RE: February ’18 New Steemit User Report – Blockchain Business Intelligence
Change the definition of the word "visibility."
The voting bots only increase visibility on Trending and Hot. In theory, that provides enough reward for those engaging with them to feel good about their expenditure. If you really want to get more good stuff in front of more good people, you have to get behind Communities – which will do a far better job than bots.
But the truth is that visibility is not why people use the bots. It's the reason that we wish people used the bots. We wish people wanted more visibility for their work so that they could get proper appreciation from the crowds – but really what they want is to play the betting pool game and get more money out of the system, regardless of the content.
It makes us feel better to say that we believe people are using the bots for advertising, but we all know that no one looks at posts based on votes. We just don't. We search for keywords, we follow the work of writers that have made stuff that we like in the past – but we don't look at votes. Because everyone who has been here longer than a day knows that the votes are crocked. The votes don't matter. They can be bought and sold in significant volume.
So the first step to figuring out a solution is to accept why these things happen, and these things happen because it is possible to game the reward pool system by buying and selling access to SP indirectly through voting. And as we've covered before, SP is the only meaningful interaction multiplier on the platform.
Which brings us to your final question:
"What is one meant to do?"
The answer is harsh but simple:
One isn't meant to do anything.
One is meant to work the system as they see fit. If you want to try to make money by creating good content and carefully marshaling your SP in order to reward people for making good content that you like – bravo. You're playing the game like I am. You are playing the game like it's been sold.
But if you want to ride the minigame, if you want to use decentralized SP in order to create leverage opportunities, work really hard at understanding the betting pools and how the timers play out, grab all the augmented curation advantages that you can – well, that is also obviously what the platform was intended to do and that you are meant to do.
The clearly works, for some definition of "works." People keep doing it.
For me, the real question is whether the combination of things which are possible remain viable. That, for the moment, remains an open question.
In the last while i have considered using bots as i am trying different content types that my following are not use to from me.
A good thing about my need to consider this option is the fact my regular followers actually read my post and are obviously not liking my new stuff but still voting for the data stuff.
I am still on the fence about using them, as i am not a bot fan, but i think the shear popularity in use is also forcing the hand of others.
I have worked online for many years and often used paid advertising. But steemit is different and should be treated so. Maybe I would be better paying google for post visibility like i do with non steemit stuff.
Thanks for the food for thought
Here are the basic central truths that we know about bots:
They don't care about content. The people that run them don't care about content. The operation and effective deployment of a bot is orthogonal to issues of content.
Very few people look at or care about the list of people/bots who have voted for a particular article. Implicitly, they care about content more than they care about the activity of the bots.
Bots are a fiscal sink. If they didn't make more for the people that run them than they pay out to the people that gamble in them, no one would run them.
So, we know they don't work for promotion because the only way that they can get content in front of our eyes is through Trending and Hot. Sane people don't look at Trending and Hot; the take away is obvious. We know they don't care about content, because they will upload anything equally as long as you pay them. Having removed the possibility of thinking about it as paying for advertising or as somehow validating your content, we are left with the only purpose for playing the bot game.
You want to make use of some of that pooled SP which would otherwise be motivated toward other content to instead be driven to vote for your content purely and only to increase the amount of funds you get out of the system.
Which I don't think is inherently bad, but it changes the nature of the platform. It's one thing to write what you like and what you're proud of and invite people to come see it and reward you if they like it.
Once you bring bots into it you have changed the nature of the platform from a blogging platform to a vanity press, a publication facility whom you give some money to in exchange for "distributing your book" and maybe getting more money back to you then you spent with the publication house to get the book printed.
At a smaller scale, that's exactly how the bots work.
It's exactly the same ripoff.
Sure, some people have made a fat wad of cash by going through the vanity press. And they are very sure to tell you about every single one of them whenever you wander by, just like the poker dealer at the casino shouting out how much people have won today as you walk by.
Steemit is a very different environment than the online traditional publication architecture. Thinking about bots as advertising does a disservice to advertising, and ad guys are not my favorite people on earth in the first place.