Politics are like surgeries or at least visiting the doctor. Sometimes you've got to have them. It could save your life or make your life a more comfortable one. But after a basic level, less is always better. Getting chopped up all the time is not a great thing. Taking pills one after the other is not a great way to live a life. But unfortunately lots and lots of politics are getting into the STEEM blockchain mainly through Steemit and Busy.
There are few topics and one of the big ones is bots. Most accusations seems like either opinions or projections of one's personal idea of what steemit should be. Notice that I didn't use the term STEEM. Why?
There is no Trending/Hot on STEEM
These tabs are just front ends. Basically they are there for the content discovery. Steemit doesn't collect your data like Fakebook or other NSA's lackeys. It uses transparent methods to help you discover content. You "Feed" is based on the people you've followed. Trending/Hot are calculated based on engagement and post age.
What is really present are the votes, the comments and resteems. One could discover content through "Feed" or individually browsing a content creator's blog. Resteems also expose content to more people and the "New"tab is mostly just useless. You could say the same about the "Promoted"tab which is supposed to be a place where new users can get more exposure with their SBD. But here is the deal: My last post got into the top few Promoted posts with just 0.1 SBD. That's just another way of saying nobody even bothers to put their money to use this feature.
To put it differently; the feature is utterly broken
We need a solid solution for this problem because minnows and even dolphins are going to loose interest in the platform when they can't get any god damn exposure. Circle jerks are going to continue and STEEM is going to be distributed among a very small group. I've talked about this here: https://steemit.com/news/@vimukthi/the-initial-token-distribution-problem-of-steem-and-dan-talking-about-steem-2-0-on-eos-telegram-q-and-a
Let's change the Promoted feature
SBD is a debt instrument. Burning SBD is a good thing IMO. Then the authors can gain bigger rewards continuously as SBD get printed in the normal rate. Although 99.99% bidding rounds for bots with $10+ upvotes end in a loss for the bidders, they only loose a small portion of their investment. I didn't run all the numbers. Most of the times I checked, the losses tend to be around 5%-10%
Since nobody is bothering with the "Promoted" tab why don't we get rid of it and allow users to burn SBD to get their posts to show a high value and get into the Trending/Hot pages. The upvote value gained through burning SBD won't be payed out to the user. It will have zero affect on the reward pool. But the users will be able to gain better visibility for their posts while getting rid of some SBD in circulation helping to keep the value of SBD higher.
Incentives - Incentives - Incentives
Why the hell should anybody use this feature???
Incentives will give them a reason. Use a significantly large multiplier for these cosmetic upvotes. X10 is a good number. Just think about spending 20 SBD and suddenly your posts shows a $200 extra value (which is purely cosmetic). No Bot is going to give results like this. You can implement this feature in many different ways. You could make Burning 1 SBD give 4 STEEM worth cosmetic upvotes. You could play with the nubers and experiment. But the basic idea is simple.
Give users cosmetic upvotes for burning SBD and allow users who don't have 10k Followers or 10K SP to have good exposure on this platform. The only difference between a cosmetic upvote and a normal upvote would be that the cosmetic upvotes won't affect the reward pool.
As for the Bots, I pretty much share what @joe.public and @lexiconical have to say about it. At the end of the day what we should be doing is trying to improve things for everybody; not pointing fingers at people or using aggressive actions that can create a poor UX for the newcomers and minnows. Just so you know, only 1907 accounts are above the Minnow level. According to the reports by @penguinpablo most days we get more than 1907 new STEEM accounts created each day.
What happens when everybody start using this feature
Some of you might be already thinking about inflation parables. Yes, many users will start burning SBD to get themselves those MASSIVE cosmetic upvotes to gain visibility. At the end things would be a lot similar to current situation at the face value. But here is the thing. You wanted to get rid of bots. this feature will get it done. Bots will become less important. We could also add "No Cosmetic Votes" tabs which doesn't consider those cosmetic votes or doesn't show these promoted posts at all.
Additionally we'll have a significant downward pressure on the debt levels allowing SBD to be continuously printed in the normal rate attracting more content creators due to better payout.
I'm no dev and I'm not even a blockchain expert. I'm a guy on this platform trying to improve things without resorting to opinion based finger pointing political methods. The code should be the law; not opinions of some random people who use bidbots to promote their posts that complain about bidbots. If we don't change this unwise course, Steemit/Busy wouldn't be much different from Feelz based SJW run hellholes. So think smart and put it into the code. Opinions should never be laws and blockchains must be governed by their code.
Happy steeming!
Haha, I wholeheartedly agree! Sometimes I think that now that the Promotion feature is so much being frowned upon, this might be a chance to get visible there since nobody seems to use it anymore. But even then I was proven wrong, unfortunately.
As to the bots, I used them for my latest article, yet in the end the loss in SBD can be quite harsh without having received much more visibility. I also tried hottopic, but even with this 1SBD investment, I made a huge loss in terms of ROI.
But ok, I have to try several things, and this might come with certain costs.
What I am wondering is how some people regularly get upvotes from 25 reputation accounts with huge Steem Power (50+). Any idea?
These accounts could be selling votes to minnowbooster and smartmarket. They could also be just people who are holding STEEM mostly as an investment. They could be sock puppet accounts making a circle-jerk. There are many possibilities.
As for using bots, Try Smartsteem or Minnowbooster They guarantee an upvote worth more than the SBD sent (as long as STEEM price doesn't fall down). You can also follow the link and register to sell your upvotes. Personally I've set it to sell vote when my VP is above 98% but you can choose whatever you like.
Thank you! I'll try one day. ;)
The problem isn't lack of suggestions it's the unwillingness of whose ever job it is to view and implement viable solutions.
The same would say. It is a good suggestion to reduce the circulating SBD, although nonetheless, I have seen little mobility in the application of the suggestions.
I don't think it's unwillingness, but rather willingness to leave things as they are.
I think they are looking for the community to find a solution on its own, although this is far from being close.
Yep. You nailed it. Even the political drama queen Robin Hoods of the reward pool are profiting from the way things are. If things were fixed, some demagogue would loose their raison d'être.
Any community driven solution would be inefficient by definition compared to a fix at protocol level.
Many people have expressed that STEEM devs doesn't seem to care much about anything other than SMTs.
That is something great idea and in my opinion also promotion tab is not effective and the Bot have both positive and negative aspects, and negative aspect is upvote on Shitposts and it is really discouragement for those authors who are creating great content with less upvotes, i didn't understand what the burning process is all about but i got an hint about the face of this system what you explained. Let's hope for the best. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂
You're right about this. Once I realised how the bitbots worked... I stopped going to the Trending/Promoted pages at all. Now I simply use the New and Hot tabs. I couldn't care less if the other 2 tabs disappeared.
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