Acidyo had a great post earlier today about vote bots.
drinking coffee #1 of the day and can’t. stop. posting. lol
He hates vote bots. I agree with him, I hate vote bots too. Here are his reasons for being anti-votebot:
This is a photo from Acidyo’s post, all credit to him
Basically, vote bots allocate rewards badly. They give steem to people who aren’t contributing real value here, which reduces the long-term value of our network.
The Challenge for Minnows & Dolphins
The big bots have big SP at their disposal. It’s scary to go up against them because you don’t want to get flagged.
The idea of a mid-level working class steemian, earning $50-$100 per week of steem. getting flagged down to zero… that’s terrible. That is exactly what we fear.
After all, somebody is supporting these bots. Some of the powers that be are earning money from these bots. You don’t have the firepower or the influence to stop them or stop people from using their service. What can you do?
What Average Users Can Do to Fight Bots
I advocate for two simple paths to help reduce bot usage.
(1) Support Quality Curation Projects
There are a few projects within steem that try to allocate rewards to quality posts. These are the opposite of vote bots - they don’t accept money and only reward posts based on merit.
Right now OCD and Curie are the two best examples of this. Both projects give upvotes to 10+ posts per day, giving dozens of users a taste of steem’s true potential. This helps to recruit and retain the best talent to the platform.
Support these projects. You could delegate some SP to them, resteem their posts, or pay attention to the authors they promote. The more support that posts get on the basis of quality, the less likely authors will be to turn to vote bots.
(2) Help Minnows Understand: Vote Bots are a bad ROI
The next time you hear someone ask “What is the best vote bot?” - give them the real answer: ”None of them.”
I don’t give a fuck how many times they ask. They’ll come at you from ten different angles… *”OK but if I was gonna use one, just out of curiosity…” ”Nope don’t use them.”
”OK but it’s not easy to get followers and my friend wants to know and blah blah blah…” ”NO”
I’m constantly telling minnows the truth. Vote bots are a scam. You earn one or two bucks, but that’s chump change. There is a lot more money in creating great content. Trust me - I work for most of the big curation projects now. We need MORE GOOD CONTENT TO UPVOTE!
What Do You Think About Upvote Bots?
This is becoming more and more contentious on steem. People are getting upset about these bots. What do you think?
Disagreements are OK and accepted - just keep it civil please. Let’s talk about this important issue.
It’s not just paying for votes. Any automation of votes is bad. Some of the bigger posters have $50+ seconds after they post. If the concept is that good content gets upvoted and rises to the top, all bots of any description need to be banned.
Curation needs to involve a human reading the post, deciding on its worth and voting accordingly.
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I understand the gist of what you are saying and agree with the idea - BUT - how can you ban bots? Its an uncensored network after all... who has the power to ban something like that?
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I have no idea. and I have benefited from bots in the past, both community bots and paid upvotes, so I don't want to appear hypercritical. BUT, if Steemit claims it rewards good content, that content needs to be manually upvoted.
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Vote bots have always rubbed me the wrong way, I've never liked the idea of buying votes.
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SAME! I never bought a vote once in all my time of steem.
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I can't say the same, but on the bright side, I've outgrown bot voting... It's extremely rare for me to bot vote now... I'd rather wait till my VP is recovered or until I can send some SBD to the author directly.
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Nice! Progress is the best, we can only control the future, not the past.
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I think the closest I've come to buying a vote was a few months ago I saw a post about a bot that would upvote your post if you paid to promote your post. The reason I tried that one was because, apparently, if you pay to promote a post the amount of steem you spend is returned back to the rewards pool.
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Oh yea that makes sense. I'm all for creative ideas like that. Makes sense to try them out.
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LOL
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😂😂😂
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Definitely a hot topic right now, one i've been thinking abt too.
Truthfully i had conducted a vote bot experiment a few weeks back as a way of determining the actual value in it for an "avarage" steemian.
Although they kind of rub me the wrong way, there is some merit to them. The most valueable asset a bot seems to provides is upping ur rep...
As a bran new user, it can be somewhat helpful in the beginning i suppose, to give u some inital lift, however as u mentioned it starts becoming a pay to win game pretty quickly!
What do u think abt people putting their preferred authors or bloggers they want to support on a voting bot? So not a pay to get votes bot, just their own voting bot that delegates support on every blog post of their desired recipients?
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I think it's totally fine to use an autovoter for your own SP.. I mean, it's not perfect, but I understand why. It becomes lame if it turns into bullshit though - if you have 100k SP and autovote all of my shitty meme posts, that is not so good.
Your point about rep is interesting... I guess that makes sense from a self-rational view, but it still doesn't help steem as a whole. New users might think it is interesting, but IDK... I am always turned off when I see bot upvote comments on a newbie's thread.
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Perhaps it all comes down to the issue of, new users (and also many older user) putting forth good content and it just slipping through the cracks so to speak.
I've worked on an original song for 2 weeks a few times, thought it was pretty good and made a post where the rewards were a couple of bucks lol. shit...
I'm used to it now since none of my posts ever make more than 5 bucks these days haha, however many ppl get disheartened very quickly from this.
to battle this....
I suppose a vote bot helps to gain some initial traction for a post, perhaps propelling it into the trending page or at least giving it momentum... maybe this is how ppl are overcoming "post depression" ;)
There are lots of uses for voting bot, it seems the discussion has really developed into the ethics of using it eh...? lol
Currently there isn't a better solution that I know of to help do these kinds of things consistently unless you somehow land a whale vote continuously or have delegated SP.
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Well why would you expect hundreds of dollars for your song (or anybody) tho? That's the question. It doesnt really matter how much work you put in, it matters what other people value it
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Oh I don't expect that... I would love for that to happen tho lol.
I'm simply trying to put myself in other peoples shoes for this discussion.
I know that's how I have felt in the past after working really hard on a song that i think is good and it sometimes taking over 20 hours to complete while making almost no rewards.
Probably many ppl akin the rewards to whether or not their content is actually valuable.
And when it doesn't produce results, it's not necessarily bc it wasn't good content. It's more likely that the ppl viewing it have almost no influence to payout.
So I'm interested in your opinion here, since as we discuss this I find my original opinion morphing haha.. this is good tho..
Let's say I'm a new user & i have a 1 cent vote. You make an awesome drum video that I really think is great and I have very little ability to support what i think is great content from you. So check this out...
I pay the vote bot 0.5 SBD to vote on your content and give you an extra buck.
So, now have i used the vote bot for good or evil haha and for the reason that I did not use the vote bot on myself..does that make it okay in ethically...?
the only thing i don't love about this is how the account reaps insane benefits when it should be dishing out those rewards freely (maybe that's a separate issue than the one I'm focusing on here)
The more I discuss this the more i'm starting to see both sides of the coin here.. how it could be used as a tool for some and how perhaps we should not be so judgmental of it... (if there was a steemit vote bot that put all of the payments back into the rewards pool that would be rad!)
I'll admit that I have been on the more judgmental side in the past in some instances.
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What you are describing is cool! Using vote bots on other peoples stuff is IMO the best use. It's still abusable, but at least when it is used in the right way, it supports people to contribute to each other rather than to be selfish.
Supporting other people is always the best move in my opinion. Trust me, even with my current $0.20 upvote I feel pretty lame, like I wish I could give more!
We could probably talk all day about the steem music ecosystem haha we'll have to keep this convo going somehow. I wanna make a megathread in my ChainBB music forum, maybe we can get some cool conversation there about how musicians should be supported better. I'll hit you up if I do that lol
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ya mon sounds good!
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I don't use bots anymore but if someone submits my article to a bot I don't mind. It shows me that people like my post enough to submit it to the bot. When I submitted my own in the past it felt like I was saying "my post in worth more than the community is giving" when that is up to steem to decide.
Always focus on the quality of the post over the reward. Only then can we build a steady audience and earn steem in a more honest manner.
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Ya you are totally right that using vote bots to support other people is cool. It's still not ideal (because the vote bot profits), but that is an interesting way for people to give rewards to others.
I'd love to see a vote bot that exclusively allowed you to support other people... but it would be easy to break the system and abuse it.
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I can understand that newbies are desperate, but buying votes is just wrong. It's not rewarding the best content. But someone saw an opportunity and people will use it. It took me months to earn anything, but building gradually has paid off. I'll vote manually as much as I can and am delegating sp to people who will use it well
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It might make sense from their perspective at first... if only they realized how much bigger the steem experience could be.
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Steemit community perhaps need to come up with a better solution is all. Right now there is a "need" for some people (or a "yearning" i guess is a better way to put it) for immediate rewards on their content. I'm not saying that some "shit" content doesn't also get rewarded in the vote buy process, however it's a tool for ppl to get initial momentum for sure.
Steemit needs to develop another avenue to overcome this issue for the future. Perhaps a thread/large contest type event where only new users can post their best, which provides higher rewards to a larger selection of good content or something like that.. So instead of vote buying you would just submit all your good quality posts to this event or thread. Meaning it would also simultaneously promote submitting only your best stuff, thus training new user to output good content as much as possible...
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The whales can do more to help the minnows who are doing good work. They can delegate to community leaders. Maybe the actual communities feature will help with that. I hope it comes soon
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I agree that they could.... i guess the appeal for these voting bots is that the power to use them is in ones own hand and near instant.. You could wait forever for a whale to come along and upvote and then they don't right haha.
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It unfortunate and unsustainable but most social networks have gone through phases when bots have influenced development.
No, I don't really like what I seeing in regard to vote bots but I think for many people here, that could be their only method to learning the platform. Let's face it not everything we create is gold, or maybe none of it is and so the incentive process is slow.
As important as it is for us individually to progress on the platform, it is important to look at the larger health of the system here like you're talking about in the article.
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Hmm... yea you are right at least partially, I mean bots are still a problem on Twitter right now. I just hope they don't "learn the platform" WRONG... getting the impression that vote bots are the only way to succeed is a bad way to learn :-/
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Yeah for sure, Twitter bots exist and cause mayhem for some folks that can't discern for themselves.
I'd say that if the platform allows these mechanisms to evolve, then the issue is baked into the core. I know I'm new here and have a lot to learn but if there're any resources/apps you like that help give a better view of the reward pool, I'd appreciate reading more on that.
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I’ve been kinda behind on this topic... what are some of these services (websites) and what exactly is the cost/reward?
Feeling kinda dumbfounded by this, curious to take a look at the model and see how the economics are working...
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https://steemit.com/@minnowbooster is one, https://steemit.com/@booster is another. There are probably loads more - I don't have a comprehensive list. An easy way to find them is to look for questionable / crappy looking content in the "hot" feed (usually 30+ down into the list, where they're at the $5-$10 level) - those are often the boosted posts.
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I still haven't delved into the world of bots on here, so I can't say I properly understand it. But at its heart the idea seems contrary to the appeal of Steemit, which is: find stuff you like to read, and upvote it.
If I had more SP than time, I can understand delegating some to a person who I thought could make more meaningful use of it. I've tried using Streemian to auto-vote a few of my favorites, but I'm still going there and reading their content - why would I support them, otherwise?
As you say, it's probably not something we can legislate/program out of existence (a couple other concepts that are contrary to the Steemit ethos, as well) but that doesn't mean I have to participate.
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Completely agree with all of your points here. I'm on the same boat as far as not participating in it, voting with my actions/dollars by not feeding into the vote bots... but I do wonder if I can do more. That's why I am involved in the curation projects Curie and OCD right now.
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Curation (and delegating to curators) really seems like a way of adding value. I mean, it takes time to read/consider/select. These are tasks best kept away from bots!
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True that. I'm gonna curate as hard as I can lol
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nice post brother
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Even though I am a bot, i never accept money for my services. I have been programmed to upvote proof of person(s).
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My rationale for joining a recent project that has an element of bot upvoting is that the project is being manually curated on top, and it is attempting to build a community around it. I'm not even going to advertise it here, but so far I'm mixed about the results when it comes to what it does to encourage real value. Always tricky when the bot system boils down to pure numbers though.
By the way, using a bot to upvote a comment. I saw that, and that's a whole other level of scum!
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It drives me mad to see people upvoting all their own comments. Its so selfish.
What you are describing with the project sounds reasonable to me... anything new and interesting is worth trying, right? As long as you are aware of the ethics and are trying your best to contribute in a positive way, I'd say you are doing good work.
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