RE: Vlog 318: Voting bots or promotional services have their place on the blockchain for now.
I don't think bidbots have anything to do with delegation. The act of selling votes would still happen even without it.
Why bother curating and getting 25% of your votes back, when you can delegate and passively get ~90%? Sure that's the current situation and clearly bots are here to stay, but is it really good for the network? Your arguments about how it's a positive thing for the STEEM token value (coins being locked, authors buying sbd on markets, etc) are valid, but what is the value of that compared to the original vision of steem to 'rank the web' and create something truly world-changing? Look at the steemit trending, 100% of it is through bidbot usage, and a large percentage of those are advertising very questionable schemes (see current top post about ormus).
You also say that those bidbots are good for minnows so they can give themselves a push, but remember that they need to pay money for that. Before bid bots, we technically truly helped minnows, out of pure generosity. Now it's a PAID service, I don't think it's right to call it 'helping the minnows'. Minnows are just forced into doing it, because it's the current top strategy for them, and growing through networking and good content like before isn't possible. Those bidbots actually advertise themselves like that, but it's a huge lie in my views.
If we want bidbots to be legit and rename them to 'promotion services', then a lot of work needs to be done on the UIs to warn people about which posts or videos are promoted, just like on any other social networks.
However I believe that the current need of steem power holders to delegate to bid bots stems from too low returns from curation. Also the lack of peg on SBD keeps on pushing the author/curator split more and more in favor of authors, reducing curation rewards, and making people more likely to want to 'sell their votes' instead.
Minnows can earn money to pay for bots. Bots like @dustsweeper are pretty cheap and necessary with that .02 payout threshold.
Fair point but because it's automatic through delegation it has become a lot easier to do so.
I believe the solution is already worked on in the form of SMT's. With 1P1V and oracles. I see this period now as a transition period until SMT's come out. It's a rough ride for some of us. But when I think about this blockchain 3 years from now no-one will remember this period. Just like almost no-one remembers n^2 and just steemit.com. People will just earn SMT with content creation and trade them for STEEM.
I don't call it helping the minnows. I call it a tool to promote content. The tool has a negative ROI (in general).
I think the problem now is that investors have now been shown a better and easier way to earn ROI. Not everyone likes to curate. I don't think it's realistic to think that investors would all of the sudden start to curate when you increase the incentive to do so. It's just to much work.
Again I believe SMT's will solve a lot of these things in the future and I can't wait for them to come out.
I completely agree with you @exyle. This is common fight between capitalist and socialist/communists. Investors have invested their hard earned money from some other activity here and so they need to be rewarded. And system does not stop a persistent quality content creator rising to the top but obviously not in a day - As Rome Was Not Built in a Day.
What will give those SMTs value?
this is the million dollar question @cardboard and because the answer is so complicated I have absolute confidence 80% of SMT's will be shitcoins.
I believe im being generous with the 80% too, because in the ERC20 world the number is closer to 99%.
What needs to happen, what should happen, is that a community, or a business that launches an SMT does so with a demand proposition along with it or you are simply creating a little pump and dump shitcoin.
For example, lets say someone creates an addictive game (hopefully what steemmonsters becomes) and they sell the cards only, exclusively for their MonsterCoin-SMT then, if the game is awesome enough, this would create demand for the coin from day one.
Since steem is the portal sort of speak into buying the MonsterCoin-SMT this also creates a demand for Steem.
I imagine it would flow something like this (assuming we don't get a fiat to Steem option)
Fiat -> BTC -> Steem -> MonsterCoin-SMT
At eat stage there is speculative gains to be made, thus keeping liquidity inside the markets.
Now, I'm not saying this is what SteemMonsters is going to do, I just thought up an example of how an SMT could potentially generate its demand.
Thank you for the answer! Tip! 2
The good thing with SMT every token is liquid and has value even shitcoins, you can exchange it back to Steem. :)
That is potentially accurate... I don't have any details pertaining this, but I would assume a bot would be setup to guarantee liquidity. Ver much in the way SBD and Steem interact.
Source:
https://steemit.com/smt/@steemitblog/smart-media-token-development
perfect.. I expected as much, I just was not sure.
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This is what I've struggled to grasp with SMT's. From what I understand, you--the website owner or whatever--has to fund up the SMT for your users to adopt. I can't see this going very well on SME's whatsoever.
The hope on this one is that it is aimed squarely at the top tier social communities attached to publications and the like. I'm not convinced that it is a product that is something they need.
Good question. Thought about that a lot too.
Considering you can tweak the SMT's to your own desire it's basicly up to the entrepreneur to add value to them and give people a reason to desire them.
I think we will see a lot of use cases we can't even think of today.
If you just see what people did with only one token so far (STEEM) I think it will be an awesome sight to behold.
And, for me, there are even more scenarios of negativity.
From the outside, it starts to look like you can push a certain kind of post at a certain kind of quality and garner a certain level of reward. In reality, you find that most of the perceived reward is already spent in buying the votes that make it up.
For people coming it, it suddenly becomes disheartening when you realise that, actually, no, what you see on the Trending page is not a reflection of the system. You're not going to be making $800 for going on holiday and whacking out a few pictures, you're not going to be hitting trending by making a Steem evangelical post... not without dumping in a whole load of investment at first.
Why should these investors looking for ROI care?
Fundamentally, they are invested in the ecosystem. If the ecosystem grows, then their ROI grows. However, if the big front page advertising to the outside world is a false promise full of trash, then it is more likely to harm the ecosystem in terms of users, adoption, bad word of mouth. Suddenly, that ROI can be under threat. Everyone here who is very much "well, let's just be hands off and let everything manage itself" could find the ecosystem they are invested in under threat.
All I can say is that I have been here for 2 years and not once have I made a any decision about my actions here based on the trending page.
There is so much opportunity here for the people that want to take it. Some will and some won't.
Personally, I don't go anywhere near it. There is nothing there for me. But it very much is the front page of the website for non-users.
It is the "this is the content you will read, these are the rewards you can get" advertisement to prospective users.
This is on what basis they function..
And this is how they pitch it...
Both quotes took from the same post of a bid bot owner.