What would Steemit look like if everyone chose to delegate their stake to a bid-bot?
At the 3rd time of asking, today I finally received a response to this question from the 'founder and developer of Smartsteem.com - biggest vote-selling market with over 3500 sellers and 2nd biggest bid-bot with over 2.4 Million Steempower'....
And here it is:
You can read the full conversation here if you wish. It does get a little 'bitchy' though, so to speak.
I had planned to add my own views on @heimindanger's 'Operation Clean Trending' post the other day, and today's discussion with @therealwolf (as above), has brought this forward as this post would have overlapped with my reply on the thread linked above.
'Shine a bad light'
@therealwolf - If you feel that a reply would 'shine a bad light' on your service, then this speaks volumes in itself. You have answered my question honestly, whilst shooting yourself and your service in the foot.
If any other witness who develops/runs/delegates to a bid-bot service would like to try to shine a good light whilst answering the title of this blog, please do.
Whitelists/Blacklists have been mostly ineffective at stopping low quality posts from reaching Trending/Hot - they are just an excuse to write another post about how they are not doing an effective job at all.
When @steemitblog can't reach trending because a new Cryptokitty has been born, or an aging guitarist likes his leather jackets being on show a little too much, you know something isn't right.
When the owner of the the hottest decentralised application to hit the Steem Blockchain so far is making negative noises towards Bid-bots, you know there are issues ahead.
If @heimindanger chooses to take @dtube to another Blockchain because the content @dtube promote is nowhere to be seen in the 'Hot' and 'Trending' pages, it will be a monumental blow to STEEM.
@dtube are one of the Steem's flagship applications, we need the likes of these applications here, and we don't need your 'Smart' service at all.
Today I am removing all witness votes to accounts I can link to bid-bots.
I know at least one Witness who's given much to the minnows over the past year and so this decision was not easy, I hope they will understand.
Have a good weekend
Asher @abh12345
If you wish to vote for a witness who has no connections to bid-bots and can actually see further than their nearest bank, @steemcommunity is one of these, and you can do this here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Hi Ash - I'm totally with you on this...
You did share a list already - but I have misplaced it - please would you remind me of the witnesses linked with bid-bots.
Thank you
Great!
This was the list, it may not be 100% and is 11 days old now: https://steemit.com/busy/@abh12345/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people
Thank you :)
Thank you, just what I was looking for. Done and done. Wishing you and Paula success as witness
Thank you!
My dear friend, I'm so new here. I try to do my best to understand. I'm getting through the basics of everything such as SP delegation, curation and such. The other day I figured out that there were Witnesses we were supposed to vote for. I was talking to a friend about it here, trying to get some information. I asked a question, so is this where it gets political? He responded with yes. I ask you to please go and look through everything I've done if you wish. I genuinely want to help people. And it sounds like you do too. I had decided when I discovered witnesses, that I would probably wait a year or so before I started voting. And during that time I would do my best to research and figure out who I should vote for. But you have inspired me to double down on my researching so that I can vote. I would like to thank you so much for your enlightenment and taking time to put this out there. I also love you for speaking your heart and your mind and also for following your heart. If you do not believe in something, you should not support it. Regardless of the repercussions. Anyway, I have a busy day today and I have to go out and meet some new people, so I bid you adieu. I hope you have a great day. All of my love to you and all of yours. And may our creator bless yous.
Thank you, and thank you for taking the time to research into your witness choices. This is a long and arduos task, but I think it's one that everyone should parttake in.
This list may help start the process: https://steemit.com/busy/@abh12345/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people
And this is full witness list: https://steemian.info/witnesses
Have a great day!
To be honest, the response really shot him on the foot. If the service was good and beneficial, no response at all should shine a bad light to smartsteem. People should generally say something good about it. Ita just like asking for peoples opinion about dlive, or dtube ...no one would have anything negative to say because these services serve for the better good. To say the least, he should be happy to get feedbacks coz they will help him modify his service for the greater good of this community.
Indeed :)
hay@asher i'am in steemit is a beginner. I do not know much about steemit. but, I always try to create interesting content and try to improve my reputation with SP.
I really like to read every post you share because it can be a new insight for me.
@abh12345 and @paulag
Good for you, I think this is a popular goal :)
Go Asher Go!
You know by now that I fully do support tour witness project! Not only because I do believe in the project but also because I do find it utmost that witnesses who really care about Steem and whom do see the money part as merely a side effect, should be heard. And have a vote when the witnesses are discussing the future of Steem!!
Thank you for your support @fullcoverbetting, I hope we can at least voice changes that will be for the better.
Cheers!
If every one would delegate to a bid bot we would have a computer have where your goal is to earn as much money as possible. While doing so you can use every possible trick and don't have to think about ethics.
How far are we from that situation? Looks like the number of bots is still growing. Perhaps even to such a high number that the request can't keep up with. I don't think you want to know how some people play this money game? Neither do I prefer to tell you what I someone's do. But I'm not afraid of sharing any info, so I might wrote another series of posts about this subject.
I thought Steemit was meant to be a social platform. If you like you can use it for such, but you won't really earn big time. Unless you are a user of the first hour.
What possibilities are there to wipe all paid upvote bots out of Steemit?
Sounds like a lovely place to be, not!
The bot numbers grow by the week, it's insane.
Without changes at code level, 0.
And those changes at code level can those be done by witnesses? Or the Steemit owner?
The Blockchain developers - steem inc.
Application devs like busy.org and Steemit can chose how they want the front end to look - hiding bidbot voted posts for example.
I honestly never understood the influence of witnesses. But it could be their influence is very limited?
I've heard that in the post one could only post 4 blogs per day. But that's neither something that can be created by the witnesses, correct?
Witnesses choose the code to run. If everything is perfectly amenable to everyone they all run the same code.
I believe they are not all running the identical code. They independently set certain variables, for instance the proportion of SBD, Steem, and SP you are rewarded with for posts and curation.
Code is infinitely mutable, and witnesses that retain support can run any code they want. If they go 'off the reservation' they are unlikely to retain support.
Mostly they are dependent on stake-weighted votes, just like your posts, so the 37 whales that own the majority of Steem choose who they want based upon the code they are desirous of, and they choose that based on the ROI they can expect from it.
That's why choosing witnesses is important.
Thanks for your answer!
I would say that's why it's important for all 37 whales to vote for witnesses. What the remaining Steemonians do is then totally irrelevant.
Thanks, Asher for putting spotlight on the "business" side of Steemit. Paying for attention is attention not deserved. And my friends are now powerless due to the fact they delegated away their power. Or powered down and moved on.
Yes this is happening all around sadly, but who can blame people for wanting to make more money. Sadly, I think this is detrimental to the platform longer term, and I obviously won't be doing the same.
Thanks for your support :)
It's clear to me at least it won't be sustainable.
Edit: removed previous text
I don't believe in negativity - I believe in change:
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/open-discussion-fix-trending-and-stop-promotion-abuse
That's a smart reply, but why so much negativity?! Make love not war! 🖖
This looks like as gooda place as any to leave wolf's original comment.
https://phist.steemdata.com/history?identifier=https%3A%2F%2Fsteemit.com%2Fsteemit%2F%40abh12345%2Fwhat-would-steemit-look-like-if-everyone-chose-to-delegate-their-stake-to-a-bid-bot%23%40therealwolf%2Fre-abh12345-what-would-steemit-look-like-if-everyone-chose-to-delegate-their-stake-to-a-bid-bot-20180407t112427035z
You bring up a very valid point @abh12345.
I am optimistic the Hivemind/Communities feature will lessen the impact of the bid bots since the trending page will be less of an issue. Personally, the easiest way for the developers to handle this is to do away with the trending page altogether. Since it basically is a list of "paid" advertisements, get rid of it.
I agree with you if D.Tube moves to another blockchain, it would be a huge blow to STEEM. This is something people need to be aware of. Those who are raking in the big bucks by moving their stuff to the trending page might have little if the price of STEEM gets back to 6 cents.
Hopefully this becomes more of a discussion as time goes forward.
The bidded posts can be hidden, and likely will be in future - if the developers can keep up with new bots springing up - This list is tough to manage in itself, let alone a Black or White list.
Does this help the reward pool though? Perhaps. There will be a load of promoted posts gaining little visibility, seen only by the people bidding for Trending. The hope is that if you wish to be seen in a community, you have to go bot free - and therefore, will the demand for bots drop?
I freaking hope so. This is actually worth exploring more as a topic/post. If you head in this direction let me know.
And yes, as for D-apps or others leaving the chain due to lack of visibility over rubbish, this would be a huge failure. It is why I was so pleased to see @heimindanger's post yesterday. Ned was not against bots at all at the event last november, if he was pressured by the likes of the above, elear, etc, I wonder if this would change.
Thanks for your comments, you've given me new things to think about.
If you'd completely remove vote-services, the trending would be full of people like @haejin, @adsactly & co. who are producing multiple posts per day.
You know – it's funny. You are absolutely correct.
In the absence of active vote services, we would simply have crap of a different flavor popping up in Trending. It would be equally worthless to the majority of users and equally pernicious.
And before I go any further, I want to be really clear – I'm not one of the people/analysts/punditry on Steemit who is aggressively against bid bots. I believe that if a system exists that allows you an easy exploit, you would be a fool not to take advantage of it. In the case of bid bots, it's not even in exploit, it's an implicit functional operation which the mechanics of reward distribution on the blockchain not only allow for but explicitly promote.
Some people here are going to disagree with me. They're wrong. When a mechanical architecture privileges inhuman methods of engaging with the system, it's no surprise when those methods reach primacy.
But I think as cogent, capable analysts, people who can look at an environment and determine whether the results are what we would like to see as participants, we both have to agree that vote services are doing a disservice to users who want to actually find good content.
Yes, they provide a different flavor of bad – but it's still bad.
In your defense, I'll point out that the recommendations are bad because of an invalid assumption about how the system works, and the value of consensus versus individual worth. That's not your fault.
But it kind of is your fault that a system that you have implemented and support is making the situation worse. I don't hold a grudge about that, but I do see it as true.
From the perspective who isn't making a fat load of cash off of running a bot service and trying to make the best of the crappy situation that we all find ourselves in, you can certainly understand why your success at making our lives worse might be a sore spot for some people.
From my perspective, it would be fascinating if your system decided to take on an air of radical transparency and start publishing weekly numbers about how effective the vote bot platform really is. Not as advertising but rather as a means of depicting how much effect moving that much SP around on the blockchain has in manipulating the results at the top.
I'm not going to tell you to stop; that would be foolish. And stupid on my part. But I would ask that if you're going to manipulate the experience that we have, you might at least return to us some measure of value in terms of information. Yes, all of that data is probably available on the blockchain for the effort of mining it out, formatting it up, and crunching it. I am probably more than capable of making those reports happen alone.
As a gesture of good faith, it would be great to see you and others in your position take care of that for us.
Maybe, with more information at hand, we might be able to come up with a solution which is more agreeable (if not completely agreeable) to everyone involved.
Fair points.
The last section RE information would be a nice to have, but I suspect it will not be forth-coming. Which means at some point one of us will have to go delving into the accounts of these bots/owners.
Dirty work and not for the faint hearted.
I strongly support almost every point you make, save that it is necessary to have bidbots on a social media platform.
There may be communities where that is beneficial. For most communities, potentiating paid upvotes seems like a definite drawback to the society, who are likely focused on a different metric of value.
If hivemind doesn't enable this kind of exclusion, SMTs will. We'll have to see what shakes out.
Otherwise spot on!
Let's be clear – I didn't say that they were necessary.
I said that they were inevitable.
Given the mechanics of votes as architected on the steem blockchain, voting bots which take money and operate as bidding pools are inevitable. They were inevitable from day one and they remain inevitable. They have every advantage over a human curator at a deep, mechanical level.
Are they necessary? In this environment, it appears so. In a well-designed environment? Much less so. But you go to war with the environment you have, not the environment that you want.
Hive mind does not modify any of the underlying motivations that give rise to vote bots. Nor do SMTs. If anything, both of them, which will require hardfork 20, will simply give rise to more bid bots and vote bots spread out across a wider attack surface.
And it is because we have a singular metric of value, only one judgment which is assumed to apply to everyone. The most, most powerful votes win.
Individual accounts can't decide what they want to see more of. They get no decision-making there. Their votes go into the great consensus, and if they don't agree with a great consensus – they are effectively meaningless.
Hardfork 20 is going to make this worse by tightening the time limit on curational votes and a number of other issues. Manual interaction on the blockchain is going to be even further deemphasized, and there is only one inevitable result.
Systems are as they are. We must observe them accurately and assess their impacts if we want to make good judgments about what to interact with and what to do with our time.
So it seems social platform projects on the Steem blockchain will inevitably fail, unless they create and extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool. Does that make the collapse of Steem, the blockchain, inevitable, too? Maybe what remains to play out is how SMT projects will generate value for Steem, whether through hucksterism or real value for their users.
Actually, you probably could have stopped with "it seems that social platform projects will inevitably fail."
Statistically, we can observe that to be true.
But as regards social platform projects that leverage the steem blockchain is a backend database – yes, they really need to extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool because the distribution of the reward pool is purely done by proof of stake, which means that it is purely divided up by the actions of those who have the most stake already with out concern for anyone who has lesser stake. And why should they?
Even more elementally than that, the reward pool is entirely constructed of inflationary value. Everything in the reward pool at every moment of distribution is truly money being printed from nothing, if you accept that steem is a cryptocurrency. It is declared mechanically as the inflationary increase in the number of tokens per unit of time, and it is literally the rate at which tokens that you already hold become less valuable.
Which is a long, roundabout way of saying that distributing that inflationary currency by way of waiting the votes of those who already have proven stake has an inevitable outcome. The only way that new stakeholders can find value in relation to currencies which people will actually let you spend on their goods is for the demand to increase faster than the inflationary rate/reward pool.
In order to do that, services need to offer something to an individual user of more value than the steem crypto-commodity itself. Something which inevitably offsets the lack of privacy afforded to a public blockchain as well, let us not forget.
"You might get paid a little bit" is not going to be sufficient to maintain a social network. It might barely be sufficient to maintain a platform, but it is entirely the wrong approach to building a social network. The shock is not to that steem as a social network exists because of it, the shock is that steem is a social network exists despite that being the major pitch for the entire system for the last two years.
Is the collapse of the steem blockchain inevitable?
Was the collapse of MySpace inevitable? In a sense, yes. The same dynamics in many ways are at play. Except that steem as a social networking platform was never popular, certainly not to the level that MySpace was.
Maybe, if we get very lucky, after the current wave of state interest in ridiculously overreaching regulation of crypto-commodities dies down a little, the market as a whole will recover and a rising tide lifts all boats. But it's only functional so far as that tide lifts faster than the combination of social media disinterest and actual fiat trade value counter one another. When one of those two stops being an exceedingly useful pillar, the whole architecture collapses.
I would make the argument that all blockchains generate value through hucksterism. And they do so less transparently than fiat currencies generate value through hucksterism. It's certainly possible that SMT projects will generate value through attracting interest in the steem blockchain, and some of that will be purely marketing and emotional manipulation. It's also possible that one of the SMT projects will actually be put forward by people who understand gamification, social network design, social media, and UI engineering.
Possible.
I wouldn't hold my breath, but I would keep my eye open. Just one.
From the start, I understood that Steemit was not expected to be, or even designed to be, the value generator for the Steem blockchain. Promising to pay people a little bit did produce enough transactions to demonstrate the speed and reliability of the Steem blockchain, as the developers intended.
I did like that posting on Steemit allowed me to accumulate SP, as a way to be part of whatever would emerge as 'the thing with value'. I looked forward to watching, and being part of, the evolution of an interesting ecosystem. I really want to see a project that works. You said:
I want to see what something like that is. I don't have an understanding of what that would look like - that's not in my background or experience at all. So I will keep an eye open, for sure.
It's so freaking complex and as a minnow it just messes with our head. I'm not capable of trying to fix any of the problems myself and I am not in a position to take a lead, and even if I was I would have no idea how. I chose to not take part in the bid bod story anymore, I don't use them, they bring too much negativity to what I believe in steem should be about. It won't bring me the biggest profit, but I don't mind. On this blockchain it is the same as in society: lots of money makes more money. But does that bring happyness? I don't have lot's of money, I don't expect to make a lot here either. Doing my dayjob pays better. I'm not holier than the pope, but that is what keeps me happy and satisfied.
So happy to see you and paula stand up for the same ideas I stand for. I hope it doesn't backfire. You guys have my support!
Thank you Jef :)
Backfire in terms of large votes, it will - these accounts are mainly related to Bid-bots.
This is fine for me, I have no issue with however we place as Witnesses, as long as we stand up for what we think is right.
Thank you!