You have some very basic math on the bidbots.
For example, a 100SBD bid with a 10% ROI requires a bid worth 220SBD at payout. The author gets 50% rewards which is 100SBD from their investment and 10SBD ROI. 220SBD is something like 30% of Steem current hourly production (SPS gets around 70 an hour at 10%). No one deserves this much just for buying it. This is what is meant by bid bot abuse.
A 10% ROI on a 100SBD bid would be 110SBD. 220SBD would be 110% profit.
Edit: Disregard this, I thought you were referring to the profits on pre-hf21. My bad.
However, I don't understand why some people downvote all bidbots. They are useful for trying to promote your content. Especially for newer accounts with hardly any followers like myself.
Glad you have figured out my explanation. It's definitely confusing, especially for beginners.
Now the upvote required is literally 22X the ROI value (220 SBD for 10 SBD profit). Before HF21 it was around ~15X the ROI value (147SBD for 10 SBD profit).
The difference is significant, but the biggest difference now is the free downvotes to counter this issue.
People trying to promote content either need to be willing to give away all post rewards to beneficiaries like null or steem.dao (until a consensus is formed), or risk downvotes.
If you are trying to promote your account as a blogger it can be tough. However, when downvotes were around no one read the highly valued posts anyway. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work or stunningly amazing content to do well on Steem.
Asides from focusing on your content, I recommend you join some contests run by larger accounts, follow people who's content you like and engage etc to get your name out there. It's tough, but possible.
Seems a bit self-defeating and counter-intuitive to downvote on quality content that utilizes the bidbots though. And giving away all the post rewards would kind of defeat the purpose of posting here and trying to promote your content in the first place.
I mean I could understand if there were alternatives other than the promoted posts on Steemit which do absolutely nothing, at least in my experiences. eSteem is doing a better job injecting sponsored posts in to feeds which is a good idea, but that's limited to a very small user base.
And I'm not so much worried about it for myself. I don't post anything special anyway. I just think the downvote everything groups are a bit out of line and potentially doing more harm than good.
Are there any bots that have no ROI? Say, I put in 100SBD and in return I just get a vote to get my money back or get a vote equal to the value of what I paid? If the issue is the ROI, would this be a possible solution to allowing promotion and stopping downvotes?
Quality is difficult to judge and generally based on opinion and consensus. However, as soon as you bid on your post people decided if it is overrewarded which is why people are actually against using bid bots for promotion.
EDIT: To answer your question, just bidding for 0% ROI is not a solution. This still requires a vote of 20X your bid which is still 5X the definition of abuse several of the cleaners follow. Also, why should we have to calculate this? You are basically going to need to set a beneficiary to receive most if not all of your rewards to avoid a downvote if you bid a lot on your posts.
Taking an unfair share of rewards from the reward pool is not a fair solution for a lack of promotion. People who want to promote their posts need to understand this.
Unfortunately, a good solution doesn't exist. So in the meantime, I recommend people do not bid on their post to promote it because of the negative attention that is received.
According to the general definition, if a post's rewards are 2X ~ 10X what it would earn organically, this is bid bot abuse. For example if we remove the bids and your post sinks down from 5 SBD to 0.25 SBD this is 20X and abuse by almost everyone's definition.
Downvoting may be doing more harm than good, but that is difficult to judge actually. A lot of people steer clear of Steem because of vote purchasing.
Imagine if politicians were allowed to purchase votes? This is some people's attitude towards vote purchasing.
I think the vote sellers/bid bot owners have a duty to warn their clients of the potential to receive down votes. The current situation makes the downvoter warn them and the buyers are confused (or pretend to be and are just upset).
Since the bot owners rarely warn people of the controversy, people still bid. The bot owners still sell and are very aware of the controversy. Some of them don't even mention in a comment that a promotion was bought, this is deceptive advertising.
Painting downvoters as the bad guys is easy, but they are trying to fix the blockchain, it's actually the vote sellers that are wrecking it in the name of profit. In the meantime, it's great you want to promote your post and all, but not at the expense of the community.
This is a statement I find rather troubling about the situation. You made a reference to politicians buying votes, but if your definition of abuse is correlated to what a post earns "organically" then how is that much different? The people with big accounts will be able to get away with this more so in the end, people with less of a following will be the ones to suffer more. You can see the error in that logic right?
I'm not trying to paint anyone as the bad guy here. I just think both sides are pretty equally flawed. I understand your perspective to an extent. But, I can also see a benefit to the bots too.
Also, I said 0% ROI or just pay 100SBD for a 100SBD vote (which would be a negative ROI). In that scenario you'd be losing 50% to curation at the expense of promoting your post. If there was someone offering that as a service then would it be acceptable to use it?
Actually now that there aren't so many people buying votes, abuse fighters amd cleaners are going after vote traders or circle jerkers as some call it.
However unlike vote buyers vote traders are definitely not doing it for promotion, but they do have a lot of stake and are removing a lot of steem from the reward pool.
There are some people arguing for vests to be returned faster (for a price) to appease big investors.
Paying 100 sbd for a 100sbd vot still removes 100sbd from the reward pool for curation even if you aren't getting half. The bot owner will get like 20% returned in curation atleastband 100sbd from thr purchase, meaning they are earning around 120% for their vote which is excellent.
The entire community still looses honesty and the reward pool, the buyer loses 50% but gets promoted, the seller still profits.
Honestly, it's better than what is happening now or pre hf21, but I doubt most people will agree it is fair, just a little better.
Good, I think the circle jerk voting is a much larger issue. I could easily name a couple dozen people that do it. Glad that's being taken care of finally.
I see what you're saying. There really just needs to be some other sort of mechanism in place to allow promotions. It's a failure of Steemit at the end of the day. Like I said, there's already some viable options with the example of eSteem. Imo, Steemit is a junk interface and it's a shame it's known as the main interface to Steem. I think it really hampers growth of the platform.
the worst is when they go downvote you when you get an organic @booster upvote from @fyrstikken and then they go around and leave their own organic bid bot upvotes alone and no one is downvoting the downvoters, its just basic human corruption and the scariest type where the people believe they are perfect and that their somehow always right, as if the FREE MARKET doesnt know better. They also correlate low price of steem hahaah with bid bots! theyre all just losers man , people who were on top when steem was high now theyre so desperate because they lost ALL their money lol