RE: Why Boycotting Bidbots to Save the Reward Pool is a Fruitless Endeavor.
The bots arent the problem and never have been - its the way they are being used (and abused) by everyone - from plagarised, low quality content being upvoted for more than its worth and thus inflating peoples perception of what they can earn on here and also unfairly allocating the reward pool.
The only way to really fix the problem is from the top (the bot owners), who need to show more care for the Steem econ system by having some kind of quality control over the posts they upvote rather than just upvoting anything that pays for it - but this probably wont happen because it will be a big human cost and (most) bot owners are just out for maximum ROI. But in the long term they will be the ones who suffer the most because they are heavily invetsed in Steem - and when the quaility of content is lower, people are less likely to invest and Steem will decrease in price.
Either that or a hard fork to ban bots (but this wouldnt happen!)
That's a good idea, I've seen allot of bots that do exercise some quality control and even prohibit certain users who abuse their service. Yet, I think generally speaking, some folks group them in their mind all into one category. The world of automation and bots might be something impossible to reverse yet maybe people should appreciate bot operators that attempt to address the problem of severely low quality posts being boosted.
I know several of those companies have blacklists or whitelists to address such a problem. A hard fork to ban bots might also cripple investment in SBD or Steem Power if would be buyers thought that ROI would be more difficult to achieve.
Many seem to want to be investing in either the next bitcoin or at least something that can maintain its value as opposed to losing value in the long run. Hopefully, the collective of the Steem community will only implement hard forks that don't end up disturbing the echo system to much to the point where people's SBD value is radically diminished. I'm certainly no macroeconomic expert, all I can do is share my thoughts on these things.
I like your solution and yet it is only a partial solution.
The truth is if it is in the bidbot owners interest to only take bids for post that meet the copyright standards and have some good content, then they ought for their own continued business do so themselves.
If I was a bidbot owner I would have a terms of service and in it I would point out:
Plagerism is grounds for no up vote. Theft is grounds for no up vote. You have so much time to correct the error. If you don't no refunds.
The bidbot's have enough SP that writing post complaining could just get your post flagged. The truth here is that in fact the ROI of these bidbots could suffer greatly if people start figuring out that you indemnify steemit.com but not the other accounts. Thus if bidbot owners continue to up vote stolen material they can be sued under copyright law. The same laws that forbid theft or the encouragement by providing profit from theft do apply. That is why after all Fences go to jail.
You make very good points @aconsciousness! In fact allot of the
better bidbots operate more intelligently with the community in
mind. For example @smartsteem has a white list. One needs be
approved before you can use their service.
Other bots like @buildawhale have blacklists to prevents spammers,
shit posters, and plagiarists from cluttering up the scene. They also
offer up to a 10% ROI which after curation makes it easier to potenti-
ally break even.
It would be nice to see more bot owners mirror their tactics and maybe
even get competitive on ROI for their customers if this is going to be the
way of Steemit's future.
Then preemptive reform would be a pound of prevention. We could
have quality trending lists and beneficial services! Thanks for your
feedback @aconsciousness!
P.S. Maybe if any bot operators have read this you could cavort with
your conspirators and help to make Steemit great again, or at least
a little bit better : ) I think it would be neato if Steemit bot operators
would help us all out with operation #sparklefarts!
I think I am going to take this a little higher up the food chain. The truth is this practice of the bidbots is endangering steemit.com and I for one don't like it.
Do as you will man, as far as I know,
it is a technical impossibility to prevent.
It might not be about preventing, but about dealing with it.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, one post I seen was suggesting that content creators be taxed an additional 25% and then giving that SBD to the curators. That solution makes no sense to me, I think it will only cause more problems.
Taxed? So you think that they are currently taxed 25% for curators, so content creators in turn deserve 100% of the rewards?
That it exactly @baah . You always slam the hammer down on the nail. lol
Yet steemit.com isn't Steem. Steem is the decentralized network that it present through a front-end.
I did a whole bunch of research and this is actually the truth. Steemit is a subsidiary of the four Corporations that own everything, just like all corporations are. Even the Block Chain.
Nobody owns the blockchain. Steemit is not Steem. The blockchain is owned by the people who either have stake in the network and/or are actually running the network (witnesses). The Block Chain is a concept predating the internet by millennia, ledgers and block chains are the exact same thing, to say someone owns that idea is to seriously mistake what those things mean and why they are adopted.
There is an old saying. He who controls the gold makes the rules. Who owns the gold? Who owns the currency? Who owns the electricity? Why is the U.S fighting over who gets to build a pipeline?
The truth is they can't really control the resources, because they have tied the resources to the currency. That is the mistake that has allowed cryptocurrency. The fighting is a buy some time strategy. Crypto is also a strategy. Time will tell?
Steemit.com doesn't own Steem or is responsible for Steem.
That would be the Block Chain which is still owned by the Corporate world.
Nobody, but the people with stake, actually owns any part of the platform, and the steem blockchain is decentralized because of the risk of one entity owning the blockchain, and the proof is in the two facts: the project is open source, and the project can be forked and has been forked (Golos).