RE: Let's talk about voting bots
Advantages
- Immense nominal return for investors: I haven't run the numbers myself, but I've seen claims that bot delegators earn nominal returns on the order of 100% APR. I don't know if that's correct, but they certainly collect sizeable returns.
As you noted later this is not necessarily an advantage. DeFi coins with absurd APRs are considered worthless by many as the "return" is coming entirely from large inflation.
I believe that Gen-5 voting bots could profit more and better align themselves with the interests of authors, investors, and audiences.
I'm generally skeptical that the ecosystem can be saved, but maybe there would be a way to incentivize reading (I think Publish0X does something like this). Someone could have a website where it gives you N random recent steem posts and you rank-order them based on your view of their relative quality, then the website uses that wisdom-of-crowds info from multiple readers to direct votes at the best articles (with some beneficiary funds siphoned off to pay the readers).
The thing that I can't understand is the number of fairly large investors who must know that their stake is being devalued and really don't seem to care. I think there are many possibilities to improve the ecosystem, but it requires motivation. Many of the people with large enough stakes to make a difference seem satisfied with the status quo, even though it's harming their own investments.
I like that idea. Reminds me of the ESP Game (which is gone now, but was amazingly addictive). I actually have something like that in mind for my next Java project if I ever get through my current project.
Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to deliver significant upvotes to go along with it, though.
I think it's a slumlord problem, eg in a run-down city every individual landlord sees it in their interest to do the bare minimum and simply extract value while waiting for everybody else to revitalize the town into a place that people want to live. The original vision of Steem assumed that "investors" would be incentivized to improve the value of the ecosystem as a whole as a way of improving the value of their stake. But in practice most "investment" has been a combination of speculation and rent-seeking -- why put in more effort, you already did the chain a favor by tying up your wealth in the coin, now it's the chain's turn to do nice things for you.
Yeah, but in this case, I think the investors are the tenants and the bots are the landlords. I don't get why the investors aren't pressuring the bots to get better. i.e. "I want my daily rewards and you should work to increase the value of my stake, too!" Maybe some "activist investors" need to start delegating? 😉