As a lot of people have been and keep asking me what the difference is between @ocdb and just another bid bot I figured I'd write a post about it and try to explain it like I'm five, or was it "like you're five"? I guess we'll see how it turns out. :P
The purpose of a bid bot is basically, promote an advertisement service to authors wanting to promote their posts onto their biggest front-end; Steemit.com. Believing that many accounts and outside viewers read and browse the Trending section of Steemit and letting anyone buy a vote for their post unless blacklisted.
Checking steembottracker.com you can get a good glimpse at how they operate:
As you can see they run by rounds, picking up bids each round and then the votes come in when the round is over. They have minimum bids and max ones and I assume there's an algo that changes the vote strength of the last votes so it matches the bid and promised ROI while the voting power is slightly depleting from the previous votes. Some of them have a minimim ROI, meaning that if there are too many bidders in that round the bot will send back your partial or full bid or add you in queue to the next round. Those without minimum ROI will just split the voting power between all bidders in that round respective to their bids.
Now as we went through the basics, I want to say some thing. This is all a great service, attention is after all what is Steem's main focus even though it can be blatantly bought right now. Who's to say there won't be other solutions later or if other front-ends become more popular due to the way they decide what gets attention. Buying attention should cost, the Steem that the bidders use goes back to the investors of Steem and at the same time increases the value of our holdings. What kind of bothers me though is that there are some owners of these services that make a lot of rewards for it, and some of them do not give back to the platform by making sure their bots aren't being abused or leading to a crappy trending quality. Not just that, but imagine you wanted to buy a vote and the bid bot owner sees that hey "this is not me", so to make it more costly for you he will at the same time post something on an alt account and bidding against you so you have to pay a steeper price for your bid. They will falsify demand in order for their bid bot to turn a better profit and in turn them getting a bigger cut, it won't cost them a much if they are the main delegator to their own bot. Think about it.
In decentralized systems everything is possible.
Now while I appreciate what bid bots are doing and hope that the rewards some of their owners make daily are enough motiation for them to continuously improve on them I hope there will also be interest in the future to distribution bots. It's a unfortunate time for curators as even being so altruistic with your stake considering how much faster accounts are growing that are delegating their stake to bots, the time will also come where even delegating to completely non-profit distribution bots will be considered as altruistic as promotional bid bots will always have the edge to for ROI as advertisement costs and will only cost more the more eyes are on this front-end. There are however ways to make that more fair too, I'll be talking about that in another post.
For those who know us at @ocd you may also know that we didn't want to contribute to these bid bots for a long time when they started becoming popular and as more and more stake was being locked up with them. We were curating instead. The time came though when we figured that "hey, if these people are growing so much faster than us and are now already showing how they are misusing their stake by not even using it for curating no matter how easy they are earning it daily, then will that change in the future?" our guess was that no, their behavior will probably not change in the future. Our blockchain might change, the system could change but one thing was certain, that authors will be having less and less stake being used on them for their activity and efforts they were providing to consumers. I realize we don't have many cosumers right now as most are just creators since the blockchain is not as welcoming to consumers and curators right now, but that is not the most difficult problem to fix.
So we created @ocdb, one of the first stake distribution bot with a whitelist, a guaranteed ROI and a way for the users we have curated in the past to continue growing if that's what they want to do. Not only was this offering authors a way to grow, it was also offering delegators and curators who for too long were missing out on bigger ROI. Why is our ROI so good considering all bidders are getting a profit out of it? Well that's mainly because we take no cut from @ocdb ourselves. Why are we doing it? Well, Steem and DPOS rely on a healthy distribution to be powerful and secure. If you check the witness page on steemd.com you can see that not a lot of active stake is voting, even though we believe it will grow over time we need to make more people aware they should vote on witnesses they trust and will keep our blockchain safe and not using their votes that means they are giving others more power. Current rank 1 witness only has 18% approval of all active stake, out of 30 votes per account, I think it should go much higher than that and one thing that will help is a good distribution of stake and making accounts of all sizes realize that all votes matter.
So the way OCDB works compared to bid bots is that each bid gets onto a queue, the account votes each post when its voting power goes to 100% and that post receives a 10% profit depending on their bid. Extreme price fluctuations may change the ROI as well considering the payouts occur a week later. All bids go directly to the delegators and all curation rewards as well, but by giving the authors 10% bigger votes than what their bid was worth a delegator receives around 10% less ROI than if he were to self-vote itself 10 times per day. We believe that this small change will keep delegators delegating to us knowing that the votes are going to deserving authors that we have curated and won't be abusing it knowing they'll miss out on this chance to grow at a faster pace with @ocdb. We also have some ideas to incentivize the authors bidding on posts daily to continue improving on their quality over time by providing them with an even higher ROI, let's hope the prices of Steem will become a big more stable in the long run to make sure they feel the difference.
Our goal with OCDB is not to exclude anyone unless they've proven to plagiarise or abuse it in ways we did not intend our bot to be used. We give warnings to authors that are getting close to that border and only in a few cases have we had to remove authors. At the same time we are adding new ones constantly and we are also going to be increasing the pace with that. We want people to grow along side us and are hoping that there are a lot more unique authors using OCDB daily so that the max bid is lowered and people wanting to use it for promotion won't be bothered to as that is not what OCDB is about, we were just surprised at receiving huge delegations in a short time period which lead to our max bid being 60 SBD at one point. We are happy to have received it though and are looking forward to it helping the distribution on our platform and that good authors and users may grow faster along side so that they'll hopefully use their stake at some point for curation again to give back to the platform.
Thanks for reading, I thing I gave up trying to explain it like you're five in the second sentence... :P
Looking forward to a better distributed Steem in the near future! :)
If you like what OCD is doing, then please check out our website with the whitelist, queue and delegators here: https://thegoodwhales.io/
Follow @ocd and check out the daily authors we curate and then add to the whitelist!
Vote for us @ocd-witness on Steemit's witness page or through this Steemconnect link. Thank you! :)
I agree that theres a significant difference... But... to go slightly off topic haha....
If im being honest, at this point i would be happy if Steemit.inc just changed the algo so it removes the promotion aspect of bots and trending page spam. That would change a lot of things and actually force bots to become more like OCDB that is as you say a token distribution bot.
Id just change the algo a bit because content placement is a front end choice, not something embeded into the blockchain.
Someone just needs to be willing to play with this a bit. The upvote value based content placement is extremely barebones and doesnt take almost anything that makes a post "trending" into account.
I just fixed Steemit. haha :D
Personally, I don't think steemit.com will change how Trending is organised any time soon. They like the big numbers next to content, even though it does not represent what the author (who's bought votes) is actually earning.
The view count was likely removed due to it being massively inaccurate. When there was only steemit.com it made sense, but now with so many windows to look though (which do not talk to each other), the count was no longer give a fair picture of the number of eyes on the content (likely way to low). Also, I could refresh the page and add one to the count before it was finally removed :)
All those things could be tweaked and fixed. If its not the view count, it could be something else.
The point is that a superior model does exist and it can be figured out because this clearly isnt the one that is working.
And really, i believe that if you did actually do this, even though the numbers would be slightly smaller, they would still be significant. The big numbers now dont even show anything.
If it is true what you say that they want to have big numbers on the trending page, then you could make the case that they are actually scamming potential users by showing them posts that arent labeled by the front end as "promoted content" and lying to them about the earning potential here.
Do you think there could be something there legally speaking?
I was also wondering if the inflated payouts would eventually become a legal problem. These numbers give a very false impression regarding earnings. A post that has a $400 payout may return the author only $1. There are posts that have a negative return. Steemit should include an approximation of the actual payout. The website should pick up payments for posts from links placed in memos to bots.
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Someone with legal knowledge should probably look into it. US has stricter rules then the rest of the world and steemit.inc is a US based company. This could force them to fix the trending page if there is any legal basis for what you point out.
Some, albeit not much, of the content in Trending hasn't been promoted. It would be cool to stick a label on every post that had received a bought vote, again though, I doubt this is on steemit.com's priority list, but could be easily implemented and appear on other front-ends.
I don't think there is anything to discuss from a legal perspective, but agree it is false advertising :)
Label promoted posts as promoted and you give secret bid bots/manual bid bots power and we're back to 2016's trending.
Yeah. Can't win.
Hey, didn't you used to be on Trending in 2016? :D
Only a few times, wasn't much into posting back then. Chose the harder path: curation. :P
This is a good idea and makes it more transparent.
Well, false advertising is regulated by the FTC....
@abh12345 you hit the nail on the head. I was here when they took away views. Even though I made very little I knew other eyes were reading even if they were not whales to vote it up. I believe they had to take views away. Really some people get a huge number of upvotes and the views would be way off. So much automation in Steemit.
With the white list malicious users and spammers can't use the bot to spam the front end, they have to use the bots that lose them money which is what makes it or break it for me :-) I've been using ocdb for a while and everyone should be trying to get white listed as hard as possible lol
I think having a whitelist is a great idea for the bot.
Also, certain profits are good too. Hell I would be happy with 1% because it increases rewards for my curators, too.
I do think some bot owners are better than others. Several update blacklists or contribute to a nice cause. And, some are active in unvoting when avuse is confirmed.. Also, some have no bottom or upper limits which lead to very sad outcomes sometimes.
Rather thank tackle all bot owners, we need to start with the worst, pressure delegators and slowly raise the bar of acceptability.
OCDB is currently one of the few I really like and I am happy to delegate to it. I guess I will be increasing delegation in the future since I am pleased with my return knowing it is much less controversial than other options.
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Thanks for a really fair description.
The bidbots are a tool.
If they are being abused it is the responsibility of the end users to curate up and down.
Yes, I do wish the owners would contribute to that clean up and curation effort.
At the end of the day it is on the stakeholders.
I like your model. DRAMA also uses an upvote to the CURATOR (who has eyes on the site) So, I understand the difference.
One year on and I still fail to see how any kind of automated voting benefits the Steem community...
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This is a great explanation and I added to my knowledge about the possibilities of the current bid bot market and the potential of manipulation there. I will be given @ocdb a try soon and am excited about it for my supporters as they deserve some great curation rewards for all they have done for me!
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Ocdb looks pretty a great bidbot how can I be qualified to use their service please
Appreciate the explanation; this makes things a little clearer. I've been rather skeptical of bidbots, simply because they always seemed like it was about lining the pockets of a few, at the expense of the many. I have had a peripheral interest in OCD/OCDB because it sounded more discerning in terms of who gets the benefits... and the "non-profit* angle is appealing, too. I know I'm whitelisted, but I haven't ever done anything about it...
=^..^=
Will be using it soon. I just haven't gone around to doing it yet. Hehe.
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Makes my week concepts quite clear, thanks for explaining it like so well.
I have various doubts
I would say that any content is OK, as long as it's decent :)
The bid will be returned if you are not on the whitelist. From the @ocd discord:
I presume there is no minimum, but I wouldn't consider < 50 SP being that useful. You can check the delegations to ocdb on https://steemworld.org/@ocdb
@acidyo thanks for the ELI5.. regardless of people approving or disapproving of bots it shows services can be built on the blockchain. And the more dapps the better off we are, as they are real world cases of crypto use.
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Nope still not on the list. I will only use OCD for drugwars fights if that helps
Hey Micheal
If you are producing the Drugwars fights via Drugwars.io (and not just a screenshot) then I would not use any bots for this.
This is because the app has beneficiaries which will pretty much cancel any ROI that could be gained from a bot.
I actually thought the beneficiaries for DW were higher than 10%, and so it seems that if you are lucky (STEEM doesn't fall in price) you might break even when using OCDB.
I see Actifit also has a 10% beneficiary total, and so I would only use OCDB when producing content via busy.org or steemit.com.
Cheers!
lol was being sarcastic.ha didn't think of that though, using a screen shot. there was only one time i ever felt like using OCD or a bid bot and that was when i was trying to give away steem for those wanting to convert actifit points to upvotes. it cost one steem to do it and i couldn't give 60 away i had allocated.
Looks like @ocdb follow transparent practise with profitable upvotes. Will give it a try for sure. Thank you.
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That's what I like about ocdb they keep the things pretty clear...and keep coming up with all the update. More importantly, the votes are going to good authors...Looking profitable option. Soon expect a small delegation from me...keep Steeming
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It would be better if some of the heavy users delegated more to the cause. I will try to keep my delegation around 10% of SP.
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Can I get a sample of ocdb upvote?
Not sure what you mean. :)
Feel free to test OCDB on one of my posts with a 100% vote? :D
I know you should always be prepared to explain as much as possible to win the ignorance of whoever is in need of it. May be you could try using pictures and graphs or memes to explain. They make explanations easier.
@Ocd is a great project on #steem though am yet to have a visit.