A positive review of @ocdb and why I’ll be using it more in the future….
View this post on Hive: A positive review of @ocdb and why I’ll be using it more in the future….
I've moved to Hive, along with most other people, following Justin Sun's takeover of Steem in the Spring of 2020. I believe hive is a lot more decentralised than Steem!
As I understand it @acidyo is currently working hard on getting the full OCD project back up and running (including extensive curation), and then it's time to start adding curated authors to the whitelist again.
Not just that, it might just be that it provides an alternative for delegators! In an ideal world those vote buying people will get less interesting bots to buy from (since their delegators go to a 'friendlier' bot like OCDB or future alternatives), in the meanwhile only 'proven' quality content makers and involved Steemians can get a bigger return on their investments.
YES! I've really really thought long and hard before really starting to use this bod. But I feel it's the most ethical way for me to grow a little faster than I normally can. (Of course, each person should decide for themselves if they want that/think they deserve that. I decided I do want it, and I do deserve it according to my own standards, as subjective as they are.)
THIS! It was @connecteconomy who said this as well: you're buying a bit of profit for yourself, but you're adding to your own curators as well <3 Which is pretty pretty awesome as long as you're not a whale yourself who can upvote their own posts after everyone has upvoted.
Anyway, I'm glad I got in the game more actively recently, but I'm even more excited I see more respected and valued Steemians researching and joining as well. I'd love to see a bull-market where the most involved and 'good' Steemians were able to grow their accounts the most, so we can together start empowering the whole ecosystem for the years to come.
Welcome to the club! I don't think you'll regret it and so far I've not seen many people feeling bad about the ethics of this bot or complain about the authors that use it.... :-)
I'm unlikely to be regretting using it given the return!
On the ethics of it, as i just said in reply to @slobberchops - it's the warped selflish upvote and milk-it culture that makes @ocdb ethical, in a 'war of just redistribution' sort of way. If the steem economic system was redesigned to prevent abuse (NB I'm speaking hypothetically) the concept of paying to get yourself upvoted even via a quality whitelist would be more questionable.
For now, however, I'm down with it! I dunno if I've got the balls to max out though, I somehow feel more comfortable around the 30-40 steem mark.
Should've checked the comments before I replied, you put everything pretty well already. :D
Didn't you notice I secretly started working for you/OCDB :D
xD
Grand😁
I did enjoy seeing a another big bid-not owner using OCDB and not his own bot, which if the bids are Ill-timed, screws everyone and defeats the purpose of it being to promote the posts. The owner scoops 'extra' and the promotion fails.
Sadly my auto failed here (VP issues) but I should still scoop a little curation next week 👍🏽
I know you can get a negative return on the regular bots, serves them right!
Ridiculous really. They all make a profit, no need to be so stingy about it!
Interesting, I questioned @celestal in his post about this one and am still on the fence about it. You could say I'm a hypocrite as once upon a time I used @minnowbooster myself but its a long time gone.
It will be a talking point at SteemCamp Im sure, this one. The respected people you mentioned are using it, but does that mean its now acceptable?
I am on the approved list too an tempting as it is.. for now I won't use it. Those arguments of yours are tangible ones though, especially about Mr 'Artist'.
It's not perfect ethical action.... more of a distributive defense against bots... I mean who would rather got a little more... me, taraz, abh, soyrosa and maybe you or frst, banfield and other bid ot owners?
In the context of the ethics of steem as a whole, ocdb is a positive force.
If bid bots were banned it might be more questionable!
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Is he even turning a profit by using bid bots? Of course, his curation rewards will be higher if he upvotes his own posts and there may be a few opportunists upvoting him for the purpose of front running the bots.
I have no idea, it's someone I'm aware of but don't follow. He has his fans and lots of people who don't approve of what he does, but we cant do anything about it.
Well, we could flag his posts. But while mediocre his posts are not actually harmful to the image of Steem. I've seen much, much worse content occupy Trending day in day out. :)
Yes true.... I only mention him because of the sheer amount he pumps at bots.
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and @slobberchops - I'm getting a bit lost in the threads... i mention him as he's embarrassing himself by overvaluing his posts. He's like the publicly schooled officer or the son of the boss that gets promoted above his station - everyone laughing behind his back because he's been 'over-promoted' and has zero respect.
I am questioning how much I'm going to pump at the bot.... I'm happy seeing my posts valued at $20, but I'm not sure if I could live with seeing them 'valued' at $60! Then I'd probably start to lose credibility.
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?
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.
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.
I am a former - very disillusioned - magazine journalist, and many of the journalists I met would have sold their own grannies if it helped promote their work!
Also, no one is born with great journalistic or writing talent. It comes with practice and dedication. There are many Steemians and people in the "blogosphere" who are vastly better writers and investigators than some of the professional journalists out there.
Completely agree with what you say @natubat. I've spent 10 years honing my craft as a writer. But that does not take away from the fact that a lot of good writers (particularly of poetry and fiction) have left steem for many of the reasons I stated above.
Maybe. I tend to think most of them left when the Steem price fell... but time will tell. And I've yet to try out @ocdb, so I'll see how it works (if I'm on the whitelist).
I understand exactly what you're saying about the concept of having to buy votes not being appealing to serious authors.
However, @ocdb possibly might be the only way (short of flagging) of giving people that care about proof of brain a way to efficiently reward quality content authors (and get a curation return themselves) - forget the bots for a moment, you're never going to stop the top 1% of early adopters mutually upvoting their food pictures to >$20 as a well known British couple and their dutch friend do every single day.
And let's face it - no one wants to flag that friendship group, 'cos that's all it is, just crypto rich friends helping each other out, they're hardly 'bad people'.
So maybe @ocdb has a legitimate place to reward more serious authors given that we're probably not going to stop that kind of behaviour even if all the other bots disappear.
I get you though, using it is hardly ideal ethical action! Just a way of earning a few more quid, but NB if steem moons, then that's an extra $20-30 a post!
All good points m8 :)
Not sure if you've seen this:
https://beempy.com/curation/@revisesociology/a-positive-review-of-ocdb-and-why-i-ll-be-using-it-more-in-the-future
I've heard of brempy but never looked into it - looks like another steem rabbit hole to idle a few hours away on!
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Certainly :)
The reporting here is tougher to get your head around. I just look at the % on the end column, mostly in amazment when I see 6000% return on a vote worth 0.000 earning 0.006 SP!
Ah I was wondering what performance meant. 'Return' would have been a better heading.
@lucypher did a post recently bemoaning the fact that too many posts are about steem (he has a point) - but is it any wonder when it's all so confusing!
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Just had a look at my pending curation rewards for this post: 0.162 for a 0.04 value vote (although never sure of the unit for these numbers or their correlation to each other) and for the why you can't buy a house post: 0.107 against a 0.04 vote. Very nice :)
Wow that is nice - what time dyou auto vote me at?
The later's more the norm - the former got a blocktrades vote.
Somewhere about 13 minutes.
I saw the blocktrades vote, happy to take the norm :)
It's not bad when you jump in late either - I noticed one of taraz's posts on the @ocdb wait list when I did a transfer myself a few days ago, and jumped in with a 100% upvote when it was 3 days old as an experiment to see what curation rewards I'd get...
I get a positive return on my (0.24 100% upvote, just with curation! I need to do the math, but it seems to me that it's as lucrative as self-voting!
Wow, follow the waitlist ... that's a good idea! That'll add a new dimension to @abh12345's curation tips!
Front-running bots is not a tip! :P However, if you like the content then why not?
@revisesociology. Your 100% vote is .24$, earning .231 SP which is just under a quarter of the current price of STEEM (SP), so .12$?
Not quite as lucrative as a self-vote, but not too shabby also.
Hehe, I know, it was ironic 😍 I'm still getting over that rose+numbers account at the top of the curation leagues 😱
I find the reporting of rewards very unclear. So the curation rewards on steemworld are reported as X amount of $ which is equivalent to X amount of SP? You're not paid out in both?
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On Steemworld it's clearer cause they do the conversions for you
My 9 cent vote is worth 0.095 SP, and cause STEEM is just under 50 cents, that's about 0.05 USD.
Curation is only paid in Steem Power.
This seems on the surface a fantastic idea - in my opinion. I say "on the surface" because I'm really tired just now, and I need to check this out further - but you have explained it in such a clear and lucid way that even my exhausted brain can grasp it!
I don't really understand why so many people are getting worked up about the "ethics" of bidbots. I have used them in the past, but I never use them now - not because I see them as "unethical" but because I think bidbots are a mug's game. In general. I hate the way that the Trending page is full of bidbotted sh*tposts, but Steemit isn't a religious organisation - it's an online community, and I think it's up to us as a community to handle these things. And a bot that favours quality posts seems like a great thing to me.
There does seem to be something of a consensus that this one is OK... and it does practically guarantee you a return, crazy price fluctuations allowing!
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The maximum bid is actually 60 SBD.
Another point regarding the use of @ocdb. The problem is not enough people are using it or shy away from using very large bids. I only see a few posts on the queue these days despite nearly 3000 users are whitelisted as being entitled to use to bot once every 24 hours. WTF? Does anyone think delegators to @ocdb will be happy if the bot does scarcely any voting?
If you bid 60 SBD, you're not "stealing" 60 SBD from the reward pool. What you're doing is taking your cut (the 6-10 SBD) and sharing the rest with the delegators. Among the delegators are many ordinary Steemians like you and me who have delegated about a million SP to the bot put together. The largest one is @freedom, a voting account rumored to be owned by Steemit Inc.
The reason so few are on the whitelist and active is cause the 3k comes from a very long time of curated accounts, who naturally have left or gone afk as the majority of them have been newcomers. It's just a "right now" problem which shouldn't be too hard to fix.
id spend 300 steem to upvote my win against acidyo. maybe some of us shouldn't be white listed:)
resteem vote.
Interesting, thank you for explaining (and all the helpful comments from others). It seems there's no application process yet for people not whitelisted - unless I've missed something?
I don't think there is - but it shouldn't be far off - you should be on the list!
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I'll keep an eye out for it. In the faqs post there was mention about being recommended by already whitelisted accounts, but I'm not sure that feature is there yet, either. (I'm using an ipad today - it doesn't always show everything). It would be good to get slightly better rewards for some of the posts I write.
I'll recommend you of course!
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👍 thank you!