OCD&B FAQ and comments

I have to take a small break from implementing new features of OCD to answer a few questions I've been getting a lot lately so I don't have to repeat myself too often in comments or dms. I really don't like ignoring users no matter how excited they may be about something Steem related and OCDB so hopefully linking to this won't be as rude when they continue asking me things. Until we've made things more obvious through our website and bot when OCD Reloaded is running.

1. Does OCD take a cut?
   No. We realize this concept may be hard to grasp for some reason, not sure if it's cause people have gotten used to anything and everything offered in some ways is supposed to have a middleman taking a slice, but our bot is completely 100% nonprofit. The curation rewards that get returned as SP are constantly being powered down and are fed as liquid rewards to the bot to pay out all delegators curation share and bid share. Think of it as a 10% mining pool where the 10% fee goes to the users of the platform instead of the owners of the pool and the 90% goes to the delegators.

2. How to get whitelisted?
   Right now the whitelist is not actively being filled with new quality and original content creators. We are however a longterm oriented project that strives for distribution not only when it comes to great content that is undervalued but also to users who we believe bring a lot of value daily to our platform in other means that just content. OCD was one of the biggest curation projects that incentivized curators extra to find these creators and now they have a chance to grow with OCDB daily for a healthy distribution while providing content to readers and curators.

3. What makes you different from a bid bot?
   Bid bots are different because they are meant as a tool for promotion, it works great for that and gives users that want attention to their post from hot or trending a chance to buy that and it is meant to cost them a fee. We work in a queue based system where the bot votes once every time it reaches 100% voting power, what this means is that we adjust the max bid a bidder can get per day depending on the demand. As our whitelist consists of content creators of over 1.5 years of Steem, many may not be as active as they used to be when we curated them so the max bid grows to not let the bot sit idle and give the active authors an edge by growing their stake faster by buying votes daily. The price increase also makes the bots votes smaller in % as users buy with SBD which will hopefully remain pegged this time around. Over time as we're adding more and more users to the whitelist, demand will catch up to the max bid and it will have to be lowered. The only thing that can change that is a growing delegation to it (which has it's limits) and a growing price of Steem (which doesn't have any limits).

4. What is OCD&B striving for?
   We want to become a big community that welcomes new users with free accounts, works together to find and help grow the stakes of quality users and authors so Steem remains the best distributed cryptocurrency in the space. We believe in the longevity of our blockchain and the advantages it will give people all over the world over this corrupt and imbalanced system we are in currently. We want to continue to be a fair curation project and give everyone a chance that joins this platform to get a kickstart in their journey and a safer way to grow in stake from your efforts than for middlemen or bots. We want to continue curating as many new users as possible and are hoping we can bring back other language curation and additions to OCDB soon again with the increase in popularity of our blockchain.

5. Why is this user buying a vote for this post?
   It's not always about just the content, a minority of users are added as we also feel they are longterm oriented and provide value to Steem in other ways than only just original and quality content. Many have also been added through the few posts we've had where they could nominate eachother for the whitelist and were curated and added. We will post some more clear guidelines of when to not use OCDB as we're rolling, for now we've been warning users and removing them after we believed it was pointless to continue down that finger pointing path. Much like blockchain, over time the advantage of a distribution bot will outweigh the small ways it can be misused.

We understand that Steem is currently in it's wild west stages, being filled with promo transactions to users wallets and not knowing who you can trust as a new user. It is sometimes hard to trust anything that sounds too good to be true. Many have asked us what's in it for us, especially since OCDB is nonprofit. As we have curated in the past, a team of over 20 curators have been incentivized with post rewards of compilations of the authors and posts we've curated daily and curation rewards from users and investors delegating to @ocd. We also have a witness account @ocd-witness if you appreciate what we are doing and trying to do in the future, we'd love your vote of trust in us.

A healthy distribution will be what Steem needs in the future, not just because of delegated proof of stake algo but also because curation activity and stake is shrinking as everything is coming and being created on Steem. Many turning to only selling their votes or investing in dapps. There are many users and growing that care about curation and always leave some stake over to do that, with the right price it will be a comfortable amount for more and more and the authors will feel they are receiving a decent chunk on top of possible adrevenue in a future Steem. The cycles of Steem move quick and often, minnows from two years ago could become dolphins today just through stake. Dolphins can turn into bear market whales just through bull markets.

We are looking forward to the next two years, I am certain a lot is going to change on Steem and we may not even be the most popular distribution bot in the future. As long as there exist better and fairer alternatives, though, we will have done our part.

If you have any other questions about OCD and OCDB (not about the whitelist right now please), feel free to ask them here!

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