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RE: The Exit Machine
I did not intend to "dump a vacuous mess of platitudes". My intention was to talk economy. "Labour + capital = prosperity" is a literary shorthand for a basic macro-economic law (added value).
If I had written instead "mass * velocity = momentum" you probably would not have taken that to be a "vacuous mess of platitudes".
So perhaps the discipline of economics is for you a "vacuous mess of platitudes". Could that be the case ? Perhaps you just don't know enough about economics and it all looks Chinese (or Greek) to you ?
I specifically asked how you expect the bidbot investment thesis would scale. You continue to patronize me with your responses.
What is exactly your concern about "scaling", what do you feel is not scalable, can you elaborate ?
"Scale" in what sense ? Technical ? Or economical ?
If the former, I would need you to clarify your concern because I don't see what is the scalability issue you are concerned about.
If the latter, I think the "bidbot investment" does not NEED to scale - this is what I was referring to when talking about diversification. The "bidbot investment" will stabilize to an equilibrium level that will be reached through market mechanics.
As an illustration, the early bidbots (booster for instance) were distributing 80 - 85% of the bids. Some people saw the opportunity and started offering bidbots that pledged to return 100% of the value of the bids (the rising).
Then even more aggressive offers appeared, such as spydo and tipu which also return (under different form) a part of the curation rewards.
For as long as there is demand for bidbot services, and that demand outstrips supply, there will be people ready to offer those services. If running a bidbot becomes more expensive than the earnings, the operators will need to reduce the payout to investors. If on the other hand the people buying bidbot services would feel that they don't provide enough value for the risk, they will reduce the sums used for bidding (potentially down to zero)
It's a free market (for attention) at work, and it works pretty well.
However, it is fragile - it depends on the aggregate number of eyeballs which the content can reach. This is why steem needs a wider array of services on offer, thus allowing investors to redirect their "steem power" capital to the most profitable opportunity.
I see your point. However their profitability and supply can also be heavily influenced by downvoting. If I only look at a post in terms of proportion of rewards, the case for downvoting is easy.
The community is under no obligation to acknowledge the back-end transaction that facilitated the disproportion. The tenor of the argument I have seen so far, is that for some reason the onlooker should be obligated to consider that transaction when evaluating whether a post has been over-rewarded. The implication is that these bots are 'here to stay' and are a persistent 'feature of STEEM'. I don't subscribe to that at all.
I hope better places emerge to sink STEEM, and I hope the concept of bid bots will wither away and die. Either way I don't intend to facilitate their existence by participating, short of returning excessive rewards back to the pool. There are more than enough targets for my eyeballs that don't use them worthy of those rewards.
One important question to ask is: who, and on what basis decides whether a post is "over- rewarded" ?
Take a look at steemworld.org. You see that for this post, the "author payout" is ~131.82USD
Now if you look at the Steemium comment under this post, it says:
"126.23$ has been spent to promote this content using Steemium."
That makes a net payout to the author (me) of about 5 USD
Do you consider that to be "over rewarded" ?
On what basis, how do you reckon my post (implicitly, the time spent to research and write it) should be valued ?
The fact you paid someone to upvote you is not my concern, nor am I obligated to consider the profitability of your private transaction when viewing its rewards taken from the pool in proportion to similar posts. I feel like we are going around in circles now. The fact I don't want to wade through bought and paid for shit while searching for organically curated content reflects in my actions of returning proportionality of rewards through downvoting as the actual blockchain was designed.
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That is "zero sum thinking".
Please allow me to invite you to reconsider the implicit idea you seem to harbor about yourself that you understand how economy works.
Do you have a reason that makes you believe you can argue economy? I mean, there's no shame in not being very proficient in all the areas, you are certainly a very good network and security consultant but would you say you are as good in networking as in, say, law ? Unlikely. What about economics ? Just as unlikely I dare say.
The "reward pool" is an illusion. The "Steem" token doesn't have implicit value. The value is harnessed at the interface with the rest of the world, with the fiat based economy.
Looking at the the proportionality of rewards (denominated in steem) between different posts is akin to trying to learn how to ride a bicycle by focusing intently on the circular movement of a spinning wheel (rather than getting in the saddle and pedaling) ...
How would you laugh at me if I came to you and I started arguing some "too clever by half" stuff in the networking domain like, for instance "that network is on /22 and it should be on /24" or something I'm actually quite incompetent at?
You get too worked up about stuff you think it's straightforward and you understand. Believe, me, there is a real discipline called "economics", no one is born proficient into it.
Sorry I don't mean to offend you but you look at too narrow a picture, at the wrong indicators
Oh look, you're patronizing me again. We are done.
5 minutes on LinkedIn, turns out you aren't an economist either, but another IT guy. Who would have thought? Hypocrite.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sorincristescu/
In some cases I am willing to forgo that downvote with a discussion when I feel the situation warrants it as in this particular instance.
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Here's just one partial illustration to my argument about focusing on the wrong indicators (the fairness of sharing a worthless cake called "the reward pool").
Does our discussion have value ? I reckon it has - it allows me to learn about you, to hear and think through your arguments and come up with some answers (for what they are worth). It allows you to do something similar. We both learn something.
Well, if I had not used the bidbots to reach trending, this valuable conversation would simply not have happened. We would have not generated the associated value.
The steem in the reward pool is an illusion to get people to interact with each other and produce valuable content and learn. There lays the real value, all the rest is just illusion. In that sense, the bid bots, associated to the "trneding", are a good mechanism.
That being said, taking a step back, I think ranking posts in "trending" by the payout is a really bad idea. Post quality should not be assessed by how much rewards they gather. But I can't change that. Since I have to live with it, then the real goal is to generate valuable interactions within the rules of the game.
In other words, it's not the bidbots that are bad, is the "payout means quality" implicit logic of "trending" which is the original bad idea.