RE: Why Boycotting Bidbots to Save the Reward Pool is a Fruitless Endeavor.
i think the onus of blame goes on delegators rathe than bot owners.. !
also, I think you are right,, it wouldn't help to boycott them..
The issue is that people with a lot of SP cannot read enough posts every day to really curate that well.. there are a few that do it and its a full time job!
Therefore I think that improving bots is one solution .. and in my opinion whitelisting is a GREAT option to improve bots .. There are a few people who do this, and the @ecotrain bot is one of the first on steembottracker to do it.. Smartsteem also do it, and that is great.. also @tribesteemup do this within a community of amazing people who all post great content..
Bots are still new, and I think things will evolve in different ways so that things are improved.. They are a great concept in many ways,, and alleviate the issues of self voting and vote swapping to a great extent.. and provide a way for others to get a share of the Reward pool..
Lets see what happens!
Last year a few folks got together and made moderate delegations to folks they thought were doing good things. @fulltimegeek, @stellabelle, and @aggroed were delegating to various and many delegates that were then encouraged to upvote others they in turn thought were doing good things.
During the experiment, @abh12345 tracked various metrics of engagement, number of accounts upvoted, number of selfvotes, etc... My recollection is that almost all of the delegates improved their metrics considerably during the experiment, and those delegations distributed the curation possible to the SP delegated to ten times as many accounts as the delegators could have reached.
I believe in that process, and believe it impacts the price of Steem by growing the market for it, potentiating capital gains for the delegators as well as the delegates and curated authors. You could find out more by asking @abh12345, or just checking out his blog.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about, this one is similar but it changes monthly. By sending wallet messages and leaving comments like "Congratulations You've Received a 1-Month Appreciation Delegation!", these comments or wallet messages can help to promote the program naturally.
Also, it can make the recipient of said delegation feel appreciated and they'll get a confidence boost and maybe later down the line when they've picked up enough steem they may do the same thing for others.
I just think voluntaryism is always the way to go, this as opposed to using psychologically coercive tactics to try and manipulate individuals to act in a prescribed way. That route is never appealing and often doesn't happen IRL with the exception of cults.
So if we were to cultishly by force impose a HF that taxed content creators by another 25% I fear the bot owners would all to easily adjust and it would be everyone else who got screwed to a greater degree.
By making the delegations temporary and indicating that up front, then there should be no hard feelings when stakes get rotated, only a desire to use that power well, while it's afforded, and the more that these rotations occur, the faster and more prominently the program is advertised.
If those individuals are doing this, I hope they are bragging about these things, as they should be highly promoted, in my opinion anyhow. Soon my slider will be unlock and I plan to increase my involvement in this operation.
I note that extant code is 'force' that makes rampant profiteering, rather than investing, possible.
I reckon it's fakenews to consider changing the code to be imposing 'force'.
Increasing concentration of Steem in the accounts that have the most of it, as current code does, is bad for the price of Steem. Correcting that problem isn't forcing anyone to do anything. Creating market forces that make it profitable to invest in Steem, rather than maximally extract short term financial rewards is simply correcting a mistake that devs were unable to avoid due to the complexity of the innovation Steem and Steemit are, and the similar ineffable nature of human society.
The code they released was intended, per the white paper, to deliver ~30% of rewards to the hoi polloi. What that code actually did was deliver 99% of rewards to whales. It isn't harming whales to correct that mistake. This is why Steemit is still in beta, after all, as mistakes are expected.
Similarly, legally making corporations legal persons has resulted in many harmful effects on society. Correcting that error in American jurisprudence would not be a harm to stockholders, but a restoration of what is just and proper the bad legal code did harm.
Well it's an enforced tax, enforced by the code.
Seems like most often it takes money/steem to make money/steem. The rich always tend to get richer.
Right, it's not force in the physical sense. It's force in the sense the code makes it happen automatically. I'm sure most content crators wouldn't want to lose another 25% of their curation rewards.
You could look at it as correcting a mistake. However, many times in macroeconomics when these things are attempted they lead to unforseen consequences. I envision disenchanted content creators and bidbot armies voting for each other via steemauto. Votebot accounts that shit post all day every day and the domination of (or trending in) some of the most popular tags.
I wonder if communism ever works, or if people will always find a way to capitalize even from within systems that are meant to redistribute wealth? If as you say that was their intention to distribute rewards to the many it sure did not take long to undo that. I didn't even realize this was still in beta, maybe it's a failed model of whatever their intentions were. Or maybe as you said it needs tweaking but that tweaking is a form of enforcement I think. Not force in the physical sense, we're in a virtual world on here.
You're god damn right!
Update: I take that back, I'm not sure who the stakeholders of the United States corporation are. They've created a system of slavery and it might very well indeed harm them in the fiscal sense if it were abolished over night.
The arguments against fixing the code are philosophically the same arguments that could be made against having civilization at all. It's possible for humans to just kill and eat other people, so creating 'code' that prevents it harms cannibals.
Kinda silly, really.
Okay, but like in the U.S. if they suddenly imposed a 50% tax on labor for everyone. Do you think it might solve any problems or just create a bunch of new ones? I think if it can be fixed it should be fixed via the code. I'm just opposed to bad ideas. I don't know how to fix the problem via the code, lots of people have ideas though. Hopefully, they will get it right because if they are to get it more wrong, they may as well be standoffish. I'm not even sure this entire platform is natural or normal in any way. It doesn't conform to the natural world so much.
You mean what they have basically done in bits and pieces since 1913? How about just undoing that tax altogether, sorta like removing the ability of capital to do practically the same thing on Steemit?
I completely agree the problem is in the code, and needs to be solved in the code, if Steemit is to not only survive, but thrive and prosper. For that to happen we need the userbase to expand, and the more broadly the better.
Investors would be intent on doing that to increase the potential capital gains a broader market for Steem would create by pushing up the price of the token.
Profiteers instead suck every token they can now, and damn the future.
@ned recently spoke in Korea, and pointed out the problem is actually stake-weighting (just like in fiat, and the law of the jungle, in which the strong feed on the weak), which he intends to make optional with SMTs. We will be able to see multiple experiments run side-by-side with SMTs, and perhaps be able to banish opinion in favor of actual data regarding how code can optimize.
I look greatly forward to that!
Yeah that sounds good, more experiments on a smaller scale seem like the way to find an answer if there in fact is one. Human need/greed might not be solvable. If the environment stops people from capitalizing I could also envision large selloffs. But that in turn might trigger large buy ins. It's all very complex stuff. Multiple side by side experiments seems interesting. The free market also seems to work, but it inherently has always worked better for those who've found the fastest or most efficient ways to capitalize.
Thank you @eco-alex for your thoughtful comment, feedback, and insight.
I did not know that about @ecotrain now I do! I think over time the respo-
sible bot owners will do their best to operate in the community's interest.
It's easy for some of those bots to blend in but the ones that stand out, they
are the ones that give back to the community and try not to annoy us w/spam.