There is a post upvoted to 50$+. It contains nothing but this picture and the text: "Close up of a cactus." Hmm.

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"Author" @perspectoid bears no shame in raping the reward pool. Bid bots claim they have a screening process. Do they really? His "posts" are full of upvotes by bid bots like postpromoter and jerrybanfield. Some of these services claim they filter through submissions.

How this affects legitimate content creators

Did you know? The daily reward pool gives out a certain amount of STEEM and Steem Power per day based on STEEM's price. Distribution is decided by everyone who is upvoting and how much Steem Power they use on each vote.

Let's pretend there are 1001 users on steemit, 10k Steem Power in total and 500k dollars in the reward pool, but 1 of the users alone has 5k while the other 1000 have just 5 SP each (another 5k). Every user votes once. The guy with 5k SP upvoted someone who'll get 250k dollars, half of the reward pool, because he holds 50% of the Steem Power used.

Now let's say 500 of the 5 SP users (2.5k) from the 10k total don't even upvote anything that day. That means whoever gets the vote from the 5k SP guy will get 187.5k dollars! That's because he holds 75% of the SP used at the time. You might want his vote, but it'll probably go to his buddy instead.

But it gets worse than this. He can decide selling is a viable option. So if you want a share of $70 from his upvote, you have to pay $50 to him. He gets your $50 and another $30~$50 in curation rewards, effectively making you even more dependent of buying his upvote because now he has an even larger % of all of that reward-distributing Steem Power.

Is there a reasonable logic behind all of this still justifying buying an upvote? Not if you're posting a fucking plagiarized picture with 5 words of text. But racing against them is important. As long as your % growth is larger than theirs, you have the chance of doing something. Sounds like hypocrite shit, but it has it's logic.

Shitposts like this damn cactus dude are going to keep using bid bots, so you might as well grab that SP for yourself instead. Hell, it'll even help people like this get upvoted for less, because you hold more of the distribution decisions.

This is why I've decided to undelegate all of my SP and why I keep using bid bots every now and then. There are other things you can do to absorb a bit of the greedy's growth, but I'll leave that for another post.

post from perspectoid with the cactus image. check out his other posts.

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Thank you for reading!