RE: Steembot Experiment, Part 2: I Miscalculated
This is why the best ROI curators get their results from identifying large bid-bot bids and then front-running those votes. Earlier curators always take value from later curators, especially when the later votes are orders of magnitude larger than later votes.
The 'harm' that bid-bots do to the reward pool (if you see it as harm) is not about the distribution of curation rewards, it's that bid-bots change the distribution of rewards from 'quality' driven curation to 'purchased' curation. Whether this is good or bad is a values-driven position, not a quantitative 'provable' position.
Do purchased votes and automated votes violate 'Proof of Brain'? Or do they perfectly exemplify proof of brain (human's improving results by applying 'brain' to the automation of curation instead of by applying it to post and curation quality?)
Which take more intellectual effort? A girl scout selling cookies door to door, or an Amazon-supported website in the Amazon Cloud selling fulfilled-by-amazon virtual cookies?
Why do we expect 'Proof of Brain' to look like humans manually drudging away at easily automated work?
@josephsavage
That's exactly the dilemma and for those of us who were lured here under the pretext of "quality" have struggled and @blockurator's point about the trending page is well made. When I first arrived, it was precisely what was on that page that sent me off the platform and into purgatory for nearly six months until I was persuaded to return.
I fully agree that the 'Trending' page is problematic.
I actually have begun to think that this was where the real harm took place:
Alas, yes. I fear that the horse has bolted.
I am working on a response for quill, but basically, the portion of the reward pool that is distributed to 'quality curation' will probably always exist, but there will hopefully be many. Currently there are 3-4 main ones, and some seem like 'quality' in there own way, so the revolution hasn't dawned on many.
I also believe that 'get paid to blog' was a short sighted tag line, and has led people to believe that something is being taken from them as more use cases come online.
As anyone who has blogged anywhere for any length of time will tell you. I couldn't agree more.
It's a perception problem. I'd be curious to know why you returned.
It is. And the answer is simple: @steemitbloggers aka #powerhouse creatives and things had shifted (too complicated to go into) so that I felt more able to participate. Participating and that community has had a ripple effect and through it I've, as it were, spread my wings....a little.
Awesome! That's good to hear. They're doing great things.
Well said. The reason I experimented with a virtually blank post was because I could take quality out of the picture. If I were to do everything else exactly the same with one of my best high-quality posts, chances are, if the price of STEEM and/or SBD didn't change too much to eat my profits, I'd see similar results. I'd have also likely had more human upvoters, so I'd have had to account for the wider distribution of the rewards pool.
And to your point on earlier voters, that's why @curie doesn't vote on quality posts right away. They have very strict criteria on post quality, and other factors. One of those is, they don't vote on posts that have received a bidbot vote. I suspect that has less to do with ethical concerns regarding bidbots and more to do with whether or not they can reasonably expect a positive ROI from their upvote when voting after the bidbot.
That's what I've been saying all along. I don't think you can quantify results that way.
Thanks for your input.
@josephsavage,
Now that's a damn fine name, isn't it?
Quill