I spend a lot of time and effort maintaining a blacklist for @buildawhale even when it means I take a lot and lose the best customers.
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
Almost 1,100 accounts on my blacklist, all personally research and verified by hand.
I run one of the few bots that blacklist people, and even fewer who spend 10-40+ hours a week finding and punishing spammers without funding or benefit and frequently results in retaliation and harassment.
I also run one of the few bid bots that actually have a reasonable cap to their maximum bid (50 SBD) so my bot cannot be used to abuse trending. I am not against people using bots to get to trending, I am against trash getting to trending. Spending money to get to trending (which is usually at a loss) is no different than using advertising on any other social media platform on the Internet.
While I appreciate your mission, you are vastly mistaken that the ROI of running a bid bot is close to self voting at 100%.
This is very far from the truth, on good days you might average 75% of a full vote, if you run a blacklist and stop the best customers (spammers) you make even less. When STEEM drops, you make even less.
That being said, most bot owners give off the majority of their earnings to delegators in many cases 95% of liquid rewards or more.
There is a big difference between using bid bots to promote trash to trending, and using bid bots to promote quality original content.
It isn't a disguise, I work pretty damn hard to prevent garbage being rewarded by my bot. It's not just something I say, look at the queue of my bot and compare it to any other, you will find all the blacklisted users hammering other bots and you will see by their content why they are blacklisted.
They make a new account but they lose their votes/money they will stop. I frequently find networks with over 50 accounts and punish them all.
I'm sure many people in top 25 use my bot to get to trending, my bot didn't get them there though, and if it is garbage I will blacklist them myself if it is stolen content or a scam I'll even remove my vote.
I appreciate you putting in the effort to blacklist abusers. However do you think when there will be more people coming or even at the moment that you can do enough to stop all abuse. There is only so much you can do by hand.
In an utopia voting bots are able to stop all abusers, but that is not possible. The point with this all is that the voting bots are toxic and draining everyone's wealth from the platform.
The difference with real advertising is that using vote bots dillutes everybody's holdings and earnings. That is just in my opinion unethical.
If many people abuse the bidbots to be in trend recently, I saw a memes that was in trend, these incredible but true. The owners of bots like you should eliminate the votes to this type of publications, I know that it is not easy. your bot vote an average of 600 or 1000 daily publications and follow up is very difficult, but not impossible ...