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RE: Bid Bots - Let's Talk About It
Typically other sites label the posts as sponsored or as 'ads' - Steem cannot do that so reliably because the 'advertising' is being powered by third parties. The intended design of Steem was for advertisers to hold their own steem power - pushing the price up. It wasn't really originally envisioned that the system would rely on ads or that people would sell votes. It was envisioned that the network would be populated by engaged, creative people rather than people just trying to look for loopholes to exploit.
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 :)
And I agree, advertising investing and powering up Steem to then upvote their post is a good use case. Right now 150k USD worth of Steem gives about 20$ upvote. That is a tough sell for someone trying to promote a product that may be cost them 5k to make in the first place. I do feel we need a "hit and run" type ad space where people can put 100$ up if they want to get more exposure to their post.
Yeah, it really shouldn't be too tough to build a decent advertising system into the blockchain - I suspect that part of why we haven't seen it is that without it certain parties can become very fat from the bid bot marketplace.