@boomerang I sent you 10 SBD for a vote and you voted for me for 5 $ ... What is this? You have held 5 SBD that you have not honored with the vote, practically 30 US $ ... I kindly ask you to fix the vote or return the 5 SBD or vote on another of my posts. it's too much difference. Thank you.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
You were in exactly the same round as I was, 4 bids ahead of me. Now look at the screenshot under my comment: A bid of 181.481 plus a bunch of OTHERS after that was accepted, even though the vote power of @boomerang was by far EXCEEDED already at that point. That's wildcat business behavior!
They should return excess SBDs that have been unfairly held... That guy sent 181 SBD ??? crazy!!! He threw away hundreds of dollars.
The thing is the maximum profitable bid is clearly displayed on Steem Bot Tracker for every voting service listed there. So some accountability needs to be held by the users utilizing them. The bids aside, you have the other issue of whales like Grumpy Cat that will flag anyone that uses a voting service that doesn't abide by their self-determined rules, such as the 3.5 day maximum post age. Where do we draw the line? At some point the leadership of Steemit Inc and the Witnesses themselves need to step in and set up a baseline of rules that are applied equitably to everyone across the board.
Also clearly displayed on Steem Bot Tracker is the "Refund" icon, signalizing fair dealings. The @boomerang bot is flawed, hence a refund is due.
And before we can even click through to see the tracker, there is a notice message which we all agree to understanding that states:
1. Vote values shown on this site are ESTIMATES based on the available information at the current time.
2.For bid-based voting bots, bids often come in right before the round ends which affect the payouts.
3.Please make sure you understand how the bots work and that any payouts estimated here are not guaranteed!
Are you @boomerang's lawyer or something? ;-) The "not guaranteed payouts" were estimated just fine at -76% in the tracker - after it was too late. The warning "Beware of shady business paractices! Bot operators may collect more money than they can dole out!" is missing entirely, if we want to get technical.
If it's O.K. to accept bids up the YinYang it should also be possible to withdraw a bid at any time, to level the playing field.
Lol! No, I'm not his lawyer. Voting services aside, I actually engaged Grumpy Cat directly about his newly started initiative after reading about it and the experience of the user that was flagged by him and lost a considerable amount on his post because of it. It resonated with me because I think it points to more systemic issues plaguing the platform. Namely, an equitable rule set being applied to all.
I completely understand your point and am not downplaying it. I just think the voting services themselves are now in a very odd predicament. For example, boomerang takes bids up to day 6. If a user places a bid on a post that is more than 3.5 days old through boomerang and boomerang upvotes it, someone like Grumpy Cat could flag that user's post and they will have lost everything. Whose fault is it? Boomerang isn't obligated to follow Grumpy Cat's rule. The user isn't either. And so we find ourselves in a situation that is untenable on a macro level.
The only way misunderstandings like this can be avoided is if the voting service market has broad based rules applied to it. I'm not a final authority on anything but simply trying to point out the considerations of this whole situation from multiple angles.
That's the risk we all take with using voting services: the payouts can be skewed if very high bids come in during any given voting round. It's not just @boomerang that this happens to. It's others as well.
The user that bid 181.481 SBD in that round actually lost money because it's clear as day on Steem Bot Tracker that the maximum profitable bid is far less than that for boomerang. See: https://steembottracker.com/
Perhaps a rule could be suggested across the board that all voting services accept no more than a certain amount of SBD or steem in any given round. For that to be implemented though, it would have to come from Steemit Inc and the Witnesses. Expecting everyone to abide by the same constraints is not realistic if they aren't enforced by the platform's internal mechanics.
For example, you've got the recent issue of Grumpy Cat pushing a 3.5 day maximum post age rule for bids. Some voting services are following it and others aren't. For those that choose not to, users that utilize them are at risk of being flagged by Grumpy Cat. As you can see, this poses a dilemma for voting services too, because Grumpy Cat arbitrarily set up this rule himself and is enforcing it because he has a lot of SP, even though it goes against the very framework of Steemit itself. These types of constraints need to come from the top down for them to be equitably applied to everyone.
Yes, we have to check bot traker, and wait until the end, otherwise there is this danger, but giving less than half of the vote purchased is not correct.
It doesn't happen to me very often, because I use the SteemBotTracker, but sometimes, monies have been refunded (whole or in part) because the service can't be rendered. That's simply decent, honest business. I understand there is a certain amount of risk with regards to more, or less, or even no profitability - but accepting considerably more than the bot's vote value and thus returning less than 50% of the stake as a vote is unreasonable and cheeky, to put it mildly.
I completely understand. And as a blogger that has used voting services here, I've had my fair share of experiences where my bid wasn't profitable because much larger bids happened to come in during the same round as me. I personally accepted it as the risk I take in using the services.
However, I think the more prevailing issue we have here is whales now setting arbitrary rules such as maximum post ages for voting services. The users have no way of knowing what the unspoken rules are on the platform - they simply know that votes can happen up to day seven. Voting services aren't mandated to operate by rules that steemit itself doesn't impart upon them. So it's now become an even more pronounced issue that necessitates intervention from the leadership of this community to ensure that everyone is working under equitable parameters.