Before the EIP that was introduced with the HF
We had 75/25, curators would earn 25% from the posts but it was never fully 25% as voting early, which many did to front-run other curators, returned funds to the pool.
OCDB would take e.g. a 10 steem bid, give back a guaranteed upvote of 10% ROI, meaning the 75% that would go towards the author was calculated to return 11 Steem after payout was due and 100% of the bid would go out to everyone delegating Steem to OCDB proportionally. On top of that OCDB would also return all the curation rewards, this meant that we had to powerdown most of our accounts to feed @ocdb Steem to pay out delegators as curation rewards only come in SP and the powerdown could not cover all of it as the SP was constantly growing due to the increased amount in delegations we were receiving for giving delegators some of the highest ROI compared to bid bots. Imagine that, even though we guaranteed curated authors in our whitelist a 10% fixed profit we were still outperforming most bid bots that were supposedly selling "promotion", I do wonder why that was the case.
Most bid bots had it different as they were not "non-profit", meaning instead of sending the delegators 100% of the bids they would take 5-15% for themselves and who knows what happened with the curation rewards or how much of those were returned. At the same time they operated through bidding windows where they offered say 1 full vote (2% vp) and then garnered bids until vp was back at 100% and depending on the amount of bids in that window (say 1 full vote only gave out 100 steem in rewards) it would determine what ROI the buyers would get if there were many competing for it which is something I personally had no issues with as buying bids to be used for promotion should cost you but since there was low demand in promotion most users stopped buying votes if there already were many votes in the bidding window. Some bots would refund bids if a certain threshold of -15% ROI was reached, some had no limit but most had a 10-15% ROI if there was no competition between the bidding windows for votes.
So the problem here was that with the decrease in price of Steem and decrease in users on the platform most of the time when users purchased votes it was mainly for the profit as there was almost no demand for actual promotion that would cost them for the attention and visibility + a good return the bid bots offered. Imagine a world where you buy an ad on Reddit and aside from getting all the attention for your business and new customers/followers, they would also give you back most of the money you spent on ads and most of the time a profit, sound crazy? Welcome to the past 2 years of Steem.
With the EIP we introduced downvotes to counter exactly this and other disagreement on rewards. On top of that we also got the curve that would lower the rewards depending on where on the scale from 0 to 20 steem rewards the post was at, this is of course something that many were against and the minnows were up in arms pointing at whales taking more of their rewards because they could get themselves to the high end of the curve where the rewards were not taxed anymore. While this was my biggest concern I saw it as something that would be better once more curation happens on Steem by "killing off" profitable bid bot votes.
So as you can see there are a lot of moving parts with the EIP where together they compliment each other but if one of them doesn't happen - such as not using your downvotes at all - it could easily nullify all the other parts of it such as small content creators getting to or past the curve because most stakeholders and ex bid bots would not curate but sell votes which at the same time would disincentivize other stakeholders to curate and be content with the increase in curation rewards.
So let's go past the HF now and look at the changes
Now we have 50/50, 25% "free" downvote mana and the curve which is way too complicated for me to explain but let's just say the closer the rewards are to 20 steem post rewards the less they are penalized by it.
Why we are downvoting profitable bids.
If you've managed to follow along so far you may understand that we can't force bid bots to stop selling profitable votes, there are no actions on the chain to do that except hardfork them out or reset delegations which also would require a HF at the cost of immutability of the chain. What we can do is give small downvotes to users purchasing profitable bids so that they become unprofitable.
Think about it, if a bid bot is at 100% vp because it isn't receiving any customers it will be forced to curate or it will just lose out on curation rewards that have been increased by a lot since the HF. You purchasing a profitable vote does not only give you an unfair advantage to beat the curve compared to every other user not purchasing votes, but at the same time you are taking away curation from the chain by giving them your Steem. On top of that they are now receiving both Steem from you and curation rewards while only giving you a 10-15% profit - that is if the community wouldn't downvote you, but either way the bid bot won't care, it already received the bid which if cast on low quality content would remove a lot of it's curation rewards but even if they received 0 curation rewards they possible got a lot more return from your bid. That bid is then sent to delegators of the bid bot minus a cut and what does that tell us? Oh yeah, delegating to bid bot x is way more profitable than honest curation and we're back to pre-HF content discovery and a broken proof of brain.
Now you may start to see why the downvotes are crucial. Unfortunately we are still seeing a lot of bid bot votes being cast, the bid bots don't want to sell votes for promotion that would not give you a profitable vote back. Why would they, they know most people would not use them then - that's the bait they keep flashing with out there to try and get more customers instead of curating content based on quality, effort or something else that benefits Steem as a whole.
There are many who keep calling our downvotes for "policing" and while I'm not trying to take any credit as we were not the first users to realize the need of these downvotes to increase the amount of stake that is used towards curation, content discovery and a better trending that we had when it was mainly posts there through bids in the past - I have to say that the change has been quick and impactful and I'm glad to see so many more ex bid bots going curation or at least shifting to hybrid. I hope they realize why they need to make the change into not selling profitable votes as it is unsustainable and only hurts the price of Steem as it has in the past 2 years.
Any bid bots still fighting this or customers being for it can't be viewed as anything else but only being interested in the Steem ROI in my opinion. I have an open mind and would love to hear your opinions on this. Blaming the decline in price on the downvotes after years of dropping in value and out of alexa rankings is pretty unfair considering the difference it has caused in honest curation where good authors have to purchase votes instead of getting them for free in a working proof of brain system that sets aside our dpos model from the rest.
Selling votes is something that can co-exist with curation, though. If the userbase on Steem is much bigger and people want to purchase votes that don't directly result in a profit then they are free to do so and the rest of users are free to downvote them based on the content they are promoting. We at @ocdb won't target unprofitable votes and will move towards the next step that we started off with early in the HF - which was breaking off voting rings that would vote-trade and only curate a certain low amount of users and farmy posts and successfully broke off two big ones while at it. The community will then decide if they want to downvote unprofitable votes, it is also not hard to imagine that if the content really is good the customer of the paid votes may end up with a profit on top of it - but that's for the wisdomw of the crowd and proof of brain to decide, not the lack of downvotes and bid bot owners enticing them with guaranteed profitable votes that we had pre-HF.
Anyway, I wanted to make some things clear after some discussion today in the steemspeak server where @fyrstikken was talking.
Let me know your thoughts, we are flexible and open to any better solutions.
Unfortunately the more posts I see trying to justify something that is supposed to be great the more I get the feeling that it isn't working. When something is working it doesn't need any justification, it speaks for itself.
What a load of wank.
Right, because things worked soooooo perfectly before all this.
mic drop
Yes, no reasonable answers, probably there aren't any, activity is way down to what it was just at the beginning of this year according to penguinpablo, of course his data could be wrong.
Eh, not entirely true. Sometimes ideas and concepts and their functions are more complex than what they seem on a surface level. Hence the need for explanations.
Yes you are right, but constant explanations, from the same people? I think something is not going right.
Michalcidyo's greatest Paiting
> Newsteem's Creation
Just show that to the nonbelievers, it will purify them!
roflmao
Who the fuck is still buying votes?? I am guessing it is stuff that won't get much "attention" (votes) otherwise.
Edit: looking forward to the end of voting rings. If they started to actually curate content instead, perhaps all that steem they have accumulated will be worth something.
Many third world peeps and those who know bots like @minnowvotes, @boomerang, etc. have no cap on ROI.
There are still some, it's not difficult to find them. The return on bought votes is now amazing, or would be if they were left alone.
yeah, I am sure they are amazing. the return for the sellers is pretty good too.
As it always was!
If people are that butthurt about the old system why not wait to build a Shit Media token or build a Steem engine ShiToken and run a bid bot there and all the botters and their customers can post and bid bot to their hearts content!
If it’s such a beneficial service surly that tribe would be a success independent from steem!
I’m keen to eat humble pie if that’s true
As long as they just sell profitable votes in their own SE token while accepting steem or said SE token it's all good.
They are doing this, but they are selling the tokens for Steem votes ;) SCT.
the (cake) pie is a lie
I'd bet there are tons of voting rings being made right now and we have a lot of voting ring alike systems out there as well... dwindling in the grey area.
I’ve seen the change and yes any change is going to be met with resistance! All those who benefitted from it aren’t going to be happy with the changes I get that and they can voice their concerns and if they really don’t like it move on
I think it’s been a good change! I’ve been curated more now then i have have before and found content easier now!
I just think that we are curating from a smaller pool than it was during the boom cycle so same authors will pop up along with your autovotes, circle jerkers and vote traders but that’s the next step I’m sure we will tackle
I don’t see why people should stop bid bottling if they want visibility! By all means do it and set it to null and rock it burn some steem and everyone wins
Solving one problem at a time is how winning is done
So, to avoid ocd downvotes one must shout scream, rant, threaten, etc?
If you have kids, that would be a bad educational advice..
But I guess
Quod licet iovis, non licet bovis.
As usual.
The bid bots didn't believe us until we got serious, now it's time to explain to the sellers that they got flags coming, too.
People that are only here to dump coins shouldn't get rewards, imo.
They were surviving before they found steem.
We are either building a sustainable culture, or we don't survive long term.
We get as much tyranny as we tolerate.
The problem, of course IMHO, lies within cutting off the creators from any possibility to get their content proper community feedback. Yes it is. What is more, the so called crusaders have led to diminishing of whole non-English communities, which can't get curators' attention.
Because this has led to gathering of SP into mega whales
Yeah that's a ridiculous statement.
No substance or time to base that on at all.
What is a voting ring?
Well if you create 5-10 accounts and delegate your SP around there and then you start upvoting just each other (urself) with that accounts while spamming shit posts (at best automated).
Oh ok. Thanks for the clarification
here's another type of voting ring @sp-group @qurator and probably many others
I hope things went smoothly. We all remember the drama not so long ago with him starting in the SFR discord room.
Wasn't in there long until the usual suspects started calling one names and useless, etc. :p
..puuh!..lot of stuff..may downvotes really are necessary in some cases..for me as a little fish it doesn’t change a lot..but had a few times the situation that a post was downvoted and asking why he/her did it, nobody answered..would be good to know why downvoted..except for the reason you talk about..guess for a not little group of steemians, steemit hasn’t anymore or even never had to do with posting, discussing, curating and so on, but it is just the way to make money..and so there will be a way also for this system..am I wrong?..
How do you decide which bidbots are selling profitable upvotes or not-profitable upvotes? Of course you don't check every transaction to see if it was profitable or not.
I assume that you have a list of bots that sell profitable votes and a list of those that sell not-profitable votes and you simply downvote those that buy profitable votes.
If that is the case, I would like to see that list of the bots that sell not-profitable votes because I want to promote my posts and I don't want to be downvoted for buying these not-profitable upvotes.
It's an InOut assumption, energy can't get lost in a closed system.
You can set @null as beneficiary (20%+ recommended) or fully decline rewards when it's only about promotion
Wouldn't it be enough of a business model to just gather SP delegations, post 10-Times a day and then self upvotes them? It should have the same effect as any size of an upvote circle. So there is a real fundamental problem with the reward system. My Solution would be an dynamic reward system. Upvotes should not have linear rewards independent of what they upvote. Newer Post with more engagement and made by reliable authors could utilize more % of a dynamic actual vote value.
The reward system has that fundamental problem, as long as most of the community doesn't use their downvotes. It can be limited a lot if they did.
@acidyo hey, the most staked members of this community are welcome to choose whatever direction they want for Steem. If you folk really want a flag-friendly place that is fine, I will simply view STEEM to be a shitcoin and focus on quality SMTs that plan to build a following and then eventually migrate over to being their own blockchains.
One of the cool things about SE tokens and SMTs is that they are a great way to engage a community and test the waters for adpotion before becoming a separate chain. Once a project has proof of interest in their project a Steem clone or a Loom dapp is not that expensive to get going.
Steem as a blockchain has good bones. Still, a system with downvotes, especially one in which each account has more access to downvotes than they do upvotes is not useful as a universal currency or curation platform.
For extremely niche topics such as a Chevrolet classic car collector forum you can have upvotes and downvotes and it work. However, if the system is universal the Ford classic car collector community could go militia on the Chevrolet community's ass and go in guns blazing just for the fuck of it.
That is the real reason downvotes don't work. They are a weapon for the internet. If the upvote/downvote system of Steem were universal across the web you would be seeing a level of ideological warfare online like never before.
Steemit Inc. understands this and realizes that it was all an experiment that has been proven to not work. That is why they are changing their narrative of what Steem should be/do now. And there is talk of eliminating the reward pool altogether and replacing it with a mere RC system. At this point, that is probably the thing to do, but its still likely a losing strategy.
However, what I would like to point out is that everyone here that is so strongly advocating for going after the bidbots and the bidbot users is that you all quite hypocritically just ignore or join in on the madness that is @burnpost.
There is nothing more anti-POB than the burnpost project. There is nothing on Steem more selfish and personal ROI-driven than that project. Authors are being completely negated while the curators are stuffing their pockets with a larger share of the network value for spam. Why no downvotes on that?
Do you know what @burnpost does?
Yes, I understand it. I believed in it until I looked into it. It is not really helping the SBD peg, after all, is SBD $1? Nope, last I checked it sits around $0.61. So maybe you can say that the burnpost project is only 39% bullshit...
It also burns STEEM, but only on the author side, not the curator side. That is why what it does is horrible. This system, having several witnesses and whales participating is draining the reward pool, essentially stealing it from hard working authors while boosting the overall network ownership for those curating the posts. It is absolutely terrible.
The plan is to siphon rewards away from authors that might add to the sell wall on exchanges and burn those author rewards. It is a complete abandonment of the POB distribution system in favor of whale ROI. You have to understand how scammy that is, we tell everyone the rules, that 50% go to authors and 50% go to curators that have invested, then the authors give their time and effort, but because the pool goes where the votes send it, and much of the vote weight is being sent to a spam post + spam comments to be burned it kinda makes that false advertising.
The burnpost project is nothing but spam, spam that has reached trending. Nevertheless, Steemcleaners does nothing, while it will go after anyone small it wants. This thing spams every day with posts and comments and Steemcleaners focus on others that do not get a fraction of the rewards.
I have tried to point this out to them and they don't respond. Steem has rules put in place by whales, but the whales do not obey these rules themselves. The crony capitalism needs to stop.
I also think @burnpost should disallow curation rewards
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Meanwhile while you are all arguing back and forth about old vs new the new crisis rising is unfolding under all the distraction. The very fact that APPICS is being allowed to bring what will be untold numbers of people onto the platform and post a picture and be rewarded way more than some making a few cents off a paid upvote is alarming. The amounts of upvote circle jerking each other and amounts earned for little effort keeps rising everyday. The rest of us would be slapped silly using such tactics. You need to stop arguing and take a serious look at the soldier account.
Alarming only to you apparently. And you need to take something for that Soldier fetish of yours.
Oh it was alarming to others alright. I waiting to hear back from them. You need not waste any time looking for them on here.
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Great , still downvoted for being so slow to get it and causing so much drama.
Ps: I hope that doesn't mean destroying to zero anyone who end up buying a vote with 1% profit, You've done that a lot.
Great , still downvoted for being so slow to get it and causing so much drama.
Ps: I hope that doesn't mean destroying to zero anyone who end up buying a vote with 1% profit, You've done that a lot.
Someone tell me how to know by how much to counter @Haejin annoying censorship and I won't upvote these so high.
The only way I can think of is to use Partiko and manually calculate it from the pluses and minuses. Sadly the non-linear algo kicks in and screws it up. Someone needs to build a real-time slider.
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