RE: Crush the Bid: Rethinking bidding bots
Great read and excellent observations. I don’t think a self-policing ethical system will ever suffice though. Not unless it also includes actual protections, not merely refunds.
I wrote about the same topic a while back already but suggested another solution. Basically, the suggestion to be found in between the lines, to call a spade a spade and call bidding bots what they effectively are: advertising.
That would require a whole new approach though, on hard fork level even. But best of all is that it would allow both to co-exist, all while taking the fallacy that is the promotional aspect out of the argument. Because that’s merely a catch-22, an argument to the benefit of only the bot operators. Because the day will come/has arrived already in which you can not hit trending anymore without using a bot. Unless you have several orcas or a whale supporting you.
Thank you for your response. I do remember that post from a while back. I didn't respond at the time because I was new to Steem, just starting to experiment with my bidding bot strategies, and not at all ready to weigh in on the different levels of arguments.
I am not in favor of protocol changes to resolve social problems in the ecosystem. I think that establishing solutions without implementing a hard fork is better for the long-term health of the ecosystem.
Trending and Hot pages are not protocol level. That means that one of your suggestions (stripping paid votes out of the formulas for trending/hot) would resolve most of the demand problem. The financial risk implications would still remain, but if the bots aren't required to get post visibility then the virtually unlimited demand would diminish and the problem would mostly disappear.
Since Steemit is fully focused on SMTs and doesn't give a damn about problems that they believe will self-resolve with the launch of SMTs, maybe calling on the other groups that provide front-end interfaces to fork the Condenser and rebuild the hot/trending calculations is more practical than calling on the bot owners to change their stripes.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
I totally agree with this. Most voting rounds end up with a loss. There really isn't any reward pool rape caused by bid bots at all because most people are loosing money (even over 80%) by using bid bots. It's just advertising. At best I'd say we need to limit the max post age. Other than that I don't see anything to be fixed.