Many people are frustrated by the situation with vote bots on Steem - I have written on this a few times, including this post on the issue of whether we should be supporting proof of wallet or proof of brain. Today I had an idea that might do something to improve the situation until more complete solutions are available (such as might become possible once communities and SMTs go live here)...
The idea of bid bots is that people put some Steem Power into an account and then sell the votes for money to whoever wants to put in a bid for the vote. This short circuits the 'proof of brain' concept that Steem was founded on, since now anyone can gain votes regardless of how much work or brain was involved in their post - they only need to prove they have money and not a brain. There are numerous problems with this, including that it demotivates new users who might want to get rewarded for their brains and it also puts off casual surfers from viewing and reading the site since they assume that if the most rewarded posts are of a low quality, then the rest of the site must be too.
There is an additional problem here, in that selling votes is actually akin to the bot owner constantly self voting themselves! This is not often spoken about, but if you think about it - you could use your Steem Power to just constantly upvote yourself and no-one else - which would be frowned on by the community.. Or you could sell your votes, get paid and then even use that money to buy votes from other bots (if you wanted to) and this would basically be the same as constantly self upvoting yourself, except that you might be seen as providing a 'community service' instead of just being greedy! Even if the bot owners don't invest in buying votes from others, the payment they receive can be used to continually buy more Steem Power and to exponentially increase their wealth and power in the community.
The knock on effect of this is that those people who run the bots will often tend to get large reputations and build up their personal power too.. Is there a better way?
What about @steemit?
The @steemit account is owned/operated by Steemit inc. and currently holds over $125 Million USD worth of Steem and SBDs! That money is not being delegated to anyone and apparently isn't being used for anything. I think it does actually get used for some kind of function within the workings of Steem (IIRC), but I might be wrong on that.
What if Steemit Inc. ran a vote buying service, using the Steem Power from that account?
They would be able to set it up to undercut other vote bot operators and this would cut out these people's ability to inflate their own reputation and wealth.
Steemit inc. could then use the profits to fund useful projects, such as the crowdfunding projects on https://fundition.io, for example.
Balance?
Isn't this MUCH more balanced and fair than the current situation?
Maybe I have missed something, but I am open to all comments.. What do you think/feel?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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That account doesn't have money in it; it only contains influence tokens.
Any use of those tokens dilutes the relative influence of all the other influence tokens. Best to leave it alone.
Can you explain that using different words Matt? I do recall reading that the steemit account has some kind of function like that, but I don't recall exactly how it is intended to work.
SP/Mvests, they're influence tokens.
We can turn them into money by powering down and selling them, but they're not actually money. With influence tokens, it's a zero sum game.
We're all standing in the town square, some of us have big stakes, and we're talking quite loudly (Sometimes on uplifting, good topics, sometimes saying horrible things), others only have a small stake and struggle to be heard.
STINC starts using that enormous stack, and it's like a plane taking off over our heads.
Nobody will be able to hear anything but the roar of the engines.
People who invested money into buying a big stake to be heard over the crowd are going to sell their megaphone and do something else instead.
I understand the idea that large amounts of SP being used will alter the dynamics - but I am only suggesting that they use a similar amount to what is being used by the bot operators, I am not suggesting to use all of it. The 'voice in the square' would be shared by the various people who buy the votes, not used up by one single speaker (aka the airplane).
@ats-david was just saying in the chat that Steemit actually has used some of those tokens to delegate with, but they power them down and use them through other accounts.
The broader crypto community is already quite hostile to the platform on the grounds that a lot of the early STEEM was ninja mined.
If that ninja mined STEEM is then used to undermine the value/influence of the STEEM people have bought, that'll just throw fuel on the fire.
I appreciate that, yes - It is a fair complaint. The fact remains though, that the coins do exist and everyone who has bought Steem did so while that was the case.
I am suggesting using some of it to simultaneously clear up the vote bot issue and also to fund some useful projects (maybe).. Both of these could make a significant improvement to the price of steem, so it could work out positively for investors and the platform overall.
It is a gamble in a sense, but then so is buying cryptocurrency!
It's certainly good to have these conversations.
Keep in mind too, we're still in beta, so we're effectively lab rats right now; and you don't go changing variables in the middle of an experiment.
Thanks for the post.
Yes, this is a major issue that needs debate and action.
Good point, I like steemit, but I feel that its not fair and hope it will get better with ideas like yours
oooooh I do like that idea, especially since it is coming from the account that is set up to rule over all others. I really disagree with the way things are right now but it is tough to get everyone on board. Like you said, the only real winners are the bot owners.
Great idea, I don't know whats the total SP of all the major bid bots, and if Steemit can fight that. I'd definitely use Steemit bot instead of others.
Great concept you explained, I myself had some doubt about steemit Inc. But I think it might be the account to still hold some steem and regulate the platform.
The idea behind bid bot is really nice and has helped a lot of people who are new but have money to invest. And good content can also be promoted using bid bots. I really appreciate your work @ura-soul.
Absolutely...i don't like bid bot system to be honest.. Also as a beginner we don't get much upvoted to the posts which are much more informative in general as the senseless posts are getting through bid bot system.. There should definitely be reassessment to it.. Thanks for the concern...
I agree, I feel that bots are just taking my money or whatever it is I am paying them and I get very low votes
great post. upvote and 100% like resteem.
I think it will be a great idea if steemit Inc can take control of the voting process on steemit platform, because voting bots have destroy the this great platform whereby quantity is been rewarded more than quality and this is what is killing the platform and which has lead to poor creativity of authors. Steemit Inc can set a beachmark and quality standard for upvoting a post
Or we can flag the users of bots until they agree to decline rewards.
Declining rewards still allows the post to trend, ostensibly their prime purpose, gets the vote seller paid, and ends any impact on the rest of us.
@mattclarke is right, its the impact of large accounts voting that makes our votes smaller, increasing active sp only makes it that much harder to be a minnow.
If we could idle bot sp, every other vote goes up 30%.
Using steemit sp would make that impact even greater.
All going to proof of wallet.
The solution to bidbot abuse is in declining rewards.
Basic rules of survival and psychology mean that people are not going to voluntarily turn down payout on their own posts without coercion and I do not think mass downvoting is ever going to happen on a large enough scale.. Though I might be wrong. Just look at the organised attempts to flag Haejin, it only made a dent for a short while - it would require a mass organisation to achieve anything much. It would be much more effective to find a system wide solution..
The terms of service for Steemit.com actually ban the use of bots.. But I guess it's not cool to enforce your own rules.. lol
Yep, gonna require the responsible whales to step up.
Either as an agreement among bot operators or as a repeat of the whale experiment.
If the bot operators were smart, which clearly they dont mind cutting their own throats if it brings in a buck, but if they were smart, they could charge more than they get now while selling themselves as being responsible.
The votes would cost less, they get more in profit, and they get to bray about how they stepped up and stopped robbing everybody else on the platform.
But they are greedier than they are smart,...