Shots Fired : NewSteem Launches Blitzkreig on Trending Battlefield

Trending has been a problem for a long time now. Before this latest Hard Fork(s) it was frequently filled with poor quality content that had been boosted by vote sellers. Trending was an open display of just how corrupt the Proof of Brain idea that STEEM promised had become. So it’s no wonder that Trending was going to be the first battleground for The War To End All Wars that I warned about last month. The Vigilantes that I spoke of back then are fighting under the banner of #NewSteem and I am yet to figure out whether this is some sort of loose ideology, or whether it is more of an organised gang. I suspect it’s a little bit of both, but that’s for another time. For now NewSteem seems largely unopposed as it rolls forward with guns blazing and I want to report on the casualties.

Source

Obviously, the shitposters who have been using vote selling services to push themselves into Trending have taken a LOT of early fire from NewSteem. Rightfully so, I might add. They were pretty much cannon fodder and as with most money-grubbing types, as soon as you hit them in the hip pocket they go to ground pretty quick. Trending already looks quite different, but the dust hasn’t settled on that battlefield so I won’t put myself in the crosshairs just yet by commenting on that. I am more interested to see if the Vote Sellers are being hit on the bottom line and to see how they are responding to the likely loss of profit margin. As I said in my previous post :-

They are currently one of the most powerful demographics on the platform so their behaviour will be key to how this all plays out.

There are actually a few Vote Sellers who are ALSO fighting under the NewSteem banner and I wasn’t really expecting that as it seems a bit counter-intuitive and hypocritical. I should not be surprised by such duplicity I suppose, but rather than call anyone out let’s have a look at the data as it tells its own story.

The above chart shows data from the top 7 Bid Bots. What I’ve done is taken transfers of STEEM and SBD to these accounts to calculate their gross income using a value of 0.21 (price has been fairly steady around this level over the period). I’ve then taken a 3-day average to try and smooth out the lines a bit and then I’ve taken the average pre-fork value (Aug 13 to 26) to normalise a 100% level across each of the services. In this way I can show just how much – percentage wise – their incomes are down. You can see that all 7 Bid Bot incomes are currently down in the vicinity of 40 to 65% since the Hard Fork(s).

Next I looked at the top 4 Instant Vote Seller services. Using the same methodology as before I wanted to see if these services were doing any better. While I do think the instant vote business model will be slightly more robust with the economic changes, some of them also vote with posting keys from users (instead of delegations) meaning they leave less of a footprint. I wondered if this would help keep them under the radar and I was pleased to see that so far it hasn’t. Their incomes are down an almost identical 40 to 65% amount.

Source

So the Vote Sellers are not dead, but they are definitely hurting and this loss of revenue will be starting to flow through to their investors. Some of the vote seller accounts are having delegations pulled from investors already, while others seem to be holding onto their delegations for now. Perhaps the loss of revenue hasn’t quite dawned on many of those investors yet. I might come back to have a look at that in a week or two.

Source

One thing that I have noticed though is that the yields on the lease market have dropped significantly in recent times. A week or so ago the top of the market at Minnowbooster for instance was in the vicinity of 19% and more recently I’ve seen that drop down to about 13%. Today there are market requests at around 17% so I would expect that the drop in vote selling yields will flow through to the lease market as passive investors chase a better return. Keep an eye on the below chart if you’re in the lease market as I’d expect the purple and orange pie slices to grow.

Source

Back to the Vote Sellers and the next thing I wanted to see was whether they were retaliating or getting involved in any downvote wars. About half of those already investigated had not issued a single downvote in the period, while the other half had started targeting users. While it’s possible that some of these flags were retaliatory, at a glance they look like they are targeting specific abusers. I bundled all the downvote weights from all the Vote Sellers above into the one chart to see that (apart from the chain stoppage on September 2) there is a general increase in their downvote activity. This is another trend to keep an eye on because if they hold onto their delegations then they will maintain a powerful stake for downvoting.

Overall I see many of the Vote Sellers generally trying to lift their game, or at least put out some positive PR material. Some are instituting Whitelists for clients and trying to ensure only quality content gets through. Some are also looking at doing some manual curation, perhaps throwing favour back to their delegators via that means. It will be interesting to see what sort of business model they might try to adopt and if/how the increased curation rewards will be shared back to investors. Where there is a will there is a way and while the goalposts might have shifted, there will still be opportunity to game the system if they adapt – and I expect they will.

Source

In summary it looks like NewSteem is punching pretty hard, the shitposters are down for the count and the Vote Sellers are taking it on the chin so far but they face an exodus of investors if they can’t stem the bleeding. There are also a few personal downvote exchanges going on that have the potential to get nasty but nothing too widespread yet. Stay tuned because these are just the opening exchanges.

---