RE: @surfermarly is right to say that greed has overtaken community spirit on Steemit.
Wow, what a sweet way of demonstrating your complicity - thank you so much, it means a lot to me :-)
I really believe that social engagement is still the most powerful tool to build sustainable and self-sufficient communities. The financial reward was actually created as an incentive in order to light up social interaction, value creation and creativity - and not to become the primary goal.
The re in rewards has a meaning...:-)
Steem and all the other tokens that will follow through SMTs are created/will be created to encourage people to participate in communities of their fields of interest. They're designed to bootstrap engagement, profitability and growth.
The idea of tokenizing the internet is to incentivize social interaction and value creation in any type of community all over the world.
Now bidbots try to beat the system, buying people into the community, letting them skip the whole process of social engagement and value contribution. Like that the whole eco-system will be gradually eroded from the inside and the tokens won't be backed by real value anymore.
I really hope we'll find a way back to our initial mission where social interaction and value contribution were our most valuable goods.
Again thanks for your unrivaled support in this manner! :-)
EDIT: In that context I highly recommend everybody to watch this video and especially listen when Ned Scott @ned describes the concept of Smart Media Tokens - they're incentives!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ruwan/i-filmed-this-video-of-ned-pkattera-and-sneak-talking-about-the-smts-and-the-future-of-steemit
I don't see bots as a replacement for social interaction. For me they are just paid advertisement - no emotional involvement around them for me.
If I pay for Google Ads it also doesn't substitute the fact that what I'm offering has to have a high value for people - and the ROI has to be higher than my initial investment in the ads. Just business.
The fact that social interactions have become a business is also nothing new and it lies deeply rooted in Steem. The first month this has been very strange for me too, but since I have adjusted to some of the basic facts of how this system works, I have found great pleasure in it.
I don't worry much about the downsides of this system, because there is one saying, that I love and work from for many years now:
You can't fake value! Value will always win, because value is defined on the receiver side and you can't argue with that - so why not relax into this knowledge and let others do, what they do best (and so naturally perfect): define the value. For me, this is a huge relief...
We will see true value discovery when exchanges are prevented from pumping the prices of all crypto assets. Then we'll see how valuable everything is really perceived to be.
Bid bots are simply fake it till you make it, everyone is vying for consistent whale votes, and vote buyers do provide some of the price floor for SBD. I would estimate however that 99% of the reason SBD is so insanely priced is pump and dump groups out of Upbit.
I think it is quite different from Google Ads in that the viewer of the ad gets a share of the revenue. Any interaction there can be mined for SP and SBD.
So there is this incentive to interact with the ad because of the potential to make money.
The biggest "ad buys" get the most clicks and most money for least work by the viewer of the ad.
Sounds like a black/grey hat troll farm to me. All we need are a few more bots, right?
I am not on the anti-bot bandwagon, and am a very new user here, I'm just talking in general, big picture ideas. I think bots can be valuable tools in communities.
Google Ads are different because clicking on them only gives the content creator a reward. The BUYER is going to get something, but they'll pay.
When that changes to the buyer being able to extract value from ad participation, it changes the nature of the game entirely. The game changes to "Man, if I could just automate this process and get more voting power..." Which quickly becomes "we need more bots" in a competitive money making environment.
Thanks for the history lesson and great discussion here.
Speaking of financial reward lighting up social interaction, I'm paying people weekly to engage and delegating Steem Power to the best of them :D
Well if the big players are performing one of those jerking circle things, someone's got to do it!
The blogs of the 'Bid-bot fanatics' are generally quite bereft of comments of any value, and so when the goalposts move again, these people will likely suffer the most.
I think this example sums the above up nicely: https://steemit.com/cryptokitties/@brittuf/fancy-cats-should-be-worth-more-soon-on-cryptokitties
'Skip' though, or just covering the cracks for now? :)
I hope you are enjoying your holidays!
I think once the community feature is installed, it will reorganize the whole community. Followership you gain through bid bots is not as strong as the community you build around you through social engagement and interaction. Bots don't go to Steemfest - do they? :-D
I have never understood what cryptokitties are. Is it something like snapchat? Or pokemon? I have a clear opinion about the latter actually:
:-D
Yes I am! 100%.
Cryptokitties is a game that was designed to help people get familiar with making transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
On the cryptokitties website, you can use Ethereum tokens to buy an avatar of a cat: a cryptokitty. Each cryptokitty has unique traits like the color of its background, stripes, moustaches, etc. The fun part is that you can buy two cryptokitties and breed them to create a new cryptokitty with random traits inherited from its parents. Also, someone can pay you Ethereum tokens to borrow your cryptokitty for breeding.
Does this help?
Oh dear, haha! Do adult people do such things? Seriously?
Yeah that helps, thank you :-)