Vote Bot Takeover Musings & Open Forum - What Would You Like Me To Write About?
Lately, I've found it rather difficult to predict which of my articles will catch fire. It "feels" as if many of them aren't getting a whole lot of engaged readership - if the comments are any indication of the level of reading comprehension, generally speaking. It's getting rarer to see a new commenter who is engaged and productive, rather than cut and pasting comments on any high-reputation blog.
On the other hand, some of my articles that I think are better are getting nothing but my autovoter's normal attention, whereas some articles I expect little from are actually doing OK. There's definitely a large element of chance (who is online to see your article when you post it, etc) so ruling our normal statistical variance is not yet possible. I've also noticed a decrease in auto-voter usage - in general, I rarely see new users adding autovoters as curation seems to be in a rut overall, as that job has been handed off to bots wholesale to "varying" degrees of efficacy.
I suspect our new bot overlords have a lot to do with this. Since they have taken over curation, it is now almost entirely pay-to-play. The difference is particularly noticeable when one goes suddenly from paying to promote one's posts, to not doing so.
I don't have data to back this up, but it seems to be getting increasingly difficult to get your post looked at without paying substantial post promotion costs. The bot owners have worked hard to eliminate any possible way to make profit with these things - ostensibly (and partially) because of the large amount of abuse that gets submitted to them, and the whining of those who don't understand how an auction works. Of course, getting every bot to provide a negative ROI almost every time also works pretty damn well for the operator's pocketbook...
On the user's side, I've noticed more and more huge, money losing bids employed to force to the top of Trending. It's basically a set of billboards currently. You can see it right now - posts with over $1000 pending payout that took huge promotion losses plastered all over the front of Steemit. (Note that this may not be bad, and in fact could be very good, for our Steem investment - a different set of priorities than what is good for us as bloggers.) It gets interesting when bot operators are dumping (HUGE) bids on their own bots...you can't take a loss if you are paying yourself, right?
I'm not implying any foul play, after all "Code Is Law"...but the rules of the game have been changed and only the bot operators are winning unanimously. At any rate, what was once (at least sometimes) profitable is no more. Bots are becoming a "toll" to get your content seen - another barrier to entry, rather than the "enabler" they often claim to be.
On the "plus" side, I guess this is one good use for all of STINC's idle voting power - at least they can get their blog seen for SMT announcements without sending thousands worth of SBD to bid bots on payout-declined posts on their own website, lol.
I'm concerned at the centralization of SP (and voting/witness voting power) provided by these bot owners. Eventually, the "bot cartel" will be able to influence witness voting substantially, particularly those at the bottom of the top 20. I wouldn't be surprised if we started hearing about backroom "offers that couldn't be refused," as many of these bot owners are far less honorable than ones such as Mark Mark. Let us not forget Zeartul and Bellyrubbank.
I'm getting off on a bit of a rambly tangent here, and I'll probably break further thoughts on this topic off into their own article.
Anyway, I figured it might not be a bad idea to ask my loyal readers what they'd like to hear about. Got a coin you want looked at? A philosophical issue you want a take on? Let me know in the comments and I'll take a look. I've got a wide range of expertise that goes well beyond crypto, so don't hesitate to ask about dog training, motorcycles, aquaculture - you name it.
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I'm thinking that the massive influx of new users and new content to go through is a major factor in play that you aren't mentioning. Large staked accounts owe it to their investment to boost new folk, and readers may feel overwhelmed with having more to consume than ever. I too am feeling a bit lost in the sea... Communities couldn't come soon enough, yet I'm not sure they are coming too soon.
Lots of bots, and competition... Interesting to participate in the growing pains of this community... Who guessed what the increase in price and popularity would bring.
Communities could save us... But when?
"Communities could save us... But when?"
A critical question, since SMTs are clearly the focus. As I mused in my recent thoughts about Steemit being a Beta, perhaps the plan is simply not to devote that much more effort/development to the blogging aspect going forward and simply let it "Wild West" itself out.
Only if they have fixed the promotion tab initially ... people instead of diverting towards bots could have promoted posts using steemit promotion. The problem is not the promotion but waste of all SP which could have been for manual curation getting used by bots. :(
I still believe the 50/50 (author / curation) reward payout instead of the current 25/75 option could solve a lot of the problems here! This will give curators (big and small) more reasons not to sell their votes and give (as much as they take) some votes away for awesome content!
it seems to be getting increasingly difficult to get your post looked at without paying substantial post promotion costs.
I agree. It seems difficult to get anyone to look, let alone vote.
Philosophy is always good with me and Aquaculture sounds interesting. : )
I personally do not use bidbots but I have checked out the website
https://steembottracker.com/
and holy shit! There are lat least 60 bidbots in rotation atm and I imagine it's only going to increase. I think this is a major issue that needs to be addressed by steem inc. and by the community .
This only makes the strongest whale accounts even more powerful and it is encouraging a whole culture of people to follow suit. I don't look at the trending page often but when i do it is cringe worthy what is on display to the rest of the internet. From an outsider's perspective this garbage could be viewed as the BEST Steemit has to offer. Not good.
I totally agree with you! I think this bot culture is also demoralizing for new people who join the platform and spend their time creating content as they don't stand much chance of trending (and being seen by bigger audience). I would love to write more content on the platform, but there is not much point if it is going to be buried under pile of s*** posts within seconds :)
I agree. If you don't have a big following, no one will see your post. I have a lot of quality posts I would like to write, but I won't waste them when I still have less than 500 followers and few that read/comment on the posts I do have. My strategy has been to do great curation/commenting and support quality posts to help them get an audience and those I follow because of their quality posts. Eventually, I'll have a big enough following, say 1,000 where it makes sense to start posting my quality topics I think people could be interested in.
I also don't pay for or otherwise use voting bots. I'm a purest and it just seems like cheating.
Your strategy sounds good for the whole Steemit ecosystem. It is important to reward people who put a lot of work in their content. By supporting other authors whilst you build your own follower base and by making valuable contribution through your comments you are creating a more positive culture. Hopefully people will watch and learn. I will look out for posts from you :)
That's the problem with trending being ranked by pending payout only, but I'm done tilting at that windmill.
The truth is most random users do start at Trending, because if you get to Trending you are statistically FAR more likely to get a much larger payout. The game now is you basically don't make anything on your posts unless you have cultivated personal relationships, gotten very lucky, or played the bid bots (generally at a loss after curation.)
The profit on operating the bid bots is enormous. Often well over 70% APR, though we are dealing with a small sample size as they aren't a year old. I'm composing notes on this for a future post, but suffice it to say that the bot operators (and delegators) are making far more than anyone else at Steemit right now.
Except maybe something like this:
The only restraining feedback loop I see atm is that the value of an upvote has fallen dramatically in the last few months - in percentage terms of SP it has gone from about 0.02% to 0.007%, but on payout (assuming 50-50) this almost doubles to about 0.012%.
On chainbb, being a forum, posts are bumped every time there is a new comment, so the front page of each sub-forum has a mixture of new stuff and the most discussed articles. One quite simple solution on Steemit would be have another category: trending, new, hot, promoted aand discussed.
Of course, we will then see the auto-comment bots rise and a new game-cycle begin.
In essence, any encoded rule must (should) have a built-in negative feedback rule. If it doesn't, then the game will spiral towards some attractor that may limit its profitability at the global level, such as a steep rise in recent_claims and fall in reward_balance.
Hi @lexiconical, interesting discussion on our new bot overlords. I really wonder how this will all play out.
Something I noticed at the end of your post was the stat 80% of Steemians don't vote for witnesses. I am curious as to your source for that number, I am running some stats at the moment and the figure I am getting is a bit lower so I wanted to check my calcs.
Hi @eroche,
My stat on 80% is admittedly something I haven't looked at in...almost 6 months? It could be very out of date. If you have recent numbers from reliable data, I'd go with them. I'd also be curious to hear what they are.
@lexiconical I made a post today with some updated witness stats which may be of interest.
really interesting because I've been wondering about the effects of bots. I don't fully get the point but I do see that it is not a profit center for content creators. I like how you described it as a toll because that helps me wrap my head around what is really going on. It never occurred to me that a witness cartel could form and that is worrying to say the least. I also never thought about a bot owner dumping bids into their own bot lol. I'd like to learn more about the eco system in laymen's terms. That might be something helpful to write about since so many newbies are being onboarded into the ecosystem.
The bots are more like paid advertising than a toll, but if your blog needs paid advertising to compete, it becomes like a toll, too.
No ill intent implied.
I hear you on that and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. It's just like boosting a post on facebook but at least you get most of your spend back. I'm not against bots as long as I understand how they effect the community. I don't think they are as bad as people say and I think there are a lot of sour grapes type members here. It's frustrating to be a newbie but the longer people hang in there their perspectives will shift. Only then can really understand your gripes lol. But, I do think that boosting into a trending section that people are tired of seeing doesn't make much sense.
agree tons of new users, net loss of older users or they arent as active now that steem has nose dived. i think the bots should be monitored. too many of them run huge negative losses. this could be curtailed by cutting off votes when profit goes into the red, or limiting votes to a certain $ amount for the last 15 minutes of voting. personally i think any bot owner that is consistently raking in huge profits should be paying to monitor for abuse
At least we can now call $3 a "nose-dive".
As for limiting bots, that may be a good idea but you may as well just make them direct-buy votes like Minnowbooster if you remove the bidding aspect with limitations.
"personally i think any bot owner that is consistently raking in huge profits should be paying to monitor for abuse"
We can dream.
ive noticed that minnowbooster seems to have no power to vote lately... id use it a lot more if i could actually get a decent vote there
Some of us are real :)
It is obviously clear how much of Steemit is not activity when there are 5x as many votes as there are views, and the majority of the comments have clearly no relationship to the content :)
The challenge is we have very few reliable metrics.
I'm afraid this is the net result of many users turning on autovoter and then checking out.
From what I just read indicates the monopoly and manipulation of steemit posts, upvotes with the use of bots... I cannot appraise or condemn the efforts of any steemian from the newbies to minnows and also to the mighty whales because all these together makes the steemit platform the greatest of all other media platforms.. My thoughts though, have resteemed
Bots and vote buying is having a very bad effect on the 'social' side of this 'social media' network. I was wondering what will be the long term effect on the network and think it is not good. Paying to play was probably not @dans vision for it's future and I'm sure with any new platform on EOS he will program in some safe gaurds. Taking bots to their logical conclusion I see AI bots battling it out to game the system as all the humans sit on the sidelines. Would love to get your take on the possibilities of AI on the platform.
I for one do not accept our robot overlords.