DISClAIMER: I'm not against bid bots or vote bots that are run responsibly with controls & limits to prevent abuse.
$100+ Low Quality Posts
I've been receiving a lot of reports of low quality posts receiving high payouts do to bid bots & other vote buying bots.
I did a quick query today with the largest bid bot & vote bot accounts (@minnowbooster, @appreciator, @upmyvote, @boomerang, @buildawhale, @booster) and I was shocked at some of what I found.
$177.45 ???
@brittuf thinks a lot of his own investing advice.
Copy/Paste text.. Add an image & title.
$228.15 to copy an article.
Summary round up from various news sources.
Highly values their own investing advice and upvotes after a few days before payout.
$104.78 ??
Why is this any different than my overvalued posts shit posts?
Yes, Someone asked me that today so I thought I'd give them an answer publicly.
The payout of a post isn't always about the value of the post itself. Some one recently asked how this is different than my overvalued posts with both @spaminator & @patrice. I know that I have had some very over paid posts in the past based on quality and content of the post itself. I'm not a great writer nor am I an artist. The time I spent writing this post I could have spent looking through these links for plagiarism & flagging them. That is what I contribute to the community and that is where the value of my posts come from. Not the post but the hard work I do behind the scenes.
Most of the posts above are nothing but self voting by proxy in my opinion. They are buying votes for content that would normally never see the light of day. While I haven't looked, I wouldn't be surprised if they majority of the accounts are constantly cashing out and powering down.
I'm Not Against Vote Bots or Bid Bots
Yes, I just said those posts are pretty much self voted and overvalued. That doesn't mean that these bots don't serve a purpose when they are run & used responsibly. The bid bots & voting bots seem easy to setup and run and delegations from @blocktrades, @freedom and others have made running them profitable. It doesn't seem that a lot of thought has gone into preventing abuse by some owners. Many of these bots are run by one person and do not have the time or resources to handle abuse prevention. Some seem to be abusers themselves.
I spent some time talking to @themarkymark in the wee hours of the morning.
Everyone has their own ideas of what is and isn't valued here on steemit. I totally understand the position @themarkymark is in when it comes to deciding what is and isn't acceptable when there is no clear abuse. There's a lot of grey area. I sometimes spend a week contemplating whether or not a group of accounts should be added to @mack-bot all while being harassed by members of the community demanding I do something now. 😹
I think what it boils down to is that bid bot & vote bot owners have to decide what content is acceptable and communicate it clearly to their users. Every bid bot, vote bot, & curation project I've seen has upvoted posts that contain abuse. What sets others apart is how they handle it when abuse is reported.
Cooperation, Collaboration, & Information Sharing
I'd like to see more cooperation and collaboration between projects when it comes to abuse. I'd like to develop tools to accumulate & share information on steemcleaners.org that can be used by anyone who wishes to prevent abuse.
Unfortunately I'm one person and short of resources myself. Despite some who erroneously report that I make $500+ a week, my income from Steemit according to SteemReports this year is probably around $11,000 USD including SP & witness pay (subtracting out my recent return of SBD I doubled).
I've reached out to a couple of people I know to help me develop the website and more tools but the costs associated with what I'm looking for is running into $2500 - $4000. So for now I'll be relying on my own limited programming ability.
If you appreciate what I do to help the community please vote for my witness.
Witness Voting
You can vote for my witness here.
Wittnesses I vote for and support:
Image by @atopy
Current Projects:
@steemcleaners 🙣 @spaminator 🙣 @steemsugars
My Delegations:
| Account | MVests |
|---|---|
| @msp-creativebot | 0.206 |
| @reveur | 0.211 |
I was wondering if it would be easy to great a bot that would automatically bid on bid bot on new round. If a couple of people would use such a bot, the bid would be split.
So let's say, a new round start, every bot would bid x% of the total maximum amount then the bid would be split between everyone.
I guess the most rapid bot would end up bidding 90% of the maximum vote, maybe a second bot would detect that bid and bid another 5%.
I think those bot will appear if they aren't already use by the people you mention in your post.
Earlier today I was wondering if someone had created one yet. I won't be surprised of they do.
It could make the bots less profitable for the users and more profitable for the owners. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Contributors would have to post quality content if they wanted their bid bot/vote bot investment to pay off.
I did write a bid bot bot, not sure, if that could help you:
https://steemit.com/utopian/@isnochys/bid-bot-bot
MACK-BOT! SIT! Good Boy!
Xpilar took me on your wall @patrice. I appreciate for your hard work to eridicate spams. Well done.
I wish I had the money or connections to get this project going, because this is a growing concern. I support Patrice 100% in this effort. For every person Patrice mentioned, there are many others posting videos, memes or articles that heavily borrow from online information, then upbotting them for $30-$50. In my opinion, bidbot upvoting should be for proven original work, not copied from someones blog or youtube channel.
This is a perfect example of proof of work.
The votes you receive are the recognition to the after-curation you had to do and the post is the report and the mean of payment.
So the community is fairly paying you back for the job.
Can't believe people is speaking about that (Especially now), STEEM has so many possibilities and is understood so differently from the perspective and reality of each different person behind the user.
We need an educational campaign it is important that we go outside the blog, this is a much richer platform than a simple web page, we need to encourage thinking outside the box, to see the potential, people working for the block chain is remunerated by the block-chain, stake-holders are rewarding your job, the same a curation group receives votes in their reports a thanks via the reward pool from a service done to the platform and that does not give curation rewards.
It would be like complain that a small part of the STEEM created goes to the witness rewards.
I reiterate my offer to donate web & server space in the chat.
And
Thanks for the hard work :)
Seems like everyone wants to complain the last few days.
Thank you and I will probably take you up on it. I'm unboxing Black Friday Day #3. :grin:
hi @patrice - appreciate your efforts
The website that you are trying to develop is : https://steemcleaners.org ?
I see that its a wordpress portal / CMS. I have some skills around the same and if you are looking at simple things like adding pages, content, social connect etc, I can help you. no strings attached.
Thanks for the offer. I'm okay with WordPress. My problem is I've gone as far as I can with form plugins. I need to do some php & mysql I think to do what I want.
Understood. For PHP editors like sublimetext can be very helpful. For MySQL phpmyadmin can be a lifesaver. For asking help, stackoverflow is an excellent resource. I said WordPress because as I am stranger to you, it will may not be an easy decision to give accesss to code and dB. I am on discord and Steemit.chat Under the same user name bobinson and I can help with PHP and dB if you need any help. Theoretically I’m fooling around with PHP for some 15 years and know few things here and there
ye i reported this guys few times to all, but they are still abusing and abusing:( i will vote for you, hope it will help ;)
Thank you! It helps!
Some nice piece of information!
Indeed such bots can be of great benefit to gather more attention to a post and give you the pat on the back you deserve, but there are always those that abuse it for personal gain. Its a controversial matter and the proposed solutions are indeed fit. We need cooperation and collaboration to improve worthy articles, since so so many are indeed undervalued!
Did minnowbooster get rid of the whitelist for higher paid votes? That seemed look a good solution at least for ensuring quality.
They put it on hold when the blowup happened with @minnowpower & @berniesanders. I hope they reinstate it. I think it would have been great to see how it worked allowing a few large upvotes a month to gain visibility on posts the contributor thought deserved visibility.
Yeah it seemed to be a step in the right direction, too bad about the timing of how that went down. Even to evaluate the experiment over a month could have been very useful :/
Have a look at
https://steemd.com/introduceyourself/@aluma/re-hi-steemit-friends-2000-followers-thank-you-for-joining-us-i-m-glad-to-welcome-you
@aluma receives quite some votes from @noaommerrr
Good boy, mack-bot!
not surprised on some of the names and unfortunately I don't think it's a matter (with some) of being busy...it's that they are raking in money and don't give a shit. Sometimes I see something beautiful done on here for the general good and other times I see the staggering depths of greed humanity usually embraces without too much of a fight. For a lot with tons to delegate , with some exceptions, they see it as a business and that's about it. Good Post (and mean it)
That's my point i wanted to voice out @patrice. Since day 1 I've already noticed the trend here. Seems newbie had no room for this community. Bid bots and upvotes for money. How about integrity and professionalism ethics. It is losing its value and put in waste. I hope admin would gave this preferential attention and give fair share to all concern. Thanks for your good post. It blows my attention to the limit:)
I agree, but you have used many of the bots you talk about in the post to promote your own post! That is quite surprising. .
I did that to gain visibility. And I think it is a good reason to use one occasionally. I'm not against them, I just think they need to be well run and monitored.
I think that the use of bots should be intended to be used by mennows, and if used by people with a hi reputation or earnings should be limited to use only one bot.
Maybe setting a minimum size post to the bot accept the post, or a minimum voting of true people to the post to be approved to use a certain bot should be good.
Maybe 1 vote of real people to use a bot that can give 100 votes. It could be a 1% rule for voting posts. And the same rule for biding bots..
This 1% rule shold be useful to filter spam post, because they will never met the minimum required votes for real people. Or at least could limit the use of high powered bots to spamming
This post has received a 33.33 % upvote from @boomerang thanks to: @patrice
@boomerang distributes 100% of the SBD and up to 80% of the Curation Rewards to STEEM POWER Delegators. If you want to bid for votes or want to delegate SP please read the @boomerang whitepaper.
This post has received a 22.74 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @patrice. Send at least 1 SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field for a portion of the next vote.
To support our daily curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness
You know you have my support, and that of the MSP Anti-Abuse Team. My Blacklist is finally in good working order and you are welcome to check it out. Get with me at some point, I really want to get the entire community of Abuse related groups working together as well.
I'll come check it out! :)
Is there anything we can do about accounts like @monitorcap and @markboss ? i see more of them constantly and are getting decently high rep. Pretty tired of their bot reposting my artwork in their "compilation".
Spaminator Report
They aren't too happy with me right now. Unfortunately I'm not sure I have the VP to keep it up.
Hehe.. Forgot to refresh the page before I commented.
Man they are so obnoxious...
Congratulations @patrice, this post is the forth most rewarded post (based on pending payouts) in the last 12 hours written by a Superuser account holder (accounts that hold between 1 and 10 Mega Vests). The total number of posts by Superuser account holders during this period was 914 and the total pending payments to posts in this category was $3627.57. To see the full list of highest paid posts across all accounts categories, click here.
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Nice information
Congratulations @patrice!
Your post was mentioned in the hit parade in the following category:
I think it's disgraceful that money can buy anithing. I'm
Against Vote Bots or Bid Bots
because overshadow good content and promote crap posts!
Amen to that!
Very informative. Thanks...
Yes that really made so much sense to me.
https://steemit.com/better/@hashamqureshi/who-is-the-better-sherlock
Please don't SPAM... take a look in this before hurting your reputation.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@miti/newcomers-minnows-and-spammers-this-post-will-save-your-reputation