You make some very valid points. Many of the most recent users of the bidbots have almost no investment, other than what they received back from the payout. They then take the SBD, create another article and promote it to the extent of what they have. It would seem like a great plan except....
If EVERYONE uses bidbots to make sure their article is seen, then eventually, no post will be seen, just paid for.
And, the bot owners remove the profits and sell it on the open market, dropping the price of Steem. So the SP invested by the rest of us is worth less each day.
Thank you for the reply.
I've seen this on golos, the sister site of steemit. There bidbots are not allowed and votes are sold via telegram on a higher margin for the vote sellers. Vote selling will not be stopped by removing the bidbots.
Yes if everyone would use the bidbots. Without the bidbots or whales ass kissing a new minnow would not have a slight chance. When I joined Steemit over a year ago, there was one post every few minutes, now there is a post almost every second. The chances to be seen have diminished exponential.
I see bidbots as a means of self promotion and I used them before to reach trending or hot. I have now a good follower base and stopped using them. I plan to raise one more account where I will use the bid bots even for a loss.
I invested in a bid bot as delegator as I see it as an incentive for investment. I bought some thousands of Steem just for that. Would it have not been for this ooportunity I would have probably not have done it. I'm not saying that I don't vote and read other posts as I had 326 upvotes, on 138 accounts, in the last 7d with zero votes on me. Data can be checked on steemworld.org for comparation with other accounts. ;)
The problem is with the trending and hot sections, they need to go. We have on trending on a normal day without the bidbots only +70 accounts with crap crypto analyse. There are some guys that used the shotgun method and bought randomly coins and are in most cases far better than following 90% of the expert advice in trending.
Like said, remove trending and hot and add a random section, where post that are active shall be randomly shown, the newer the post the more views it shall get. This will give more value also to the resteem function, as now it is mostly done by spammers that eat up the bandwith.
Only commenting that a post wwas paid for will mostly bring the account very fast to a low reputation by being flagged. I've seen one project like this before that was commenting on minnowbooster when the comments have been removed. I think that the bidbots that use the comment are already showing that the post has been paid for.
By the way, Minnowbooster added the option for an external vote selling service on their website, where one trades vote anonymous.
Hope that you take my comment as constructive and not criticism.
Again, all of your comments are well founded and I do not necessarily disagree, yet transparency remains the goal of this project. If golos and the external MB voting were more transparent, it would reduce the problem.
Blessings!