I've been stalwartly against any form of vote buying for around a year now but I used ocdb once last week out of sheer frustration on a post that took 6 hours to make and edit. Not to mention the previous few hours to write and edit the poem that featured with the short film.

Honestly, I still think that the whole vote buying system is what drives a good % of people away from steem within their first month. But having said that ocdb are the only bot that (claim to) return a profit on your investment. I can't know until I study the maths after payout on the post I boosted.

One argument would be that ocdb is simply making the whole broken curation system seem more legitimate.

Another would be that steem is an open Blockchain so anyone can build what they like meaning bidbots can never go away. With this argument ocdb are providing a vital service to help good content creators.

But the reality is you're probably going to get $2-5 at the most of profit on the post from your ocdb bid. However it isn't true to say nothing could be done about bidbots. If the community actually came together to stop their use and proliferation by communal down voting, it could close down bid bots. But it seems no one wants to do that as they see it as discouraging potential investors... or they are not concerned about content quality... or they're so high up the pecking order that they don't make the majority of their money from content.

For me, it is insanely short term thinking as steem has limited USP to the average person; earning from content or maybe gaming. The issue here is one of choice. Do we want to attract decent writers and dissolutioned journalists (there are plenty of them who are censored by their editors daily) to steem? Do we want to pull the best artists, musicians and yes even celebrities to steem? All of these people value their time and work. None of them are going to want to buy votes, it simply isn't worth it for a few dollars. Also, perception is very important.

I can only talk about what I know so I'm going to talk about the (now departed) writers of steem. There is a mid level of writer, I'm probably in that category. People who write to a high level but for one reason or another don't work in media, press engagement or journalism. I used to work (full-time) as a content writer and press officer for a charity. The point of this story is that the very real environment of struggle for influence/support on steem has driven a huge percentage of people like me off steem to medium or other sites that pay them legitimately for their time! It goes back to the point of perception, even if you can game your way up to $250 on an article and through the use of multiple bots and eek out say $30 - $50 (I highly doubt this is possible with vote buying but lets run with it as a hypothetical) how does it look to serious minded people that you have to play these games to be rewarded for quality?

My current thinking is that @ocdb something of a saviour of the proof of brain concept – I’ve long been sick of seeing cliques and bot users vote their mediocre posts above their real value, and finally I (we) quality content producers have finally got a way of rewarding ourselves to their level, and there’s nothing they can do about it because they are not, and probably never will be, on the whitelist!

To an extent I agree with you here, despite my protracted argument against vote buying. That was perfect world scenario stuff. Once I've looked at the maths on my boosted post I may well start using ocd's bot on all my posts in the hopes that some people will jump on board for curation rewards, or maybe just read and comment as they become more visible. I'm sure the bot is profitable and I also appreciate that ocd have put a tone of time/effort into what has at least allowed the good content creators a fair option for vote buying, rather than the other options that often return negative ROI.

That's my 10 cents anyway. It's early days for steem of which I'm aware, so maybe things will change. If they don't, I think steem will evolve into something that isn't really proof of brain and we'll lose our USP.

P.s.

I am dimly aware of a line of argument that we shouldn’t be banging on about quality so much because most people either can’t produce quality content or aren’t interested in it – instead we should be encouraging people to put up their shit-posts because that’s how steem is going to mainstream – however the existence of this bot in no way prevents people from doing that, it just doesn’t give people the opportunity to use it to upvote their shit content, so I think that’s a null argument.

this made me chuckle. I've heard this argument too and I call it the fbook effect. Imagine a steem exclusively full of posts about how people's cats had just sneezed or pictures of people's dinner some with $100+ payouts that vain people had paid to get. M8 I really would leave if this were the case.