Hello there @therealwolf, you were expected
I believe self-voting and curation trails to be a lesser evil than bid-bots.
You are largely involved in the @smartsteem bot. Congratulations on the work done by the way, you are one of the few bidbots using a different codebase. I hope more follow your ways and create different features and diversify the offer of bid-bots to users.
Hey @heimindanger - just saw the article few minutes ago.
Thank you @heimindanger! I've much respect for @dtube.
Ever since the creation of smartsteem.com - my goal was to reduce abuse and give users who create quality content a way to promote their posts.
Now, after months of running, developing and improving it - I feel that there is a limit of what smartsteem is able to to do. Part of this reason is also because many many many more bid-bots have been popping up in the last 1-3 months - of which 99% run on an open source codebase and are simply not giving any f* about stopping abuse. (afaik only buildawhale is actively blacklisting users besides smartsteem)
Even if smartsteem were to blacklist ALL spammers and restrict users who are abusing our services (by pushing posts to global trending every single day) - those users would simply go to another service.
Don't get me wrong - I will still personally blacklist all spammers and abusers I see - but there is a limit on what smartsteem can restrict as long as all other services allow it.
Nevertheless, I will brainstorm about ways to stop the hijacking of global trending spots in an excessive way.
I don't miss the times where the same 5 faces were on global trending every single day. But of course, real bid-bot abuse is just as bad.
I'd actually say that the circle-jerks are the worst thing on steemit. I checked out @me-tarzan and it was just bizarre. There are only 18 accounts with higher reputation to bring down that abomination. Most bid-bot rounds end up at a loss. So it's just payed promotion. Whether they deserve the trending page is questionable. But looking at old interviews of @ned he wanted people to buy STEEM to get into the trending page. Bid-bots are simply a market solution for the promotion feature that doesn't work.
Unless a person get lots of organic upvotes or STEEM price has a bull run, id-bot users will eventually run out of funds. circle-jerkes never run out of funds. They can only grow. I think the white-list system is the best path. But there will be other bid-bots. There are only 16 bots with a vote value over $17 If these bots can work together the level of abuse can be greatly reduced IMHO.