RE: Transparency Bot is going online to help fight the rampant rise in bidbots and their long term devastating effect on our platform.

[samueldouglas]

I'll be interested to see how this goes. Someone tried to do a similar thing in the past couple of weeks, can't remember the name - it got flagged down to nothing in the first day by more than one bidbot owner. Guess they weren't as ready as you were.

Lots of great discussion of paid-upvoting (and its connection to witnesses and whales alike) going on at the moment. Anyone who doesn't think that it's a problem needs to educate themselves by reading up on "rent-seeking" and "regulatory capture".

Hope it goes well for you. I look forward to upvoting your comments on trending posts.

Comments

[bycoleman]

Yes, it is going to be a battle and I may need to power up a lot more. Hopefully I will receive some delegations to be able to keep in the fight.

There is so many opinions on these bots, it is really amazing how many think they are good for the platform. Send a link to the concepts you are speaking of and I may be able to include them in an upcoming post.

Blessings!

[samueldouglas]

Rent-seeking

In economics and in public-choice theory, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. wikipedia

@krnel (with a little input from me) has a good discussion of how this might apply to steemit. There's a bit of nuance in how this applies - it's not quite the same as in classic economics (I think), but it is certainly something that is putting the brakes on growth here.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer. wikipedia

I have discussed how I think this applies to steemit, but you don't need to use too much imagination to see where I'm going with this if we recognise that the top 20 witnesses are essentially making policy/regulatory decisions.

[bycoleman]

Thank you very much for this. I will review later and then again.

[deep.throat]

Yes, that was me, I scanned the blockchain for each and every bid bot and vote selling transaction and called this out, but I got immediately flagged. If the community is now being supportive of such an initiative, I may restart my operation and join your cause :-)

[samueldouglas]

Hey! Glad you are still around. Let's not get to ahead of ourselves regarding community support - though anyone paying attention would know which higher -rep steemians are likely to support this (privately at least).

If nothing else, I'm sure there are lessons to be learned from your experience.

[bycoleman]

It takes a bit of SP to keep from being crushed. Transparency bot was going backwards until I leased more SP to keep it afloat.