantages to building as a layer 2 protocol, is that it becomes less restricted by previous design decisions. On the other hand, SCOT does not offer a consensus framework, so it's currently not decentralized. Once SMT's reach full release, I will do a deep-delve side-by-side and decide which (if either) is the best path forward for SBI tokenization.
That all makes sense now. I've often joked that I want to give away so much SBI that it because economically stupid for me to not post more often. I had been looking at SBI more as a way of encouraging reciprocal given to cement communities and a way to encourage good content creators to stick around because they know they get some guaranteed value for posting. It does make sense for SBI to help deal with the supply side of bidbots. A difference with bidbots is I can finance those with stake and withdraw that stake. SBI, well, they're kinda locked in. I guess they can be cashed in but I the process isn't as seamless. Still, when the window is long-term, locking up stake or SBI doesn't make much difference.
Enrollments are locked in, but there are two different ways to delegate. With delegation, it's not locked in but can be withdrawn at any time.
Delegation does not directly benefit specific people the way an enrollment does, of course.
So when I talk about targeting supply, it's the delegation options- because you're right, normal enrollments and sponsoring (the way we market and the way most think of SBI) is never going to be perceived as a good alternative to delegating to a bid bot.
Been here for a while. Have posted a lot of unique thoughtful content about investing. Each post gets just less than a dollar of return. As an investor, I can lever up the daily returns between 1 and 5% on each post. I do not know of any other investments that return the same. Of course the cash out return depends on what happnes to the price of STEEM long term if one does not cash out. I do not cash out. BidBots helps me to keep the balance growing but it does need regular posting.
I guess if you look at it that way it's a pretty good ROI to boost a post. I do generally consider how much time I spend writing a post and it's still pretty uneconomical to do properly researched technical writing (as I have done in the past) that might take hours or even days. Maybe I'll just have to keep my posts a bit flippant and off-the-cuff for now :)
I think the design of Steem is based on a utopia, thinking that everyone will be well behaved, authors creating only quality and original content, curators will only curate quality content after reading them and appreciating them but this is not how it works.
I think most of these issues are coming due to the fact that there are not enough active users on the platform. Before joining Steem, I used to post on some Facebook groups related to vermicomposting (worm farming) and my posts got good engagement thanks to the 10 - 20K membership of users interested in the topic. Now how many active users do we have on Steem? And how many of them is interested in the topic you are writing? There is not enough audience.
Content creators from other platforms might be attracted to switch to Steem to make $$ but then they might loose their audience and will start giving up when they need to do "trickeries" (upvote bots, self-upvotes) to make those $$ but their posts ending up being un-read. In order to get a bit of the audience back, I might post a link to my Steem blog to FB but then people will engage with me by commenting on the FB post not on a Steem dapp because they don't have a login and signing up is a pain or they just don't believe in crypto.
Talking about regular curators, who are they? Are they really curating our posts or are they auto-voting them?
Paying bots for upvotes to get into trending don't always guarantee exposure to a real audience, it might just trigger other bots that follows vote selling bots in order to grab a piece of the curation reward.
I'd love to see another Dapp that combines native Steem comments with other commenting services from other social networks. And maybe even hide the $ payout thing unless you are loggedin and the blog you are viewing is yours. This would allow dragging audience from the non-Steem world. Non-steem users don't have to know that the blogging platform is based on Steem, content would come first.
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You hit a lot of good points. Steem's communities are currently quite ad hoc and we currently lack ways for communities to form web front ends with the community content on them. The paid for content is a bit of a false bill of goods except for very rare exceptions. My observation is that people will support content creators with follows and perhaps autovotes. It takes time to get those connections and content quality doesn't speak as much as community engagement.
Steem isn't going to pay the bills for most people - but that's never stopped other social media platforms. I imagine a steem plugin for the major forum software might convince a few major communities to join us on the 'chain.
I'm not sure if I'd say the design was based on utopia, but it was definitely assuming people would see the long term value in building up the ecosystem. Personally I think a lot of the behavior we see is short sighted and ultimately counter-productive.
I get a mix. There is a decent amount of auto-votes but I auto-vote myself and see it as just supporting an author who has established a reputation for producing quality content. I am sure that if I started posting utter drivel then many of those auto-votes would fall away - and so they should.
I don't always have time to vote in real time but often I go back and read through my auto-votes long after I've voted on them. I guess it's another pragmatic lesser evil :)
Yea utopia is probably exaggerated 😄
I do some vote buying lately with the SBD I earn I like to boost the rewards for my followers and often I make a little extra out of the deal as well. If steem managers to go up and maintain a higher value it will be all worth the effort.
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Sounds very similar to my approach. Thanks for the positive reinforcement :)
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Ahhhh bid bots.
I don’t think it matters. I mean are you writing content to become a famous content creator or to earn easy crypto? If you are here to earn crypto.... get it any way and with whatever effort you can.
If one’s goal is to be some famous blogger/content creator then steem isn’t the place to be anyway. It isn’t main stream and I am 99% certain it never will be.
Do I use bid bots?
Yes (ish). I delegate to precious so have that vote. And I get auto votes for being in some communities or by using certain dapps. But I rarely pay for votes aside from precious. Especially on posts that I am proud of. A lot of curation initiatives won’t upvote posts past a certain payout. On my good posts I would rather see them get curated to a decent payout than pay out of pocket for an upvote.
Why am I writing? It's a good question. I don't see myself as someone who would appeal to the mainstream. I'm probably just reaching out to make a few connections with like minds and build a bit of a network. Getting fame and crypto in the pocket might be nice but they aren't the main motivations and probably aren't realistic goals for someone like me anyway.
As for curation initiatives. Well I am a bit skeptical about whether they even exist or if they are an endangered species bordering extinction. I certainly don't hold my breath hoping to be discovered by @curie or anything like that as I'd only end up disappointed. I've seen many others make that mistake.
This post has received a 33.68 % upvote from @boomerang.
Hey, good post. This account on steemit is new, but I'm an oldie and I always followed what you had to say. Good call on the Steem top when that happened.
This article is pertinent to the conundrum I am having right now. Been working on this project for a long time, but my newbie "steem-realms" account isn't getting any love yet.... so I have been considering how socially acceptable it would be to use a bid-bot just to get some love on my launch post for this project.
I've considered the "PROMOTE" button, but I am unsure that's cost effective, plus it only takes SBD. -.- I think my project is worthwhile, but just getting that initial hype going is a challenge. And yes, this is partially a shameless plug, but I do like your content and always have.
Thanks. I used promote when I first started but I don't think it really is worth using.
Your project looks interesting and if you're using soft consensus custom json then you obviously have a decent technical background. It might help if you revealed who is the mastermind behind steem-realms? I for one don't like to resteem projects if I don't know who is really behind them.