OCDB past HF21

Alright, it's time to address the changes to OCDB for HF21 including reasons why we decided to go that way. For those not aware of OCDB and what it does, here's a short summary.

It was created late in the current economic system because we as curators do not approve of bid bots and the immense stake they have garnered. It was held non-profit for the sole purpose of staying competitive to delegators against bid bots and has garnered over 4.3M SP in just under a year. It operates with a whitelist of authors it allows to send it bids, curated by the team of @ocd over the span of 2.5 years and allowing authors to bid for 10% profitable votes under the current system.

Competitors past HF21 and predictions

With the new EIP, 50/50 curation/post rewards, the 25% free downvotes and the new curve I expect that a lot of bid botted posts will be receiving flags, especially those with no moderation behind them. Even though good bid bots are supposed to bring in a great ROI for delegators seeing as it should cost the buyers to promote their posts, this ROI is often depleted either cause there is not enough interest, authors only bid when there is not many other bids in the bidding window to receive a profitable vote or the middleman (bot owner) takes too high fees for their "service". Here is an example of the returns to @freedom taken from @tarazkp's post The hidden costs of middlemen.

Keep in mind this is before free flags and it would not take long by looking at most of those accounts voting history to find the majority they are used on is low effort and undeserving of attention, a.k.a. "shitposts". We very much expect the ROI to drop even further for most of those accounts past HF21 as downvotes become normalized more and more and projects using the passive voting power of free downvotes coming to life. Not to mention we don't know how these bid bots are adapting with HF21 and what percentage of curation rewards they will be returning on top of the bids to delegators.

Now let's get into the changes of OCDB, reasons as to why we went with them and some predictions of how they will play out

• The queue has been removed

OCDB used to have a queue and only vote when the account reached 100% voting power. This was mainly in place as we did not want OCDB to be seen as a "promotion" bot but instead a distribution bot considering it guaranteed a profitable return to bidders. With the new changes it will instead allow for both, bidders will be able to choose if they want to receive their vote instantly (at minimum post age 5 minutes due to the curation penalty) or up to three days later.

With the queue we had to balance supply and demand by increasing and decreasing the max bid allowed, when the queue became too short we would increase the max bid (as long as it wouldn't reach a 100% vote) and when the queue became too long (getting close to where the vote wouldn't land until a day or two before payout) we decreased the max bid. With these changes now we will be instead balancing the voting power of the account by adjusting max bid and min bid depending on demand. There is another factor involved here now though that we have to take into account which I'll be talking about that in the next point.

• Minimum bid will be increased

Although almost no one used OCDB with the minimum bid, due to the new curve and to be able to guarantee a profitable vote on your bid we have to increase it to the base post reward where the curve is as linear as it is now before it becomes slightly more "curvy" after. This will be done to avoid abuse and taking advantage of the OCDB vote, e.g. someone bids 0.1 sbd knowing he'll get a much bigger vote to guarantee the 10% profit and then has other accounts vote or sell them additional votes leading to OCDB "wasting" more voting power on this user than others bidding between 8-40 Steem. On the other end of the spectrum we will not be giving smaller votes for bigger bids due to the curve for now as it's too early to come to the right decisions and put the work behind it to do the right calculations. We are hoping instead that demand of unique users will increase over time leading to the average bids being just over the minimum amount.

Adding to that, since we now have a base minimum bid that won't be lowered but a maximum bid that can be adjusted depending on the situation of the voting power of the OCDB account, when we get to the point of there being too much demand from unique users using OCDB daily but the max bid can not go loer than the base minimum bid, our next adjustments will be the frequency of how often you can bid. Right now it's one bid per day and after some modifications from our dev we are now able to adjust this as well to e.g. 1 bid per 1.5 days or 2 days.

• ROI has been adjusted for 50/50

Needless to say since the 50/50 change and 10% going to the SPS we also had to adjust the ROI of the votes from the bids. We will be monitoring this closely in the coming weeks but have it set on a relatively safe number for now, but of course we want to remain competitive with the returns to our delegators and if we manage to get more delegations from current bid bots then we see this as a win for the ecosystem. We have no selfish interest in increasing the delegations to OCDB as we take no cut as the maintainers of it but we believe it will do much better than in the hands of bid bots, especially after HF21.

In closing words

We want to let the current and future whitelisted authors know that we will be a lot more strict about the use of OCDB. We will have a more detailed post about guidelines and rules coming that will be edited and finetuned over time and linked to our @ocdb account, discord and website so everyone is aware of them. Since we have not had the highest incentives to keep curating posts using OCDB daily with the service being non-profit it has naturally caused - as many have experienced in the past the way guaranteed autovotes affected authors - a more lazy approach to posting and the quality of said posts has decreased over time with authors using it daily and max bids on no matter the effort. We will judge bidders more harshly than before by the effort of their posts, the length, the quality and the way they use OCDB. It should be seen more as a privilege to be whitelisted and being able to promote and receive a guaranteed ROI on your quality and high effort posts than it turning into a farming session where you are forced to post daily just to use OCDB. Bear in mind that the amount of whitelisted users will grow over time and there will be competition to use OCDB's daily votes so the bar of what is accepted will naturally also go up among other factors. There is only a limited amount of Steem in existence that can be delegated to OCDB, though.

This will change as we hope OCDB can be a prime example of how delegators can use their passive stake instead of selling it for attention and we are hoping many other projects will considering copying what we do and more stake being used for that. Having said that we are curators by heart and nothing would make us happier if delegators would instead delegate to curation projects pro bono or to only receive a return on the increased curation rewards past HF21 than selling the votes. We are not yet at the stage where we can be too optimistic about that, though, but I am looking forward to curation projects attempting to outperform bid bots ROI and our own ROI.

We are looking forward to the Hardfork and growing alongside everyone along with the platform and currency. Thank you for reading and supporting OCD&B and the team of curators working hard to reward and continuously keep rewarding deserving authors and users on this platform.

Feel free to discuss the changes, thoughts, opinions or improvements you think would be better but please keep it civil.

For more info on OCD and OCDB feel free to join us on Discord, check out our OCDB website and follow @ocd for daily curation of deserving authors, incentives to share Steem posts and other things. We also have our witness @ocd-witness which you can vote through Steemconnect or Steemit if you appreciate what we do and think we deserve your vote of confidence.

Thank you!

---