I don't think the problem is the price of SBD. The problem is that the price of SBD is pegged at $1 USD for the purposes of calculating the SP portion of the post and curation reward. That's what is making it more lucrative to delegate to the voting bots, because you get paid in SBD and not the platform's $-pegged SP calculation.
They need to drop the peg and put in a SBD price feed.
I'm not sure that will fix the issue completely. It seems the bots are coded well enough that they can automatically find the most profitable posts to vote on, more than the difference in payouts that you mention. The problem seems to be that algorithms that detect profit potential in a post are more effective than humans parsing through the content so much so that even careful curating yields far less than the arbitrage difference, and that will, as he mentioned, drag on the ecosystem as less people want to create or seek quality, and instead merely seek profits with bots.
We're already entering a phase where bot-created content can help ensure an audience is found (like Netflix already does in analyzing viewing habits before creating their shows to make sure they're going to be popular among the target demographics because they can view all viewing patterns on a granular level, which Hollywood didn't have access to) so it's going to be an interesting mix when that starts hitting more of the social media platforms.
It may not fix the issue completely, but it will be a good start. We are talking about delegating to a bid-bot which upvotes every 2.4 hours to the highest bidder. It doesn't do any fancy calculations to detect maximum profit potential, it just splits its 10% upvote between the bidders.
Bot-generated content is a whole different story on its own. I don't like the idea of bots being able to post automatically. Comments are not so much a problem, but not whole articles.
Okay, that clarification just made this funnier. So it's as simple as money in money out huh. I can't see how stuff like this won't absolutely cripple the site in the long run, from the stats it seems most newer users here become inactive shortly after they realize their created content will never get seen by the light of day because they don't have the cash to play.
NOt really. The bid-bots are just in the business of auctioning off their votes, and paying their investors. You can bid any amount and get your share of the vote, but be careful that the bids don't total more than about 70% of the vote value or you will lose.
I think those that come here and leave early are the ones who came in for a "get-rich-quick" solution, which this isn't. You have to build a following, and engage in comments, just like you're doing now. Once you build your following, and post good content, you will be seen, and rewarded accordingly.
It takes time and hard work, or $100000 investment. You can succeed if you work at it.
This is a really good discussion here. The way I see it bots are profitable now so they are booming at the expense of curation. New users are making a common mistake and thinking this site is purely about producing content, but its more than that. You need a network too. If newbies come here and post good content, then get ignored (because people are delegating to bots rather than curating) they are unlikely to stick around long enough to learn this early lesson about building a network and they will write the platform off. NEVER TO RETURN.
This is worse than not attracting them to the platform in the first place and is the main detriment I see with the high SBD right now.
Unless the payout structure changes I could easily see this site become fractured into one where only wealthy posters have any long-form content, and new and low power accounts use it more of a platform like twitter, with extremely short posts and quips.