I agree that an improved promotion solution would decrease the demand for upvote services. I don't know that it would completely get rid of it - that depends on the relative profitability between using the new Promotion tools and the existing upvote bots.
But it only has to diminish the demand for delegation to start falling away from bidding bots and being directed to other purposes. That would go a long way toward rebalancing rewards to actual curated (and promoted) content.
I commented on your proposal. I think it's a fantastic idea, but largely for reasons other than the impact on the upvote services.
I spend a ridiculous amount of time managing my promotion strategy to get 10-15% return over promotion cost (profit) per post... and it doesn't scale. With things as they are, how could any advertiser see Steemit as a viable platform for advertising?
Imagine pitching Steem to any marketing firm:
Look at all these active, dedicated users!
Q: How wonderful, how do we target advertising to them?
A: Well... you create posts, then you pay for promotion to get a higher spot on the promotion page for 0 guaranteed views because nobody looks at that page. Also, you need someone working full-time to appraise and track the upvote bot ecosystem, all so that you can spend a MAXIMUM of $500 to get full votes from every major bidding bot, per post... with zero ability to target which users or demographics will actually see your advertising.
Oh, and make sure you stay under the radar of the flagging bots that downvote external links, advertising, etc as spam or 'low-quality' content- although you could mostly avoid them by declining payout on advertising posts.
What The Actual F***? This is an advertising nightmare.
For Steemit to be competitive and reach anything near the valuation of competing social media platforms, it needs to be very easy for advertisers get involved and to target selected demographics.
Exactly my sentiment, Steemit has always been considered a free market. In a free market, you do not push out businesses you don't like, you create a solution better than the exisiting one.
The point is not to render upvote bots obsolete, rather to negate their effectiveness to a large extent such that they either evolve or die out. Upvote Services have no real need to change as long as the situation doesn't.
I think about this all the fucking time. The amount of time and effort spent upon optimizing bot use is absolutely a tremendous waste. It is like trying to hammer a nail in with a fucking rubber duckie. GIVE ME A HAMMER GODDAMNIT
I thought after releasing this proposal and seeing that it currently has a grand total of 29 views as of my writing, for me to feasibly believe it will be taken seriously is pretty naive. As such, I think I will have to continuously improve upon the idea and create proposal 1.1 on top of continuously bringing awareness to it.
The irony that if I have the system I am recommending in place, I'd just spend 100 SBD, set up my targeting properly wash my hands and have the majority of the Steemit community know about it.
Dead right on that one! Have a full upvote, sir!
Thank you good sir! Have my full upvote as well!
Are in charge of sneaky ninja by any chance? :)
If you mean @sneakyninja, where The Daily Sneak is published, then yes. And it's a huge time consuming project I wish I had never started!!
Okay, not really. It's helped me to learn a lot, and to find quality content like yours. But it has been time-consuming.
Yes I can imagine it is very time consuming indeed! Where do you see it going? Do you intend to work on it being profitable?
It's already profitable, but not profitable enough to fully reward the time spent on it. I would like to see it move toward becoming a community-driven project, with people contributing their own curation commentary, and then talking to each other about why different posts were selected and what it means to create good content.
Ironically, that will initially make it less profitable (some of the promotion costs will be indirectly passed through to contributors, instead of recouped as profits), but it's more a labor of love.