Too often I have read posts about abuse and reward pool rape. Some users try to exploit Steem and get more than they actually deserve. I am talking mostly about bot upvote abuse. The solutions so far didn't really work.
With some users trying to exploit the dMania bot as well, I have to deal with it somehow. I want to shed some new light on the problem and make it clear for everyone where the actual problem is.
Why only bot upvote abuse?
I would argue that bot abuse is the only real abuse that exists on the platform atm. Every other post that receives high rewards was upvoted by some real person. That person invested a lot of money so that he is able to make those high upvotes. He can use those upvotes however he likes. If he likes to upvote his own comments to $200, that's his choice. It's probably not the best idea or a good strategy for an investor, but it's his choice.
It isn't any different when a low stake user upvotes his own posts and comments all the time. Nobody complains about that, but it is actually the same thing.
If some user upvotes content of the same user all the time (@haejin or others), it's not abuse either. Looks like it and a lot of people don't like that, but not really abuse. Some users with a high stake choose @haejin as their special friend and upvote all his posts. They have invested a lot in the platform, so they can do that. It's their choice. It's probably not the best thing to do if you are interested in the long term growth of the platform, but if they think @haejin posts are their letters worth in gold so be it.
People can use their own stake to fight that kind of Steem Power use or they can let it happen. Again it's their stake and they should use it as they see fit.
Where the real problem lies
Most people don't realize where the actual problem is. For me it is as clear as day and I wonder why I haven't seen any posts about it. The only real abuse that happens on Steem is by paid upvote bots. Not their existence, but how they are designed at the moment and the amount of power they have on Steem.
People normally use paid upvote bots to boost their posts a little and make them a little bit more visible. Nothing wrong with that. On Steem there is already a feature for that -> Promotion. The problem is that nobody really uses it. Mainly because of the way it was designed. Promoted posts on Steemit are only visible in their separated tab. There are a lot of ads and stuff by ICOs. Most people don't want to look at that. The quality of content is lower in general on the promotion tab.
Other platforms had the same problem and they integrated ads and paid posts into the regular content. That way those posts would get more exposure and people would only see ads/paid posts from time to time. Bad design by Steemit in my opinion.
That was one of the driving factors why paid upvote bots came to existence. There was a demand for it by the users. They are willing to pay so that their posts receive more exposure. New users don't have many followers and it's hard for them to get started on Steemit. I had the same problem at the beginning. Paid upvote bots can help you with that. They provide a valid service to their users, so there is no real problem for paid upvote bots in general.
The actual problem
There is a big problem if people use paid upvote bots who don't care about the content and just want the rewards. They just create random posts and use paid upvotes to collect rewards.
Some upvote bots received a shitload of Steem Power in the last few months. The reason is because they are money printing machines for their creators and everyone who delegates to them. The rewards that those bots generate are huge. It's hard to find the actual numbers, but you can guess from the amount of Steem Power that those bots have. The big upvote bots generate tens of thousands of USD every day. That is more than any witness, author or app on Steem receives.
By delegating Steem Power to a paid upvote bot it becomes suddenly legit for whales to self vote all the time. Before they had to create posts and upvote them. If those posts provided zero value, it would be visible to others. Like I said before not real abuse, but probably not the best idea. People who don't like that could downvote them with their stake. Normally people would never upvote with 100% of their stake themselves all the time. Almost nobody does that. No whale would do that who is interested in the growth of the platform.
Except with paid upvote bots that sort of behaviour is suddenly legit. People delegate to upvote bots and receive almost 100% of their investment, without getting the bad repuation of exploiting the reward pool and selfvoting. That is the real problem and it's bad, really bad. Can't be the only one who sees a problem there.
What can be done?
There is no way to stop or regulate the paid upvote bots. They are part of the system now. We have to deal with it. People who delegate to them should ask themself if that is really in the best interest for the growth of Steem.
There is one simple change that would resolve the issue of abuse with paid upvote bots: Reduce the amount of Steem Power delegated to paid upvote bots and make the use of paid upvotes more expensive.
The price of paid upvotes depends like everything on an open market on supply and demand. At the moment the supply of Steem Power for those bots is very high. So high that using them on any content can generate profits for their users. If the supply would be less, the price of paid upvotes would rise and there wouldn't be any auto profit anymore. People who want to use paid upvotes would only use them if they think their posts are valuable and will generate future rewards for them. Abusers would loss money if they use them at random content.
So all it takes is a few whales to stop delegating to paid upvote bots or just delegate less. One simple click for a few users to stop almost all abuse on Steem. Easy as that.
I hope that some whales see this post and think about what they are doing and how bad those actions are for the Steem platform. Stop thinking only about short term profits and think about the future of the platform.
Final words
I am on vacation now and I actually don't want to deal with stuff like that atm. Nevertheless I think it is very important that people understand where the actual problem is.
I am pusing this post with paid upvote bots for maximum visibility. Like I said not the paid upvote bots are the problem, but the amount of Steem Power they have.
To stop abuse of the dMania bot by paid upvote bots, I could ban all of them. That would solve the problem on dMania, but not in general. Like I said paid upvotes provide a valuable service and are important to new users. A ban isn't the best solution.
You don't stop abuse by punishing the abuser. The only way to stop abuse is to make it impossible in the first place. Like I said, just reduce the delegations. One simple action that would change everything. Paid upvotes should never generate auto profit for anyone.
This post turned in a shit show and that wasn't really my intention. I wanted to bring attention to a problem and provide a solution. That problem wasn't recognized as such before. At least I achieved one of my goals by starting a discussion about the problem. At least now more people know about it.
I am going to remove the dMania upvote from this post. With the amount of SBD that I have used to promote this post, I will lose money.
I will stop caring what happens on Steem and Steemit from now on. I will focus my attention on dMania. Now you have one less person who gives a shit.
Some people here turned this post and discussion in the complete opposite direction. Some of them just don't like dMania, some of them have a personal dislke for me and others were paid upvote bot providers who felt attacked by my post.
How to stop almost all abuse on Steem:
Undelegate to Dmania.
[EDIT] - Upvoted for visibility and self-aggrandizement. Also...Streisand Effect.
Plus he paid for upvote bots to get the post noticed.
This is Streisand abuse!
OMG, no!!! I love Barbara Streisand!!!!
Streisand effect! I would vote up this comment, but I'm too busy voting up NNLTU, lol.
You fucking rock man,
How to stop almost all Streisand abuse:
Undelegate to Dmania
LOL! That word!
Well, it's may be one of all solution to solve the problems. Delegate only for important things and to person who needed as instead.
The reason DMania upvotes above average posts is that it has value. People will always pay upvoting bots because the system is designed towards that path.
The solution is to direct those wasted SBD to DMania itself. Pay to become a curator of DMania.
This way you create a quality meme platform and increase its value.
Hey zombee I just wanted to kindly ask for a boost (upvote) on dmania.lol, because I genuinely want to contribute to a funnier dmania by posting only the funniest, high quality memes I find on a regular basis. If you are interested in helping a minnow grow on dmania, in order for him to make dmania grow further, you can upvote my post if you wish: https://steemit.com/dmania/@johnnydabaus/rofl-zg1hbmlh-7tbh9
Your funny Edit comment made me laugh. upvoted, but not a big one.
wow excellent comment
thank you D:/@ats-david
excellent comment
please come in my blog
Weird, I posted this video earlier today (in fact, it was still in my clipboard!). It was in response to someone saying "Doge Sauce". Looks like Streisand is everywhere.
Elvis is everywhere as well! :)
Delegations are not the problem, neither are upvote bots. If neither of these existed, you'd still see the same problems with self-voting of bad posts.
The primary problem is the current blockchain rules combined with the rise of SBD above its intended value has skewed the incentives drastically towards self-voting versus voting for content you actually like. I wrote a post about this some time ago: https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change
I disagree with this statement:
Minnows self-voting themselves would never be able to move the same amount of VP as voting bots and delegations are able to do on their behalf.
Please consider the following chart as evidence:
Source: Steemit Statistics by @arcange
This graph shows the cumulative distribution of the voting power on this platform and proves that minnows have effectively very few to no influence.
I know that you have a personal interest in keeping the image of voting services high, but we should be honest about the correlations.
Also, it's not to say I don't think there are some problems with vote bots. This post is actually representative of what I consider worst about them: they cumulatively allow someone to upvote a post to the top of the trending page without much if any support. I'd like to see the bots put more limit s on how much they will upvote any one post. Lately I've been thinking that I should downvote posts like this that hit near the top of the trending page and just seem to derive most of its rewards strictly from the bots.
I fully agree with you on that point!
What's completely missed here is curation. We have no control of what gets trending anymore, and then high amounts of downvotes are needed to balance the rewards out again. That's a lot of lost energy, time and money after all.
I'd love to see content and quality becoming a priority on this platform again!
Well said!!!
@surfermarly SOO well said!
💖
:-)
This is exactly the solution that the Steem blockchain intends for these situations. If an author pays for upvotes and then receives a large amount of downvotes they will lose a significant amount of money, which in most cases would discourage the behavior in the future.
Steem is supposed to be a self-moderating community and downvotes are the primary tool for that. Unfortunately there's a number of downsides to downvoting that cause it to be used much more rarely than I think it ought to be.
Actually, down voting is like putting a chainsaw into the hands of a 6 year old. I've been following the flaggers and their flag wars. They follow no one, have massive SP, run bot farms for upvoting and generally degrade the quality of steem. No quality value is added. Only massive amounts of money flow their way.
Somebody took a lesson from Goldman Sachs with them stats
Yup. And to prove them stats, I just upvoted you for an entire .24 cents. Wooppeee!!!
Haha thanks! Welcome to prove it any time ;-)
I haven’t come up with any solution except to work towards becoming a whale myself and support those who prioritize a smaller wealth gap.
Let me drop a little tuna upvote for you too :-)
I do think voting bots have a useful place on the platform and I do profit from them, but I watch the value of my account pretty regularly and I can say that I'm much more interested in the price of Steem than I am in profits from vote bots. I just don't think that getting rid of vote bots would really improve the problems with good curating right now.
Hi surfermarly,
Thank you for sharing the graph. We all have visions on how this will develop. Personally, I am happy to see new end-users getting some of the Steem as I would like to see a better distribution of Steem. I see this as a good thing even if some of it is sold it at least has the possibility of ending up in some different hands. I realize this is not a popular vision.
Hey @whatsup good to see you again! :-)
If that Steem was really ending up in different hands, I'd fully agree with you. But if you do the maths the people who spend hundreds of SBD in order to promote one single post, lose money and don't win at all.
Minnows buying votes is not the source of the problem, and whales selling them neither. Minnows not being seen is the source of the problem :-)
The demand and popularity of the voting bots IMO is a direct result of the lack of a wider distribution and inability of other users to get views.
The amount of spammy posts are a direct result of "fear of using flags" and more human eyeballs on the site can help correct this if we provide either safe reporting or safe flagging of questionable content. (obviously it is going to be arbitrary)
Per the white paper the large stakeholders are going to have to "police" the large-stake holders or backup those who are actually trying to use the site to find, curate and post.
I don't agree. The use of bot come from human nature wanting to get an advantage and human nature wanting something easy. If we want to get attention, let's just pay a bot for votes... But what about quality posts that add to the community. Many of the flagging fools follow no one, run upvote bot businesses and then downvote those who they think are taking too much of the rewards. No added value at all.
Yes. I have considered going back to using bots just to get real users to actually see my posts when someone like you doesn’t need notice them because not everyone spends 24 hours on their feed and only 20 of my 1400 followers have any real weight.
Agreed. Most people aren't on the trending page or feeds. A lot of the weight comes in bot votes.
It is the whole "I don't wanna get caught flagging" thing going on. It would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a way to program in a kind of deflector shield that prevented against retaliatory downvoting. It would be tricky to implement, but theoretically worth discussing.
Incentivizing the good content and curation is one thing, but bot votes aside, we are still left with the problem of self-voting at a whale level. And I think @blocktrades says it best. Incentivize curation of others bringing it back to a 50/50 split of curation rewards.
At the VERY least, it will break up the earning capacity of the bigs, and leave more for us littles to swim in. If we can take a breath and see the bigger picture, we won't be annoyed by our lack of self-vote points.
If the wealth were distributed well, we would be able to regulate self voting and upvoting bots and counter delegation that we didn’t agree with as we saw fit, as a community, and neither would be much of a problem because the many peoplple with a real stake in the platform would act to prevent abuse or selfishness, if not by downvoting than at least by not upvoting, which would make a bigger difference if the distribution were fair . But don’t talk about that, let’s only talk about the problems which allow those at the top to stay firmly planted at the top ;-)
Sure minnows couldn't upvote themselves or sockpuppets for much, but certainly whales could and did. I stand by my statement.
Whales do not use vote buying services, do they? This discussion is about whether vote buying services are abusive or not.
There are minnows burning thousands of dollars in SBD to promote their posts and to be seen at least for a couple of hours. The only winners in that game are those who sell their votes to them.
Attention - our most valuable good in this economy - is no longer earned, it can be purchased. Also quality doesn't matter anymore, since visibilty is provided to those who are able to pay for it. That's how the currency attention will constantly lose its value, and the vision of Steem to give value back to those who create value is no langer valid.
Attention was always available for purchase under the rules of the Steem blockchain. This idea, whether you agree with it or not, was one of the fundamental design elements and its use for things such as advertising was intended.
The idea of selling attention to advertisers (which was presented by Ned Scott at the first Steemfest in Amsterdam) is a completely different scenario. That has nothing to do with the eco-system as it is designed right now. Selling my attention to a product advertiser (which has never been able so far) is a completely different thing than selling my VP to a minnow who wouldn't be seen in the network otherwise.
From my point of view the future design of Steem shouldn't support these trades.
I don't see what you think is different from a regular person buying steem to get attention versus an advertiser buying steem to get attention. Maybe you're arguing that the "regular person" is only doing it as a way to get additional rewards, whereas the advertiser isn't. While this could certainly be true, it certainly isn't necessarily so.
And in any event, both scenarios were considered in Steem's design.
No, the post was claiming that vote buying services and delegations were the root of steem's problems. I don't think it's the root issue, I think it's a problem with the way rewards are handed out currently under the blockchain rules, and I think the only realistic solution is a change to those rules.
You mean, to the 50/50 curation share, and the 5 minute idea? That makes more sense to me, for all of the reasons you have gone into.
Oh, and yes, whales certainly do use voting buying services. I've seen a number of such posts...
We should ask @aggroed to invite us to a panel and discuss this explosive topic with a couple of more people in detail. I'm losing track of the comments thread already :-)
I just don't see more discussion really achieving anything. In my opinion, the only viable solution is a change in the rules, and there is already a plan to make some changes (I'm not in full agreement with the version of the changes proposed, but I think it will be better than what we have now).
Unfortunately now it's a matter of waiting for the new rules to get implemented, and they're delayed by other coding issues that are arguably even more serious (e.g. bandwidth issues).
I totally second this
Which is basically the whole point of this discussion.
Ban self-voting and revenue from delegated SP (that is, make it a voluntary DONATION) and watch these problems disappear.
Oooh. What a great idea!
This makes sense, like congress won’t change the rules that benefit the people with the true power.
No it would just go underground and more secretive. You really think it would stop selling votes? If so I got some lake front property for sale, interested?
I agree, some loopholes will still exist, but buying votes is not half as bad as what was described above.
I personally try my best to make good content and I only ever upvoted myself when I originally started, my vote carries no weight, my voice is often not heard and it seems unfairly to watch memes get hundreds and something I put a lot of effort into go without likes because there is no real incentive to upvote a minnow other than site expansion and keeping people involved just enough? Where do we go from here @blocktrades @berniesanders @zombee
@dizzyjay This one of the problems; the platform wants to be both an investment and a social platform, so how can it be fair to both the shark that came in with $100K and the Minnow that started with nothing? Since some Whales give themselves $100+ votes for a 5 minute blabla video that took all of a half our to make, I refuse to feel bad about my paltry $0.03 self vote for a video that took travel, 2 cameras, 4 microphones and an entire day+ to record and edit.
I understand that. But one whale is also all it takes to destroy many of the minnows, all it would take is for one of them to see you bitch or downvote them their bad behaviour and you’re done. Upvoting is only the tip of the iceberg so far I truly hope SMT make a difference in the delegation aspect. I love this site it would devastate me to not be able to use it. I check everyday for comments and been interesting stuff. All this makes me sad and really it’s unfortunate that the way we want to decentralize wealth but are unwilling to give an inch in solidarity to that.
I know of this German guy that took on Hey-Dginn who retaliated with $90 flags on his posts right away. I made it a point to follow him and up vote him whenever I can. I have some ideas, but they would require the solidarity you mentioned and some privacy.
No.
The rise of SBD has nothing to do with this problem.
As a user of upvote bots I admit they help promote spam.
Another problem is that curation does not work:
https://steemit.com/curation/@stimialiti/what-you-need-to-know-about-curation
Curation is a donation and yields little to none benefits to the curator.
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Yep. Curation rewards are designed to be pretty comparable to author rewards, but with SBD being what it is, they're pretty worthless. If SBD were $1 people would have a renewed interest in curation trails and the like. Right now, there's no point in voting for anything, far more profitable to sell your upvote to a bot.
Thank you, new follower and upvote from me
i read youre post and you are right in everything you say
Your old post is great!
Says the account obviously making tons of money using them.
I read your post. Impeccably written. I think it is by far the best proposal I've seen, and easily implemented. Give the first five minutes the same curation points, take the 30 minute standard away and make it 5, split the rewards 50/50 so curators are more inclined to upvote OTHERS, thereby incentivizing some of the money back into the community rather than self, which is essentially the ticket to keeping this thing going. Bravo @blocktrades. Bravo.
I think it comes down to high value accounts/users getting a bit greedy(if you can even call it that). I mean it’s natural to like your own posts and such but what’s self promotion and what’s too much?
Voting bots are contributing to the same problem though. It is providing upvotes people would otherwise not be getting.
With the current system, these voting bots are encouraged given many can only afford a few dollars, not a lengthy investment in the platform through steem power.
I don't know of a proper solution, though pinning the price of SBD would not change much. It would only lessen creators rewards, it wouldn't create new demand for better content.
Right now, there IS good content on this website that is being ignored, while shittier content is favored from self voting and voting bots. If SBD was lower, people would still self vote and use bots, taking away from better content.
The system needs to be self moderated better, having more upvotes for good content and more flags for bad content.
Voting power going down based upon the number of votes is a hindrance to the idea, as this keeps people from both flagging and voting. Many people choose to not upvote good content because they know it will take from their future rewards, should they want to upvote their own content.
Perhaps increasing curation rewards, decreasing author rewards would help solve this?
I cannot think of an excellent solution, though I hope I am adding to the discussion.
Cheers
How ironic, I make a comment against voting bots and get spam flagged by voting bots.
Voting bots have the potential to be a good thing, though idiots like bernie, marky, grumpycat etc are the ones who are using them.
We need decentralized bots, for the good of the community, not used for profit like these scumbags that use them.
Same thing here. Although, I didn't make a comment directly against bots. Just for splitting the rewards 50/50 so good curation was a little more incentivized and the pool had a little more to go around for the littles.
I see you got caught scamming hahaha! At least you got upvotes from @jerryscamfield and @haejin (The Steemit Donkey) you're only missing upvotes from @craig-grant and @trevonjb to fully complete your scammers circle jerk.
Do you refer to his participation in rewards not made through dmania?
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Hahahahaha!!!
I’m so behind on this. I thought some of these were good bots/upvoters...
whats Jerry Banfield guilty of?
He overcharged people whom wanted to open a steem account quickly.
He was in a good position to commit such abuse due to his relative popularity and aggressive marketing of Steem.
I wonder what haejin did that ozchartart (a.k.a berniesanders, a.k.a nextgencrypto a.k.a rewardpoolrape did not do)
Thanks, I'll be withdrawing my witness vote from him
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Wow, look at you using your delegated SP to upvote yourself. Are you intentionally trying to make yourself and dmania a target? You're very close and I'm not sure you want that to happen... I suggest you stop promoting your own bullshit with power that was delegated to you to support the comnunity, not line your own pocket.
Edit: I will soon start opposing all dmania votes. Good luck to your scammy ass.
He is even downvoting with @dmania. That's not how those delegated SP from Steemit should be used...
Wait.
So he used an upvote bot.
Then he used @dmania to downvote the upvote bot that he had paid to upvote him!?!
dude....What. The. Actual. Fuck.
That's.. I don't even know. Bipolar? MPD?
how nice reply
lmao bipolar
😁😂🤣
Good to know.
I am glad you got this comment upvoted nicely so I do not need to upvote it myself.
Commented to keep record.
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That’s messed up!
src
src
you are very lucky man
Why people are so greedy? They already have hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet they would do anything to get more. Look at Elon Musk, this guy knows what's up and how to use wealth for benefit of all.
With a spacesuit man in a car flying through space?
How is that NOT benefiting us all? I tend to think that putting a roadster in the limelight is a symbol of self sacrifice.
He he he. Just kidding. OK. It's a total phallic symbol in space. We get it. But still. I <3 Elon. Just sayin'
It was a mass test, they could have sent a concrete block but decided to have some fun.
Not like they burned all that cash on a flight because elon didn't like the colour or something.
Exactly. They had to send something. Why not that? Great photo op.
AT LEAST this.
I feel the benefit already
you are satisfied man
You are the satisfied winner of favoritestupidcomments man.
Didn't he do it during a test of a brand new rocket, the most powerful on earth, though?
Ahahahaha
that's all right
They were testing a rocket and it didnt matter what they put in the payload area... the car was the sme as a metal weight used to show the capability of the amount of weight the rocke could lift... the fact that they chose a car at the last minute has nothng to do with anything that you could use to actually downgrade the level of achievement he made testing out his incredible revolutionary Falcon Heavy rocket, peopel like to talk shit but sorry we DONT get to uyse any secert alien technology so just face the fact we are stuck with rockets.. ist what HUMANS make ist what we KNOW we have and we CAN use them they aren THAt expensive when you considr the amount of mney youc an amke colonizing space
you think people thought building infrastructur e on the north american continent was waste of money just like peopel think building habiotationa nd infrasytructure on mars and in Space is a waste? Foolish anto explorationaist thought lol wit what are we talking about again? Howd we get to Elon Musk again? Oh yes right
Dear ./@ackza
very responsible post
It was a publicity stunt, and guess what....it worked.
You're talking about it right now. He spent ZERO on advertising by throwing that car into space, but everyone is talking about it now.
zero?
Symbols are more important that many acts. The car cost nothing, and the toys and gags in it were a labor of love by the team. I can find nothing negative in the act, and a lot to smile about.
That is the big question @nameless-berk! "Why people are so greedy?" Even me, I can't think about it? What is their goal? They are not satisfied with what they have. I, I am dreaming to have 20,000 SP for the charity works that I am doing to help the other people in need. But in my situation, it is very hard! So, I need to direct to other whales that I know for their help!
Almost 40% of my earn is for the charity! I don't even have my own... But I am happy to help others... You can check my latest charity works for the satisfaction...
Thanks,
@kennyroy
great post.Dear @kennyroy
You are right my friend.
Greetings from Berlin
Bla bla. I don't buy the altruistic crap. People who have to announce how generous and selfless they are usually are quite the opposite. If you're generous and altruistic, it will go without saying.
Plus, you're totally whale-mongering on here. Not recommended.
Do not let me go wrong with what I say. Do not judge me because you do not know me. But that's your freedom and your belief. Before you say anything, observe first if the person is telling the truth.
Thanks anyway @littlescribe...
I <3 Elon. He's my boyfriend. :0)
"Look at Elon Musk, this guy knows what's up and how to use wealth for benefit of all" Oh come on. Being an absolute genius and a dreamer doesn't make him a philanthropist.
Shots fired!!! 🔫 🚓🚓🚓
why?
Hey man @berniesanders what is wrong with your reputation why is it in -ive,may my upvote be of any help?
I think no am too small here sorry can't help you still am upvoting maybe it will change someday
I think he lost his reputation trying to fight @haejin. but he was no match lol R.I.P his reputation
His reputation was gone long before then. I think he has a long history of picking fights with whales he disagrees with.
It was not @haejin. It was Dan Larimer (@dan), the founding engineer of STEEM. He dubbed him the "Bad Whale."
He is a bad whale, who every once and a while does good things.
It was a good fight. He'll bounce back. Already he's getting points for his protests.
He's the main source of the points he's getting for his protests.
Yes, yes he is. I wish people would just look at http://steem.supply
There are 3 problems with this link:
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right thinking dear/@cryptosuf
that right sir,
for people who already have a great power or the investors with a lot of talkative capital to say there is a good thing why we plankton want as good as any for the article alone do not care and voting bot is what makes the sound version because there is voting that looks a bit but enough for any result of our work
Going hard on this one...
please help my vote because i need your vote
nice blog post
newbie here please approve me aal
please vote back
@berniesanders, what's the likelihood @zombee paid for the stock images in this post? Just curious 'cause it's making a lot of dough.
very interesting I really like what you share.
I will wait for your next posting
I new to Steemit and I can see that you are one of the problem all ready...ready to bedown voted with the rest that point out the truth you are just spaming and saying it's not me no no no not me when we can all see the truth it's not just you granted but you are part of the problem bots should be banned fallstop.
and Up voting your own post shouldn't be allowed.
that would stop the problem not someone like you copying post that have already been posted rewording them then saying i'm not part of the problem when you are.
not going to down vote you or up vote you you don't desever the time to do it.
I used that Steem Power because it was a problem on dMania as well, so it concerns the dMania community.
I already thought I wouldn't make many friends by discussing this topic. It is still very important that people see there is a problem. If people think or talk about it, I achieved my goal.
I pushed that post for maximum visibility, not for personal gain. There would have been much better or easier ways to do that if I want to fill my own pockets. I wouldn't have spend hours writing that post and bringing it to everyone's attention.
The ones who are really filling their pockets on Steem are not directly visible to everyone, they are hiding behind the scenes.
You’re full of shit. You do see I can counter every dmania vote, yes?
I mean, I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm TOTALLY with the masses. It sucks when whales and large dolphs can upvote the reward pool into their pockets, leaving the rest of us with less.
It sucks and I hate it--not because they are making more than I am, but because it degrades and jeopardizes the total value and longevity of steemit, and is a bogus move, from a long-term investment position.
On the other hand, how is it any different than taking an ROI on some venture capital?
On the other hand, when your business decisions as a large share-holder are negatively affecting the landscape and economy as a whole of the business by which you gain, is it not then your responsibility as a large share-holder to cradle the success of the business like a baby in your hand?
And if that is the case, should you not be treated as a share-holder would, in a board meeting, with a majority vote?
And isn't that where our witnesses come in to some degree? And I suppose, by your (bernie) making a statement here and there, that is the result of a board meeting of sorts, is it not?
Just thinking out loud right now.
Superb bro
It all comes down to remaining focused on your own efforts, and both cooperating with and competing with the people at your level. You will invariably climb the ladder. There's is no difficult-to-climb dominance hierarchy here like we have in the fiat economy.
Every skill has value here so long as you know how to produce, create, teach, or entertain.
OP does have a point... this post passes copyscapes it isn't like they are copying. The post is thought out at least, it seems.
The best solution would be to BAN the BOTS from Steemit and to enforce one account per user
And how do you propose that to be done on a technical level?
Grumpycat did a surprisingly good job of forcing the bots to only upvote posts that are less that 3.5 days old. If a few whales joined forces, they could tip the ROI of a bot into the negatives and close them down one at a time.
I'm not from a technical background. However, I think that the bots should be identified and have their accounts closed or massively flagged to drop their reputation to negative levels
I hope there is something I can do to stop the dmania upvote countering because Dmania is such an incredible tool for steem and it would stop such incredible organic momentum we are getting from Dmania, Steemit and 4chans massive meme communities will come to steem and bring millions of users from all over the web, its really an incredible tool for steem and i am SURE zombee will apologize and learn from his mistakes here i will try and talk with him
I think that's exactly what everyone does NOT want.
It's only cool if you counter garbage memes
is right but there are people who do not see it from that point of view and misinterpret it thinking that you only use the publication to fill your pockets
like getting a good comment
Zombee, Thank you for the information
The comments preceding each of bernie's auto-flags are earning him hundreds of dollars per day. See for yourself on http://steem.supply
Hmmmm. OK, so what's your takeaway on that? I mean, is that so bad? Or are you simply pointing out perhaps a hint of hypocrisy?
Not just a hint of hypocrisy... but that's the idea. This is just the one account, he has about 15 bots doing the same thing. They are accumulating 1000's of dollars for posting the same repetitive comment over, and over.
Not only that, these comments are each associated with downvotes on someone's posts or comments meaning their share of the reward pool for those posts effectively vanishes. He is not only taking from the reward pool in the same way he blames others for, he is shrinking the Steemit economy a little more with each downvote.
When you consider that Steem Power is an appreciating asset, it compounds its value over time when you use it to curate, and then you consider that Bernie's considerable Steem Power is not being used in this way, and that he is taking Steem Power from others based on some philosophy of "guilt by association" ... who is the one doing all the harm?
What's worse is he knows it. He isn't at all dumb. He is using the typical populist approach to gaining followers by telling people they are victims and that he is their hero. When does he ever encourage people to make their own creative contributions to Steem?
Guess how the people who have to protect themselves from Bernie's onslaught go about doing that? They upvote their own content to counteract his flagging, and then Bernie gets to run to his followers with another story... "look at the reward pool rapists!"
Bernie is the bad guy. He has been flagging my share of the rewards pool away since my account was 2 days old. I have never abused the system in any way.
Wow. I had no idea.
But what doesn't make any sense is why he would he be flagging you 2 days in? I would logically conclude either he made an error, or there was something that caught his attention, especially if he kept it up.
What was it that pissed him off so much? I don't really get it? I mean, I totally get what you're saying about raping the reward pool with hypocrite cries. But why pick on you? What, did he date your sister or something?
No, I commented on a post by @haejin, and then protested when I was flagged for it. That's really it. I unwittingly stepped into a political crossfire. I didn't know @haejin was a marked man when I came here, when I look at his account history on steem.supply and I look at bernie's, what I see is that Bernie is just a vindictive person with no clear cause. You should see all the nasty things he says to people. No class. This behavior can't be seen on haejin's account history at all. What can be seen is that he accumulates about 1.1% of the total reward pool for himself.
The resolution is to educate people about the apps available to us for viewing the blockchain. Transparency is the real deal here, and @haejin is the better man.
Also, here is a screenshot of one of my own blog posts where he and his bots flagged all the rewards away. This was a post meant to encourage people like myself who still find themselves a bit gun shy about producing video...
I always thought that was the gag you know? Depriving others while enriching yourself. Pretty much exactly like the real Bernie Sanders.
Is the account not a funny joke? Or are people taking it seriously?
Do you really think you deserve 30+ SBD for the garbage that comes out of your mouth? You are the problem here.
I think that @berniesanders intentionally voted so much for visibility rather than for money, if he had wanted, he could have added much more value to his comment, if you look at his comments tab you'll see that he usually does not upvote himself if there is no valid reason. He is a little bit crazy, but I like him.
Aren't we all a little crazy?
Well, you make a good point there. @berniesanders may have just upvoted for visibility, or he would have taken the pool. Maybe that's partly why he gets so mad, because it sucks for him to see others raping the platform, when he easily COULD, but DOESN'T.
Yeah, people think 30 SBD rewards is crazy, but that's insignificant compared to what he could be rewarding himself with.
Then again, I just got an update that he's doing hundreds of these, and coming home with thousands in total earnings from preaching "bandit". A lot of people are pretty pissed about that being disingenuous.
the dude has 70 different accounts he can upvote himself with.
Could and does.
Are you not aware that he is voting with anywhere between 15 and 70 accounts and scamming people through randowhale? Automatically upvoting with multiple accounts each taking their slice of the reward pool, and constantly harassing people and claiming others rape the reward pool?
He is the king of hypocrisy and reeks of anger. He deserves no money for his hatred.
Wow look at you using bots to upvote yourself. Are you intentionally trying to make yourself a target?
Keep on flagging me!
It is the ONLY power you have!
Since you clearly do not communicate well with words, all you have is flags!
You always prove my points for me! Thanks :)
Don't you think that it's a bit weird that you paid some voting bots in order to bring the problem with paid voting bots into focus? :-)
There have been uncountable articles about that. The reason why nobody cares is that those who hold larger stakes in SP profit from these services through delegation.
Shit rolls downhill. As long as the most powerful are fine with this situation, nothing will change. End of story.
If I were you I'd take my valuable SBD to invite my girlfriend for dinner or something like that - but I wouldn't ever spend it in a voting bot :-)
Steem on!
I already said paid upvote bots provide a valuable service. Using them is not the problem, but the price of paid upvotes. I can't and should never be possible to get auto profit by using them.
I am promoting this post so that many people see it. I want that the problem is recognized by more people and maybe somebody will change their mind.
I know that you boosted the article in order to get more visibility. But as long as people pay for these services they won't see any need in stopping to offer them. Building a followership takes a certain time, people only need to be a bit more patient. Nothing worth comes easy.
Whats the reasoning for flagging those bot comments?
https://condenser.steemliberator.com lets you choose payout options on comments.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the ROI after curation rewards on the larger bots is almost always slightly negative these days...so as far as i can tell most of the time people are not profiting directly from the bot's vote, but rather from the increased visibility, which is exactly as it should be in my opinion.
Vote selling is a market just like anything else. If people can get instant profits from bot votes then that just means it's an inefficient market. That's exactly one of the problems I aimed to solve with the bot tracker website and as I mentioned above it seems to be working most of the time.
But you promote ALL of your posts. So people can see them? I mean, I guess if I were in your shoes, I might do the same thing occasionally, but I'd like to think I'd spread the love.
How do we feel about using force to MAKE him spread the love? I'm not sure this is about love at all...
Right there with surfermarly on this one, you made a massive post about bad upvoting bots and then used them yourself to bring attention to your post.
This is why myself and others use these services right now because the system internal here on steemit called promotions is utter garbage in terms of getting you viewership and any type of return value on your investment. And yes paying to promote your post is an investment.
I see no issues with it at all and in many cases the bots operate at a lose for voters. The ROI is always always in the negative. Good for the bot owner but then again they are providing a service. Its all fair game I say.
From my personal point of view the fact that they offer the service doesn't legitimize the service itself. It's all just for their own benefit and the gap between rich and poor will be growing and growing. This platform pretends to be the alternative to governmental structures, but in fact it's just a copy of that. The power is in hands of very few, and so the money is.
We can sit and watch... or stand up and opt for a different world. It's our choice.
I love you! :-) Nobody ever realized that money is power? And we don't have issues with that in the "real world" yet? Can Anarcho-Capitalism ever be Anarchy? The operative term here is Capitalism! And in Capitalism there are few people very powerful. That's what we already have in our western society. And those who are powerful are the rulers. But in Anarchy there shouldn't be rulers?
Anarcho-crapitalism is a thing, and that thing is an oxymoron.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-07-17
Haha, sweet :-)
This is the real world. There is no new world as long as we copy the old one...
You are more anarchistic than you think!
Haha, maybe :-))
How would you change it though you would have to flip everything making minnow votes count more then whale votes. I just don't see a way of correcting it honestly unless every single person had the same vote weight. But then what would be the power of holding more steem power etc.
I'd invest the money in curation projects like @communitycoin.
What we need is a better user experience in order to improve the user retention.
Do you see these curves drifting apart?
Source: @arcange
Bring back the whale experiment at 100mv.
I'm glad that you're brave enough to tell it to everyone sir @zombee :)
I wouldn't use them too, only if I had a little more followers who upvoted my content. Sometimes it's really painful when I spend so much time generating some content and get nothing out of it. While sometime I just boost a random photo and actually make some money on it.
Guilty as charged on the abuse of bots, but hey, I need to survive too.
you are a user with a reputation of 56 so you already earned some money at steemit. Just be persistent and keep posting good content.
not really, I got a lot of rep by voting bots without actually making money out of them
The reputation-function is exponential so there is a big difference between 45 and 56.
Nonetheless, if you do not get upvotes you have to change something. Work harder, persistend, put more effort into your posts, take steemit more serious, give 110%
You can have success or excuses, not both
Send me a message at steemit.chat or discord @tagsplanet, I can give you some tips on how to build a followership if you want :-) Voted your last two articles, hope that helps a bit.
Thank you so much @surfermarly. Will get in touch with you as soon as possible. Thank you again.
Do you mind sending those tips to someone else? haha. I haven't had much luck developing views on any of my content yet. Not that I have a ton yet, but I'll take any help I can get to build a following. Thanks! Love your posts btw, been following a little while.
Haha, sure! Text me in one of the chatrooms referring to our conversation.
And thanks for the compliment regarding my blog :-)
Exactly. When you only have gas and matches chances are you are going to start a fire, but when the fire starts they think they can put it out with gasoline. No one really goes back to roots of how things work in real life they think they can make some sterile online platform and people will come and write quality content so they can draw in more and more people that way. That never works. So they basically want this to be like reddit but with rewards for your time that can only work if you take cash out of the equation and make a system that will split rewards somehow not make it public so anyone can manipulate it not a single content creator will benefit from this nor will the platform. No wonder most of the titles this days are click baits and other ugly shit. This platform at this point in time is like when you see a starving artist on the street playing some instruments trying to survive another day, but still i think talented guy on the street will still make a better buck since people understand situation even if they dont like hes music they still might give him some money. Here you need to not speak about platform or other people even if they are scamming or doing other illegal shit that doesnt do good for anyone, or they will make you invisible. Only shit that gets promoted is stuff that makes them more rich they dont have community interest in sight. Its sad but true. And i think they have no vision.
How much SBD for a Happy Meal?
With the SBD burnt in this post you could invite a whole group of friends.
Hypocrisy at it's finest.
How would you approach this issue? I'm new here so I'm not yet familiar the politics of this platfarm.
Good thought @surfermarly, you have well captured my thought, "The reason why nobody cares is that those who hold larger stakes in SP profit from these services through delegation". This sums it up.
SHOTGUN!
This response sits well with me @surfermarly and you have my Follow now.
Totally agree on this why are using the bid bots with a large quantity if you just explained that isn't the way to go. Ur contradicting yourself sir!
There has been tons of articles about it. Powering up your SBD would be better than spending it on an upvote bot too but I like the taking my gf out for dinner idea so if you see me cashing out some SBD to my bittrex this year it's cause we're hungry :)
organic traffic and exposure is my favorite kind. As lon as shit continues to roll down hill they'll never have to smell it but we can try to fling some poo up there every now and then and eventually it may help.
In the case of the bots, I think we're in too deep to stop them. The guys profiting the most from it will never agree to stop them.
If you are going to flag upvote bots with free stake you have been gifted while preaching about upvote bots being abuse, don't bother using them.
Good call :-)
the problem is capital accumulation lol, the literal basis of captialism. It's almost like capitalism fucks everything up or something
Capitalism is just supply and demand, not a scam on itself. Sellers simply make it seem like their services are far more expensive than they need to be, and buyers have no problem with it, since they think if something is expensive, it's good.
capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital (the word is literally fucking in it)
other systems with markets exist lmao
@zombee - how should I take anything you wrote serious, if you buy votes to promote your post?
You used the services yourself, which in your words: are abusing the system. See the irony in there?
Oh and - how about you stop abusing the delegated SP from Steemit by upvoting your own posts with @dmania.
Hilarious and So true!! Now I get what you were trying to say ... Good one @therealwolf!!
The irony is strong on this one. Is showing the bad of bid bots then uses said bots and delegated SP in dmania to upvote himself to the trending page.
You got a 14.87% upvote from @upmyvote courtesy of @zombee!
If you believe this post is spam or abuse, please report it to our Discord #abuse channel.
If you want to support our Curation Digest or our Spam & Abuse prevention efforts, please vote @themarkymark as witness.
Hey, great idea!
So, you'll be giving your profits from the $200 in SBD you spent to rape the pool today, yes? Because powering your moral high horse with the blood of bot profits, smacks a bit of hypocrisy, don't you think?
I wouldn't agree that bot abuse is the only abuse on the platform at the moment. There is still plenty of good ol' plagiarism and identity theft going on.
There is plenty of bot abuse as well though, coming across posts like this one or this one definitely grinds my gears.
Hmmm....you are saying right and do respect and take respect...
Wow, this shows exactly the problem of bot abuse. If I had enough power, I would downvote that posts to death but unfortunally I can not do it at the moment. Maybe delegating to Steemcleaner or similar projects..
Unfortunately with steemcleaners we will only deal with stuff that is plagiarism, ID theft, etc.. Those pictures they are posting are original, we can't just flag it because we don't like it, there would have to be some form of abuse.
See a flag just as a downvote. Everyone can do on the plattform what he wants because it is free and decentralized. So every person can also flag/downvote content like that. Call the abuse bot-abuse to boost crap content into trending if you need one. Might is Right, simple as that
So why didnt you downvote it ?
Because I have just 10 votes a day and downvoting 200$ articles with my 0,10$ does not change anything. I am giving 110% at the moment to grow big by posting interesting content and when I get the power that is needed I could start thinking about how to make the community better by downvoting.
What I hate the most are people upvoting their 3 words comments and If I had the power I would downvote every single one of them because it is raping the rewardpool, but at the moment I have other problems then cleaning SteemIt from people like that. If I would be a whale I would delegate my SP with greatest pleasure to a service fighting against these people.
I agree with you that upvote bots are not an enrichment for the platform and too many people upvote their crappy posts, which give the platform no added value.
However, we are on a decentralised blockchain, more or less on a free market where the set "Might is Right" applies. There was an opportunity to make money and people have used it. Everyone would like to earn money in this way and lies like anyone who denies it. Some individuals are concerned about the future of the platform, but most came to SteemIt because of the money. I would also prefer SteemIt without bots, but as you said before, this is currently unthinkable.
I had also delegated SP to a bot once, because my activity decreased and I found it great to earn some money with not doing so, quasi interest rates like at the bank, only much higher. However, people who take the platform serious and post daily and work hard earn more if they actively use their own SP instead of delegating it to bots.
I therefore recommend to all those who actively participate in the platform to withdraw their delegations and to enrich the platform with their own high-quality content.
Totally true !
Steem must take some action about those bot :/
You are Steem. I am Steem.
Let's take action then
Although Steem is still in Beta it will get updated from time to time, I really don't think we need to focus on bots today, because at some point bots will vanish and there will be a other kind of market to deal in with. Let the forks be with you all!
For low stake users like us,using bots can actually be more expensive. The bidding system often leaves no room for profit and many bots are on the negative.
What is the difference between paid voting bots and what is @haejin doing? None. What @haejin is doing is far worst in my opinion. When you use upvote bot you invest some SBD once and that is it. In case of @haejin, he only had to invest once in @ranchorelaxo and have in fact free upvote bot in from him every day. If that is not bigger abuse than using voting bots from time to time, than I don't know what is abuse.
Yesmen who pay each other with an outside source, basically. Circular reasoning at its finest.
@zombee Thanks for the thoughtful post, shining a light on this problem. Follow me back for great opinions about crypto and markets.
Uhhh, this is a fascinating topic you wrote about here, my friend. I was literally this week learning more about how people get these huge upvotes and thus I learned more about upvote bots...
Straight away I could see that system can be abused in a way you described. What I am curious about is how this platform will evolve.
With this crypto-boom that is happening now some stuff seems just ridicilous, not only regarding Steemit platform.
...When for creating a fucking mem you get payed 100$+
xD COME ON!...
Well, it is definetely an interesting time in history <3
I am not technician regarding providing solution to problem you described, so I will just enjoy seeing where this platform/movement goes.
Thanks for informing more people..png)
Personally, I don't think the voting bots are the problem, just as big stake holders can use their stake how they want, they have chosen to sell some votes. In my opinion it can happen transparently on the blockchain as it is now. Or it can go back to being done the way sweetsssj and others are going it in "Off Chain" deals and via wallet transactions. I would rather give them a legitimate way to do what has been being done anyway.
We all know bullshit posts when we see them. I saw one with with a dirty snapshot getting $40.
I thought about this last night, and I think it will be a self correcting problem as the voting bots are getting busier and busier and many are sending large bids. Wait until they are so busy that people start loosing and it will sort itself out. (maybe)
Using upvote bots is the only realistic way for minnows to give their post some visibility. Most times the use of the bots ends in a loss as the sender would most likely get back less than the sbd sent as rewards for the post after factoring curation and 50/50 split. So I do not see where the abuse is in using them.
Actually, the terms and conditions for Steemit state that all bots are prohibited - which means that Steemit Inc could change Steemit to simply block all bots from their site.
It is an interesting problem that I must admit to having not paid very much attention to. I post content that I hope people enjoy seeing. And if I get good votes on it then that is very cool. I have never used a bot, and frankly I am not even interested in what I consider to be "false" votes because I want to grow an audience for my work and bots don't really constitute a real audience imho.
I do understand the issue with diluting the rewards pool though and I have often thought that if the steemit community at large would simply abide by the rules of the platform then a lot of these issues would go away. One thing for certain is that with more people joining steemit it seems it has convoluted the platform overall, somewhat. However it is still possible to find good content but you have to look harder.
The reason I joined steemit to begin with back in 2016 was to post original content and to read original content by others. I have thought that it might be a good idea to do some sort of steemit spinoff for original content ONLY... where it is done by the rules in order to promote and foment the posting of only original content.
You made some great points here! I completely second your approach.
Unfortunately, content has never been a priority here. Just consider steemit's design and the trending page for instance. All eyes are on payouts.
But money follows passion, and not the other way around :-)
I’ve never used a bot. I’ve tracked a few posts from others that use bots and I can safely say the bot is the only one that made money. This is not an advertising platform. If you want to advertise and get an ROI then Facebook might be a better bet. This platform is best for organic sharing of content in its current state. If you have used a bot and profited on it, please drop me a link so I can check it out. My voting bot witch hunt is over!
This post has received gratitude of 24.03 % from @appreciator thanks to: @zombee.
All I see here is little wannabe dictators!! Thank god Steem is decentralized.
It's terrible! There is more and more Upvote bots had introduced to Steem community! Just recently, 2 more bots were introduced to Steem community! LOL!
any object that involves money will always have people trying to scam the system
Or, it will have people actively engaging the system as it is designed, and it will have others propping themselves up on claims to victimhood. All perspective I guess. :)
actively engaging means all bots and no humans? lol
No, it means humans learned tool making a long time ago. It is an intrinsic ability. Use it.
Great information, thank you
The point is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY
By Meja
Well said and human nature is wired to put in the least amount of effort for the biggest reward. Enter bots.
Ya but Not good 4 me
My religion 4bidden it
I'll do the straight way
I just consider this steemit like a game. All the steam I use just to raise the level
steemit.com/@elgordoloco
This post has received a 21.71 % upvote from @boomerang thanks to: @zombee
It's difficult to reduce rewards to upvote bots. It's hard to tell what's a bot and what isn't and you don't want to cross the dangerous line of censoring certain users.
So much drama on steem atm.
The real problem lies in: People post for rewards not because they are interested in posting it.
There are thousands of posts about how to earn more money on your posts, but rarely I see that anyone posts how to increase the quality of your post.
Unless people stop posting for money and start posting because they love what they have created and think rewards as an added bonus, there will be a problem here.
Just an opinion though, what do you think?
This is definitely a factor, but I don't know how to easily disincentivize it.
It depends on people's morale. The more people with good morale in power are here, the easier it will be.
how to make good posts is just good writing and good music playing and good film making and good investigative reporting etc. no way to teach that easily.
there is some pretty gang-oriented upvote patterns i've noticed that give me the idea that something else is afoot...i have been investigating some patterns i have seen in some of these popup news sites that don't look legit to me. I get into it on my blog. Then my latest is about steem itself. Curious what you'd think.
I know my content is quality, just every avenue there is to post is over run with bots, spammers, or accounts that try to troll. I think maybe 2 people have responded about the ideas of my post in comments, the rest of the responses i have to wonder who that person really is.
Your opinion is valid, maybe if you'd vote for a post on a quality measurement and not a quantity measurement this could solve it.
"Excellent, Great, Average, under average, poor". (Or a similar well thought scale). And the rewards would be calculated after the 7 days following the grades of the post.
Its not even about quantity if a content is good and has value. But if you upvote post or comment that only says "hi steemit" and you earn money thats just stupid and people will abuse the fact
Quality measurement would require quality people to measure it.
I think that for most honest people it's a combination of both. You can post about something that you're truly passionate about, but at the end of the day, you'd also want to earn something with it.
Personally, I like posting about stuff from my day to day life, it doesn't earn that much, but it's fun to do so. On the other hand, I'll also post stuff that I think might do a bit better than the usual day-to-day stuff, because it's fun to see your work being appreciated.
Full disclosure: I use Minnowbooster on some of my posts and usually I only use it once for less than 1$.
There is nothing wrong with promoting your content if you are into that, people do that on google facebook, etc. Point is wrong content gets promoted more and for wrong reasons.
Admittance is good.
Quality is indeed not rewarded as much as quantity via votes and the system is made in such a way to promote that
I think if steemit can grow and overcome this then it will be truly an awesome platform as there is a lot of good content on here but sometimes people need to use bots to gain visibility as everyone is using bots to promote shit content. It's a shame as I have never used a bot and don't want to but can see a valid reason for doing so hopefully we can just get rid of them and have a more level playing field.
Hmmmm... yeah we don't use abusing language on platform.. it get wrong impacts on others...
Simple truth.
STEEMIT an amazing service, it's a whole world, and I really hope that it will exist for many long years.
This is an opportunity to create creativity, communicate, share their thoughts, and at the same time receive rewards.
For me, the subject of paid bots is still not completely known, maybe I could use it to promote my blog entries about my life.
However, it is very important for me that the actions of other users do not harm the system itself! Thank you for taking care of her!
You got a 20.16% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @zombee!
Want to promote your posts too? Check out the Steem Bot Tracker website for more info. If you would like to support the development of @postpromoter and the bot tracker please vote for @yabapmatt for witness!
Woah! I didn't know I can upvote my own comments and post too?! But yeah, I read about delegation of SP to some bots which go around upvoting and get me some profit sharing or something, but didn't bother about it. Again, I'm always seeing such posts where people talking about unfairness of the system and by itself tells me that something is seriously wrong with steemit system.
As an investor, I've got about 1200 steem which was about $5K before the btc crash....since then, I've only converted 50% to SP, and remains really sceptical if I should go "all in" or sell off the other 50%. Knowing that I need to wait 13 weeks to cash out if I did.
Anyways.... I'll upvote this comment to see what gives...LoL
it's kinda sad where steemit is going :/
bt without upvote how we can enlighten our post (for new user)
so if we use bot our post has the chance to coming up in trending....bt without bot we cannot grow up....dont mind pls
The fact that there is a problem is doubtful. But I don't understand why you would even think that what you are proposing could or should be viewed as any kind of solution.
What you are suggesting to people is don't delegate your SP to the highest bidder. In other words you are telling people "Make less money!" Any solution that requires people to sacrifice their own market interests is:
So I think we're back at the drawing board and the solution you are proposing remains unrealistic. The people who are idealistic enough not to use bots or not to delegate to bots are already not doing it. If you can't think of a real incentive for people to stop doing what they are doing, you are not really proposing a solution.
If you want to be part of the solution, do "ban" (whatever you mean by that) the bots on dmania as dmania is one of the sources of the lowest quality posts on the steem blockchain anyway. It's one of the legitimized ways to make shitposts, so people profiting by paid bots are certainly likely to be using it. Starting to fight the bots there could start the process of achieving what you were talking about as it will hopefully decrease their market share. Of course, that's also not very likely to work as they will just post from somewhere else and you are not doing it because it losing their votes on the dmania tag will only decrease the visibility of your whole platform. See, you are not wiling to do the personal sacrifice yourself, but you are asking it from others. I'm not saying it because I think anybody is obligated to personal sacrifices for the common good, but just to demonstrate how unrealistic and unreasonable your proposed solution actually is.
To be clear, I've never used a voting bot and I've never delegated to a voting bot, I don't even autovote anybody.
You make a lot of great points, I feel like it would be hard to manage but changing the 'weight' of a bots up vote to have diminishing returns compared to a real person also might help in the short term. Much like amazon gives 'verified purchase' reviews more weight so its not worth it for companies to give away free products for good reviews anymore.
You make it sound like using bots is greatly profitable but it's not.
Look at the bid bots listed here.
These bots don't generate auto profit for anyone.
And also I don't see why using bots is abuse:
And if you can use bots to make profits then that will draw more people to the platform.
This post is not only about bots, and upvoted by bots, but it reads like it was written by a bot as well. Lots of repetition and low density text.
My take/summary:
I agree with the conclusion, there certainly is a problem, but how to we fix it?
Geez this create more steam on steemit and thus discussion I get more confused on who is who now...
The bots aren't the problem. You used them yourself to bring attention to your post and spur engagement. The problem is you have some users posting multiple times a day and being disproportionately rewarded thousands of dollars for redundant content.
It's inexplicable that some of the Witnesses around here feel compelled to cap the price of SBDs at $1, but have no problem with there being no upper ceiling on the earnings potential of any given post.
The recurring rewards of sub-par content contributions is unsustainable and a fundamental flaw of the Steem blockchain that continues to remain unaddressed. Until there is a systemic fix, nothing will change.
Reducing the Steempower delegations would be ideal however i think there will always be enough people who delegate SP to upvote bots if those bots are generating such great returns.
In my opinion the best way to stop upvote bots would be to reduce the demand for such bots by making it so that new content does just disapear right after it has been posted.
Maybe the postion in the hot and trending tabs should also depend a lot more on comments and userinteraction than on amount of $ upvoted.
People say you need to spend money to make money, but I just don't feel right paying to have a bot upvote me. I have even been hesitant to spend money on STEEM to supplement my SP to get me higher up. It has been a long slow crawl, but I want to be able to say I did it from the ground up, busting my butt. -@bozz
Do you think users can responsibly delegate our SP for profit? I have been wondering this myself. I am delegating to Minnowbooster, and I am wondering the pro's/con's of the platform.
Steemit will have issues because of the money aspect, but solving as many of those issues as possible should be the goal.
Hello everyone,
I can literally Proof that using any up-vote bot right now will not make you profit at all. People used to make profit with them, that explains the sudden raise in SBD, but nowadays its not profitable. Secondly those voting bots do improve the value of your precious Steem XD.
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wooaaw.. a lot of comment
This is an excellent post. I completely agree that we should use the Steem promote feature in combination with bots to only help visibility. Improvements are needed to the Steem promote feature, such as being able to select a larger amount of Steem dollars to make the post visible on different levels. Maybe add a feature that, a certain amount invested in promotion, will make a post visible to all the steemit witnesses and to higher ranked steemit community members. Also a feature that donates a portion of the steemit promote funds to new steemit community members. Thank You for sharing this information on Steemit! Have a great weekend!