Steemit: What Would You Do If Your Influence Keeps Diminishing Inspite Of Powering Up?
I think it is fair to suggest that large delegations to bid bots and other apps on Steem blockchain have certainly reduced influence over the reward pool for everyone. Falling prices have further amplified this effect.
I have been powering up my earnings for the most part in the past year, especially during the bull runs when Steem was cheaper to buy with SBDs. Having said that, you need a lot of SP to make a meaningful impact on anybody's content including your own.
Truth is that we all want the site to grow and more users to come in but with that we also need to brace for an impact on the reward pool as well. It's likely to continue to dilute as our numbers increase here, especially if price stagnates.
We should all remember that the Steem reward pool is rather limited but the user base exercising it's right over it isn't necessarily limited.
Unless the prices go up significantly we're likely to see the rewards shrinking on our content without use of bid bots in the days ahead and powering up isn't going to help unless you are capable of buying Steem in the hundreds of thousands to support your work and your projects on a daily basis.
If you are depending on an income from your content here or are using this platform to fund your projects around Steem blockchain or anything else for that matter, how are you looking at sustaining your efforts if this trend continues? !
I've been listening to some showing their concern on these matters for a while and felt maybe it's worth a discussion.
How do you feel about this in general? How does it affect you?
Well let's hear it!
If you like my work kindly resteem it to your friends. You may also continue reading my recent posts which might interest you:
- Let's Watch This Fun Video From International Steem Meetup #1—Malaysia
- Why You Should Vote For @firepower As Witness—Witness Campaign Post From India!
- Steem.Chat Contest #30
Interesting post and topic firepower, here are my 50 cents on bidbots.
Bidbots are a cancer that will destroy steemit if they are allowed to proliferate as they have been over the last year or so. I haven't used a bidbot in nearly 6 months and I will never use one again.
Here is my reasoning why bidbots are a massively negative mechanism:
Bidbots rarely return a profit for the people bidding for a vote and in most instances return negative ROI. This means they only serve 2 purposes in regards to content creators.
To allow less than quality content to be boosted up into the trending pages:
They prey on the hopes & dreams of decent content creators to make something of themselves on steemit. Drawing new steemians into cycles of making very little profit on their posts by spending money to maintain the illusion of success. This is the worst kind of mechanism for a creative platform like steemit, as any writers of a certain level will be put off immediately and look for other places where they can legitimately make decent money from their content.
There are only two sets of people who benefit from bidbots:
Greedy people who would rather delegate there SP to a bidbot owner for a return of the profits than curate new and exciting content.
The bidbot owners. I have seen various bot owners pleading poverty, saying they are running at a loss etc. Hmmnnn, I don't believe this whatsoever.
So, if we have a look at these points it becomes abundantly clear that bidbots are raping the reward pool in the most cynical way. By preying on the hopes and dreams of people, while facilitating some whales in not spreading their VP around steemit to help the platform grow and sustain growth of everyone.
In conclusion, I am a curie curator, and I have seen many authors of a very high quality, many of whom have been published outside of steemit, leave this platform over the last 6 months. It is these mechanisms of corruption which is causing this bleed of talent. The people who can make a difference at the top need to decide what they want steemit to be, devs could stop these corrupt mechanisms if they chose to and I personally think it is a balance between content and entrepreneurship. Sure there needs to be businesses/initiatives running on steemit to sustain it's economy, but this doesn't mean we should just blindly accept businesses which rape the reward pool and give nothing back at the expense of the content creators. If there was no quality content here, there wouldn't be a platform.
P.s. I continually power up my earnings from curie curation and posts so I am invested in this platform but i don't have any further funds to boost my own SP up to the point I would like. I strongly believe in the future of steemit and it is intrinsically built in to my future plans for life. I will never give up :-)
Well.. we are on the same track. I have pledged not to use the bidbots either. Even at instances I got $0.0 for the posts which I would have written by taking many hours but I never used bidbots. I'm still continuing here because of the mere hopes!
When small users ask me if bid bot use is good I suggest them to do whatever they feel is right. Earlier manual curation was fun because the curation rewards were also higher.
Communities like #steemstem and #utopian-io are completely against bidbots. Using bidbots produces a negative impact and many good steemians won't even look at our profiles. Indeed I have no reasons to lament. Personally I have benefitted a lot after entering into steemit. I'm measuring it not with the eyes of mere financial growth, but as a person I got acquainted with many good people all over the world and also gradually developing my writing skills.
Afterall we were producing contents on various platforms such as Facebook and Quora for free of cost. If we get atleast 1 cent for our post, literally it is a gain! I won't use bidbots at any cost since I don't want to be even a small part of the so called reward pool abuse. I'm developing my skills a lot. That is enough for me! It will pave me ways to earn something beyond steemit.
I would say people like jerrybanfield and haejin are a curse to steem blockchain although the system is decentralised. I think a 50-50 curation system also can serve many purposes!
Good on you @sathyasankar. Although it is hard at the beggining I firmly believe that you will be better off joining the various discord communities to get engagement on your posts, rather than spending your own money to boost them up to trending. If everyone took the same choice of not using bidbots like you have then things could improve a lot for the small fish and the big fish would still be earning big rewards but would simply have to write a post to get them instead.
IKR! This is just hilarious! I've seen and heard enough on these lines. Feels scammy AF!
I was a curie curator from its earliest of days and for quite a while actually. It was just great fun looking for content and curating it. Those days we did some great things to empower people and build up the community. I was so disappointed when I saw curie loose it's delegation. Now I just look back and say, those were the days! sigh.
I've had to junk several of my own projects owing to lack of engagement from the community. I had a strong feeling months ago that we'd be here sooner than latter and it didn't take long to get to stage where bot use is profitable over real content creation. Liberosist and I've had plenty of discussions about this months before it happened.
But with large stakeholders finding the lure of easy money via bid bots the best way to profit on their investment there's nothing we can do. This process of profiting via delegation allows them to quickly increase their stake as well.
It's too bad there's no separate pool for downvoting. If there was, that's something I'd use a lot around here! I'm sure many users would as well.
I wonder if someone can pull the data on how much of the reward pool is distributed purely by use of bid bots and how much of the pool goes to the delegators.
Hi firepower yeah, it is a sorry state of affairs and I'm not really knowledgeable enough about the blockchain tech at the heart of steem to be sure of my reasoning on how this problem could be resolved. In my mind it seems the only way to stop bidbots would be if everyone just stopped using them at once. No profits = no bidbots lol.
But human nature dictates this would never happen. For example, I have hesitated ever making a post about these feelings and thoughts before for fear of a concerted flagging from the people behind these bidbots as I'm trying my upmost the last 10 months to build my rep and position on this platform to a point where I can achieve my dreams of writing and travelling off the back of my earnings. This ties in to what I say about human psychology, people are scared to speak up if they are serious about trying to build their steemit presence, greed + fear are strong motivators/deterrents. I don't know if it could be tackled at a base level, like by steemit INC? I have read a little about hivemind and it seems that it might be possible to freeze bidbots out by the community mechanism, like if hivemind was used in conjunction with SMT's to build dedicated community reward pools (maybe based on types of content, e.g. writing or visual arts etc) and made it more profitable then vetted people of talent to be part of the sub communities pretty soon all that would be left on the main pages outside of these communities would be the mediocre and poor content. However, even as I write this I realize that this idea (even if I'm close to what will be capable with hivemind + SMT's) would be open to corruption as well.
Wish I had been around then man! It sounds like it was allot more rewarding and maybe esaier lol. I'm not moaning at all but curie curating is hard now. I was in among the top 4 in November/December/January but even then it took a lot of work. Now, it is V difficult finding more than 3-4 decent posts/week to submit based on the stringent criteria and my time constraints. I think I joined steemit a year too late.
I think you've hit on one of the problems for community minded people to take concerted action against the negative people and businesses here on steemit. To fight against them you pretty much have to give up your chance at earning much as long as the battle is on.
This is really sad and I know where you're coming from. I recently helped to launch a steemit charity as part the sndbox summer camp final quest challenge and the charities intro post received minimal support. The bulk of it's organic support was from sndbox and I had to go on a big publicity drive promoting it in various discord channels to even get it noticed. I would have done that anyway, but the steemit ecosystem as it is means that the whale/dolphin support just wasn't there as few of them will be looking at the #introduceyourself tag. Why should they bother.
Anyway, rather than end this comment on a downer. I'd be interested to hear your opinion on what I was saying about hivemind/SMT's. As I said. I'm really not that technically minded so I'm not sure I've understood what they could be used for in a community sense and would value your insights :-)
I haven't used a bidbot in quite a while either. Didn't feel right to artificially inflate my importance in the marketplace. Last time I did use them however they were profitable. Seems that things have changed.
I was also surprised earlier today to get an upvote and comment from @botreporter, @bycoleman and @transparencybot due to the fact that I didn't use a bidbot on my post. I guess one way to help fight bidbot activity would be to delegate some SP to @transparencybot or one of their other accounts and maybe upvote their comments. Looks like the pro-bidbot people have beat up on that account quite a bit. It's got a negative seven reputation score. Seems like they could use some help.
Hi @randr10 I also recently popped up on @botreporter, @bycoleman post about trending articles that haven't got there by using bidbots and in that case my short story had been found by another curie curator and that is the only reason I was there. This is the sad fact that it's the only way I will get there as well, despite having had my fiction + poetry published in magazines etc. I am seriously considering not posting short stories to steemit until after I have submitted them elsewhere and had a response from the publication, as I lose first publishing rights when I post to steemit. The truth of the matter is that less dolphins/whales around means less chance of any type of meaningful reward based on quality unless @ocd or @curie find you (both amazing curation communities who I can't praise enough). This is mainly the fault of bidbots as, I can only assume, whales/dolphins delegate away the bulk of there SP when they're not actively producing content and a lot of them are circle jerking there way to a tidy profit even when they are producing content. I'm not going to mention any names as I would be risking a flagging just for pointing out the truth but I have studied a few of these types of circle-jerkers and often they produce less than quality content while people spending hours producing good interesting stuff are left out in the cold simply cause thay don't have the SP to offer anything to these greedy minded people. Ha ha, anyway I've gone on a rant again ;-)
I'm new here, and from what I've read from most users is that bidbots are problematic. However, if they are problematic, how come they are allowed on the site in the first place? Just asking because I honestly do not know. I'm still looking into this/doing my due dilligence research on bots and earning on Steemit.
While I agree to most of what you say here, I don't think your influence will diminish if you're active here and powering up most of your earnings. It's still very easy to get a higher growth rate on your existing SP than the inflation in Steem. Even if you're not active but continuously powering up all your passive earnings, your percentage of reward pool is bound to increase if you delegate all your SP to some bid bot. I just had a look at http://isteemd.com/ and noted that almost all bidbots are giving you a better return than the current inflation rate of Steem.
However, I get what you wanna say here. Since the bidbots and delegation market got prominence, earning rewards on Steem is no more same as before. I too had mulled over this issue here:
I can see that the Proof of Brain is a failed concept and I have no motivation to produce quality content here. In fact, I must admit that my own content quality has decreased a lot over time. The best motivation I get to stick to Steem is its powerful search engine optimization ...and I've high hopes from SMT & Velocity. Without that there won't be any significant momentum in Steem price as well as new joinings. But my patience is being tasted beyond my boundaries 😉
To the people who are not using bidbots or bot backed communities & platforms; because they are against these concept, I'd say they are missing on it. I use bots though I'm against them because we need to work the way system works at present. If you won't use bots, someone else would. You won't get anything from the reward pool on which bots have all the influence. If you want better rewards than bot, engaging in self-voting (or creating multiple accounts for it) is more rewarding in the current system.
Personally, I don't expect good rewards in the current system. I just write here for the sake of writing and if this system doesn't change soon, I'd rather move on to something better as and when I get an opportunity.
Would like to hear your thoughts too on this matter. Do you see any remedy to it? If so, kindly enlighten us.
Thank you for articulating this nicely. I'm not pro-bid bot use because of two main reasons.
However if rewards continue to dilute further and push comes to shove, that just might be the only recourse around here for most who aren't supporting bid-bot use currently.
I've powered up a lot of what i've earned here as well invested a lot of my own funds in 2 years. So it does hurt to see day to day earnings deplete with no fault of your own. Especially considering we're just around 38-42K active users and 8K-85K active voters of which a large percentage are bots or alt accounts as per what i've heard recently.
SMTs might be great eventually but at the moment I don't see how it will improve the price and even if you earn extra token for your content, these SMTs themselves need to have a great value in the market for anyone to earn a decent income here to add to their livelihood or fund new projects to promote the blockchain, tokens and dapps.
A lot of my own plans for growing the community are on hold due to lack of votes which just 2-3 months ago were great and were funding a lot of activities and there were 2x planned for the 2nd half of which pretty much all are junked until things improve.
Now we're left to fend for ourselves and that's not going add to the growth of this platform and that presents an issue as well as an opportunity such as bid bots for users who don't get organic traction on their content.
This is a major problem for growth around here which needs to be tackled at the earliest. But I'm not sure how and who is going to address these issues as I don't see much from Inc on these matters.
You raise aa very good point. We've seen the value of our upvote decline appreciably in the past two weeks. I have thought about our fellow Steemians who are going full-time with Steemit. In light of what is happening in the marketplace, that can be tough.
I think it shows, once again, the value of having multiple streams of income. I love Steemit and want to do even more with it. Yet, depending on only one source of income can be dangerous.
2018 is not 2017. The cryptocurrencies marketplace is still trending downward for the year. Who knows what the future will hold? However, with Steemit we gain a lot of skills in creating content no matter what happens. This is good for the future.
Thank you for sharing this. Very helpful!
That would be quite the gamble for anyone to depend on this platform for income...
My view is that, in my short time, it seems that it was a mistake to have up votes as being the measure of quality. It seems a more just reward pool would be based on the interaction it draws... An article or video can only make a financial impact for a week, however, people might find the article 6 months down the road, but it's just useless platitude to get a like at that point.
Pardon the rant.
I agree that there's something wrong with the upvote system. I would rather see a button that allows you to 'like' or 'appreciate' a post or comment, then a separate button that allows a reader to TIP the content creator. The tip function could be active forever, or at least for a longer time period than 7 days.
I'm no programmer, but maybe something could be put into place so that bots could not activate the tip button. An actual person would have to tip, and hopefully that person actually looked at the post.
And does the system need to be set up that whoever has more money in their wallet has a higher-valued vote? Why can't the value of the vote be pegged to a metric of the # of posts + # of comments + # of replies + # of 'appreciates' and tips someone gives? All of these together would show engagement with the platform, and a human interacting with the other posters.
I think this is a good solution for creating true value around true human engagement. I would also like to see a chat platform integrated so individuals or groups can have discussions on the side with tip capability included.
I would like to see a chat function integrated on Steemit too. I don't like that one has to leave the platform, go to Discord, figure out the Steemian's username there, and then set up a chat. Let's make it easier to interact with each other!
As I was bumbling around during my first couple of weeks, I needed to ask questions and get some guidance, but couldn't figure out how to message someone. Eventually I realized that Discord is a thing, but those first days without the possibility of getting one-on-one guidance were tough.
That is a brilliant idea! Tips! What a great way to encourage good posts and discourage poor quality posts. Thank you for sharing that.
:-)
I like what you're saying. The idea of a one-week limit on upvotes can be stifling to more creativity and can silence those who really like a post. I'd like to see it extended, but I'm thinking there is a reason it was built into the platform and why it stays there. It would be good to hear the point of view of Witnesses and some of the dev team.
Great comments and thank you for stoping by @bananamemos
I also would like to know why there's the 7-day limit for payout on posts. There might be a good reason. But having a tip button would sure be handy for when we come upon a very helpful how-to post, for example, even if it's a year later, we can show our appreciation.
Thanks, @terrybrock. :-)
That's more or less what I was thinking; like a system where each day the total number of views, likes, resteem, etc, would factor into how the steem gets distributed... Could still keep a weighting for the amount of sp a person has, while limiting motivation for bots.
I know a bit of programming, enough to explain the logic, but not good enough to implement it myself.
If we take everything you know about programming, @bmanmcfly, and add all my knowledge about programming, we'd still have something equal to only your knowledge about programming 'cause I don't know any of it. :-) What I do know is how it feels to be a participant on the platform and see ways in which it could be tweaked, without having those tweaking skills.
But that's the value of Community. Someone is probably already working on good solutions.
Absolutely correct! I say this to everyone including myself every day.
I am with you.
STEEMPOWER is for me the key point when it comes making a difference. The distribution strength should be used more for the people out there to reward them and as you mention your own work. I wrote also about that topic and I see that I am not alone. many people have the same desire and are already doing something about that even if its just a small action.
I also powered up and plan to power up more. One Goal for me is to become an Orca. For me an Orca already can make a significant change.
Distribution has been an issue from the start. If you ninja mined Steem in the early days, you stand to gain today in many ways! The only way to improve distribution to benefit yourself by increasing your stake now is to find a pot of gold and use it to buy Steem Power in the hundreds of thousands somehow. :)
Puhhhh so you think that you would need over 100.000 k of power?🤔
100K is a decent start and a personal goal I have been working towards from day 1. However with just 40-50K active users in play, I can't imagine how much lower the votes will be worth if there were 10x users exercising their right over the reward pool. We should be glad we don't have those numbers atleast not at current prices. Might just see my vote go down to a $1 with over 60K powered up.
Wow, 100K a decent start. But yes, maybe you are right.
With the current price situation, it's better that we don't have so much active users here.
But as you said today if you are not a multi-millionäre or find a pot of gold it will be difficult to collect STEEM to 100K.
Of course I worry about this, but at the same time I know the answer is not to slow down, but quite the opposite.
I've been trying to help people as much as I can and seeing my efforts become weaker does frustrate me a bit. But I'm not even considering stopping. That's not a choice...
You would need over 500k worth of steem to even make it worthwhile for self-voting. It's just much more competitive to buy votes from bid bots than powering up. I can see why it wouldn't be worth it for most people to spend 3-4 hours on content to get a $4 upvote.
I'm from the UK, but I now live in S.E.. Asia.
I can (or could, before the price drop) just fund my life posting on here.
If was living in the UK, I wouldn't have the time to be on steemit.
a $4 up vote?- I dream of a $4 dollar up vote - that's my daily bread!
😂
I had a $12-$15 upvote with about 25K SP around the same price as we have now, less than a year ago. Now I just hope it doesnt go down to a couple of bucks at same price levels!
I am a simple man with simple needs. I am here to earn steem and not dollars. So for me the fight becomes easier.
Sure, one day I'll like to be able to get a second income from my account here on steemit but that day is far, far ahead ............. so I am just concentrating on gathering more steem.
those who completely depend on it as a source of income are really shattered and also few people bought when steem is around 7-9$ are worrying. I hope this dynamics will change and the. price of the steem will soon shoot up.
This is a great post @firepower. I've been concerned about this issue ever since I joined Steemit. That said, evolution occurs under stress, so over time the platform will evolve to solve these issues.
I'm also noticing a lack of sustained engagment and I feel that some users don't actually read content but just ask for upvotes and follow-for-follow. In order to counteract this, I'd like to see a way for users to reward readers for reading and engaging fully with their content.
I recently read a Steemit post about a new initiative called Steem Bounty that looks to tackle this problem, so it might be worth a look: https://steemit.com/steem/@xyzashu/a-new-steem-interface-that-gives-additional-rewards-for-your-interactions
Thoughts?
You can also build a passive Steem income by selling your votes or delegating Steem Power with SmartSteem. It's a great platform that encourages quality content rather than fluffy posts.
Yes even though I have not been using steemit for that long, I can see that the bid bots are everywhere and it seems that’s the way people are making their money. I would prefer that not to be the case, as it’s takig away from people wanting to help eachother and just looking for bots...
I still need to strengthen my account so my voting power is worth more to users, but I hope to keep growing slowly myself and in 6-12 months being to make more of an impact to the content I like ! It sucks about the drop in price, I had ‘more’ of an account value 2 weeks ago! But, the markets rise and fall, I do feel that we will see a slow jump in price over the next year, just not as soon as we may hope
I hope for a steady increase in price just so be able to get back on a few community projects I had in mind.