Can't we just stop this bidbots thing and start manual curation?
As long as delegation is a blockchain protocol and as long as there is little incentive for voters to curate better content, bid bots will be with us and will be popular.
Expecting people to simply act “for the good of Steem/Steemit!” (whatever that means) is insane. If we are not acting in a desired manner, then there is likely not enough or no incentive to do so. If we want behavior to change, then we need to align the blockchain protocols appropriately. But few seem interested in that...or even discussing it at all.
As for delegators, there are many projects to delegate to.
Yes, there are. I’m involved with a few myself. But they don’t pay and people looking for returns shouldn’t be expected to fund projects for free while the project devs and managers make money off of them. Delegating to bid bots is easier and more lucrative than anything else, other than getting free delegation from Ned or other whales.
Steem’s misaligned incentives breeds and feeds the anti-social behavior. Expect it to continue.
I agree with most of the things you said.
In one of my comments, I talked about the APR for delegators and I suggested there that we must create some projects that could be proven as profitable as bidbots but also contribute to the success of this platform.
Our @super8ballclub project is on top of them with the highest ROI on the entire steem blockchain and we made a post where we compared the profits of Super 8 Ball Club with other major projects.
Bidbots pay all the liquid rewards to the delegators, right? It drains more voting power than the bid received. I mean, if the received bid was $100, the bid will have to vote $120 or $125 worth. It simply means that the profit of delegators is equivalent to the liquid rewards of the post after curation. (SBD/STEEM).
At @super8ballclub, we pay 'all the author SP rewards' and it means the same profit as bidbots. We give almost the same incentive as bidbots to the delegators. The only thing which makes it a bit less profitable is the broken peg of SBD. Could this mechanism be used as an example for other projects? Maybe there should be projects following this approach? or maybe they can experiment the opposite.
But the conclusion is that the profitable project exists and if anyone is looking at the "most" profitable project, it's Super 8 Ball Club. We have delegators and @tombstone is the top delegator so far. I think we need to raise some awareness among people about the profitability of our project.
How do your returns compare to the Smartsteem or tipU bots? Currently, tipU is returning ~20% annually on delegation.
Actually, the thing with bidbots is, there is always a time when people are not buying enough votes so it averages out. These sponsor reports calculate their APR each week and you'll notice different percentages each week and that's pretty natural.
As for Super 8 Ball Club, according to the last week's payout, we are giving 9% return annually. Tipu is also sharing a portion of curation rewards so it is obvious that they'll win the race but smartsteem is different (I'm not fully aware if they also give from curation rewards or not).
The point that I want to make is, projects increase the value of blockchain and improve the ecosystem overall. On the other hand, bidbots are the reason of many current problems here.
Manual curation = Efforts = Steem will moon
Voting bots = No efforts of curation = Sideway movements or downside just like it's happening currently.
However, if someone is interested to delegate a large amount of SP to @super8ballclub, I am open to discuss the profit terms with him and maybe we could arrange a share from our curation rewards too.
One last question:
How much STEEM can be earned per week from 5000 SP delegated to super8ballclub? I saw the posts, but missed/don’t remember the timeframe for the numbers provided.