Bots: FACTS & FIGURES. (Part Two)

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This post shall be addressing the topic of the Upvoting Services and what all was noticed in the past 20 days of using them.

The topics that I shall be addressing are the following:

Using the bots and using the webpage steembottracker.com as a tool,

i) Issues noticed about how consumers use the bots and the above website (or lack of use in the case of the website),

ii) Issues noticed about the way the services relay information,

Making notes on the general differences between the different types of upvote services out there.

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Prior to continuing this post I must make the following notes:

This post is part of a series of posts and all posts in this series that have been published prior to this post are to be considered as a part of this post.

Including but not limited to all the notes, definitions, terms and conditions specified in Bots: FACTS & FIGURES. (Part One) .

It is understood (& agreed upon you) that by reading this post you (the reader/viewer) have understood this and have read the prior publications within this series (A list of which shall be provided on each and every post within the series.) and that you understand and agree to the terms by which I am publishing these posts.

Listing:

Bots: FACTS & FIGURES. (Part One)

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Now that I have that formality out of the way, I can continue.

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Intro:

As was stated in Part One of this series ove the past weeks of actually utilizing the "Bidbots" as we call them it is now possible to actually go forward with finishing off what I started roughly eight months ago.

ref: Experimenting With Bots & The Importance of Communtiy Bots (Services). and there was another post on the same topic, however it was limited as my liquid Steem resources were limited at the time and the usage of bots was limited to only a few. Since that data and those results are no longer valid, for numerous reasons, stretching from the list of available upvote services on the market to the actual market value of our two Cryptos (SBD and Steem) that post is to be considered void (basically "out of date").

Although the actual collection of data from the usage of these commercial services is not yet completed, there is data and information that can be relayed to the public as it is not affected by the fact that other topics that need to be addressed are not yet confirmed in their entirety. (As was stated in Part One, I am roughly 2 posts away from completing the entire process of confirming ALL the relative aspects that we as consumers need to know.)

So this post as was stated earlier shall address some of the topics that are very important and that can serve as a great foundation of proving the intentions and importance of cold hard facts collected on the streets and not via theoretical "should be's".

So lets get into it!

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Using the bots and using the webpage steembottracker.com as a tool:

General Info:

There are many Steemians using the commercial upvote services that we generally refer to as "Bidbots". This is definitely "no secret".

They are being used for many reasons, among which the most common in order of what I was able to notice are:

1- To possibly earn some extra money.

2- To promote a post, project, service, update (and the list goes on)

3- To give a whale sized vote to a post that is not theirs (to upvote someone else's post)

4- A combination of the above three.

There are possibly more reasons for using them, but as stated, from what I was able to see and assess, these are the most common use cases.

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The website https://steembottracker.com/ has been put together and is managed by @yabapmatt.

It is a fantastic tool for all Steemians who wish to use the bidbots.

It shows the latest statuses of how many dollars worth of ids have been put in per bidbot and it even shows a suggested maximum to bid on each bot with the goal of ensuring the upvotes that are given by the bots are profitable to the consumers/Steemians.

The data shown on the site is updated in sync with the data that we see on https://steemd.com/ . Basically from what I was able to conclude, the page updates as quickly as possible and as such is no faster or slower than the realying of any information we can see for ourselves on steemd.com.

I also monitored https://steemworld.org and found that there is little to no difference there either.

So by all means, steembottracker.com is definitely a reliable source of up to date information needed for everyone wanting to use any of the commercial bidbots.

I dare say that it is a "must" as to the best of my knowledge, there is no other service/site offering all the needed information for all the bidbots in one place.

Likewise for those who are not familiar with bidbots, you can click on the following link to read all about it in a way that is simple and crystal clear:

https://steembottracker.com/#bid

The site also offers a "Vote Calculator".
I won't be touching on this as it is optional for use and all the necessary information to see if your bid (payment for an upvote) can be profitable or not can easily be seen in the table on the site:

To not go into too much depth about what all the page offers to consumers/Steemians, I highly recommend that you look into it yourselves and check it all out.

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The following information may get a little confusing to those who are not yet familiar with Bidbots or how steembottracker.com works, but I shall try to make it all as simple and straight forwards for everyone.

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i) Issues noticed about how consumers use the bots and the above website (or lack of use in the case of the website),

During the course of the past few weeks, it was clear that some consumers out there putting bids in are either not using the web page steembottracker.com or they just don't care if the vote that they are going to get is profitable or at a loss.

Why?

Well, from what was clearly the case, some of the bids (purchases of upvotes) being put in by some consumers were well above the maximum that the bidbot service could offer in return.

i.e. The max uvpvote from the bidbot is $20 and a person puts in over $20 (worth of Steem or SBD) to get a vote from that bidbot.

This is guaranteed to create a loss, a non profitable vote for the person buying the upvote.

This is not a rare occurance.
Sometimes it could be as a result of people putting in a bid at the same time, prior to any updated information being able to reach the website. Sure, this is more than possible.

I have seen "rush hour" or "peak hours", when the number of people using them far exceeds the maximum possible (for a profitable upvote). Demand at times for purchased upvotes is very high!

However many times it was obvious that this wasn't the case as some of the bids would come in well above what the maximum payout of the bidbot could offer.

Hence, for these cases it was clearly not a case of "bad timing" it was obvious that the consumer wither doesn't know what they are doing or doesn't care about the total losses that their paid upvote results in.

Or if the consumer is using steembottracker.com it could be that they are not familiar with the information on that page and are misreading the information. Could be, not saying it is the case, but again, after seeing so many people paying for a non profitable vote on practically ALL of the bidbots offered, I dare say that it could be any combination of reasons.

The most logical being "a lack of knowledge" in what they are buying when paying for an upvote from one of these commercial services.

It is comparable to going out and buying a product that a person wants and not knowing what all that product is, just buying it for the sake of buying it and hoping that it performs up to their expectations.

Or maybe someone can give a better comparison. Either way these are definitely issues out there which are solely a result of consumer behavior when purchasing upvotes from the bidbots.

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ii) Issues noticed about the way the services relay information,

One of the things that I have to emphasize here is the fact:

Each of the Bidbots is owned by an individual or company (idk what legal status the owners hold, nor is it any of my business to know).

They are built for making profits.

Hence, as privately owned services/bots it is up to each and every owner to do their bit the way they believe is best so as to ensure we the consumers are assured exactly what is relayed to us via their offer.

Bidbots are a commercial service and anyone who purchases that service is a consumer.

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The following things were noticed and could be looked upon as items that need to be addressed.

If we look at the details of each and every bidbot, we need to realize that not all of them work under the same terms and conditions.

Some offer a minimum loss of lets say -10%, while others do not guarantee any minimum loss.

Yes, for those who didn't know this, there is no guarantee that the upvote shall be for a larger amount than what a consumer pays for it. Hence literally supplying a service that is at an outright loss to the consumer.

This information can clearly be seen in the following column on steembottracker.com:

Note: ROI = Return On Investment.

Where there is listed "none" this means that there is no limit.

However, where there is listed "none" on the +side of that column in the table shown, this is misleading, as the potential profits are limited to the maxim dollar value of that bidbots vote.

There is only one bidbot on there that lists "0%" in the minus column.
If I am not mistaken it is the same as with "none" on the others.

Again, I stress, this is how the owners of the bots wish to express themselves as private business people and it is up to the consumers to be fully aware of the terms and conditions as well as the meaning of each term used by the owner.

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The next thing that I wish to address is;

The "Min/Max Bid" information supplied to consumers.

As was mentioned earlier, not all the bots work under the same terms and conditions.

When for example you put in a bid that would make a vote by the bidbot exceed their minimum ROI, some of the bots automatically place your bid into the next round of upvotes, hence guaranteeing you that their terms and conditions are met as listed.

However.

It came to my attention that some do not do this.

Those that offer no guarantee of a minimum loss obviously don't do it.

Then some return the difference of funds to you and accept a partial bid from you which is the maximum possible bid up to the maximum (loss) -ROI.

Which again, may not be an issue, however I failed to find any clear definitions or terms and conditions that relayed this to consumers. Maybe they are out there and due to the search engine limitations on the front ends built on Steem I was just not successful in finding them.

This should be addressed, as the terms and conditions for each commercial service should be made available at all times without any hassles or complications.

Then there is the following:

The "Min" amount of a bid.

ref:

If we take into consideration that as per this information relayed to us by the bidbot owners it brings up an issue that should be looked into by those bidbots which accept a lower amount as described earlier.

Namely, if a person were to put in a bid lower than the listed amount it is an invalid offer/bid.

Yet, if a person puts in a valid bid, with a valid amount and then the bidbot returns a portion of the funds with the explanation that it shall exceed the min ROI, the bot is in fact accepting a lower value bid/amount.

Hence, where the issue comes into it is that the information can be misleading to a consumer.

For example:

A consumer puts in a bid that ensures no valid bid can be made. Maxing out the bidbots capacity, yet doing so in a way that leads them to believe they shall be guaranteed a profit.

i.e. the maximum that a bot can accept is lets say $50 and its minimum valid bid is lets say $5.
The consumer bids $45.10.
Hence by the listed information, nobody out there can put a valid bid in.

However, what happens is that another person does put in a bid for $5 and the bidbot returns $0.10 and accepts $4.90 as a bid.

Hence pushing it to its minimum ROI, namely an ROI with a guaranteed loss to the consumers.

I shall once again reiterate how the flow of information including but not limited to the terms and conditions offered by each of these services is the responsibility of the owner.

From my understanding, steembottracker.com is a portal where the owners of these services can relay information about their commercial services.

The table shown above is not owned by the owners of the bidbot services, but some of the information on there is directly from the bidbot owners.

I could suggest that this type of information could be easily relayed with a simple "asterix" () symbol next to the "Min" bid amount and a note somewhere clearly visible stating something along the lines of " Where there is an "" next to the min bid value, please check the terms and conditions of that upvote service to see all the relative details."

I suggest that this gets looked into so as to ensure consumers are not mislead into doing anything that may result in financial losses.

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There is another thing that was notices over the past days.

One of the bidbots seemed to have a bug in its relaying of information to the page steembottracker.com.
As it was all working fine up to a point and then it all of a sudden stopped relaying the listed information.

What exactly was happening is the following:

What we see in this picture is the data from the beginning of a round in which people could buy upvotes.

As you can see the figures didn't change from beginning to end.

Being inquisitive for the purposes of this project, I went ahead and put a bid in for a circa 60% upvote.

Well, I only got a 18% upvote.

This confirmed that it was a bug that was costing people money.

I tried to contact the dev who had informed me days earlier that he was looking after this bidbot,

ref:

I didn't get a response.

Maybe I should have contacted the owner of steembottracker.com, I do believe that he would have responded immediately or ASAP. (His track record for getting back to people is excellent, at least with me to date, I can definitely say that is the case.)

As you can see, I did this on a post which was mine and not on any of the posts from which the profits were going to better causes. 'I took the hit for the team' as the old saying goes.
Figured that I will maybe make up on the losses for these little things that I did to get the exact results and information needed, maybe from some of the other upvote services out there, while testing them, but even that seems to be not happening for whatever reasons.

I'll address that in the post in which I list out all the exact figures of Steem spent and payouts received.
Still have to wait for that one.

However, today, I see the following on steembottracker.com

So this issue has been addressed, even though it went on for over 5 days straight.

Not sure what the terms and conditions are of the bot at question, again referring to the above stated issue of not being able to find all the needed information in a user friendly manner.

Basically, bugs like these can happen, it is not to be taken in any negative way, the important thing is that consumers report these bugs to the bot owners and just as importantly to the owner of steembottracker.com, (@yabapmatt) so that the necessary steps can be taken in the hope to ensure no damages are incurred to consumers.

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If at any place in this post anyone feels that I have been unfair towards any of the owners of the bidbots, I sincerely state that at no time was it or shall it be to unfairly state anything.

However, when trying to do good, some may see things differently to others out there, so no matter how I word anything, I feel that I can never satisfy everyone out there.

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In the hope that these observations and this information serves to better the flow of information in this commercial sector on our Steem blockchain and to further better the overall experiences of fellow Steemians who use these services I will be signing out for the day.

This post is part of a series of posts, the first one of which was Bots: FACTS & FIGURES. (Part One).

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Wish everyone a great day, mine was fantastic, got some of the best news a person can get today and nothing that anyone says or does today can get me down!

Cheers.

Yours truly