Bid-Bots - Also Known As "Vote Buying". What does it mean for steem?
I remember some time ago when those first bid-bots burst onto the scene. I actually even used them to give some people a boost a few times (not myself). I watched and observed and after a couple of months of them being around I stopped using them at all. I had my own reasons, but I really had not told people it is a bad idea.
I believe about the limit of what I had recommended was to check and see if the return they were getting for what they were paying was worth as much or more than what they were spending. I also recommended they look at who controls/operates the bid-bots they choose to use and decide whether they want to empower that person or not. It is a completely personal decision.
I still believe it is a personal decision. I do not believe banning anything actually works. I will not recommend banning bid-bots, or bots as I don't think it is feasible, it is not freedom to advocate for such, and I don't think it would work anyway.
I also am NOT an advocate for choosing not to vote for something because a bid-bot was used on it. I vote for things I like based upon their quality, and how much I like it. That is what I was supposed to do. That was the idea behind giving curation rewards on steem. Quality content would theoretically rise to the top.
Who or what voted for something is no measure of quality. It therefore should have no impact on how I curate.
I am a strong proponent of the saying:
"Good ideas do not require force."
I actually think about that statement several times a day.
If I were to stop voting based upon quality and instead focus on whether or not a bid-bot was used on a post then I am now in MY MIND trying to FORCE someone to stop using bid-bots to receive my vote. To some degree it could be viewed as coercive force. I am against this.
I also cannot force you to agree with me. I do not try to.
That doesn't mean I cannot share what is on my mind and it may or may not influence you. The choice is yours.
I often attack concepts such as people promising FREE things. Someone pays. [1 | 2 ]
I often attack concepts such as always choosing the easy path. Often opportunity is lost, and it can in the long term be the wrong path to have chosen. [ 1 | 2]
The short term reasons I see people using bid-bots and my thoughts on them:
"It is hard to get noticed"
And you think paying for your vote is the same as getting noticed? Do you not believe in hard work and perseverance? There is no free. Someone pays.
Bid-bot owners: "It is my steem power I can vote how I want."
Indeed you can. It needs to stay that way for this platform to remain truly decentralized. There is a difference between CAN and SHOULD. It greatly depends upon your goals. If you don't care about long term, and your goals are short term to maximize your personal gains then bid-bots are genius. They are highly effective at this. The returns for the amount of effort greatly exceed actually having to curate. If your goals are long term viability of the steem ecosystem and for it to be around potentially forever then bid-bots are a bad idea.
No one can force anyone to use or not use bid-bots. We can discuss and try to convince people with our ideas and thoughts. That is all we can truly do in a decentralized environment.
Now unlike our human situation in the steem ecosystem not all people are equal. This is a reality. I am not proposing we equalize outcome as I believe that is unrealistic, not to mention technically impossible. Yet, I do think it is important to keep in mind that it is not a 1 person 1 vote type of situation in the steem ecosystem. So when we make analogies to other things in life those analogies often are not very accurate when applied to steem due to the disparity of the voting power. It truly is an Apple and Oranges type of situation for many analogies.
With that said. I am now 100% anti-bid-bot. Though I will not force others to be that way. I'll only tell you WHY I chose to be that way. It will not impact who I do or do not vote for though. If you use a bid-bot that will not change how I vote.
It all is based around observation of what has been occurring, and trying to project that into a long term view of things.
The idea behind curation was a great one in theory. Encourage people to use their voting power to vote for things that will be popular and thus reward the content the community likes and encourage quality. That sounds great. Just like many ideas that sound great, in practice there are some problems.
Remember that disparity of voting power? Well in a 1:1 situation that curation conforming to actual interest and popularity theoretically might work. In steem your voting power can be bought and powered up, and you earn steem power over time, etc. It is possible and exists that in some cases there are people millions of times more powerful than you. So your vote of one must go up against a single person worth a million of you. Pretty much anything that single person chooses to endorse with all of their power is deemed as extremely valuable and popular even though only one person thought so.
Each day there is a reward pool that is a fixed amount of steem that is spread out across all of the content creators.
It is based off of seeing how much of a vote is worth in terms of the overall voting power.
If only a single person with 1 steem power voted on a day and no one else did that item they voted on would get 100% of the reward pool portion allocated to content creation. They would also get 100% of the curation rewards.
If two people voted and one had 1 steem power, and the other had 1000 steem power then the thing voted on by the person with 1 steem power would receive 0.1% of the daily content reward. The one voted on by the 1000 steem power person would receive 99.9% of the daily content reward even though only two people voted.
Ideally if everyone was curating based upon quality rather than upon whether they know the person, it is their account, or they disliked something (flagging) then even though it would still be skewed we would still mostly have things that people view as quality rising to the top. People who make amazing pieces might get tons of votes from smaller people and not earn much, but they would still earn something.
If voting occurs for reasons other than quality it naturally leads to consolidating power further, and the tendency to support quality seems like it would fall more and more by the wayside.
Bid-bots offered a way for the person with a lot of power to sell their votes. They no longer have to curate and look for quality. It is automated. Furthermore, if the post is actually worth the vote due to quality they'll still get good returns on curation without actually curating. Even if it is not quality they still will make good money on the fee for purchasing their vote. It is an amazingly lucrative and brilliant scheme for increasing power and earning on steem with the least amount of effort. (Coding the initial bot, setting up the interfaces, etc. are all work. Once that is done though it becomes effortless compared to actual curating.)
I knew that for a long time. Yet I was still not anti-bid-bot. I chose not to use them but I admired the brilliance in the people that created them when it came to good business.
I became anti-bid-bot within the last couple of weeks when a friend asked me a lot about them and forced me to think about them. He was, and may still be pro-bid-bot.
He was concerned about people banning voting for his things due to him using them. I told him I don't curate based upon who or what curated someone. I do it based upon quality, so at least for me that was a non-issue.
Yet in discussing with him it made me really look at this and think long term.
If people increasingly buy bids, how does that help quality rise to the top?
If I can buy votes then I should likely find what takes me the least effort to publish and simply pay to have it voted for.
If people are buying all of these votes what does that do to the reward pool?
It should heavily dilute it and increasingly over time put most of the rewards to those who pay for them.
People not purchasing them and hoping they will get noticed for the quality of their work will see a decrease in the value of their posts as the reward pool goes more and more to the bought votes.
So while they hear "Persevere, and keep writing, and it will get better." If the bid-bot trend continues that may not be the case. It was the case before, but that seems to have changed.
There is another diminishing returns factor that has nothing to do with bid-bots. If the value of steem does not increase, but more and more people join then the reward pool will be spread increasingly across more and more people. This will naturally result in people making less and less on their posts.
The only way this is not the case is if the value of steem increases. As the value of steem increases so does the value of the rewards for everyone.
I wanted to at least join into this discussion and share my ideas.
The choice is yours.
Good ideas don't require force.
The existence of bit bots is problematic because it defeats the purpose of what steemit or any community in general is supposed to be.
Steemit was about providing content and creating meaningful discussion in a system that rewards quality.
People who received huge rewards are now benefiting from the power that comes with it in a way that promotes crappy content being the center of attention while discussions die out thanks to the fact that the content in question is trash and hardly worth to talk about while the provider get's his reward anyway thanks to a bot.
It is a system that defeats itself because it hurts user retention while also ensuring that the people who have money/influence get more and more while everyone else get's breadcrumbs at best.
Of course, not every bot or bot user is bad and I have used them in the past myself and intend to continue doing so. But I still think that Steemit would be a much better place without them.
Stopping slavery, good idea, but hey, don't use force to stop it :P Wonder where we would be right now. Pressure can be applied in many ways, and the removal of support is a form of "pressure", a removal of applying an action and instead negating applying an action/force. Negating to participate or support in something is not force, it's the removal of any force. A flag on the other hand, is an action and a force applied.
I guess stopping haejin as a community isn't a good thing either, as we shouldn't use for there... :P If it was a good idea to stop haejin, it would... magically happen on it's own? When something wrong is created, people need to act to stop things, or remove support to no longer feed that thing.
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I'm not a fan of banning anything.
I am, however, a fan of changes to the code such that 'vote-bots' won't work.
That's not a ban...that's kinda like having a breath-a-lizer in your car that would prevent it from being operated by a drunk.
About the only way it MIGHT be possible is to require solving of a Captcha in order to vote. That would require making many methods of voting no longer permitted. Captchas have been about the only successful counter bot tech. They have to keep making better Captchas.
EDIT: Whatever is serving the Captcha would centralize and thus make part of the process vulnerable.
I'm not a code geek
but I hear otherwise.
something about API.
Captchas are web page or app based. I am a code geek.
If it hits a web page that is still slaved to the http / https protocol which is centralized.
Examples: What is done on steemit technically has no impact on what is done on busy and vice versa. They both tap into the decentralized blockchain but neither website is the gate keeper of the other.
Once you add a gate keeper you add a level of centralization.
Now whether or not there are already centralized aspects of the steem blockchain or not I cannot really tell you.
I do know the tech is all open source, so if they did centralize it someone could fork it and make a new non-centralized chain. Though yes that would be a large undertaking.
Also as to API. Which is short for Application Programmers Interface.
That is like having sockets exposed for people to plug into.
They are the public input and output parts of code.
I could build something like a generator that produces power and have a certain type of plug that can be plugged into it to get that power.
That plug is the API.
Some people might make a plug that can accept different types of input, or have multiple plugs.
That is analogous to what API means.
if you think you can
or
if you think you can't
your right either way.
Well I tend to agree. I will tell you no one has found a way to detect bots long term and effectively yet. This is one of two reasons that captchas were invented.
Captchas were something that bots couldn't easily be coded to solve. Thus they become a barrier for bots.
Though Captchas were also used to help teach object recognition to expert systems as well.
The thing is YES you could do it.
Though to do it you would need to bypass http and https. This means it COULD be done by writing a new protocol, a new method for accessing and viewing data, etc.
Yet it wouldn't be a web browser, or page.
If it is going through a web page then it is going through a centralized point.
You could make something that was not centralized but it would be something NEW and not an http/https based web page. So you would also need to be able to get people to adopt that new platform.
When http and https were implemented centralization was not really viewed as a problem.
So could we do it? Sure.
But it would require people learning to use something completely different from what they are currently doing.
So yes, it is possible. Knowing how society works it is highly improbable they would switch how they do things for this. Convenience motivates a lot of people.
it would require people learning to use something completely different from what they are currently doing.
Obligatory reply
Steemit is still in Beta
but it won't be much longer.
the Bot infection is serious.
how long before it kills the host?
one more thing.
only about forty thousand of us are real people.
who'd hung out on steem thru thick and thin.
the rest of the accounts are either inactive or bots.
what's a little bit of inconvience
to get rid of disease carriers?
You are likely using Chrome, FireFox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, etc.
Those are all web browsers. They use the HTTP and HTTPS protocols which are centralized. They connect to web pages. That's it.
So when I said learn to something NEW I am saying something other than a web browser as it would require a new protocol that is not http or https to avoid centralization.
So it is much bigger than whether or not Steemit is in beta. Steemit is ONE centralized portal to the steem blockchain. It is a web page.
You were referring to CAN or CANNOT. I said sure it CAN be done, but to do it would require using something other than a web browser. It would require convincing people to interface with it in a completely new way.
So is it doable? Sure. :) Doing it without introducing centralization would likely require something other than the HTTP or HTTPS protocols.
How do you identify a vote-bot?
Bots are simply programs mimicing people. You can try to come up with patterns to identify them. Which the bot maker can then tweak their pattern. Also you will get false positives that treat actual people like bots too.
Not truly possible.
anything is easy once you know how.
nothing is possible if you don't try.
I dunno...but I'm currently Muting the hell out of whatever I think is a bot.
I'm sure there are a few 'false positives'.
I came up with this idea recently to use the @Steemit account to sell votes 'officially', in a way that makes other bot owners hugely lose out and such that the funds received can be used in a way that benefits Steem directly.
Some have said that using those tokens would dilute the rewards distribution too much - but I don't know that for sure.
The Steemit terms and conditions actually ban the use of bid bots, but that doesn't seem to have ever been enforced.
Improved discovery and curation is most likely the best solution - but since the speed of fixes and upgrades here is so agonisingly slow... I don't expect that to solve anything in the near future.
I have stopped using bid bots except in cases where I really want the information in the post to be seen by many, such as the recent post I made about organ harvesting in China.
I think we've had this chat before on Discord. I like this post because you're not enforcing anything nor misleading minnows to give up bots in the hope that they can build an audience.
The fact is Steemit's Alex rank seems bogus mostly accounting for bot and sock accounts. It's not like the traffic is from a flux of real users, engaged like reddit or imgur.
Bots are needed and it's sad many witness and early adopters put that judgement on minnows. If the Alex rank was for genuine users then minnows would stand a chance to get noticed with more niche content and create genuine pocket communities of interest. Not dribs and drabs.
posting is very amazing useful for me because I am new beginner Steemit azinkan I follow you father.Follow me thanks
Helpful post bro....