You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Transparency Bot is going online to help fight the rampant rise in bidbots and their long term devastating effect on our platform.
I'm sure your articles are good. But don't you resent a system that means you have to pay someone in order for them to be seen?
Paying for advertising is an old practice which is perfectly acceptable. Every day we see advertising for crappy products or for excellent ones. Without the visibility we wouldn't know the good ones exist. The bidbots were allowed on Steemit, so putting pressure on people not to use them creates a contradictory situation. If a bot brings an interesting article to my attention which would never have otherwise appeared on my feed, where is the problem? All artists and musicians face this difficulty of trying, first of all, to create really good art, then trying to get it "out there" so people can know about it.
I've been thinking about this a lot today, and I need to investigate the 'getting seen' aspect further. But, at a glance, it seems to me that a lot of people who are putting about 25 SBD on bots are getting around 50 views within the first day or so.
Now, if I pay facebook $20 AUD, which is about 8 SBD, I can get a post in front of 340-1500 specifically targeted people (e.g.: interested in cryptocurrency) per day, for 3 days. Sure, the engagement rate can be pretty bad, but if even only 10% of people click the link I'll have 100 views for only 8 SBD.
Now, none of those people directly pay me anything, so it's not the same as here, and obviously I need to look further into what the comparative views are over a longer time period. But I think we should think hard about this 'being seen' angle that we are being sold here.
Also, and I need to flesh this out a bit too, appeal to advertising assumes that advertising is in itself morally acceptable. To your credit, at least you defend the view openly not everyone gets that far). But equating bidbot usage with advertising fails if advertising is not an ethical practice.
Finally, yes, bot are allowed. But I don't accept this 'code is law' argument from an ethical viewpoint. There are lots of things that you can do within the code parameters on steemit, but you wouldn't say that they were all morally good, or that they were helpful for the long-term sustainability of the steem economy.
Banning the bots is one thing. But how do we get people to look at things and support them financially? I know a number of FABULOUS artists who are totally under-recognized because they are not getting the right exposure. And god-awful art that gets rewarded by strong marketing. I was lucky to make a living with my paintbrush - but very few artists are able to to that. What can be done to remedy this? If artists don't get rewarded for what they do, they have to spend hours and hours doing other things just to survive. And as a result the general quality of the art suffers because it requires full time work to arrive at a high quality result.
If you can come up with something better than the bots, more power to you. They are far from perfect. What we need is not to remove what already exists, but provide more viable solutions and people will gravitate to them.
Yeah, I feel the same way about my writing.
This is a problem both on and off Steemit. Part of the problem is artists believing good art is, or should be, enough.
Good marketing isn't using money to get in front of the most people. Good marketing is figuring out who the right people are, why they want to buy your art, and how to present it so the right people will see it and see something they want.
What we have here with bots isn't marketing, cause there is no way to discern who is seeing the message. And many of the automated votes come from non-human accounts with steem automatically delegated to them as new "members". Delegated from whom? All those artists. You, and me.
This is long but if you'd like to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...
Believe me @wholeself-in, it is a problem I know quite well having been a self supporting artist for the last 30 years. Finding your audience is what it is all about. At some point you need to extend your audience, having sold work to all your current clients. Now steemit should be good for that, right? Actually the bots have brought my work to the attention of some like-minded individuals who would never have found me otherwise. I feel like everybody is ready to criticize, but no solutions are forthcoming. I am not computer savvy and my creativity is not in that area. So maybe we can appeal to people who have those abilities to create tools to diffuse the right information to the right people.
in your opinion because they financially don't back their own endeavors they are better?
I ran Arkahdia Arts Studio for 16 years and am an Artist myself..
You need money to build a following......
The reality is Art is subjective and those spending for position with something people aren't interested in will go broke...
So they will be like most other artists....
This situation is much more complicated than simple advertising, and there it’s also fair to raise the question of the ethics of some forms of traditional advertising.
Bid bots make no discrimination based on quality, we are just being shown articles for people who pay and the ad power of these giants will only get stronger and stronger until the whole platform collapses.
No judgement on you personally.
Yes that is the defect of the bots - they'll upvote anything. So somebody needs to invent something that can somehow upvote real posts and differentiate between them and junk. Now there's a real challenge for the computer geeks...
Actually you are 100% correct and I have no idea why nobody has figured out to set certain requirements that the algorithm will recognize and most importantly enforce like 1: MUST contain 2-3 paragraphs minimum 2: Make sure these are words (which can be done from the bot to make sure that someone doesnt kijghdsfkjdsfghkrfg kjsadbads kjsdfh. making it look like a sentence) 3: 1+ Pictures required (we like pictures ^ ^) and if it does not check out.. Insta-Refund! Happen 3 times in any 7day period=blacklisted simple, easy and it works! Does it mean that the posts will be quality!? that is in the eye of the beholder BUT it definitely won't be spam. But you see, that would actually work WITHOUT being beneficial to them so they say "We have to keep you from getting where we are and we will break the very rules that we set in advanced then present them as a just reason of why we do what we do under the guise that we are actually doing something great for this platform instead of locking it down like we really are. Something like "This will be GREAT for steemit!... we will keep all the sp and sbd and you get to spend hours of your day posting and if you do really good with the current market prices you might just get an entire dollar out of it or if you do favors for a whale he might make it rain on ya ;-)
Yes, there must be a way to do it.