Bid-Bots - Also Known As "Vote Buying". What does it mean for steem?

I remember some time ago when those first bid-bots burst onto the scene. I actually even used them to give some people a boost a few times (not myself). I watched and observed and after a couple of months of them being around I stopped using them at all. I had my own reasons, but I really had not told people it is a bad idea.

I believe about the limit of what I had recommended was to check and see if the return they were getting for what they were paying was worth as much or more than what they were spending. I also recommended they look at who controls/operates the bid-bots they choose to use and decide whether they want to empower that person or not. It is a completely personal decision.

I still believe it is a personal decision. I do not believe banning anything actually works. I will not recommend banning bid-bots, or bots as I don't think it is feasible, it is not freedom to advocate for such, and I don't think it would work anyway.

I also am NOT an advocate for choosing not to vote for something because a bid-bot was used on it. I vote for things I like based upon their quality, and how much I like it. That is what I was supposed to do. That was the idea behind giving curation rewards on steem. Quality content would theoretically rise to the top.

Who or what voted for something is no measure of quality. It therefore should have no impact on how I curate.

I am a strong proponent of the saying:

"Good ideas do not require force."

I actually think about that statement several times a day.

If I were to stop voting based upon quality and instead focus on whether or not a bid-bot was used on a post then I am now in MY MIND trying to FORCE someone to stop using bid-bots to receive my vote. To some degree it could be viewed as coercive force. I am against this.

I also cannot force you to agree with me. I do not try to.

That doesn't mean I cannot share what is on my mind and it may or may not influence you. The choice is yours.

I often attack concepts such as people promising FREE things. Someone pays. [1 | 2 ]

I often attack concepts such as always choosing the easy path. Often opportunity is lost, and it can in the long term be the wrong path to have chosen. [ 1 | 2]

The short term reasons I see people using bid-bots and my thoughts on them:

"It is hard to get noticed"

And you think paying for your vote is the same as getting noticed? Do you not believe in hard work and perseverance? There is no free. Someone pays.

Bid-bot owners: "It is my steem power I can vote how I want."

Indeed you can. It needs to stay that way for this platform to remain truly decentralized. There is a difference between CAN and SHOULD. It greatly depends upon your goals. If you don't care about long term, and your goals are short term to maximize your personal gains then bid-bots are genius. They are highly effective at this. The returns for the amount of effort greatly exceed actually having to curate. If your goals are long term viability of the steem ecosystem and for it to be around potentially forever then bid-bots are a bad idea.

No one can force anyone to use or not use bid-bots. We can discuss and try to convince people with our ideas and thoughts. That is all we can truly do in a decentralized environment.

Now unlike our human situation in the steem ecosystem not all people are equal. This is a reality. I am not proposing we equalize outcome as I believe that is unrealistic, not to mention technically impossible. Yet, I do think it is important to keep in mind that it is not a 1 person 1 vote type of situation in the steem ecosystem. So when we make analogies to other things in life those analogies often are not very accurate when applied to steem due to the disparity of the voting power. It truly is an Apple and Oranges type of situation for many analogies.

With that said. I am now 100% anti-bid-bot. Though I will not force others to be that way. I'll only tell you WHY I chose to be that way. It will not impact who I do or do not vote for though. If you use a bid-bot that will not change how I vote.

It all is based around observation of what has been occurring, and trying to project that into a long term view of things.

The idea behind curation was a great one in theory. Encourage people to use their voting power to vote for things that will be popular and thus reward the content the community likes and encourage quality. That sounds great. Just like many ideas that sound great, in practice there are some problems.

Remember that disparity of voting power? Well in a 1:1 situation that curation conforming to actual interest and popularity theoretically might work. In steem your voting power can be bought and powered up, and you earn steem power over time, etc. It is possible and exists that in some cases there are people millions of times more powerful than you. So your vote of one must go up against a single person worth a million of you. Pretty much anything that single person chooses to endorse with all of their power is deemed as extremely valuable and popular even though only one person thought so.

Each day there is a reward pool that is a fixed amount of steem that is spread out across all of the content creators.

It is based off of seeing how much of a vote is worth in terms of the overall voting power.

If only a single person with 1 steem power voted on a day and no one else did that item they voted on would get 100% of the reward pool portion allocated to content creation. They would also get 100% of the curation rewards.

If two people voted and one had 1 steem power, and the other had 1000 steem power then the thing voted on by the person with 1 steem power would receive 0.1% of the daily content reward. The one voted on by the 1000 steem power person would receive 99.9% of the daily content reward even though only two people voted.

Ideally if everyone was curating based upon quality rather than upon whether they know the person, it is their account, or they disliked something (flagging) then even though it would still be skewed we would still mostly have things that people view as quality rising to the top. People who make amazing pieces might get tons of votes from smaller people and not earn much, but they would still earn something.

If voting occurs for reasons other than quality it naturally leads to consolidating power further, and the tendency to support quality seems like it would fall more and more by the wayside.

Bid-bots offered a way for the person with a lot of power to sell their votes. They no longer have to curate and look for quality. It is automated. Furthermore, if the post is actually worth the vote due to quality they'll still get good returns on curation without actually curating. Even if it is not quality they still will make good money on the fee for purchasing their vote. It is an amazingly lucrative and brilliant scheme for increasing power and earning on steem with the least amount of effort. (Coding the initial bot, setting up the interfaces, etc. are all work. Once that is done though it becomes effortless compared to actual curating.)

I knew that for a long time. Yet I was still not anti-bid-bot. I chose not to use them but I admired the brilliance in the people that created them when it came to good business.

I became anti-bid-bot within the last couple of weeks when a friend asked me a lot about them and forced me to think about them. He was, and may still be pro-bid-bot.

He was concerned about people banning voting for his things due to him using them. I told him I don't curate based upon who or what curated someone. I do it based upon quality, so at least for me that was a non-issue.

Yet in discussing with him it made me really look at this and think long term.

If people increasingly buy bids, how does that help quality rise to the top?

If I can buy votes then I should likely find what takes me the least effort to publish and simply pay to have it voted for.

If people are buying all of these votes what does that do to the reward pool?

It should heavily dilute it and increasingly over time put most of the rewards to those who pay for them.

People not purchasing them and hoping they will get noticed for the quality of their work will see a decrease in the value of their posts as the reward pool goes more and more to the bought votes.

So while they hear "Persevere, and keep writing, and it will get better." If the bid-bot trend continues that may not be the case. It was the case before, but that seems to have changed.

There is another diminishing returns factor that has nothing to do with bid-bots. If the value of steem does not increase, but more and more people join then the reward pool will be spread increasingly across more and more people. This will naturally result in people making less and less on their posts.

The only way this is not the case is if the value of steem increases. As the value of steem increases so does the value of the rewards for everyone.

I wanted to at least join into this discussion and share my ideas.

The choice is yours.

Good ideas don't require force.