My thoughts on bidding bots as the owner of @buildawhale, a minnow, and a Steemian
View this post on Hive: My thoughts on bidding bots as the owner of @buildawhale, a minnow, and a Steemian
View this post on Hive: My thoughts on bidding bots as the owner of @buildawhale, a minnow, and a Steemian
Hello @themarkymark
I have always told my readers in my #blockchain-blogger series that the purpose of post promotion via bots is not to make money, the purpose is visibility.
I have been on this platform for ten Months and I can boldly say that Steemians appreciate quality and when they mark you out as a person of quality they will follow you and support you.
Now with the population Of Steemit, there is that sense of scarcity when it comes to upvotes, but the truth is that Cream always rises to the Top and when you are consistent with bringing people value, you will get reawarded for It.
Most of my upvotes come from Curation trailing and those people put me on their Steem Voter because they loved my Content, that is what anyone can achieve over time.
Now with services like @buildawhale and @minnowbooster that journey can be made even faster since upvotes increase visibilty.
I find it disheartening that people still choose to abuse an utility that was created to help them. Boosting rubbish content is simply boosting your level of ignorance for the whole world to see.
@ogochukwu
#blockchain-blogger
I feel like a majority of content is created purely for the largest roi with the lease amount of effort. We all want to make money, but at least work for it and provide value so people want to reward you.
I have a question for you TheMarkyMark. I had someone post on my D.Tube account claiming you put my channel on some "blacklist". I own a channel with almost 200,000 subs on YouTube and was having censorship problems so I put the videos being censored over on D.Tube and for some reason some guy claiming to be your curator is putting me on a black list claiming I did not create the content I actually created.. Would appreciate your thoughts on this matter.. I own 4 channels on YouTube and I am friendly with a few of the top Contributors on D.Tube (Press4Truth and HighImpactVids are two people for example). My channels on YouTube are: Godrules, Saledaddy1, Sanity4Humanity and Godrules 2. Would appreciate not being put falsely on a black list by some rabid contributors who claim to work for your blacklist. Contact me directly: arwoodco@gmail.com if you would like.. You will see a couple thumbs up from Press4Truth on some older videos here on D.Tube which should be evidence enough, seeing I was talking on the phone with him as well.
she is @themarkymark
I feel like this comments its really good comments @ogochukwu
she is @themarkymark
@themarkymark I see the voting bids as the great equalizer for minnows and dolphins to earn while we give the whales a reason to hodl.
It doesn't mean I don't get annoyed with the way the voting bid bots are used. I think the combo of a small user base with many who spend more time minding other people's business than their own. There will be a new topic next week.
:D
Hello @themarkymark,
I used to use upvoting services as I felt that sometimes a post I worked hard on could use a little more exposure, yet I digress, my views began to devolve into becoming dependent on them to an extent. I thought that buying upvotes to create good exposure is a good idea, and I still do- but there aren't any hard stops as to what can be voted on.
These "garbage posts" you speak of are everywhere, and although it's liberating to be able to share whatever we wish, a lot of times I feel that people only post to get rewards, not to communicate a message, nor share an experience.
I got interested in curating recently, but have found myself lost in the new tab for over half an hour, looking for something I wanted to help get more exposure. Either I was met with a picture and two lines of text, or the nicely written article got cheetah'd. At this early stage I feel like I'm at a loss.
There's nothing wrong with self-promotion or the bots, just people's constant misuse of them. I know that by running build-a-whale, you come across these issues a lot, and everyone has their brains racked on what to do about this. I feel if enough people did their best to be a good Steemian to fellow users, that the tide may turn at some point. How soon that will happen, depends on everyone taking an active initiative with themselves first... or at least I think it does.
With love,
shello
she is @themarkymark
I agreed completely about the vote bots being great for promotion with a mix of gambling (less so with web apps) through in the mix. The steemit promotion button has never been a good option. I remember when whales started offering free promotion to promote it, but it never caught on b/c the value from it wasn't there. No return. There is only one good thing about it, it burns the steem used.
These issues with spam, reward pool hogs, etc etc will probably never disappear but I think the only solution that is reasonable to bring back a sense of curation is reducing the effect of upvotes to the 25% of the past (10 to 40). This has been the worst change to Steem that I can think of. Damn HF 19. I was completely for all of the changes in HF19 except this one. Boy was I right. But I was, and still am, a minnow. Maybe because of this change actually.
While I cannot blame the system (platform) for this because I am in no way entitled, the share of profits from the reward pool is greatly flawed. By changing the amount of votes a day, as you suggest and I have many times whenever possible, you just might see more posts being viewed and curated on a daily basis. This not only forces the spread the rewards, and thus longevity of the platform, but I think also fights spam just by recognizing good content. There is little benefit these days to producing high quality content and I have been struggling with this reality since the HF.
Thanks for you take. Hopefully we can make some changes soon. I hear rumors of some HF19 changes being reverted.
The tone of your post is pretty apologetic. You created a tool, you also have manual curation associated with the project as far as I recall from our conversations, and there's nothing wrong with any of that. Nothing really to explain. Any tool is misused when someone is malicious or opportunistic enough. No matter how many safeguards you put in, there'll be someone who figures out how to exploit it. All you can do is blacklist the assbags; doing anything else will impact the general utility of the bot. If the community in general has issues with your bot then nothing prevents them from not using it.
I'm personally less likely to vote on a post when they've been upvoted to high hell by a bot. That author clearly doesn't need my tiny vote for 6 cents but the guy down the list with no upvotes does.
@themarkymark hey hows it going @themarkymark? I've been using @buildawhale ever since i started posting on steemit as a regular and i must say @buildawhale has always been fair to me just know i appreciate everything you do on here to help steemians out.
I noticed in your post you mentioned that it costed around 8500 steem a week, is that to pay for delegated steem? Or a server to run your bot? Just curious.
It is to pay for delegation. I have additional fees (but minor in comparison) to run the hardware.
Well just know I appreciate what your doing. Thanks a lot.
she is @themarkymark
Oh man!
8000+ steems a week! Why such a high costs?
Because I am leasing 2M steem power
Well, you could pass sbd earnings minus your management fee like other bots do.
I send almost all my sbd for rent and many times more. Not sure what you mean.
I don’t know why people can’t just vote for what they like instead of using bots, it’s meant to be a social network site, thanks mike
Is there a way to limit the same person purchasing a vote multiple times over in a day? maybe they can buy 1 vote a day (or whatever the reasonable number is) to cut down on spam (atleast within your own bot)??
I think blacklists are something all bot owners should take serious consideration on. This may not look good for the wallet immediately, but I think more people would be okay with vote bots if they saw some filtration going on
Minnowbooster has a daily, weekly, and monthly limit - or they used to. Right now those limits are set so high that they are not relevant.
she is @themarkymark
The bigger issue I think that needs to be addressed is that Upvote Services are affecting how the sorting algorithm works, as you already know. I feel, as a minnow, that there is a massively uneven playing field for minnows, especially who do not yet know that Upvote Services are basically a must to get your content seen at all on Steemit.
This causes the situation where tons of newer users to leave before they can even get a chance to grow. I think a better solution would be to have a revamp of the 'Promoted' platform where there would be a more appropriate way fro minnows to have their content seen.
I have written and in-depth proposal on the revamp of the 'Promoted' platform which I believe will aid in the overall growth of Steemit.
If you are interested you can find it here :
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function