Tips For Increasing Profits (Or Reducing Losses) On Your Bid-Bot Use

in #steemit6 years ago

Bots 0.jpg

Could be worse.

Regardless of whether we like it or not, bid-bots appear to be here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. This is the natural and logical result of refusing to fix the enormous gap between self-interest and the game-theory of Steemit, where maximizing selfishness will lead to compounding benefits. It was either going to be this or 99% of network activity was going to be self-voted. I'm not sure which is better.

So, with the begrudging acceptance of one who has campaigned against bid bots, then reluctantly embraced them, let's look at a few things that I can tell from the bidding logs a great deal of you are doing wrong.

Bots 1.png

#0. Not Using The Bot Tracker

This would be the cardinal sin under the current delegation regime. Don't do it. Skipping it will cost you and your fellow bidders money.

#1. Last Second Bidding.

This is probably the biggest one causing problems for users, and it's where most of your (and my) losses come from.

Avoid bidding near the end of a round. It's safer to have your bids in with 3 minutes left on the timer, and even that is pushing it – 4+ is better. This prevents you overbidding a round, or inducing others who are less careful to overbid the round, resulting in losses for everyone. The timer on the bot tracker regularly desyncs and can be off by as much as 90 seconds, plus you need to account for transactions time and the bot software to recognize your bid.

This isn't Ebay. Sniping doesn't really work so well when you need to sign your transaction to a blockchain.

#2. Overbidding.

You may be able to get post in without curation, and therefore bid up a bot over a "loss" after the -25% cut, but most other users either can't or won't. Doing this will come directly at their cost and, to me, qualifies as "rude but technically possible.

#3. Not calculating curation.

I see people purchasing bids for dead posts that are already over 30 minutes old at a loss, with no hope of receiving any views or attention based no how much they bid. You may as well give up on this, bots are not money printing machines anymore (unless you own one.)

Bots 2.png

#4. Using the wrong bots.

If you can, try to get whitelisted at a selective bot like SmartSteem to reduce the pool of other customers you must compete with. Use the few bots with an active blacklist and anti-abuse measures, such as BuildAWhale and Smart Steem, both of which are often profitable. If you need to bid early, use a bot with an ROI limit, as shown above, to minimize potential losses.

#5. Not checking your bids.

Things go wrong. Not every bid you submit will receive the appropriate vote. You will need to audit, like reconciling a checkbook.

#6. Decide your bid, then bid less.

I try to use a maximum formula dependent on each bots minimum bid value (Say, 2x min bid +1, or 3x -1, etc,) but one thing I do no matter what - add a -1 SBD to my bid formula. It's a lot harder to go wrong under-bidding than over bidding, not only do you create less losing rounds for others, but your individual RoI per SBD spent will be higher.

#7. Make sure to keep SBD on hand.

Kind of a no brainer, but it's hard to hit the exchange at the last second.

#8. Posting garbage.

Don't be the catalyst for the next reward pool war.


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Getting roi from bidbots is the dumbest game on steem right now.
It's a casino where the house always wins.

Perfectly said. I just wish these political drama queens would realize this. It's ridiculous to say bid-bot users are abusers. There are problems with the trending page and some are claiming that bid-bots are scamming those who use them because they loose money after curation 99% of the time. To me the biggest profit of bots is getting more followers.

Yeah and then the issue is that 80% of the followers aren't engaged to vote on future posts or they are bots so oftentimes they are worthless.

In my case 27.5% of my followers are dead followers and 80.6% are ghost followers. It seems that most accounts have 80% dead followers. That is to be expected from alomost 1 million users and only ~64 K Daily Active Accounts. I'm actually happy to see that my dead follower count is lower than many of the popular accounts.

At the end 20% of your followers will make up 80% of your interactions.

Yeah it is true. I feel like Twitter and Instagram are bot orgies as well or just follow for follow madness so I guess in comparison a lot of other platforms have similar sort of issues.

We are actually better than all of them. So there is bit of a bright side too. You can say that the cup is at least half full.

I did not know about Roi, thank you! :)

Have you factored in Operation Clean Trending? That must be cutting profits quite a bit.

I like this post. 3 days into steemit, I found out about the bid-bot and I did 2 trials and it was positive.

I just started to take Steemit very serious and I found this article very helpful.
I got some SBD that I earned from some comments. and I want to double my efforts to post some good content related to photography basically. and I am willing to pay some bots to boost it.
Really thank you you just post it in the right time for me.
Keep it up.

thank you the science that you have given me tonight tentan bot

@lexiconical that is some great input on using bidbots. Choosing the right bot and playing at right time is key to get better return....

@lexiconical - great post here on the use of bid-bots. They are a fact of life on Steemit it's true. If you want to move up in followers and hope to reach Dolphin or Whale status, then one must use bid-bots to increase your exposure and hopefully more SP & SBD as well. Upvoted!

thanks; for. sharing this ;posts😔:-$💗

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