How Much of the Rewards Pool is Paid out by BitBots Votes V's Organic Votes
A recent post by @tarazkp called out for someone to look at how much of the reward pool is available or paid out via organic votes.
You can read that full posts (and comments because it is an interesting discussion) here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@tarazkp/looking-for-a-good-bidbot-mathematician
To try and answer this question and carry out this analysis I am going to look at data for the month of February 2018. Some of the data I can extract from previous analysis I have prepared for the month of February and other values required a new query or calculation. You can find full details of the query and original analysis at the bottom of the post.
The basis of the queries was to find the number of votes given in February by each of the accounts as shown below and also to value those votes. Valuations are based on 100% votes as per steemworld.com and adjusted by the voting weight actually used per vote. Please note that the value of a vote today on steemworld is not the same as it was in Feb due to changing conditions.
Once I had all of the data for February, I was then able to deduct these from Total values to arrive at Organic Vote and Estimate organic Vote value. The results are shown in the table below.
The value for Bidbots above is the combine value of all of the bidbots as listed on https://steembottracker.com/
@abh12345 wanted to see some pie charts for this data so below shows the % of total post pay-out each voting route (or app or whatever we want to call it ) contributed to the over all total.
The pie chart below shows the % number of votes each app contributed to the overall total in February
Based on this we can see that 62.49% of post payouts in Feb was down to organic voting (I don’t really think it is fully organic voting as many people auto vote but for the sake of this post)
Conclusion
@tarazkp had asked to see what % of the rewards pool is available for organic votes after bidbots and other known voting apps. By using data from the month of February, we know what was paid out on post in SBD value (this is gross, so author and curator rewards).
We have also calculated how many votes the bidbots and other know voting apps made and an approximation of the gross worth of these votes. By deducting one from the other we are left with ‘organic’ votes and vote worth.
In February 62.49% of vote value was organic and the bitbots contributed almost 24% of the total payouts for Feb.
Would it be safe then to say if 62.5%% of the vote value is organic, the 62.5%% of the rewards pool is used to pay ‘organic’ votes? This would also be the case then that 24% of the rewards pool will be distributed by paid bidbots!
I must mention again that when I say organic in this context, we are talking votes made by all other except those listed. We are all fully aware that this is not a realistic of ‘organic’ votes as auto voting and other bots are all over steemit. the bitbots accounted for can be found on https://steembottracker.com/
Queries and Data
The M query used to find the total number of votes for the month of February was
let
Source = Sql.Database("vip.steemsql.com", "DBSteem", [Query="SELECT#(lf)*#(lf)FROM #(lf)Txvotes (NOLOCK)#(lf)#(lf)where timestamp >= CONVERT(DATE,'2018-02-01') #(lf)and timestamp< CONVERT(DATE,'2018-03-01')"]),
in
Source
From the data I then carried out COUNTROWS DAX expression to get the total number of Feb votes.
To get the total number of votes from the bidbots the following M query was used
let
Source = Sql.Database("vip.steemsql.com", "DBSteem", [Query="SELECT#(lf)*#(lf)FROM #(lf)Txvotes (NOLOCK)#(lf)#(lf)where timestamp >= CONVERT(DATE,'2018-02-01') #(lf)and timestamp< CONVERT(DATE,'2018-03-01')#(lf)and voter in ('kittybot', 'isotonic', 'getboost', 'booster', 'lightningbolt', 'nado.bot', 'shares', 'peace-bot', 'postdoctor', 'spydo', 'singing.beauty', 'minnowhelper', 'jerrybanfield', 'sunrawhale', 'sleeplesswhale', 'zapzap', 'cryptoempire', 'pwrup', 'redwhale', 'lovejuice', 'foxyd', 'noicebot', 'minnowfairy', 'honestbot', 'seakraken', 'upboater', 'whalebuilder', 'mrswhale', 'upgoater', 'smartsteem', 'dailyupvotes', 'pushup', 'allaz', 'sneaky-ninja', 'upmyvote', 'dolphinbot', 'minnowvotes', 'chronocrypto', 'thebot', 'inciter', 'oceanwhale', 'promobot', 'mitsuko', 'bearwards', 'voterunner', 'brupvoter', 'payforplay', 'edensgarden', 'redlambo', 'mercurybot', 'appreciator', 'slimwhale', 'moneymatchgaming', 'boomerang', 'childfund', 'buildawhale', 'youtake', 'megabot', 'authors.league', 'upme', 'alphaprime', 'steembloggers', 'msp-bidbot', 'lost-ninja', 'estream.studios', 'upyou', 'postpromoter', 'rocky1', 'bluebot', 'flymehigh', 'aksdwi', 'puppybot', 'onlyprofitbot', 'boostbot', 'discordia', 'canalcrypto', 'therising', 'ebargains', 'fishbaitbot', 'luckyvotes', 'brandonfrye', 'estabond', 'upmewhale', 'hotbot', 'adriatik', 'steembidbot')"]),
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "% weight", each [weight]/10000),
#"Changed Type" = Table.TransformColumnTypes(#"Added Custom",{{"% weight", Percentage.Type}, {"timestamp", type date}})
in
#"Changed Type"
Using the data returned by this query, I then carried out a mash up of data from https://steembottracker.com/ . This gave me the value of a 100% vote. Using the data about the vote weight was multiplied by the 100% vote value to get the approx. value of the vote given.
The queries used to get the votes and vote values for February for the above mentioned apps is covered in detail in previous post so I will not replicate it here. If you are interested in this code you can find it on any of the posts below
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/feb-18-zappl-steem-app-analysis-blockchainbi
https://steemit.com/dmania/@paulag/feb-18-dmania-steem-app-analysis-blockchain-business-intelligence
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/feb-18-dsound-steem-app-analysis-blockchainbi
https://steemit.com/dlive/@paulag/feb-18-dlive-analysis-blockchain-business-intelligence
The value for the total post payout in Feb is taken from https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/february-2018-steemit-post-benchmarking-report-blockchain-business-intelligence
To note on this, there is a timing different between posts and votes. The payout value is based on Posts made in Feb, not actual votes made in Feb. This might lead to a small variation in actuals
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Much needed information.
So, roughly quarter of steem rewards (re)distribute through voting bots.
that's what it seems to me too
i agree with you...
Thanks for this research. I would have assumed bidbots vote value would have been higher than 50%. Great to see that this is not the case. Although I need to find a new way to read interesting content on Steem since filtering by Trending or Hot is mostly showing bidbot users or users who have a large autovote following.
Bidbots should work on limiting the amount of vote per post to some arbitrary number like less than $50 per post. But then most people use multiple bidbots so.. I do not know the solution.
Knowledge is power. With this information I hope the community can find a solution to bring back quality content to the top.
most people use the bidbots just for the money but others use it for good purpose for example i use bitbots because i post staff that people don't even pay attention to. with this how can i get to boost my steem power? just because its very scares for people to upvote you. bu i will never give up. so this is the different between the two users. some already have it but still uses bidbots.
Everyone uses bid bots for money and then try to say that they just use them to get more attention. Why do you want more attention? Because you want money.
Bid bots are used by people who think they deserve more money. Steem will only grow if people realize that self upvoting and bid bots may pay more but aren't the right thing to do.
but what some bidbots request for certain amount of money before you can be upvoted and here lies the case you had no such amount how will you be able to do that?
I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to say... The bid bots putting a minimum bid amount is just their side of being greedy. It doesn't affect the people who are placing bids.
Remember, this accounts for the bid bots available on bottracker. I would be interested in the figure the bots that are not yet on the tracker. They are being created at a cyclic rate it seems.
Hi @paulag, I was recently looking into net SBD transfers to a subset of bitbots for another analysis and got numbers at a completely different order of magnitude. I'm not 100% sure that my numbers are correct, but 6k SBD votes from bidbots for the full month also seems surprisingly low to me.
This is what I got: The amount of SBD sent to any of
between Dec.. 1st and Mar. 1st which was not refunded. (Operator chashouts and delegator payouts excluded)
Even if the bidbot votes are not profitable, this would make an order of magnitude of 300k SBD to these bots in Feb.
yep cos I had ran part of the report for 2017. it is now updated
that looks roughly consistent now, great work!
You're correct!
6k SBD is closer to the daily upvotes by the top 11 bid bots, not for the whole period.
updated, they were ran for 2017 instead of 2018
She did add a note that she took numbers from 2017. I guess, back then bots were that small. I recently wrote an article asking similar questions as you and I came to the conclusion that they take out at least 10% of the reward pool. Of that 90% ends up in holding accounts or goes to bittrex. Quite a rip-off, if you ask me...
What's your opinion to that, bernie?
thank you @doodlebear I have now updated.
Does that mean the bots mentioned by @crokkon are part of the organic upvoting? That would be a devastating blow to the "proof of brain" concept, since it's basically circumventing the importance of upvotes by normal users (who provide the brain..).
Can you do another analysis of that kind with all the "organic" upvote bots? Ideally with where their profits go. I have the impression their power is way too big on Steemit...
Almost all bots in my list are part of her's as well. So they don't count as "organic". A tricky aspect is however "sell your vote" from MB/smartsteem/booster and maybe others. My data only partly counts those and I think this appears as "organic" in @paulag's approach. Can't tell if this makes a significant difference.
edit: corrected - minnowboster and randowhale are part of my list, but not in paulag's
I also have some serious consideration of whether we ought to be trying to come up with a way to filter out "curation trains" of followed auto voting, but I haven't come up with a really good way of detecting that sort of event. My gut says that some sort of clustered timeseries would be about the only way to determine or detect a relationship between events like that, but it's hard to say for sure.
The system does not make it very easy to analyze votes by value and aggregate, so this is always a lot of fun.
That would be an interesting task: Creating a filter that corrects the upvote bot bias. If you are interested in developing such a filter, you should contact @greer184 who is running @q-filter, where he works on alternative ways of filtering content.
I've actually been trying to implement a filter that would simply bias presentation in favor of things that I have personally voted up in order to provide an additional form of weighting and presenting the content available on the blockchain, but that's been going slowly at best. I know that any kind of filtering is a big task.
In this case, because up vote bots are nearly impossible to detect if they're not on the big listings, I'm not sure that it's absolutely useful to trying correct for them specifically as opposed to individualizing the experience of a user who is already involved in seeking out content that they like and signaling to the system that they do. After all, it's theoretically possible that someone might like the kind of content that is consistently voted up by a bot. I hate to make that kind of assumption up front. It's theoretically possible that, at some point, someone might create a bot which consistently votes up content that I'm interested in. Theoretically.
(You really have a bunch of friends who like to follow you around and flag everything you do, don't you? I don't think that I've ever seen a comment with a reasonable content like that get so absolutely stepped on as hard as feet could go. It's really quite impressive. No one cares that I'm a thorn in their side so much that they follow me around quite so slavishly. Good job!)
Ah I see, thanks. I just realized she's referring to the list on steembottracker.com as a whole. Man, there are a lot of bots!^^
This leaves then the question where the profits go. I know boomerang and minnowbooster shuffle it back to the community, but there are several holding accounts where a lot of profits go.
Would be interesting to learn how and where the money gets hoarded (and by whom).
Nice pie charts :)
I've been looking at some numbers too at the moment they look fairly similar to the (updated) numbers above.
So it doesn't look that bad on face value, but as you say there is more too it, and I think I'll do a follow-up to this soon :)
Please do a follow up - I know that you have a list of additional bots and also to mention - you were the one that spotted the date error and help me correct my mistake
As you wish :)
Submitted!
Thank you so much @paulag
I have a question though. How does that return match up with what was sent to the same bidbots? Unless @penguinpablo's numbers were wrong, they were receiving over 40,000 SBD a day. I don't have all the numbers of course but estimating that would be ~1.2M SBD liquid a month sent to them?
you are most welcome. Hope it helps.
this report is based on votes and payouts. Not what is sent to the bid bots. I am looking at data on how much was sent to the bots but so far I have been unable to get back to @penguinpablo's numbers. Leave it with me and I will work on it :-)
I hope this is some fun for you doing this. I wish I had the skills as I think it would be great but then, I also wonder if me not knowing the reality romanticizes it ;)
hi @tarazkp I think I have answered your question on what is sent to bidbots and I dont think the story is a positive one for steemit
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/analysis-of-steemit-bidbot-business-steemit-business-intelligence
its easy to 'not know' when you have people to ask. Yep I enjoy this stuff, I'm a total numbers geek
Interesting, I would have thought bidbots made up more % of the reward pool, but I guess I was mistaken!
I'm fairly new here and I've got to say, I was a bit disappointed when I saw how many people are using bots.
I'm of the personal opinion that using bots damages the overall community.
There's already a small learning curve when new users arrive and having to learn how bots work to keep up with the competition will just scare many people off.
Also, the use of bots destroys the very idea of social proof.
I am in agreement with you. When I see a bot comment on a post, a little part of me no longer wishes to engage.
excellent analysis
Thanks, PG!
Shining a light on inequities is the first step of correcting them, imo.
Im still bummed by ten voters taking ~30% of the reward pool, daily, intended to support the 60k users.
Source
If we want mass adoption of steem as a currency, looks like that is something that needs to change.
Does this cover bought votes from Minnowbooster or smartsteem?