Front Running Curation Bots
This was going to be a short post, but one I wanted to get out quickly as I think I've found a good opportunity for minnows to up their curation rewards with this one neat trick.
Note: this is not an exhaustive article on curation rewards. For more basic information, you can look at the Steem blue paper or this explanation.
Anyway, the Steem blockchain is something of an experiment involving 50-60 thousand daily users trying to earn Steem. They do this by gaining followers, getting upvotes, and trying to get a sweet viral article that will earn tens, hundreds, or thousands of dollars. All of us who post on Steemit are competing for the rewards pool.
The result has been the heavy use of bots, which have skewed the user experience away from a purely democratic system. These bots use their tremendous Steem Power to give ones post a huge upvote (for a price!), with the hope that one can recoup the cost by snagging more followers and getting into the Trending or Hot category.
My few attempts at doing this have been mixed-they've been successful at snagging me new followers, but neutral at income (probably negative if you count taxes).
We know, ProtegeAA! What are we supposed to do about it???
Of course, a lot of people hate this system, but there are ways for minnows to thrive in these conditions: front run the bots.
Yes, front run the bots! What I mean by this, is that you are going to figure out which posts are about to get a gigantic upvote, and then you're going to upvote that post before the big bot swoops in.
This should net you a much nicer curation reward than if you vote after the bot. Remember, curation rewards are there to help reward those that discover popular content first. You want to get in before the wave of upvotes, not after.
Regular bot users make this easy.
How do I find these people?
Use @yabapmatt's outstanding Steem Bot Tracker gives you the perfect tool for this. First, head over there and see who is about to upvote:
In this case, we see that @postpromoter, with a $1600 100% upvote, is about to vote. Now, you're going to head over to his wallet and see who has donated Steem:
Check it out! @steem.services just paid a massive 100 SBD to @postpromoter. They're going to be getting a big upvote shortly on this post:
The pre @postpromoter upvote is $147. We'll check back in a little bit and see what they look like after that huge upvote.
Meanwhile...
Meanwhile, you can look at other big upvote buyers as well. Some of them are regular customers. Here's your easy money tip: set up an account on Steem Voter to automatically upvote these authors 15-20 minutes after they post.
You just set up your own voting bot to front run the big guys.
But bots are awful!
No, bots are a natural evolution of human nature gaming a system. Steem is not a utopian fantasy that allows everyone to make equal amounts of money-it's a platform that gives an edge to 1, those with lots of Steem Power; 2, developers who can write great software (like bots); 3, content creators and social media savvy people; and 4, crafty folks who find tips like these to maximize their gains.
Ok, that might sound a little cynical, but the race to earn portions of the rewards pool is always going, and better players enter every day. Hopefully, the side effect is a platform with great content and lots of cool software development that funds itself.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
That's my One Neat Trick article for Steem...let me know if it works for you!
Oh, and as for the WoW 100 SBD upvote? You can check the progress here.
-Jeff
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://steemmaker.com/front-running-curation-bots/
EDIT: In case I am wrong, let us know in the comments below!
I think you are on to something @protegeaa.
I may have to experiment with that a bit!
One time I actually beat a few savvy steemians in the curation league using this tip...
They don't necessarily have to be big vote buyers.
Some actually get a lot of organic votes and others self-vote quite a lot...
But, I didn't like that using up so much of my voting power, so I stopped doing it.
...and slipped down the charts in that competition...
OCD is one account you can beat, since they intentionally wait to upvote their posts so curators can get in the game.
I use SteemStats for a quick way to see who's coming up to 30 minutes on their latest posts and decide to curate or not.
Oh, cool! Sounds like you have looked into curation maximization a lot more than I have. I didn't realize there was a league, but that makes sense!
I'm by no means an expert at curation! haha
Have just picked up a few bits and pieces here and there...
@abh12345 hosts The Curation and Engagement Leagues - Sponsored by @carlgnash and @paulag!
And when someone mentions me, I come running. No bell necessary. Fortunately, I don't salivate or bark. :)
@protegeaa, I'll just second what @wizardave said about the leagues and leave it at that.
Hey - i'm a little late to the party here, but just wanted to let you know there's a somewhat hidden feature on the Steem Bot Tracker site called "Front Run the Bots". You can find it under the Tools menu. It basically shows you all of the posts for which large bot votes have been purchased but have not received the votes yet and calculates the estimated curation rewards for voting before the bots do.
I like the idea of outrunning the bots, and I would imagine that the only way to do that successfully with any kind of consistency is to employ an autovote service.
I wonder at a few things, though. Even if you beat them to it, is your curation reward based on first in, or on how big a vote you have with how much VP? In other words, could you still be muscled out by the bid bots and the bigger accounts regardless of your position?
Then, what happens when the voting window gets moved up? It's probably not anything to worry about right now, since it's been over four months from the last HF 20 update, but moving the 30-minute window to 15 is supposed to be a part of it.
As I said in my comment, I believe the curation rewards are on a decreasing logarithmic scale. So the first vote is worth the most and by the time you get to vote 11, it's not worth much at all. I think SP has something to do with it, so I don't know that you'll soak up much of a $200 vote if you only used 100 SP at 100%. @royaleagle might know. I think he's pretty good with this stuff. Royal Eagle, you got any info you could give us?
Okay. I might have to hunt down the post I read a couple months ago now and re-read what it said. Except I'd probably be starting form scratch since I have no clue who might have written it. Any input, though would be just peachy, because this whole curation thing is way more complicated than it needs to be, and much more than it out to be. :)
I don't know why they obfuscate things so much. It would be so easy to be upfront and clear about how things work. Most businesses have a website where they talk about this stuff. It still amazes me that they don't have a Steemit.com/info page where you could get all this information. What do I know? They're the ones making millions of dollars. I'm just an idealist.
Apparently the Steemit FAQ and the user written etiquette pages are that. I'm not sure how up to date the FAQ is though, and what I remember reading was kind of general, not getting into the weeds at all.
It would probably scare people off before opening the account (instead of after). If it's open and they leave, there's always the chance they come back.
You may be an idealist, but it's coming out like common sense and best practices and they should be following it. It's generally left up to someone else to come up with things, so maybe we try to advocate for a more transparent system? Trying to be positive here. :)
I haven't even looked at the FAQ in a while. They hadn't changed and the stuff they said wasn't accurate. What's the point of saying "don't send wallet spam" if you're not going to enforce it? Come on! The FAQ are more of a joke than a comedy show. Am I right?! :D
I think people are scared away because of the complexity of it, and once they start, it's hard to get oriented. Fortunately some people stick it out and they're the ones we get to talk with today.
I'd love to have a more transparent system, but the system as it is gives ned a lot of control. Even if they system is broken, it's his system and he doesn't want to give up control. I'm honestly not sure what his gameplan is. I wish he seemed more intentional about Steemit. He seems so laid back and uninvested. Being that he has a ton of money now, he might consider investing in a personal coach to help him with things. Mark Z probably used one. ;)
I should probably go through it again. I've gone through a lot of material so I don't know what came from where.
We're kind of off topic on someone else's post, but I will say there are plenty of things that could be shored up on Steemit, and throughout the STEEM ecosystem, if the intent is to actually move forward with what exists. With SMTs coming, I don't know what that means to Steemit as a platform. If Hivemind/Communities come and blows everyone away, then maybe Steemit gets pushed to the fore.
The problem is, we as users don't know. And maybe some of it we don't need to know. I'd just rather post, comment and curate and have the rest of the inner workings be handled. There seems to be competing interests at work here, and I don't know how it gets untangled. I just believe it needs to be sorted out, and I have hope that it will.
Just my 2 cents, this is part of the radical decentralization that blockchain does best.
Steemit should focus on SMTs, onboarding, and HF 20; there have been 19 hard forks so far (with some big changes in a couple of them) and so you have old posts that are no longer relevant showing up on Google searches that mis-explain curation.
I think the community can work on some solutions here...
One thing I've always wondered about the calculation when you beat the big boys with your vote:
and earn more than 10 10% gambles
or even 1 100% gamble?
I've also toyed a bit with curation trail auto-voting, but the problem was you voted after the fact. It would be better if they let the hmm not sure what you call someone who follows a trail ??? anyway if the main curator would let the followers go first it would be a greater service to their followers...
Hmm I wrote this yesterday, but evidently didn't get it posted. It showed up when I came back to this post. Strange...
I've never tried being a part of a curation trail of any size, so have no clue as to how that works or why trail followers (I don't know the name either) can't vote first. I've noticed, though, with the curie vote in particular, that there are users who do vote ahead of the bigger voters, but most vote after. So I'm not sure how that works, or why a few might be ahead. And in general, those curation trails are coming in a few hours, if not a day or so after the fact, because it's being manually curated to start with then going whatever approval process they go through.
Something else I understand I'm supposed to go to Discord to find out about. :)
This is a great idea, I may have to try it out. That WoW post had nothing but bot upvotes on it, if I read them correctly. But it's hard for a plankton to play this game, when I only have 10 upvotes a day. Maybe one day when I get a slider, I can look into it. Great post Jeff. 👏
For beginners, very useful information. I myself was afraid to cooperate with the bots. But, then communicating with other people, I heard from them that cooperation with the bot has a detrimental effect on reputation. It's a mistake
I suppose you risk somebody angrily down voting you for participating with bots, but I haven't experienced it yet, and while I support people policing the blockchain on their own, I don't think this is the best method.
Don't punish people just trying to keep up.
Apparently again bad translated. On the contrary, I support participation in bots. I am not against that.
I have never punished anything, I respect the opinion of others.
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Hmm. For maximizing curation rewards, that makes sense. But if you're a minnow looking to build rapport with people and grow a follower base, wouldn't it be counterproductive to vote on posts you don't even care about or will be commenting on?
It's counterproductive if you would've used that voting power for something else, yes.
But finding one or two posts per day to try and get in on, before a big upvote, might be a worthwhile long term strategy to build up more SP, which will give you more of a voice long term on this platform.
Also, I'd never advocate for upvoting articles you dislike just because of the rewards! But there are plenty to choose from, and I think this can be a win win that allows minnows to maintain their integrity and make a little more money.
That's a really good idea. I haven't tried that. I might have to give it a shot. It's not hard to do manually. It's easier to do automatically, but harder to be successful. My understanding of curation is that the first 10 spots get the most curation on a decreasing logarithmic scale. After 10, there's not much curation reward given out. I normally don't vote on posts just to get curation, but I'll give it a shot and see what happens. Thanks for the hint!
I've seen that too, but I'm not sure if it is the most up to date. Of course, you could select to upvote only those that are over 15 minutes and less than 10 votes and see how that works out.
Thanks for this tip, I've been doing something similar myself but this will help hone the skills of curation. It's better to see who is paying for a decent size upvote, then you check if they have many other upvotes, if not upvote their post. Leave a comment and follow them. You may win an active friend who is investing in Steem if you drop a good comment.
Yep, good comments are always welcome!
Sadly, this is a proven method to score well in curation. :)
There are caveats, the main one being you will likely be up-voting rubbish!
Indeed. As I commented above, I recommend only upvoting those posts you actually like or don't disagree with.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the comments and curation knowledge of people in these comments. I don't actually spend much time focusing on maximizing my votes, but wanted to share this random thought I had to help out folks trying to get the most out of curation.
This method has been used to top my league in recent months and so i'm pretty confident it's one of the best.
The others relate to the same idea, being in before the big votes - curie, utopian, dtube. This votes will perhaps ensure a better quality of post, but the bots do what they say on the tin for sure!
I can add you to the league post ready for tomorrow if you wish, you might pick up a prize first week :)
Sure thing, thanks!
And thanks for the feedback. I was reasonably sure this works, but hearing from others studying this is helpful.