Bid-Bots - Should you be Buying your Upvotes?
Bots are, as I am sure you are aware an enormous area of contention on our platform. People are buying and bidding for up votes in order to increase the value of their post and ultimately milk SBD and STEEM from the platform. Should you and I be using them to help ourselves? As I see it at the moment - yes, and here is why.
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The Really BAD Bots
Okay, first a note about the terrible bots that do milk our system. These are the bots that work together to up vote each other. We saw this recently where on bot would comment on a post and them several bots would up vote this comment. This bot added no value to our platform and is completely raping the pool of rewards.
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The OKAY bots, that we can use sometimes.
The bots such as @booster, @jerrybanfield, @greengrowth. These bots are bots where we bid for an up vote. The up vote is shared among the users depending on what they bid.
In an ideal world, they wouldn't exist on our platform. But the truth of the matter is that they do exist. Therefore people are using them. If we stand back and refuse to use them we are not benefitting, we are not taking a share of the increased profit.
Yes, it is good to have your morals. But at what cost. Minnows and Plankton cannot watch other Minnows and Plankton use bots without using them sometimes to try and get a bigger slice of the reward pool.
If we don't use them we may be letting piss poor content get a bigger share of the up vote.
I believe that if you write good content you should be using bid bots sometimes, this way it keeps you in the game and not watching poor content over take you!
The Future
Some bots have a discord channel to report spammy posts. I noticed on the @greengrowth bot that they have a channel to report spammy posts, which the bot can then blacklist. This way it is promoting better quality content.
A Better Future
Bots can start to allocate their up votes on different criteria. For example, you can only bid for an up vote if you have written 300+ words or have included at least 3 pictures. This sort of criteria is a good way of weeding out some of the poorly constructed and lower value content.
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My 10 Cents
I don't think it is ideal, but I do and will continue to use bid bots from time to time so that I can stay in the game. I am confident in the content of my work and feel it worthy of the reward pool. I do hate to watch someone who has posted a photograph take 5+ SBD when I may only be taking 1 SBD. My vision is to get enough SP that I can make more of a difference on our platform.
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 25 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 14 SBD worth and should receive 41 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigHaha, ok, buddy, you did select a post that suits you perfectly ;-).
I am thinking the same! But thanks anyway!
Agreed. The issue with many of the bots is that they're abused by people who have no interest in the platform itself, and are simply here for money. That's why you'll see awful posts with just an image (likely not their own work) and one sentence receiving high rewards.
It's a shame because it does highlight poor content while others struggle to gain any attention with their well-created posts. Like you say though, it's a case of use it yourself or see others do it and find yourself stuck.
I think some more strict rules enforced by the community at large would be helpful?
Would people actually profit from buying upvotes if they just post uninteresting content? I doubt that many additional people would upvote such a post, even if it's in the hot or trending section.
How would you get consensus among the community for stricter rules? I reckon that something like that would only result in additional flag wars.
You're probably right about the flag wars, yeah. It is a very difficult situation to police, but it's a shame that people are abusing the system.
yes you are and good awareness for people using bots is main necessary now a days. Thanks for such nice posting
You got a 50.00% upvote from @greengrowth thanks to @jmcmeekin! You too can use @GreenGrowth by sending your post URL in the memo field to the bot. Minimum bid is 0.01.
If you feel this post is spammy or not worthy of @Greengrowth you can contact a moderator in our Discord Channel https://discord.gg/6DhnVTQ.
There are no "good bots".
Automated upvoting should be removed from the API so that only validated humans can vote on Steemit. By continuing to support upvoting bots of any stripe, it is continuation of supporting crap posting, reward pool rape and flag wars.
I beg to differ. Please, do not destroy all bots. The one I develop has the best intentions^^. It searches for quality contributions that deserve more reward and upvotes them WITHOUT the author having to pay for the vote.
In fact, the little fella, @trufflepig, did pick this post to upvote :-).
Doesn't matter. Upvote bot is upvote bot. Allowing it to happen allows for the bad actors destroying the system.
I think this would be great. However, there is something about a decentralised platform that makes me enjoy watching the innovation in the various forms of bots and ways to ultimately reap more SBD.
Steem will just end up to be bots upvoting posts made by other bots and then flagged by other bots.
Very nice post and great article.