RE: Damn, the trending page looks particularly shitty today. // I blame Stinc and everyone else.
I completely disagree.
Right now you dont have many people attacking overpaid posts. One of the reason is the psychological aspect of bots being seen as a marketing tool.
That is the main justification behind their use.
Most bid bot buys net you a loss. Take away the exposure aspect and what are you left with?
A big payout value post no one sees and you losing money.
That destroys the appeal of vote buying greatly.
Profit adjustment from vote sellers would occur which would reduce their profits. Tie that in with 50/50 and having your delegation locked into bid bots that lost the exposure aspect and there being a possibility of high curation returns makes vote selling not the best choice anymore.
Steem is a blockchain everything is transparent. It would take a coder with minimal skill to find the reward pool drainers that no longer have the justification of calling vote buying "marketing".
You now added another reason to flag for people.
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I doubt that, especially considering the people who frontrun the bots and all the fools who jump in after the big vote because they don't realize what is happening and they think it will earn them curation rewards. I thought the exposure/marketing justification was there for the vast majority to justify cheating, not that they really want the exposure, why? Because there was almost always a lack of engagement from the buyers under their posts. In short, they buy because it does return a hefty profit, especially if you factor in the lecherous frontrunners and the idiots that pile on, comment or whatnot.
Try it out. If you max the potential buy i.e. buy to top of the trending page you are extremely unlikely to break even.
Well look at who the top buyers are individually. Exposure is a huge part of why they use bots. Hatu, zaku, chbartist, the turkish dude, the bald guy Jerry 2.0...
Based on what? Like I said, exposure is only an excause to cheat. If they didn't have exposure they would probably prefer it, the reason is because they return a profit, not only from bots, who are almost always profitable, even if it's not a whole lot, but also from all the other people that front run and that pile on after the bidbot drops the vote. Why do you think that they don't engage almost at all. All those people, top spots in a social media, and they do not give a fuck about their fans?
You also probably missed the begging one of the bots was doing at the top of trending a week or so ago, I think it was smart steem, pretty much spelling out "make some steem buying votes".
I saw a few posts examining the profit that bots return, not one found that it wasn't profitable, especially in the long term, and they did not factor in all the other votes that came with it.