Thoughts On Voting Bots

Since @ned made his appearance on Bloomberg i have been thinking about some of the common arguments that occur on steemit an though i would share my mind with the community. As you all know the market value of the STEEM token is largely driven by speculation. This is the case with all cryptocurrencies because of their relative youngness and continued development phases. However for Steem to succeed in the long run it will need real value that must be derived from real utility. As of now the STEEM tokens primary utility of is that it allows users to promote content on Steembased applications.

According to @ned :

The idea that STEEM and SMTs really are the world’s advertising network. These are tokens that get laid across applications and they have these functional properties underneath everything that cause interfaces to basically sort order posts in terms of their value, and once you have posts sorted in their order of value, then any blogger curator content creator video creator or straight up advertiser can look at that sort order of value and say well you know if i just buy some more SMTs or STEEM I can promote my post to be higher up in that sort order and thereby get more attention.

This means STEEM has a sustainable, flow of value caused by the native tokens. Value comes from those who buy or rent STEEM to promote their content, which causes dynamic rises in potential exposure for products and essentially increase sales. That’s flow is analogous to what you would see used by traditional businesses like Facebook and the like. Since there is no driving force like company in control has made Steem popular across the internet. On steemit the paid promotion services, which ae mostly the form of voting bots, provide a fair level of utility to the STEEM tokens. I say this because any user can buy STEEM or SMT's to promote their content. this can be used in order to sell products or get more recognition as well as many other uses that come with percieved popularity. This is no different from advertising via traditional media platforms, but instead of this value going to some company that wont share it, on Steem it goes to Steem Power holders.. The more they hold the higher the price of seem goes.

in the words of @yabapmatt :

Generally advertising works, which is why it is so prevalent, and there is no reason to believe it would not work on Steem-based sites as well.

In steemit currently the content promotion service is done by large holders of Steem Power. The returns are from the service is attractive and provides powerful incentive to invest and hold Steem Power. On a daily basis thousands of dollars is invested in Steem Power specifically for the opportunity to run vote buying services. For most users the main issue they have is a small number of “whales” are earning the vast majority of the rewards. Unfortunately this distribution problem with Steem has yet to truly be addressed nor may it be possible to address.

The point is that using paid content promotion services is not the cause of Steemit's problems. Removing the bots will not change anything for the better because Logically these whales will use their power for self upvotes or circle-jerking if they aren't selling their votes. Personally I believe that bid buying adds value to Steemit thus getting rid of them, would be a bad idea.