This is exactly correct! Additionally, with flagging being a focus of discussion recently I want to mention that flagging is a great solution for bad posts that are promoted via bid bots or otherwise.
If people flag bad posts that someone paid to promote, then they will stop paying to promote them, and then the problem will be solved and the bid bots will be used only for their real purpose which is to promote great content from minnows who don’t have the SP to promote their work any other way.
If anyone wants information or needs help using the bidbots please see http://www.steembottracker.com let me know if you have any questions and I would be happy to help!
I totally agree here, unfortunately not many can or will do the policing. I wish the parties that had that responsibility could reach further and wider. If the trash that gets submitted to my bot and others was flagged, they would stop abusing them.
I don't have the finances or manpower to police the 500+ posts that get submitted daily to @buildawhale.
I have a firm no plagiarism or stolen content stance, but it is a full-time job for 3 people to deal with the volume. As it is, everything I make with @buildawhale gets put back in to pay for steem power.
@themarkymark Why not run off of a whitelist? Every bot owner contribute some time or sbd to see its operation. That Steem Power that buildawhale grows is your nest egg and payment. If we do what's right and promote a clean healthy Steemit, then the price of Steem will go up(to $3,$4 or maybe even $10). That is your compensation for the time and work investment now.
If however, you have NO longterm faith in Steem or Steemit, we can all ignore the spam and just grab all the cash we can atm and try and be the first to bail when the ship gets overrun by rats and starts going down.
A whitelist would be a huge undertaking and would require endless maintenance and would require just as much work policing content as if I actively read all 400-600+ posts a day we receive.
I do agree that there needs to be quality moderation for upvote bots, but it only works if ALL of them offer it, or if no one delegates to the ones that don't have some kind of moderation scheme in place.
One way to deal with shotpost upvoters is require registration and account "approval" process to prevent shitposter accounts from using the votebot. But again, that only works if ALL the teams running bots started doing that.
That doesn't work either, all you have to do is submit one good post and be approved, then you are free to shit post. The post doesn't even have to be authentic, just pass the approval process. The solution is to police every link.
I'm already losing money paying everything I make back to pay rent, there is no way I can manage that nightmare of a problem.
That's a flawed moderation system. How about: only accounts that are over a month old, have rep above 25 (haven't fucked anything up in a month) and have an introduction / verification post. Hell, steem.global asks for a selfie in a comment thread to prevent abuse of the faucet. Asking for users to register and have some kind of proof of consistency in quality isn't much to ask for.
Then why are you still doing the bidbot? Sounds like time to cut losses and move on to a better business model.
It offers a valuable service to new users who are struggling. We also offer a lot more than just a bid bot.
Which is why 25-50% of all whale Steem Power would need to be delegated to small curators (on 30, 90 or 120 day periods) in order to spread out the work of curating quality content.
If all the large sp holders prefer immediate profit than platform performance, then a whitelist is the only other ethical solution I can think of.
If you are okay with spam winning the day, then, by all means just keep doing everything as is now and await a HF magical unicorn to save the day.
I'm not sure about problem being solved. I get multiple people DMing me offering upvotes for money now. If we chose to "flag everything upvoted by a bot" we would just have them go underground, where they still sell votes off the blockchain where we don't see it and with accounts not everyone knows are bots. (Or at least for some time until we realise that's what they are)
No it's not "flag everything upvoted by a bot" that i'm recommending, it's "flag bad content that gets large rewards" regardless of the origin of those rewards.
The complaints against the bots are basically due to "bad" or "low value" posts getting high rewards and showing on trending lists. So if there is a concerted effort to downvote those posts then the authors will stop paying to promote them since they will be losing money.
That way it doesn't matter if the votes are bought on or off chain or whatever - if there's poor content with high rewards it should be downvoted until it doesn't have high rewards anymore.
I know you didn't say that, I'm just saying even if everything was flagged, it still wouldn't stop them running the bots and they still won't put up a disclaimer telling their customers "this is not a free market, you may get flagged for subjective reasons". Funny thing about the bid bots, is the less people using them the more profit there if for those who do use them. I think what we need is a hard-fork.
What would you propose for the hard fork?
That does require altruistic whales. I do however agree.
Since rewards are stake-weighted pretty much anything will require whales. For better or worse a very small number of accounts have almost complete control of the rewards fund.