Steem Bot Tracker - Doing Our Part for #newsteem
Hardfork number 21 of the Steem blockchain is quickly approaching, and, in addition to the code changes to the blockchain rules, it has also brought about a community-based movement to improve the platform.
The updates to the Steem blockchain code will merely provide additional tools and incentives for change, but it's up to us - the community and the stakeholders - to utilize those tools and incentives to make that change happen.
Since vote selling services (also known as "bidbots") are at the forefront of these changes, we feel that we have not only an opportunity, but a responsibility to ensure that the vote selling services listed on the steembottracker.com website are working to support the goals of the #newsteem movement rather than to hinder them.
Old Steem vs New Steem
In "old steem", vote selling services are primarily used by people who make the bare minimum "shitpost" and profit from it by purchasing votes that pay out more than they cost. In #newsteem, we want to see vote selling services used by legitimate content producers, brands, and business who want to advertise on the Steem platform. We want to see the profit from vote buying come from the increased visibility and exposure of the content rather than from the vote value itself.
Stopping the "old steem" use for vote buying is actually very simple - if buying votes is not directly profitable (i.e. you cannot purchase a vote worth more than you paid for it) - then the practice of purchasing votes for "shitposts" will stop almost immediately, and the only time it will make sense to buy a vote will be for those who actually value the added visibility and promotion the vote provides.
Luckily, HF21 will provide us with a new tool to implement this change - the downvote pool. Soon the vote selling services that have only been using their large pool of voting power for upvotes, will be able to start using some of their power to downvote without sacrificing their profits.
Going forward we will expect all of the vote selling services listed on the Steem Bot Tracker website to utilize their new downvoting power to help put a stop to the practice of vote buying for the sake of directly profiting from the vote itself.
How You Can Help
Even if you don't operate or utilize vote selling services, you can help bring about this change too! While stopping the "old steem" practice of vote buying might be pretty easy, getting enough people to buy votes for the right reasons will still be a challenge. If we can't meet that challenge then we'll eventually slip right back into the "old steem" way of doing things.
This is where you come in. Steem is currently comprised of a relatively small but very engaged and very targetted audience. There are tons of companies, brands, and content publishers out there that should want to reach the Steem audience - we just have to show them that we're here and that all they need to do to get our attention is to buy a bunch of STEEM or otherwise support the platform.
@coingecko and @metalpay are two good recent examples of this. Let's do what we can to support their products and show everyone the real value of the Steem community!
Steem Bot Tracker
Getting back on track a bit, the main point of this post was to say that after HF21, @aggroed and I will be expecting all of the vote selling services listed on the Steem Bot Tracker website to use both their upvote and downvote power responsibly and in a way that furthers the goals of the hard fork changes and the #newsteem movement.
We hope that the various services that are involved will see this as an opportunity to work together to improve things for all of us.
Do we have any service that would allow downvote trails? The bot owners could use the delegated stake to follow those.
The @steemflagrewards crew does run a flag trail service.
https://flagtrail.herokuapp.com
You can set how much voting power you are willing to use for downvoting.
Thanks!
For now, I guess I'll hit the trending pages and start disagreeing over rewards. A plug-in that tells me how much of the post payout is bidbots might help me shift focus a bit.
But yeah, gifting some of my downvotes to say steemcleaners would be cool.
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I expect downvote trails to become much more common after HF21 and that would be fine if the bots use those (assuming they are run well) to distribute their downvotes.
I don't expect the bots to sign up for these as it is likely that a lot of the targets will be overly rewarded posts - posts that have been previously upvoted by the bot. The owners do have their own accounts though I guess.
I'd like to see in #newsteem:
Do you think there could be a bot war? - Responsible bot owners start downvoting the bad content promoted by bots that don't care what they are promoting, leading to retaliatory downvotes on content voted on by the more responsible promotion services.
I don't condone removing upvotes unless the post is clearly some type of scam or plagiarism. Removing a downvote without a refund just due to quality of content is basically stealing - someone paid for a service and the funds were taken but the service was not delivered (on purpose).
Ideally with #newsteem people won't purchase votes for "unworthy" content in the first place because it will be a money-losing proposition due to the downvotes. So if this works bot owners won't need to remove votes or use a whitelist because the system will police itself.
As for a bot war, I find that unlikely since I think most of the bot owners are actually pretty responsible. If they don't care what they are promoting it's usually because they just don't care anymore and not because of any malicious intent.
Doesn't this just create an easy way for someone to gain immunity from bot downvotes: Just buy a small vote from most or all of the bots. The bots (in your vision) won't remove the vote and presumably won't downvote something they already upvoted (this would be the same as removing the vote).
Exactly. Lol. Matts post was basically pointless.
"Responsible bot owners" my ass...
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I don't really know how things will play out yet. The point here is just that there is behavior we want to encourage and behavior we want to discourage and I'm hoping we can work together using the new tools available to do that.
More specifically to your scenario - the bots are not the only ones who can downvote things. It only takes a relatively small downvote to wipe out the profits made from a significant amount of purchased upvotes, it's not 1-to-1 since the profit from buying votes is typically 10-20% at most.
Yes but the main point of your post was that bots, as long as they continue to receive large delegations and represent a large portion of the voting stake, should be playing an important role in downvoting. I question whether this will be the case in the model you laid out, especially over time as people realize they can immunize themselves from those nasty bot downvotes (which you want to encourage) by buying tiny votes from each bot (or at least the ones active in downvoting)
I think your approach needs some iteration here. Overall I agree on not knowing how things will work out, and the iteration can certainly come later.
The problem is not that shitposts are promoted. The problem is that any post can be promoted, while STEEM does not profit from this advertising. The only people profiting from it are delegators and bidbot owners, at the expense of the coin price. So it's not even clear if they are profiting from this compared to a scenario where they burn a percentage of the returns.
Having bidbots as a sink will help the price, make it more fair to everyone (since you get exposure only if you loose something for it), and will also make everyone feel better about seeing posts they are not interested in on trending.
How does it hurt the price? I would say that it does not hurt the price but actually helps the price. Delegators and bidbot owners are hodlers, which is a value. Inflation harms hodlers, but hodlers allow their stake to be reduced slightly in order for high quality content to draw more people to the Steem platform.
Bidbot owners and delegators are the ones invested heavily in STEEM, propping up the value of it. The content producers are not the ones creating the value of STEEM directly, but indirectly. While the direct value of STEEM comes from investors buying up STEEM and holding it. These people want as much of an ROI as they can get, logically. Bidbot services were a useful way of optimizing investor ROI, while providing a useful value (promotion) to content producers with the potential of gaining some percentage of profit on top of the initial investment. This is shared profits, which is good.
At least, this is what I believe to be reasonable. I can respect that you might disagree.
Thanks for your long replies.
Of course hodlers like to have a return, but I would say that most investors are first here for many other reasons, not returns on investment. Also, most people don’t even know about the possibilty of having that return before investing in steem.
If ROI was a great selling point, then why not increase the inflation to 100% per year and give it to hodlers and delegators? They’ll love the profit and buy more steem? I don’t think so.
What I was proposing is to reward delegators, but reduce their ROI by 20%, and burn that 20%. They still have a profit, but they also help burn steem :)
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Fair enough.
I wonder what content/accounts the bots will be targeting then as it sounds like unless the work is scam/plagiarism, the downvotes will be few and far between.
Would you consider downvoting a content creator who produces ten posts a day, which receive next to no engagement, only to apply their own stake?
I DO condone vote removal and I find it amazing you think one person should earn the Steem from selling votes to shit posters and I in turn should downvote it.
If the bot owners set some standards and enforced them things would be much different now.
It's not right for someone to sell a service, accept money for it, and then purposefully not deliver the service. That is just stealing whether it's for vote selling on Steem or anything else. It's also not just as simple as asking the vote selling services to refund the payment for any removed votes, because while they can remove the vote they cannot get back the voting power that was used.
The whole way Steem is set up to work is that if the community feels that a post has more rewards than it should, they can downvote it. The problem was that in the past it cost money (in the form of reduced voting power) to downvote. With HF21, that will change, and it presents an opportunity to make changes to how vote buying and selling works on the platform.
It's very easy to yell at bot owners to "have standards", but people have been yelling about that for years and it will never happen. With the free downvotes we now have the opportunity to solve the problem from a different angle - take away the profit from shitposting and buying votes - so then it won't even matter if the bots have "standards" or not.
So, yes, I do think you and I and everyone who cares should use their new free downvote to downvote shitposts upvoted by bots. It only takes a relatively small amount of downvotes to counter all the profit made from buying votes, and once "shitposters" stop making money buying votes they will stop altogether and all will be well with the world.
I've been downvoting this entire time, without free downvotes.
Yelling about having standard.. .It's as simple as posting ... Don't use my bidbot to upvote 1 picture posts, or links from youtube. "It will never happen" is utter bullshit and a cop out.
Anyway here we are and it least it gets cheaper.
you're talking censorship, maybe move to China ? :) at least they're honest about what they call it there
I don't believe I am.
If content reaches sub zero rewards it is still possible to view this content. Censorship does happen on Steemit.com though, at Steemit Incs discretion.
It happens on steemit.com (and other UIs which use Steemit's nodes as a back end rather than their own) not Steem. There has never been any content removed from Steem.
EDIT: Above comment was edited so this response no longer applies
Thank you for the clarification, I will edit the above.
it's not possible to remove content from a blockchain unless you completely re-stream it as far as i know ... they don't have an intermediary 'cooldown' layer that keeps the posts on a separate server for x days before they're locked in so actually all your edits, all original and post-edits are there (thats as far as i understand because its an incorruptable ledger the whole thing is you can't edit it ... in theory , as long as there's enough nodes active , under some circumstances things might be 'taken over' by a kind of cartel if they join up thats why more nodes = better and compared to the 9000+ BTC has to keep its data valid i dont think steem has nearly enough .. thing is, people see witnesses and think nodes get paid by default or maybe they think it should be like that , but in fact its not, no one running BTC nodes gets paid just for running it to the best of my knowledge .. @abh12345 @smooth and yes 'at the discretion of steemit.inc , its their company and they do with the DAPP as they please but i think they shouldn't play all magnanimous frontface either, they're the biggest dumpers of their own coin and expect the plebs to fix it ... if i didnt like this thing i wouldnt be here but the tek is just too cool to play with
actual money (as promised on the sign-up page) instead of sticking money into it to be able to do something would be a nice bonus :D
also maybe make it more attractive for people who unlike guttertrash like myself HAVE actual money with zeroes at then end lol
anyway ... see you around
It would be interesting to see the impact of HF21. Would people truly use their downvote ability to downvote shitposts from all hierarchy of sea life? I commend that Steem Bot Tracker is doing due diligence to improve the blockchain. Maybe I might start looking at Steemit posts again if #newsteem proves to promote posts of quality/value.
Good luck with the HF, and no stones this time around please? We need our wizard In good health for Splinterlands.
I offer a very effective tool for reducing the amount of shit upvoted by bid bots. The Global Blacklist API that is available to all bots yet only a handful use.
This paints a much better picture of the fork than I have seen in many of ths comments on the steem blog posts, but of course those were just comments.
I really hope you're right about the change of the use of bots, as I felt like my posts hardly got traction, even when I used bots at first. Seems a bit better since i came back after a long winter offline, but still only have had a few posts get into the dollar amounts. That was mostly because the great work of @Steemskate, @c-cubed, and I think @carlgnash had something to do with it. But hopefully with the focus on curation will make that stuff more common. In turn, i plan to curate any longboard posts, since that is my own community I am focusing on bringing to steem.
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Hi,
So why is it that the vote buying is not encouraged anymore. I get they are wanting it to be used as like an ad thing. But why is that?
Also is the steembottracker website still working. I have tried to use it but kept taking me to a page that said wouldn’t load when I tried to send a bid.
🙏🏼
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so ... "bring a friend and some money" with the masses for the middle classes and also PROMOTING the extra downvotes, are we ?
of all people ....
primary motive is not to keep the top 20 well-provided with caviar and champagne. If you create a system that has options and THEN you go policing and call cencorship curation because you thought from your millionnaire perspective "no one should be doing that" ?
You're in for a lifetime of patching
see, and i wasnt gonna react anymore but for some reason all the silent accounts start posting and they all got one message
"bring a friend and some money to save the whale" ...
sorry mate, much respect for your achievements, that's without doubt but i cant get with this salespitch that suddenly EVERYONE in the top 20 adapts
"we gladly took your money for four years" but now its time to move on from the masses to the middle classes, thank you come again, bring a friend bills need to be paid
that excuses thing timcliff was stressing in the same pitch ?
it goes both ways ... we need more stuff like steemmonsters to give incentive, not more downvotes to give incentive to flagwars and hate
good thing im forbidden from politics or this one would have gotten the VETO from the start on all sides mine
How about making people not only earn as much as they bought, but less. The difference gets burned. Also, some of the profits to delegators get burned.
If a bidbot doesn't do that, we all downvote it, with the help of other bidbots who respect this rule.
but it's about money and bid bot owners want really much of it ;)
They will earn less of a coin worth more. And if they don’t do it we can downvote them.
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That sounds pretty authoritarian. Downvote them if you want, but it might be very unwise to do. They can just add you to a blacklist and you'll never be able to use their services. I believe after HF21, everyone will be forced to use their services in order to get over the new 20 STEEM threshold wall. Any posts below 20 STEEM in value are going to get hit with a penalty against the rewards.
So, yeah, HF21 just made bidbots a lot more essential if you ask me.
Haha. Aint that a sad sad afair.
Fuck it. Bring on the blacklist
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Nicely done Matt...
If you guys need any help with anything let me know!
Cheers
What does this mean exactly, though? Aside from making buying votes not profitable from the bid on it's own how else are you enforcing/incentivizing this through the website? Not really sure if I missed something in this post.
It's purposely a bit vague at this point since we don't know how things will turn out after HF21, but I think that in general it will be fairly easy to determine whether or not a particular vote selling service is working to help combat the problems and make things better. Any that aren't will be just removed from the site as we don't want to promote those kinds of services.
Ah alright, that's great to hear! I'm hoping bot owners will work together to improve themselves as bid bots if done correctly can be good for all stakeholders and possibly give some of the best ROI's possible in an uptrend market.
Thanks.
Honestly, this means nothing. Keeping it vague means requiring nothing or just above that.
And how in the world are they going to fix the problem when they are the damn problem.
How many big bots have required you to be a whitelisted author to get a vote. Say curie voted or ocd voted. Outside ocdb i know of none.
Shitcontent that requires not a sliver of proof of brain drives bots.
Force bots to adopt a max total bid on a post (all bot votes combined) and a curie/ocd whitelist and then we can start talking about change.
Theres a requirement for you @yabapmatt to set.
Not something vague as "help".
What does help even mean.