Bidbots are against content
Before bidbots, if you were to ask someone what the best way to earn on Steemit was, the answer would have been to create good content or to make good connections. If you were to ask someone now, it would be to make good connections or to pay for your upvotes. The content aspect of the site has been rendered null and void. Bidbots make Steemit - and other dApps on STEEM - a place where you can pay to get paid, rather than where you create or curate content to get paid.
Shooting people is wrong
We all know that owning a gun does not mean that you should be allowed to go around shooting people. Ownership of property does no equate to permission to use that property to harm others. Therefore, "it is their stake, their choice" and "it's their property, their right" is an illogical stance that has clearly not been thought through by the ones who are saying it.
* It's called a "reward" pool
The creator of STEEM would not have named the daily reward pool as such if it was not for rewarding users. But, a great deal of the reward pool is now allocated towards paying customers. Thus, the reward pool has been seized and is now being sold rather than distributed as rewards. A good way to think of this is that the reward pool is very much akin to the fruit of the Earth, and was intended to provide sustenance to the best content creators and community builders within the ecosystem. Vote-selling equates to the theft of those trees and their fruit, and the demand that we pay to have something that this very platform was designed to distribute for free to those who deserved it most.
* Curation Rewards are for what??
The creator of STEEM foresaw that their would be greedy bastards out there who sought to abuse this system for personal gain, and thus, curation rewards were implemented as a means of incentivizing fair voting. They even went to the effort of adding time penalties to save from people voting on content they had not read and therefor could not determine its quality, again highlighting the effort took to ensure that voting on content remained fair. Why would anyone go to these lengths, or even consider curation rewards at all, if the reward pool was intended to be auctioned off to the highest bidders? It's rather clear no one would have, and so vote-selling is not a natural progression of this ecosystem as many liars have tried to argue. it Is in fact a form of abuse that the platform was designed to counter, and that only after some shady hardforks did it become a viable option for abusers. If we are going to allow bidbots to continue then there is no excuse for the culprits to also be receiving sizeable rewards for voting fairly- in return for them voting unfairly.
Neglected Responsibility
If you are an influential member or an ecosystem where thousands of people are trying to earn money for them and their families, then whether you asked for it or not, you have an obligation to be responsible with your stake, for the ability for everyone else to earn is largely effected by the choices you make with your stake, and thus the quality of life these people and their families will experience also is. If one considers that too much responsibility, then one could simply leave. But beyond the neglected responsibilities of abusive whales on the platform, you and I and everyone else are also neglecting our own. For we already know that Steemit is the first of its kind and an example to the future. So when we set a precedent that the needs of the one are more important than the needs of the entire community, that lesson will be learned a thousand times over by observers of this ecosystem and may find its way solidified into the future economies of the world. But if we recognised our responsibility towards one another, and opted as a community not to make decisions that hurt the majority of us, then that is the lesson that will be learned by observers, and that may ripple its way through economies of the future. In short, we all have a responsibility to one another and to the rest of the world who will use this experiment as a blueprint for tomorrow.
* A final attempt to convince you
If responsibility or fairness is not enough of a motivator to do the right thing, then you are probably a cunt and should seriously indulge in some self-reflection. But perhaps your dignity will matter to you. If you think these whales who are behind this are not laughing at you on a daily basis, then I suspect you'd be wrong. I know I would find it hard not to laugh at you if I was getting away with such rape and being praised for it by the idiots I was impoverishing. Another reason they have to laugh at all of us is the ironic nature of this whole fiasco when viewed through the lens of the Steem whitepaper. Rewards were said to be intended to go towards content creation and community building. I have already explained why the content aspect of this site has been made redundant by vote-selling, as now the best strategy is simply to pay to be paid. But if you consider the fact that every time someone buys or sells a vote they are essentially saying that my share of this reward pool is more important than it being distributed fairly, they assault the very notion of a community spirit by their action, then we can see that vote-selling is in fact a community destroyer and not a community builder, and thus, the ones behind this, are earning the most influence on the network, every day, for betraying the whitepaper and the initial distribution plan in every way possible.
I can think of another hundred reasons not to use bidbots, and now that I will be writing an anti-bidbot post every single day, you can expect to hear about them soon.
This is a glimpse of the basic principle at stake. Society isn't an economy, but much, much more. Reducing one's participation in society to mere economics degrades society. This isn't just a principle that affects Steemit, and clearly is the basis for much that is, and has long been, wrong in the world. Was it Jesus that said 'The love of money is the root of all evil'?
Society is about people engaging and building relationships. Automated voting of any kind, and particularly when conflated with stake-weighting, degrade society, and directly counter that purpose.
Potential solutions are coming, in the form of SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities). Soon there will be examples of all kinds of communities that potentiate rewarding participants in various ways, and there will be some that demonstrate exactly how stake-weighting and botvotes are harmful, and how much more powerful society is than mere economy.
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Soon?
Theyve been saying communities since ive been here.
What happened to vice coin and their smt?
Abandoned because smts are vaporware and will be for months to come?
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I am an old man. I have tried all my life to change the world for the better, and I may have succeeded for my sons.
Changing the world is hard. I can wait a few months.
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Im glad you got faith, stinc stopped getting the benefit of the doubt from me almost a year ago.
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Some months ago I had a brief conversation off chain with @ned, in which I detailed some of my concerns, including my view that stake-weighting was not something that could be fixed, but had to be foregone. He told me he'd address my concerns prior to the release of SMTs.
Months passed, and I gave up, reckoning that he'd merely made a politic answer to get rid of me, as so many witnesses and phat whales have.
Last month he spoke in Korea, and detailed how and why stake-weighting is a problem, and what he was doing about it. I gladly eat my discouraged words, and feel he has honored his commitment to me to address the issues I brought up privately, despite that no further pressure from me, even from me!, was brought to bear on him, and you know as well as I do the ferocious pressure that is bearing on him to maintain the financial rapine that stake-weighting enables by those whose financial support is critical to Steemit, and he himself.
I reckon he has earned my patience, and shown far more gumption and dedication to a vision of Steemit as social media, rather than cryptomining app, than I could have imagined.
Srsly, I'm quite impressed with his remarks in Korea, and his sincerity, humility, and dedication to Steemit.
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Hmm, i see stake weighted voting as the essence of the platform, without it their is no real game, just a popularity contest.
The problem i see are the largest accounts having enough to make the game unattractive to anybody except themselves.
The whale experiment had that under control when @ned gave us pay to play.
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I dunno if you've seen the video made of his remarks in Korea, but I suspect it might change your mind, at least a bit.
While egalitarian voting, which he calls one account one vote, may be a sort of mob rule, that is the essence of social engagement and the heart of curation. I am not a communist, as you may recall, and prefer the term autarch to anarchist, but I know we both want actual freedom and simply come at it from different directions.
@ned has every reason to simply fleece Steemit for all the cash it can produce, and there's no lack of folks that want to do that with his help. I note that he has proved that is not his purpose, or intent, by enraging many who openly profiteer on Steemit, and have a great deal of Steem to do so with, with his remarks on stake-weighting.
A recent post on Oracles, Communities, and SMTs provided specific mechanisms of enabling communities to create their own approaches to stake, voting, and every metric under the sun, that @ned has clearly been working very hard to make happen behind the scenes.
Given the nature of opposition to such power being delivered to communities to prevent profiteering, the complexity of the world-changing potential such communities will have, and many prior examples of hardforks with unintended consequences, I find the extended silence from Stinc, and the length of time necessary to develop these ideas appropriate.
I chafed and spoke disparagingly as much as anyone. Having seen what he has been doing, and considered what he has endured to do it, I have greatly increased my respect for @ned.
YMMV, but the world is the result of stake-weighting. I am confident neither of us has any desire for such corruption and profiteering to continue, here or in the world our posterity will inherit from us.
@ned has devised a way to make freedom possible, and speech and communities more important than money. As to stake-weighting being the essence of Steemit, I feel rewards are the essence.
It isn't the chance of winning the lottery that is a whale upvote that separates Steemit from Reddit, but the mere fact of rewards. Stake-weighting perverts that into soliciting, pandering, and sycophantic groveling from folks that are convinced nothing is more important than money by their indoctrinations.
I believe stake-weighting can't avoid that, nor the profiteering enabled by it. What does the contents of one's wallet have to do with the value of their opinions on things other than money? There will be communities focused on that, and that embrace bidbots, self-votes, etc.
I believe those communities will fail quickly, for good reason. What do you think?
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I think it is best if the whales are left free to rape the the platform, but dont, because they think it is better not to do that.
If folks are restrained for reasons other than selfdiscipline then they havent learned they are just bullied into compliance.
If @ned had let the whale experiment play out i would have more respect in my tone, but instead he appealed to authority knowing this was the inevitable result.
Id find more respect if he let us go back and try that experiment again.
Rather than allow the system to work as designed, he changed it to fit the fit the system to the people.
I say we go back and if the bad whales sell, great, cheap steem for everybody.
Once the system is made to work for the little guys we will see stake weighted voting negated by the community deciding it is bad, dealing with it on their own, and not appealing to the authority of the code.
Im at the point now that i dont believe anything stinc says until i see it.
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Ok, you have convinced me to stop using bidbots.
But, since i haven't ever used a bidbot, i will first need to learn to use one by using it. After i have used it a few times, then i am sure i will be able to stop.
I hope this is a good plan, a plan that you will condone.
What should be interesting to all the people i follow that do use bidbots... well, i don't vote for posts that have gone over a certain dollar amount.
Whether by bidbots, or by just autovoting bots, if a post is already doing really well, i just don't feel like voting too.
Still, since i read most of what i vote for, if it is really good, i will still vote.
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I think that I'm going to join you on the anti bid bot platform, but for a slightly different reason. I run the numbers and I keep getting results that I'm taking losses.
When I post the articles I get responses from members on how my numbers might not be correct or Im not using the right vote bots, or i'm voting at the wrong time, or............and it goes on and on and on. Seriously how much time effort and research should you have to put into something to get a reasonable profit? I know there is no finite number on that question but these continuous loops of information that gets the members more confused about how to actually turn steemit into a passive income stream is troublesome. "How do I make a profit" I have two ways that I know works and that is what I'm sticking with. I will not waste any more money on vote bots especially after a witness in that resides in the top 50 basically said that his bot was not giving out profitable upvotes.
The other ethical component about using upvote bots is not something that newbies to the site really understand until they get burned a little bit. I have been burned allot so far. Im waiting on a response from a fellow steemit member and then Im officially out of the vote bot business.
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epic question.
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Awesome post. Would love to see more ideas on how to give them less power. Would it even be possible to ban them or move them to "promoted" ?
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Stop copying me:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@baah/re-meno-re-baah-how-can-kayzen-benefit-steem-20180610t173837226z
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That's nothing much like what I've written here. It's an idea for sure though, but I don't think it would stop people using bidbots, because the excuse that it's for promotion is more often than not a lie. It's just about trying to get money and a higher rep because so many of them fallen victim to the gamification aspects of the site. The page shouldn't even a be a top-down list, that again just makes this a competition to get to the top, which in turn helps us justify stepping on each other to get there.
If I ever find myself with the money needed to do so, which I doubt, but if I do, I will build a platform that is actually designed with community in mind and not divide and conquer.
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You're resolving the posts listed in any one order as stepping on each other, that's hardly the reason for it or the consequences, you look at it as stepping on one another and the rest see it as crowdsurfing.
One of the implications of making the home page only promoted posts would be in creating the demand for spending sbd to get to the top while burning that and not affecting the curation value. Back when bid bots started there was a promoted bid bot that tried to involve people into using the promoted button by matching a vote equal to the amount promoted for, or at least tried to match it. I always thought that it was was a great idea and worthy cause, and I think that by switching the homepage around we can give people the exposure they want, and for cheap at first, while with time more and more people will speak up against self-voting or vote selling and the aspect that cheats us out of having a social experience over having a competition for attention of people that will rather sell you what they were meant to give out freely because there's no lie to hide behind, it's blatant abuse at that point, no more "it's for promotion" to excuse it.
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Then the creator of steem should do something about it. Its the problem lot easier to fix for them than anybody else.
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If the Creator of this universe doesn't get involved and stop it if an adult is trying to kidnap a child before your very eyes, should you do nothing because it is easier for God to do something about it if They wanted to?
If you are living in a home with ten other people and the central heating has broken in the middle of winter, should you try to fix it or wait until the people who built the home decide if they want to?
If you have three younger siblings and a mother who is an alcoholic, and if she has been passed out drunk for ten hours while your younger siblings are calling out for food, should you ignore their cries and wait for the mother to wake up and feed them?
I have been among this community long enough to feel an obligation towards the people who are in it. An obligation not to make things even worse for us just to make things easier for myself. If enough of us understood this obligation, then few enough of us would be using the bots that everyone's power would grow to make up for the unused power. And then we would find ourselves able to reward one another more, lessening the necessity for the remaining ones to continue using the bots.
I do not see this battle as unwinnable. The only problem we have is that too few of us realise there is a battle going on. And even still, many of the ones who do see a battle erroneously think it is a battle between bidbot users and those who are against them. But it is not. This is a battle between a small handful of Steemians who are attempting to gain complete authority over the network, and everyone else in the community and who will join the community in future.
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Those are the things that personally affect my real life. That i care about. A online platform which says it doesn't care about its first million users, not so much. If a game is toxic, you move on to another game
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Street fighter is a game. A content creation and rewards platform is not a game. You are mistaking a game for that which they have sold to us as a game. They have convinced you that this is a game through the process of "Gamifcation." You don't need to gamify that which is already a game. Thus, this a product and a service. If your local grocery store was selling you sour milk then I would not object to you desiring a better service. I and many others have paid in countless hours for a service promised to us by its developers, a service that has not delivered upon to an adequate level. I see no good reason why we should not be able to seek for a better service in light of the payment - the investment in time and creative energy - that we have already made.
In a game the consequences are not real. There are, however, very real consequences to the community that result from continued bidbot usage.
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Everything is controlled now by witnesses who are voted for by users. Seems bidbots are winning the witness vote
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the witnesses really dont have much say,. Steemit INC has most of the say because they still have a ridiculous portion of the premine.
Witnesses should imo have more say but not before Steemit INCs shares are distributed more
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Oh and the creator of steem left for eos and is making a competitor... one that is even more centralized #fail
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I am kind of excited about that. Maybe they will show Steemit Inc a better way to do things. Competition can be a good thing for Steemit.
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i do agree with compitition
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They ran him off because he refused the hardforks making this situation possible.
We have this abuse because stinc wants it this way.
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The "Proof of Brain" mining system, as claimed from Steemit blue paper simply does not exit if bidbots are allowed. I recommend reading posts form @borges.barilla. This curator is critical to bidbots, but also trying to understand the bidbot economy from within.
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