RE: Don't use vote-selling bots: use @promoted instead. A bot that upvotes you when you burn money!
I'm sure I'm not alone to believe that we need to reduce these exploits. And offering a better, more honest alternative could be a solution.
I don't know if I agree with your opinion on the good/evil that these vote selling bots present. I'm curious to know why it's any worse than any of the other things that happen surrounding whale accounts with large votes.
Why do you see these as a problem? How is it any different than whales voting for their friends constantly, huge curation trails, or gratuitous self voting?
At the moment I'm fairly indifferent on the morality of selling votes/voting power/delegation, and interested to see how the markets evolve. I however don't see anything worse happening now than in the past year.
Edit - Just to add a comment about this bot itself - glad to see the others getting more competition and you've got a nice twist. I do however think the post promotion system is somewhat worthless - and I doubt anyone even really reads it for the most part. Would love to see data on trending page views vs promoted page views.
I believe the vote-selling to be less of a trouble than past exploits (voting games for example), but it is one nonetheless. It is unnecessary service that only exists because a hole in the system exists. @randowhale added a random factor in the thing, which was smart, but I don't believe people use it for gambling when there are dozens of more entertaining gambling methods online.
Self-voting/friend-voting is easy to detect and is a consequence of the brutal change on the last fork. It's pretty bad in my opinion but it can be fixed easily by changing back to another non-linear reward, or something 50% HF18 + 50% HF19. Community can point fingers too but I don't think this is a viable long-term solution, we don't want to have useless contents just to 'flag' abusive users.
Curation trails I'm unsure about it. I don't think it's great for promoting the best contents but in the end this is how the world works... L'union fait la force. Still, I don't use it personally.
About the exploits on STEEM, I believe that this will be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. We improve the mechanics of the STEEM game with updates, then someone will find a new exploit, until we find a solution and make an update, for someone to exploit again.
It is very similar to online game cheats that need to perpetually evolve to not get detected, and how anti-cheats need to perpetually improve their detection as well.
Hi mate, sorry that comment suggests a real ignorance of market mechanics. Voting bots exist and are incredibly successful because they are necessary ie because there is an incredible demand for them. The fact is, it is incredibly hard as a Minnow on Steemit, HF19 may have even made it worse as people sit on their VP now. For many people just starting out, the only way to get anything from a post is from a voting bot.
Having said that, I think people milking the voting bots for every drop by upvoting their own comments is a real problem. This is why we introduced the selfgoat on MinnowBooster. If you are upvoting your own comments, people are going to see a picture of a goat licking it's own ____ all over your comment section.
At the end of the day, a post can only get a single vote from any one bot. I think comment upvoting in general is a much bigger problem and drain on the rewards pool, and should be removed all together and replaced with a tipping system.
Either way, I think this bot from @fabien is a really cool idea and finally makes the Promotion feature actually worth using. We welcome the competition.
Full disclosure: I am a mod on MinnowBooster Discord server and have around 170 Steem invested in the project and 200SP out on delegation. I earn a daily slice of revenue from my invested Steem and daily dividend payments from my delegation.
Well said. I'm still not sure I'm concerned with people selling votes (it's probably the best incentive to power up I've seen to date...), but I understand where you're coming from.
Best of luck with the new bot and it'll be interesting to see how this all unfolds :)
This is what I've been saying since the first time I saw Steemit. The promoted posts feature is a complete waste of money due to the current way it's setup. If they want anyone to put money into that, they need to figure out a way to get eyeballs on the promoted posts. You're better off running a Facebook ad to a post and having an outside monetization method on the post to make money from it then you are throwing away SBD on a promoted post here. Maybe if they made promoted posts as sticky posts in the trending section then you'd see people pumping more money into using it. Or make the default page after you click a tag go to the promoted section instead of trending.
I tend to agree with @jesta to be honest, but this really could work if you were to get a mega crap ton of steem power behind it. I'm willing to try it just to see how it plays out, and you do get the added bonus of being on the promoted page, but I think the attraction of the other bots is not only the instant return but that it is (potentially) worth it. I just promoted my post for 10sbd and got a (just barely over) $1.00 upvote from @promoted. There will likely be some residual votes from being on the promoted page, but that probably was me literally just burning my money. Most people (especially noobs who don't have anything to burn) are not gonna be into that. I'm curious to see how this progresses though, I think in general it's a good idea and a good thing for the platform.
I agree with you, but I cannot fund this myself, I'm far from being a whale. Anyone can delegate SP to the account to help the cause (or run the bot yourself)
A lot of people were already using the promote feature regularly, we just gave it an extra boost. It isn't much yet, but it's better than nothing in my opinion.