Thanks for joining the discussion!

minnowbooster is a bid bot with a fancy name and different coding lol. you bid, you get a vote, bid bot. Also, the return from minnowbooser is all over the place and you have no way of knowing what it will be. I love reggea and what he does, but it is one of the reasons i dont really use it anymore. Way to unpredictable for me personally. Other bid bots you can get much closer to knowing what you will get back using @yabapmatt's bot tracker.

Though it used to be a big issue a couple months ago, the issue with excessive bids has been solved also ever since @yabapmatt created his bot tracker. People very very rarely over bid now.

Bid bots are clearly not the only abuse here. the worst abuse on steemit comes from spam accounts, account farming and unnecessary self votes of large whales actually. Far more coming from these places than bid bots. In fact I was just going through steemcleaners blacklist yesterday of over 5500 accounts and as I went through it was clear that they were largely account farms and spammers, most seemed to be farms.

Bots have had an impact on the rep system this is certainly true. However it is really flawed to begin with. You can get a good rep just from being friends with a whale and getting one or two votes from them I've actually proven this physically. That clearly should not be a show of real rep. This needs updated somehow. Possibly to include the idea of bid bots being here.

I don't see bots as having abused this, instead i feel it is simply flawed to begin with. You can bring an account with nothing posts to a rep of 50 super quickly by just voting a small number of times on posts from it using a higher rep/sp account. I've seen accounts hit 45 rep in their first post actually from this exact thing. I've also not seen much benefit from having a high rep other than what it can do for someone if you upvote them.

Currently we share blacklists among several bot owners and I believe @themarkymark is a part of that. I'm also about to start using @steemcleaners entire list of abusive accounts (currently over 5500). I'm actually converting it into a form I can use right now and will also be sharing this list with other bot owners.

The only abuse I see from bid bots is the abusive accounts that have had the chance to use them, which myself and many other owners are actively remedying. In reality they are helping minnows out a lot. It's actually helping re balance some of the older issues we've had here with many whales simply not helping minnows in exchange for only helping themselves or friends. Which is potentially why certain whales are upset by it lol.

I know what you mean about being tired of reporting spammers and scammers. I also believe that when it comes to bid bots, we as owners of them are responsible for rooting them out of our services since we are the ones voting on them. This is why myself and @sneaky-ninja will now be working with @steemcleaners. We will be on air discussing this tonight at 12pm utc (7pm est) if you want to listen in.

There is definitely a lot of grey area in voting late. It is for that very reason that we cannot make a blanket, black and white rule that it is bad. Some are abusing it and some are not.

Actually, fun little side note... There was an account called @abusereports just started that is showing anyone voting on the sixth day. I was pleased to see that since that account has started there have only been 2 votes from @sneaky-ninja on their lists. :)