The Bot Revolution on Steemit - Over 300$ Worth Of Upvotes Every Two Hours
View this post on Hive: The Bot Revolution on Steemit - Over 300$ Worth Of Upvotes Every Two Hours
I have moved all my content away from the now centralized and controlled Steem blockchain to the decentralized Hive blockchain.
I am familiar with the love/hate relationship with bots. I see them no different than Facebook where you make a post and it asks you if you want to boost it for $5.
In fact, on Facebook it has been found as much as 70% of the impressions were fraudulent. I’m going to cite this but there are many studies on this.
As the owner of @buildawhale I have two primary objectives, not to manipulate the windows in any way and to reward and encourage quality content.
We do not use or sell our voting power outside of our bidding windows. We also offer to value-add services rewarding awesome authors with great content. The first is our daily Curation Digest where we feature at least five of our favorite posts from 300-400 posts daily. We also have an author of the day up to three times a week where we reward an author with $100-$150 worth of votes.
I am also working on developing a new community project in the near future.
I have to pay for all 2.2M steem power I have, but I am always trying to get better prices so our bidders don’t have to lose for me to win. It has been difficult and the first 2 months were operated at a loss. I continued to do this as I had to get bigger to support the amount of users using @buildawhale while offering them profitable votes. Our value added services (Curation Digest, Author of the Day, PreVote Club) all offer value on top of the instant vote most people are looking for.
Build a whale is dope. If you ever have any work that can be done remotely would love to try to help out!!
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it's an honor to even get a response from you.
“Give Me Money. Money Me. Money Now. Me a money needing a lot now.”
The War on Drugs is such a great way to telelogically manufacture autonomous people into more desired ones while nominally maximizing public welfare by victimizing the innocent for conduct that has no victims?
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I love how you guys have pushed @buildawhale to the second biggest bot on Steemit in such a short time. thank you for the insight into your business and for your care about quality and community. I think all big bots share that sentiment and that is one of the reasons why it benefits the platform.
Facebook advertising is very ineffective. Doing that on Steemit creates a dialogue like nowhere else. I will use this advantage to do some promotional posts for my projects soon. I rather have 1000 Steemians read my post than 50k likes on Facebook.
How exactly can one get on your curation list for this nice reward?
We were the biggest for a bit but it was never about that.
@buildawhale grew at a rapid pace (20K, 32K, 50K, 217K, 470K, 970K, now 2.2M with around a week apart) because our bidding windows kept filling up and wanted to continue offer value.
I plan on doing one more massive jump soon but I think that will be the extent of our growth. I think we have enough to offer value to many users on a daily basis.
My primary focus now is to reach more people with our Curation Digest, expand it into new native languages, and offer new unique services. I have a few ideas I playing with, but I want to come out with something new and different.
How did you make 'big jumps'? Is that just regular bot income (if so, how is that a big jump instead of regular ongoing growth)?
The big jumps are just me taking larger risks with my own capital. It wasn't until last week I started to come close to break even.
That sounds super interesting. I can't wait to see what you are coming up with! :)
I think you (@themarkymark) will find your innovative family with @earthnation
I am Doron Kutash, @the-source , (www.thesource.network),
and am working at the Heartquarters of Earth Nation, building systems for a planetary transformation into Paradise on Earth. Keep up the great work! :)
You'd like someone to do translations regularly @markymark?
We are not doing translations, the plan is to do native language curation. Spanish people curating Spanish content for example.
Appreciate your investment in the platform!
Thanks
Oh I thought your updates and possibly other posts.
Yes that's a good idea
You rock @buildawhale @themarkymark
Keep being entrepreneurial, innovative, and building systems that help "we the people" become empowered to bring in new/free the people media, and a better world!
It is good that you share this. Especially with the increasing bot debate. We need to be careful how we handle vote buying/leasing.
First of all what do you mean by breaking even. Using the platform costs nothing. If you would have some setup costs, I imagine they would be solved already as you get around $100 sbd every 2.4 hours.
I hope whatever you do, you asking what will be best for the community.
Leasing steem is extremely expensive, I have been financing 6,000 steem/week out of my pocket to kick it off the ground. It has been at a loss until last week where I finally hit a break even.
It is a great effort, however, can you reach to some whales or steemit inc. for funding the curation part, I believe some big amount of SP is just sitting. I mean that @buildawhale will be profitable for time being when it will get more attention.
However, curation does have some cost: remuneration to curators, upvoting cost on quality posts and maintenance of hardware.
The curation is the best part the @buildawhale possess. If it can be scaled up, it will be huge boon for steemit community.
I have been trying and it has been my primary focus lately but it is difficult.
Well man, these piece is by far one of my favorites. @bellyrub and the other bid bots should be seen as a promotianl tool for content and should be used for posts that the user should know right off the bat if it is quality content, because there is no profit to be made from them any ways.
If you post something that is far less worthy, your bid and upvote will not be used as intended because others will not even vote on such posts, the market will even itself out and soon people will realize this and hopefully use it to promote good content.*
I agree. I love Bellyrub for the promotional value, and all the rewards I can bring to my curators even if the vote is a loss or break-even.
Abusers must take a large risk - voting bad content has to make it to payout without having votes removed, and they have already paid. I hope you don't have to deal with too much of that.
PS - I added you to my witness roster!
Hey man thank you very much for that, We are making it a better way to be able to use the 100% feature.
What it looks like will happen is, a cap on the bids maybe 50-70 SBD also adding them to the high risk category in a blacklist with 2 warnings.
1st warning:
2nd warning:
This might seem kind of drastic, but we feel something like this might be done.
We cannot rely on the outside users to flag those types of posts so we find it a better way to be proactive.
"a cap on the bids maybe 50-70 SBD"
I'm not usually in favor of caps, but that seems totally reasonable. It will prevent someone monopolizing Bellyrub's entire next vote as soon as bidding opens. Bidding more than 70 does seem a bit excessive...and risky for everyone bidding.
"1st warning: un-vote, refund."
I don't think that's drastic at all, but I'm sure people will still fail to read and do it anyway.
I agree, also regarding the caps. As a "decentralized" there should be no boundaries some users have come to me with anger in regards to this.
@bellyrub is an auction bot and the market dictates it so.
It is a complex situation, There have been some high bids sent in resulting in this mind set.
The cap is still in debate, as far as it goes the more refund/banning is and will be set in place disregarding the cap.
That sounds like a good plan. You could add a function to bellyrub to call it for moderation, leaving a comment below the post to inform others as well. You would save yourself the trouble of manually checking all posts.
@zeartul I definitely agree with you. They need to be used when you see its useful and quality content for the steemit community and crypto world. upvoted your comment. @gold84
To be honest quality is based on the people around you, you might think your post is of high quality, but others might not think so.
The main reason for this is we don't want @bellyrub to be used for a post to jump to the trending page knowing it is low quality* trying to avoid spammers landing there.
The sheep might like to think there is a labor theory of value but value is ultimately all subjective. Publilius Syrus:
"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."
@zeartul I understood that, and agree. As time passes mopre people will give the correct use to it. @gold84
Thank you @zeartul. You have helped the most from all bot holders to create a community and understanding around the topic with regular posts and updates and your public engagement. You gave this movement a face and now you hold the biggest SP pool with @bellyrub. Well earned.
Thank you @flauwy your support from the start has been well noted.
By the way: Is it still possible to send Steem instead of SBD to @bellyrub? Right now that makes more sense due to the low price.
At the moment @bellyrub is configured to only accept SBD.
You always say the right words, totally agree with you.
Without @Minnowbooster my awesome-formatted posts with very good content would still be worth 2 cents because nobody would see them.
Minnowbooster does exactly what it says, boost Minnows so that they have a chance on Steemit.
Like you said, people boost their bad content but nobody else will upvote them or follow them because bad content is still bad content so there is no problem with upvote bots.
The only people who seem to be outraged at bots are the ones who already have high voting power. They are just angry that Minnows can now compete with them in the hot section.
Anyway. I have looked all your videos on Youtube when I started Flauwy.
Und sie haben mir einen guten Start auf Steemit (ohne Investment) ermöglicht dank deiner Information und durch die Bots selber ohne die ich wahrscheinlich schon längst Steemit verlassen hätte.
Denn ohne Investments und ohne upvotes Bots brauchst du es hier gar nicht erst versuchen.
Hey man, I have checked out your profile over the past few days and I love it. I can tell that you have watched some of my videos since you picked up on many elements I mention. I like the overall style you created.
I am sure there will be a much larger number of bots in the future who are dedicated to communities. i think that will be great.
I read your post.you have written well. Very informative post about bot. How many days have you used bot @flauwy?
I have used bots since July.
How can I get this, can you give me some idea? @flauwy
You can start using the Bot Tracker I have linked above and inform yourself about the bots. @bellyrub is the biggest so far so you might want to start there.
Lots of thanks
Hi @glauwy. Can you use @bellyrub if your SP is lower than 300? Because for some reason I thought I heard you have to have at least 500SP.
No, you can use @bellyrub no matter how much SP you have. 500SP is required to get the slider for your votes.
Thank you Flauwy, it is good motivation to hear that from one of the people you have learned from. It is basically validation that I am on the right track.
Yeah there will probably be more bots... and I already know where I will go to learn more about them (or even find out there are new ones)....
:-)
Hey @flauwy,
at @boomerang we implemented a code to stop votes for the ones blacklisted by @cheetah, and we are in close contact with the steemcleaners team which to a tremendous job. We also believe in a clean steemit, where the bots are used for a better visibility. You can check our blog, where we post when changes are done.
Also our delegators earn 100% of the SBD received for the votes and are transfered every voting round.
Thank you of better said vielen dank für den Beitrag!
Thank you for your update, @boomerang! These things are greatly appreciate and help to make Steemit a better place. We can solve a lot with smarter bots that help us to filter good content.
Are you guys a German team?
We totally agree that Steemit needs to be a better place. That is why the bot operates like this, giving 100% of the revenue of the votes to the delegators. We don't share revenue with blacklisted users by steemcleaners. We tell them to undelegate.
Let's put it this way, we speak also German between other languages.
As a newbie on steemit, i do appreciate the help from bots. But the flooding of comments gets ridiculous after one too many bids.. I realise now that i have probably ruined my articles reputation with the high amount of advertisement in the comment section >.<.
Makes me wish for bots with more discretion so they don't scare away actual readers.
Yeah, I know what you mean but I wouldn't overrate that. As long as you deliver good content you have nothing to fear. Maybe some see that as a negative but most will not care about that and are rather glad that you stuck out of the masses and enriched their day.
I like that recent post thing at the bottom. Concerning upvote bots, one thing I beyond helping people get content out and find their audience that I think is important is that it keeps capital flowing into the network to ensure that people can move their money how they want.
Good post with clear information ;)
I thinks bot is can helped a community ;)
This is very informative on the trending in bot use over time. Apparently a lot of people are using bot tracker. I do notice that there are lots of last minute bids. I wonder what the next round of sophisticated bot strategy will look like?
That is a very good question. I considered myself a specialist when it came to bots profit. Now all previous strategies don't work anymore and all you can do is stay sharp and wait for a 99.99% opportunity and hope nobody else does the same. Kinda risky.
My favourite strategy is now to see the bots as 100% promotional tools and ignore direct potential gains. Bid early and hope that others don't or at least honor the profit barrier and don't make it a loss for everybody.
This is so crazy, but I have been using them also. At first, I converted all my sbd into steem power but lately I have been sending some to the bots.
There is profit to be made delegating to the bots too. I have never interacted with bots like this before!