RE: Bid Bots - Let's Talk About It
I feel the only way to "police" it as a community is with are upvotes and downvotes. We have zero control with what people what to initially do with their stake, but as a community, we can DV stuff we feel is abusing the reward pool.
The closet we can come to a sponsored label would be the declined payout, or an icon if they choose to burn, or even an icon that relies on the poster to say it is promoted if they lie the community can retaliate with DVs.
I agree with your view though, I believe it will be harder to have legit promotions on Steem because it is decentralized and the SP is controlled by private parties that will do what they will. I am just shooting from the hip my idea on the situation and how to maybe turn something that is perceived as bad to a positive for Steem. We are not getting rid of promotion IMO, nor do I believe we should. But finding the best way to go about it will require our collective Proof of Brain.
I also put out a design for a feature that the Steempeak team were thinking of creating - I'm not sure I've seen that they have though. The idea is to give each user a 'voter mute' list, so that we can all create custom trending lists that remove the effects of specific upvoters. So if there are upvoters who continually annoy us, we can just remove them from our experience. I think that's a pretty empowering feature in general, but it also has the effect of minimising the power of the more visible bidbots since people can easily stop their effectiveness on a personal level. It's not perfect, but I think it would have a similar or even bigger effect than free downvotes if widely adopted.
I'm all about empowerment rather than control of others. We have the ability to empower, but don't seem to be using it in a fully imaginative way yet. All that said, I just realised that I now run a Steem powered site at ureka.org - which I didn't when I first though of this idea.. So maybe I'll integrate it in there and see how it works out :)