I Wonder If Bid Bots Can Be Made Less Harmful?
I can call myself a curator with some experience. And yet sometimes I have problems. Yesterday, when I was curating, I noticed that most of the authors I supported are more or less familiar names. I try to be responsible for my task, so I started looking for new authors. Tag by tag, I went through different posts, in a row. Unfortunately, I could hardly come across any posts that I could support.
After sorting the posts, for example, by the tag #health, out of the first five, four consisted of one picture and a few words (up to 10). These short posts were supported by bots. This brings me back to the issue of bid bots. If you imagine an outside reader who came in to read something about health, then a sad picture awaits him.
We all respect and love investors, we understand that they are busy and not everyone can and wants to be a blogger. At the same time, they want their money to work and make a profit. But when using bid bots to maximize profit, you need to publish a post every day... any post. There is a problem with this and I believe that there is room for improvement.
Clean up the trash
I think that a small change in the bid bot algorithm can dramatically improve the quality of content on the entire platform. Now everyone who delegates their SP gets an equivalent vote from the bid bot every day. That is, if there are 100 authors who have delegated their SP, 100 posts will appear every day in order to receive a vote. If there are 1000 such authors...
However, it is possible to do otherwise. Bid bot could independently create 10 posts per day and vote for them with 100% power. Subsequently, it could distribute the rewards received among the investors in proportion to the delegated SP.
Advantages of this approach
- A significant reduction in the number of spam posts.
- Investors don't have to do ANYTHING AT ALL to get their profits.
- Increasing the share of attractive content for readers.
I would be glad to hear your thoughts on this matter.
This topic always has it's way of coming up almost every week in the back of every seriouse manual curator's mind in the blog.
Sometimes, it left me wonder and ask the same question as the one on your heading...
And then again..., I also understand that whilst it's possible to adjust this program by bot owners.....it could as well be a difficult decision to change this...."Gen-4 narrative by bot owners.
I have just noticed some interesting points shared by @remlaps on this same topic..., it would be interesting to see if Gen-5 could work.....
Thank you for sharing these great thoughts.
Yes, remlap's post is very interesting indeed. I think any forward movement would be helpful because the current state of bots is seriously damaging the system. But unfortunately, we don't often see any changes.
I am keen to see any of those adjustment.., maybe starting from the Gen 5!
There are a lot of things in the systerm that needs adjustment.
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I've been thinking about this some more. A couple additional thoughts:
It's a big paradigm shift, but might be worth considering... Maybe Steemit and abuse detectives could try it out for a 3 or 6 month experiment and see how it goes.
You're right, when I was thinking about how to make bots at least a little bit less harmful, I was starting from the current conditions where almost no changes are happening. I was looking for the easiest and, accordingly, the most real mechanism.
Your proposal is more thoughtful, it is more perfect, but it is much more difficult to implement.
I also like @michelangelo3's suggestion in this post. It would be great if Steem could implement something like AutoEarnings, when the investor would receive his annual interest and at the same time he would not need to trash the blockchain. Then there would be no need for voting services. In this case, the investor would "lock" his SP for high annual interest.
If today's voting services were to die, they would pave the way for a whole new generation of bots, ones that would bring value to the blockchain.
If I had something to say - the problem would be solved quickly. Add the new BBBS section to the start page. Remove all articles with botvotes from Trending, New & Payouts and move them to the BBBS subsection. Problem solved for everyone involved.
The investors aka bot users don't give a shit if their posts are being read or commented on.
You can even throw them out of the hashtag lists. It won't bother them.
They want their profit. That's it ;)
Steemit Trending is certainly controlled by steemit.com and the proposal from @peppermint24 by adding the BBBS section to the home page and remove all articles with botvotes from trending, new & payouts and move them to the bbbs subsection will definitely be done
@steemcurator01 probably know if there can be an opportunity to do so.
I also believe that a Bidbot can pay some bonuses from the profits to their ivestors who delegate in order to get a higher profit without having to post every day, then it will be more tidy on the trend side
For exmeal they will get the usual 50/50 distribution + 10% in addition from Bidbot for not posting themselves but only investing to get the disapproval,
There are probably many who are tired of posting every day just to get max profit, it can be a good idea we get less dirt on the trending side
That would be the best change since 2017. OK, you can call it something more serious. Instead of BBBS, you could call it SPI. Stuff promoted by investors.
There was once a "Promoted" section, but those were the articles you could promote with a STEEM shipment to @null. The BBBS stuff was still in the trends.
WORD!
Den Promoted-Bereich gibt es immernoch. Um dort angezeigt zu werden, müssen allerdings SBD an @null mit dem Artikellink als Memo überwiesen werden.
Zum Rest antworte ich unter den anderen Kommentaren.
Ja erste Sahne. Und von wo/wie von der Startseite kommt man da hin, wenn man diesen Link nicht kennt? Irgendwie war das doch mal so, dass man das Hashtag spezifisch bewerben konnte, oder?
Da sagst du was! Das ist so eine der Fragen, über die ich nur den Kopf schütteln kann - also eigentlich über die Antwort zu dieser Frage. Promotion sieht schon anders aus...
Hm, das ist mir nicht bekannt.
Jo. Ist so wie ne Werbeagentur, die Geld für Plakatwerbung kassiert und wenn du fragst, wo denn geworben wird und gesagt bekommst: "Die Plakate hängen bei uns unten im Materialkeller!"
Ha! Gut, wenn man so alte Screenshots mal aufhebt.
Alleine auf diesem kleinen Ausschnitt sieht man, wie viele Rückschritte die Plattform gemacht hat. SoMe Share Buttons, Counter und da rechts oben der Promo Button.
Das hatte ich sogar genutzt. Wenn du auf einen Hashtag geklickt hast, den du verwendet hast, dann in der Artikelliste deinen Artikel aufgerufen und auf Promo geklickt kam man zur Wallet, wo die Daten zu deiner Seite dann schon hinterlegt war und dein Artikel war dann unter dem Hashtag für 1 Tag oben mit Vermerk "Promoted" gepinnt. Waren aber maximal 2 Artikel und lief wie bei GoogleAds im Bieterverfahren. Wer das meiste gezahlt hat wurde da halt gepinnt.
The "trending" calculations are realised via hivemind.
The trending posts are fetched from the condenser with
bridge.get_ranked_postsand the parametersort=trending.A new sort category could add without a hardfork. But a new category would be required. This would have to be changed in the Condenser and in Hivemind.
In my opinion, it would be "simpler" to exclude the posts with votes from various known bots from the trending calculation. The only difficulty here would be defining the conditions for this.
Which accounts? Which vote value?
The code is public anyway and the bot list could become a transparent part of the Hivemind code.
I am currently working on another new function for the Condenser in Hivemind.
If we can clarify the open questions about the trending, an implementation would be quite conceivable.
This is a great idea! This is roughly what @the-gorilla does in his interface.
Yes, I have seen that. I really like @the-gorilla's interface and especially the sorting options.
By the way. What about the zombie hunt in the Steem building? Do I arrive too late and all the zombies are already killed?
I had already prepared myself well. Damn!
As far as I can tell, some kind of glitch has crept into the code. @the-gorilla tried to find it, but the code has become so large that it takes a very long time. He postponed this work until better times.
This is probably the simplest and cleanest way to do it, but my question is... how would we actually get the coding done on steemit.com to make this change? Does the Tron team do any development at all on Steemit.com anymore? And if so, who would monitor the coding to make sure all new and existing bidbots are including in the algo...?
That's a very good question. I have the distinct feeling that the whole "Steemit.com thing" is like a ghost ship without a captain. For example, I've tried to communicate with the official Twitter account - no chance. No feedback. I think the X account is also a bot. Posting the engagement challenges but can't respond otherwise. :)
As I replied to @xpilar, the questions you mentioned need to be discussed and the conditions defined accordingly.
Implementation in the code is then the easiest part...
I don't think it's possible to automatically detect future bots. However, the list could be updated with a transparent code change.
Yes, there were already some sensible suggestions online to separate the bloggers from the investors and to consider both separately. However... Like so many good suggestions, they usually require activity, possibly investment and in any case manpower. We continue to fail because of these problems, it seems. What is desired first and foremost is a self-sustaining system...
Well, there is no simple solution, and we are not capable of drastic ones under the current conditions.
Interesting topic. 😀 I just posted Let's talk about voting bots. Unfortunately, I'm on the go at the moment, so I'll try to come back and comment later this weekend.
Update: Quick thought. If it's automated, they could even do it with 1000 posts per day, just to stay off the trending page.
Yes, this is a really interesting topic. It's funny that we published posts on the same topic almost at the same time 😃.
The number does not matter if the bots will publish their posts in some separate unpopular tag. The main goal is to keep people from posting their own low-quality posts for guaranteed votes. These short and sometimes pointless posts are cluttering up communities, dominating the trending pages of popular tags, and making Steemit less readable in general.
Yeah, and also interesting that we both focused on the fact that author rewards can be redistributed in order to provide passive income to investors. I've had it in mind for months to do a post on this topic, so it's sort of amazing that these came in so close together.
Right, if the bidbots follow a self-vote and distribute strategy in a more-or-less invisible manner, then we just have part of the community competing for (rewards + audience) and the other part just competing for rewards.
Then if the bidbot posts don't show up as spam and interfere with other curation, their section of the blockchain basically just becomes a "proof of stake" mining pool. Not what the rewards system was intended for, but it's equivalent to some other blockchains. So then we can start to see if the premise in my post was right ("Premise: Rewards + Audience is more valuable than rewards alone.").
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That sounds super simple and pretty... awesome!
😊 After your comment, I am very pleased with myself. It is a pity that this nvcol will not be implemented, as well as everything else that we have discussed.
Oh, sometimes miracles do happen... 😇
To be honest, I think there's a lot of movement in the system at the moment. It's not coming from Inc, but from talented community members. And that's how it should be: We are the community, we all own the Steem.
You know, for me as a layman, a bot like this sounds really simple (I find our DUBby much more complicated). Who knows? We even have brilliant developers in our close "circle of friends"... 😉
I'd like to write a loooot more, but answering all the comments in the "rep" exhausts me. I already need the whole of Sunday. Luckily, I've taken sufficient care of the animal family and the husband is sick in front of the TV (so he doesn't want anything from me this Sunday). I also want to read and process remlap's post in peace - I didn't fully understand it the first time I read it... 😉
What would these 10 posts written by the bid bot be about? Wouldn't they also dominate the trending page each day and likely be of no interest to content consumers? It might clean up the tags (if they only use one tag such as bidbot) but it wouldn't clean up the trending page which seems to be the biggest issue to me...
These 10 posts will be boring, that's for sure. There is a big difference when there will be 10 uninteresting posts every day or 1000 like now. Also, I thought these 10 posts would be published in one separate tag. That way no one will come across them.
There is also an obvious advantage for investors, because they will not have to publish anything and they will receive the maximum profit. I think that if such a bot appeared, it would become a leader among existing bots.
Yes, there would be less for sure, but they would still be the top posts on the trending page very likely... which in all honesty could make it look even worse if the top 10 posts on trending all said "voted for delegation payments" and had nothing else to them...
Personally I liked the idea of filtering all the posts that used a bidbot or delegation service and excluding them from the trending page. Only posts that were voted by users would show up on trending... though we would need that to be part of the DIP program or the steemit development team, which doesn't seem it exists at this point.