Why Bid Bots are Bad for Steemit | Imagine if the NBA Allowed People to Pay to Play in the League?
What's going to be incredibly ironic about this post, is that in this post about how bid bots are bad for Steemit, I'll likely be using them to promote this post. I don't use bid bots all the time, but when I have a post I really want to get eyes on and really want to get visibility to I will use them.
In this post I want to argue why bid bots are ultimately bad for Steemit. I'll lead off with what I think is the strongest argment.
Bid bots play a large role in what content here on Steemit gets visibility and gets seen. I think many people would agree with me that much of the content in the "hot" and "trending" section isn't great content, it's just promoted by powerful people with lots of money to throw around.
Now when a reader or content consumer comes over to Steemit and says hey let's see what this site is all about. Let's see what's trending, and then they see this low quality content, they may say, this site kinda sucks, nothing here interests me, I'm gonna go back to reading clickbait articles on Facebook.
In my opinion that's because getting seen on Steemit is pay to play. Here's some food for thought. Imagine if the NBA was not made up of the best basketball players on this planet, imagine if the NBA was a pay to play system where you could pay money to play in the league. While there would be some elite athletes, you'd also have Tim the 5'8", 250 pound accountant from Madison Wisconsin playing. Do you think people would pay $150 to go see Tim play basketball as opposed to seeing Lebron James? Probably not. By allowing Steemit to be a pay to play system were not getting the best content or the best quality content displayed most prominantly, were getting the content people are willing to pay the most to get seen.
I think the above is the strongest and best argument for why bid bots are bad for Steemit but let's take it one step further. Bid bots have the potential to wield a lot of power here on Steemit. When everyone else is using bid bots to get visibility here, if you are not you are at a disadvantage.
Well recently with the whole feud between @berniesanders and @jerrybanfield , Bernie is suggesting that bid bot owners should block Jerry from using their service. I get where he's comming from, I believe his argument is that Jerry is promoting low quality content. Now this goes way beyond Jerry and I don't feel it's fair to single him out because almost everyone is doing the same thing, they just aren't as visible, aren't as well known, or aren't doing it as well as him. If Jerry were to go away tomorrow this issue would still persist.
My point is that bid bot owners in a way have a lot of power and influence on here. Now when they band together and act as a group that power and influence is magnified even more. If bid bot owners decide to block certain people from using their services, and not block others, in a sense that's a form of control or a governance of this platform. It may not be comming from a corporation or central authority like Youtube/Adsense/ABC but its control and censorship none the less.
Now I get bid bot owners own their bots and they should have the right to use them how they see fit, but I would argue it's dangerous how they have the ability to create an unlevel playing field when they decide to help and support some creators and block others.
So how does this differ from say Youtube? Youtube will let creators pay to have a sponsored video at the top of suggested videos and will let creators play a preroll video, however youtube will not let you buy your way to the top of the search on the trending page. I think allowing this to happen almost assures quality content is never going to be the focus of Steemit.
Im curious to hear your thoughts?
There are pros and cons to Bidbots but in my opinion there are more cons then what benefits with using Bidbots.
Some whales have Bidbots and abuse their voting powers they have garnished indirectly form people using the bidbots services. They have abusively used these Bidbots to attack other account holders by downvoting their post to nothing.
My concern is that these Bidbots have become powerful account holders with garnished Steem and SBD that they are like corporations in the real world that has the potential of abuse.
Get rid of the Bidbots in my opinion so that we don't see the abuse from it.
I guess ultimately I don't get what the point of bid bots are? I know bots have legit purposes although honestly i find the majority of them annoying whether its grammar bots or any other type. Is bid bots just people abusing the ability to use bots or is there a real purpose?
Just my opinion but why let people pay to get content seen, why not just let things get shared and seen organically on merit?
That is hilarious. "you'd also have Tim the 5'8", 250 pound accountant from Madison Wisconsin playing." LOL Tim's such a chubster. LOL
The thing is Steemit's trending page could be fixed so easily. Like they could take in an array of things such as reputation, amount of upvotes, amount of views, amount of comments, and also figure in stake weight into the equation and the percentage of bidbot upvotes. Like if more than 50% of their post value is from bidbots then that would rank it lower.....etc.
In certain situations you could put a little "Sponsored" tag by it if there was too much bidbot activity pushing it up there.
The Trending page seriously has never been without controversy from the beginning of Steemit in 2016. It has always been a subject of conversation and people have had issues with it the entire time for different reasons. I just can't believe that Steemit INC hasn't really worked on solutions and tried them out. They just do nothing in regards to it.
I would almost prefer no tabs at the top and just let the content fall into chronological order. Honestly that's not really a great system but I think it beats the current system as it least its kind of fair and even across the board adn just let the organic content that's good rise to the top. That said there would be so much to sort through in that sense it would make an already difficult system even more difficult.
I don't really follow the inner workings and politics of steemit but are the creators really still involved or have they kind of moved on to other things?
It is a good question because I seriously feel like there are only about 10 or so content creators from 2016 still trying to pump content. Then there are a bunch of them that sort of moved on or became more of the investor aspect and don't actually put content out but are running voting bots and stuff like that .
Then you have the people who came in a year ago when you came in and I feel like most of the people washed out from that and there are still a good little chunk of people still going from that.
Then you have a couple of the new people that have gained some quick success and are continuing on. @annemariemay @coruscate @spenceryan to name a few. The thing that in a way pisses me off is that I see the set of new people and they don't hardly vote for anyone else and then they get DTube support. I had a very hard time getting DLive or DTube votes.
It is almost like I know too much about the system so I can see so much it just pisses me off half the time. Plus there is the very real situation with knowing that I have the skills to be a Witness and would be a good candidate to be a witness for the community but there is like no chance that I would get powerful enough people voting for me and it would actually be unprofitable. It has happened to a bunch of people who have tried to come here and "move up" Then a lot of the Witnesses who are in the top 40 aren't even active here anymore. They just have everything automated for voting and aren't on here day to day.
It is upsetting to say the least.
Sometimes I get kind of bitter about new people who come on and have success right off the bat. Don't get me wrong, I wish everyone success and want everyone to do well, but what's somewhat annoying is sometimes new people will come on, within 2 weeks be making 10x what my posts earn and they still complain about earnings and its like shit I've been grinding almost daily for over a year to do a 10th of what your doing.
The other thing that annoys me more about this is many of these people are kinda fair weathered fans ie when Steem prices are good they are all over the place, when steem prices drop or crypto drops you won't see them for a month and then they come back and everything picks up like they never left earning $15 or $20 per post and while my opinion is not the be all end all of Steemit many times I don't even find their content that great or interesting, they just somehow got a whale or dolphin to take notice early on.
That annoys me not even for myself so much as for people like you who've been on here long before eve,n I who have contributed so much to the community been an ambassador to steemit, welcomed people, helped people, etc.
Yeah trust me I know what you mean. Once in awhile I talk about STEEM in my content but it seems like a lot of times people just end up talking about how STEEM is the best thing ever and continually for the last two years that always has had a higher probability of getting a decent upvote.
But I know what you mean about people's content not being that engaging or useful a lot of times on here. It goes partially to what you were saying about long form content.
But it is strange because some of the stuff on YouTube is in a way meaningless but sometimes we get really pulled in by people's lifestyles or what they are doing on there. One guy who will get served up to me once in awhile is FouseyTube and obviously he got super popular with the fake pranks and now it would be easy to say that his content wouldn't be that interesting but there are certain facets of it that suck me in.
Like at one time he was renting some apartment in LA for $50,000 / month or something insane. Or he will tell some weird story or he will have a new tattoo and somehow I will find myself watching that guy. I don't know if it is because of all the pieces combined and the perception that it is important because he has so many subscribers and gets so many views or what.
I think another reason is that it is hard to make waves on here because of the way the trending page is and in general I feel that most people perceive this system as an unfair system overall so then people are trying to do what they can to work within that environment. I'm not sure.
At this point I'm primarily playing a game of doing content that will get upvoted by Busy.org and eSteems automated system with their delegated power. That is like one of the only reasons any of my posts get above $5 a lot of times. And I have one person who drops some solid votes on me once in awhile.
Luckily there was emphasis on one of the aspects that catches my attention, many times we see articles have a large portion of voters who decided to give their vote a publication, say 50 people. What the article raised would not go beyond $ 1.
On the other hand, a simpler, shorter and less contenty publication obtains $ 20 of 15 votes, for example, that is, everything is very uneven and not at all uniform. I am sure that because of this many of us discourage ourselves and stop publishing a little, in addition to resorting to bots to use their services.
Rightly said....bots are not good if as steemitian we want to grow big..
Even the reward system should be changed.....the reward per vote should be calculated from the quality of content..
Or else new comers will be frustrated by seeing 0.00$ on every blog they write and slowly go away from the platform. As now many creators are shifting slowly and slowly to dailymotion or metacafe and youtube is loosing creators..
Thanking you @saswat036
@saswat036 you bring up another interesting point. I don't think this has to do with bid bots so much as a huge imbalance of power. For example my post in the first 8 minutes has over 110 upvotes and has earned something like $6 and then you see other posts that have like 7 votes that have earned over $30.
I could find even more glaring examples of posts that have hundreds of upvotes and earn $3 and posts that have 15 upvotes and earn $300 but I'm too lazy to search for them, but we all know this goes on. To me it would seem that once a post hits some threshhold of large support from the community that post should get some type of boost to make it more even with a post that gets just 1 upvote from a whale. It doesn't make sense to have a small handful of people yield so much more power than the entire community as a whole.
I'm not a programmer or coder or developer but I'm sure this issue gets a lot more complicated and the fix isn't that easy. For example if Steemit were to say once a post gets 200 upvotes its earns equal to a whale vote regardless of who upvoted it and how small those people are however at that point people would just buy 200 accounts and upvote themself 200 times.
I know Youtube had similar problems with thumbs up on videos so had to change their algorithm to focus on watch time and other engagement factors
yes sir.......slowly people are bringing all these bug and sharing them...
we can expect a drastic change in steemit platform soon.
Thanks for responding to my comment........
yes bid bots can create much more difference 😐
Now just as a fun aside, if the NBA ever does allow average citizens to play in the league I'm gonna start a Steemit Crowdfunding campaign so we can raise the money to get @brianphobos squaring off against Lebron so we can see him dunk on Lebron
Hahah, Scrolled down and saw this. Lebron would munch my ass and then turn around and posterize me. Hahahha. I would love to play a guy in the NBA 1 on 1 though to see how good they were and how badly they would break my ankles and destroy me.
Last week a guy showed up at LA fitness that played in college and also played professionally in Spain and he was like proto typical NBA build for a shooting gaurd at about 6'7". He ended up being on my team but he was pretty much unstoppable. It was a size match no matter who gaurded him but besides that he was taking the ball to the rack getting hacked and still finishing strong. He only put down one dunk which surprised me because I sort of thought he would throw down in everyone's face but what you realize overtime is that even if you are big and way better than everyone else you still usually have to get the opening to attempt a dunk so guys are always in your way. Rare exceptions to this are these guys who have completely postered guys. Those are like the highlights everyone remembers forever.
I've often been curios about the same things ie how would I stack up against a professional athelte, how big and fast and good are they really? I always wanted to see what it would be like to try to run back a kickoff against a professional football team or to try to hit against an MLB pitcher.
I'll let you go first on running a kickoff back against NFL guys. I used to return kickoffs and punts in high school and personally I hated it especially punts. I was under a punt one time and a meth baby blasted me full speed before I even caught the ball. It was a penalty but I was still injured at that point.
The other thing about getting the shot to do something like that and getting an accurate experience to see how good they are is a person would have to be training for months and months and not just be going in their cold turkey. Like even if someone played in the MLB and didn't see a live pitch for a week and stepped up to the plate their chances at success are extremely low. That is why when guys get hurt they usually send them even clear down to single A to get their timing back against live pitching and often what you will find is they don't actually do that well down there. It isn't like they go down and just start crushing bombs and averaging .400 So it certainly becomes a question of how much of a diffrence is there even between the different levels of professional baseball.
The thing that always pissed me off with the new version of the American Gladiators was that they would always have the contestants be like 5'7" 130lb so the Gladiators would look super human against them. They typically didn't have formatable competition. Same thing sometimes with that Joe's VS Pro's type stuff. Like of course a top level athlete is going to destroy a weekend warrior who has a gut but what happens when they go against someone who was a college athlete who just graduated or something but didn't get drafted for whatever reason. I know people don't identify with that as much but I think a lot of those shows build it up like that the pros are god like. Don't get me wrong, sometimes they are but not the exact way it is built up like on TV.
Also everytime I see some video online where some legit basketball player or something is playing a "regular guy" they destroy them but often times the person they were playing wasn't any good anyways. Like I can go to LA Fitness and pick out 8 of the guys I play with and they would do better than the guys that we see in some of these videos. Some Somali Pirate played Kobe in this video.
I'm not going to lie. I could do better than this guy against Kobe. Of course Kobe would still win from size advantage and skill but at least I wouldn't be jumping on his back trying to hug him like that guy was.
i personally find no use for them.. although they give others a chance to get noticed, though theres a good side and bad.
The good first: income on their content, also a chance to attract others interest on similar topics.
The bad: unwarranted attention flagging due to numerous reasons to jealousy which we see on here often, lastly the percentage of still being ignored if resteemed...
It's a risk though the fees aren't too high at the moment.
What if they just did something similar to YouTube where you have a couple promoted videos at the top of the feed and then the rest of trending is filled with content that hasn't been promoted. It does seem too challenging to build a front end that would display stuff like that.
Are you more opposed to bid bots taking a large % of the reward pool or the trending page being filled with sub par content?
The latter is easily fixed by following creators who make good content and not even bothering with the trending page.
You can also follow individuals who curate high quality content.
If the NBA was pay to play, and some high income individuals bought there way in, yet high quality players were still able to play, there would probably be some organic separation of the good players and the pay to play
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Hey @metama I actually really like your idea of showing a limited amount of sponsored content that's paid, but everything else IMHO should be 100% organic what gets to the top. I know people will always find a way to game the system and I'm sure creating an algorithm resistant to that would be a huge challenge.
I get what you mean about follow content creators you enjoy and ignore hot and trending but in that case what's the point of having a hot and trending? To me the hot and trending should be the best of the best or most interesting content and in reality its the worst content. Maybe we get rid of the hot and trending tab and just go chronologically, we'll still have garbage content on there but at least its a level playing field at that point. To me whats really bad is when someone new comes to the platform they are going to be immediately turned off by it.
Another thing, is Steemits search function is pretty horrible which means its hard to find content that appeals to you. There's people I discover on here on a regular basis who I'm like shit I love this guys content, why did it take me a year to find him.
Also ultimately I think what we all want is more adoption overall, and not only more adoption but right now pretty much everyone on here is a creator, I think we want to get more people on here who are consumers of content so were all not just talking at each other trying to get our message out. Right now the environment is not appealing at all to someone who would be comming here to read or watch content. Your average person would abandon this site visit within 10 seconds most and go back to youtube, medium, etc
As far as bid bots go, I'll be honest I don't fully understand Steemits algorithm, how bid bots work, etc despite having been on here over a year, I've just never really cared enough to dig into all the stats and figure that out . I'm comming at this more from a larger picture of I see what they are doing to Steemit, I feel like they create an imbalance of power and I think they cuase people to game the system as opposed to creating quality content and having it organically rise to the top so to speak.
the example of the NBA ... this is already happening ... Formula 1.
On the other hand, bid bots are not the problem, them are part of the consequences of the problem ... The real problem is the traffic of votes. I mean, it's criticized that someone uses a bot, but is not it that your friend gives you a vote of great value?
What you bring up about friends voting is interesting. I think in many ways human nature tends to affect Steemit the same way it affects real life.
In real life its hard to get ahead, on Steemit its hard to get ahead. In real life greed and lazyness causes people to cut corners, on Steemit money being involved causes people to cut corners and try to game the system. In real life nepotism happens and people tend to help friends and family so the same is goign to happen on here. So I think some of what's going on is just bound to happen.
So if I follow your saying its a negative that we vote for our friends regardless of whether their content is good or bad? I would agree with you, I know I do that, there's a handful of people on here who every post they make they get a 100% upvote from me but I also try to spread some love around and upvote new people and various people I see who create good content.
In terms of that vs bid bots I would almost compare it to spinach vs steroid for athlets. Performance enhancing drugs are now allowed in most sports. Athletes can however eat spinache which is healthy and improves their performance to an extent but not to the extent of steroids or HGH. I would say voting for freinds is like spinach and bid bots are like steroids.
Steemit will never be perfect because people aren't perfect and life isn't perfect however as we can see by what's going on right now steemit isn't doing the best it has.
remember when people in africa and asia used to be steem ambassaddors and be posting pictures of their whole town wearing steemit shirts or holding steemit signs? we dont see that anymore. remember when people were posting quality long form content everyday? those people now post once or twice a week and some havn't posted in like 30 days. now that all the everyone getting rich off crypto hype has died the platform has gone downhill. when money isn't here to keep people around quality content and a good experience has to do it and we dont really have that here to the extent we need to
When I started here I was gung ho about posting my step by step how too's and tutorials. I'm talking quality content that would actually teach people how to make stuff. now I can care less as this site just seems to be a crypto chart circle jerk. I suppose I am just waiting to see something interesting pop into my feed like the above post.
Hey @motinkergnome I completely agree with you. Most of the discussion on here and most of the content on here is either about cryptocurrency or Steemit itself.
I bet you could post awesome DIY tutorials and example of your work and really cool stuff and you would probably make $0.50 per post. On the flip side you could probably take a screenshot of coinmarketcap.com and post it everyday and would probably earn $5 per post.
This site is definitely too centric on cryptocurrency. Don't get me wrong I like crypto but I also enjoy documentaries, DIY stuff, entrepreneurship and business content and news etc. This site will never get mainstream adoption and be a place normal average people come for content unless we get more of that type of stuff and even then the interface can't really match pinterest or instagram for pictures, youtube for video, etc.
I'm not trying to down Steemit b/c I like it here but I guess I don't get what Steemit and everyone's mission is. Do we want mainstream use and adoption? Do we want this to be a social media site that average people come to like they do pinterest, instagram, facebook etc?
I agree completely. I have been trying to get my family and friends on and they were like why it is just garbage posts.
Yeah while occasionally there are some gems on here in terms of content I don't come here for the same reason or in the same way that I go to reddit or youtube because i genuinely enjoy the content on there, I come here to kind of play the game of upvoting my friends, posting my own shit, claiming my rewards. Its more a job than leisure where as youtube and reddit I truly enjoy and learn and am entertained on those platforms. I'm here because I'm part of this site and have been here for a long time but I honestly couldn't blame or even necessarily disagree with someoen who's not a content creator or into crypto who comes on here at the urging of a friend and then is like that's fucking dumb
Instagram has been working super hard to kick like bots off their platform for years, and it doesn't offer as much monetary value for this as STEEM. I wonder how Steemit will combat this.
Yeah it seems every social media platform wrestles with this. Instagram every now and again will do something that stops the like, follow, comment bots for a week or two and then a new site or service pops up or the existing ones figure out a workaround.
I think Youtube has been the most effective of platforms on stopping this and I think it's partly because they are a video platform. They use watch time along with a host of other things like comments, thumbs up and down, engagement, etc.
Buying views on Youtube is really ineffective and honestly it many cases it can actually do more harm than good in that your watch time or retention suffers because these bots visit your video for a few seconds and leave.
It seems the only way to really trick or hack youtube is more through social engineering for lack of a better word ie giving away prizes and money. Most giveaways on youtube are fake, people never actually give away anything but it allows creators to get people to jump through all types of hoops like watch this til the end of the video, hit the thumbs up, say something in the comments.
I do YouTube SEO and My whole job is hacking youtube :D. Fake views can mess up your video, but you can get high retention views with a lot of watchtime that can get through the algorithm ;). A bit more expensive though. Get in touch with me if thats something you want to try ;)
Would you have any interest in doing an interview on my Channel giving some tips and hacks and I'd also be happy to let you plug your service if you have one.
I know some people don't like going on camera so could be a video hangout or even just audio
Okay Its against YouTube Terms to talk about buying views, but I'm game to teach everything else about Ranking YouTube Videos.
I hadn't really thought about that aspect, I'm sure you have some white hat or organic methods you could probably share and if you wanted a plug maybe without spelling out thats a service you offer we could have people contact you for assistance. feel free to hit me up rulesforrebels at gmail and we can set something up
right brother bid bots can effect the geniune content created by great efforts of writer. I am also against bid bots 😐