That's fair. I've come to accept bid bots as a natural means of boosting your content. If it's spam, it will get downvoted and you'll lose a ton of money. If it's decent enough, then you just get some more visibility. You still have to risk a lot to use a bid bot and spam, plagarism, and low quality content won't survive anyway. That's my take.
I'd also argue that it's definitely not often that people write up to 1500 word articles with an accompanied fully edited 40 minute video fairly well produced that is comprehensively going through something teaching people about it
You are led to believe that because there is a large codebase supporting it, that it's natural.
It's the opposite of natural, it's inorganic voting by definition and severely distorts the natural content discovery mechanism. There is a large cadre of individuals who share the same opinion and I have spoken to many of them, however many feel is there is danger in getting on the wrong side of people with millions of SP trying to protect their income. If you find me with a rep of zero at some point, their fears would have been correct. As an investor I happen to care more about the underlying price of STEEM and health of the ecosystem than rep, so bring it on.
Additionally, if those votes had been organic, more than likely you would have earned every penny. If human whales or curation guilds of similar size to bid bots, actually took a look at your post, and move that slider to 100, I'd have nothing to say about it.
Great discussion in any case, and I appreciate your willingness to do so.
99% of existing social platforms have some way to boost. Promote doesn't work on here, so people found a way. You say it's not natural, but as a marketer of 6 years, I see it inevitable. I do appreciate you leaving your 2 cents since you down voted though and the discussion as well. I wouldn't mind if there were a better bid system where you submit a base fee and they review and then give you a reward based on the review, but it's geared for profit like any advertiser is. I don't approve, but I don't neglect what everyone else will be using. Again I don't' support facebook, but say you disagree with advertising for your page there, well then 90%+ of your audience won't see your content and good luck getting new followers with that reach. Even with a verified page myself it barely gets anything without ads. The point being, that if a large portion of people are using some sort of promotional system, then subsequentially it is very challenging to compete without participating. Also, given there's no actual rules or guidelines, everyone enforces their own values ad-hoc. There is no real reason why anyone should assume that bid bots aren't approved of to begin given every platform has some means to promote content and it would make sense to look for something like that. I get why people don't like it, it would be 100000x better if we could just burn Steem to promote which would also help the value and the reviewer gets a tip.
Thanks, I understand your concerns and the need for some sort of promotional system. I'm just not sure the reward pool is the correct mechanism for that. Burning STEEM for promotion is a great concept, also a transaction between the individual front end and the promoter to get placed on their home page as well might work. A system where the content is marked as promoted and prominently displayed without bids, would also create an income stream for the front end.
You are correct about values. At the end of the day, I want to view how a post is rewarded proportionately. I am not required to recognize a transaction that you have made with a third party to get that reward.
My point is that no one can change or learn or rather no one will based on randomly enforced ad hoc rules that aren't public or consistent though, that's the issue. I remember a long time ago Bernie downvotes me a lot of using "steemit" as a tag in a post and at the time I genuinely thought that any post on the steemit site could have that as a general tag. He insisted based on his ruling that only posts about Steemit can use that tag and he would punish any successful posts that end up there and aren't about Steemit
Valid points! At the end of the day we are all sovereign actors on this blockchain who try to influence others with words and votes. The receiver of such words and votes is sovereign too. Sovereign in his or her right to respond to those words and votes in the manner in which they see fit. Unlike traditional social media who centrally sets the rules, there's a bit of anarchy here. There's no central authority to appeal to, and I'm 100% fine with that.
In a way you have to look at it with fresh eyes, as nobody is going to codify the 'official rules of Steem' for you. The closest thing we have are groups of people with varying stake attempting to exert influence as I have just done. If you're not in agreement, that's fine. You just have to accept that all rules here are ad-hoc for the most part, and the worst case is that we as honest actors both walk away with a differing perspective.
Agreed, glad we could both rationalize our positions productively
The point being, that it's wrong to make the same mistake, just because all the others do it. Be decent, be interesting, use bidbots but don't exaggerate it like you do on this post. Nobody likes trending to be a page of advertisement.
Okay, that's fine and fair
This is a paid promotion. It's not teaching, it's an advertisement. The 40 minute video is an infomercial. I can't take anything you did here seriously because I'm under the impression you were paid to say it. This is paid programming.
Well I invested in it so it helps to spread the word because I believe it will do well and benefit people cause they could earn it free like Brave. Sorry you feel that way