I don't condone removing upvotes unless the post is clearly some type of scam or plagiarism. Removing a downvote without a refund just due to quality of content is basically stealing - someone paid for a service and the funds were taken but the service was not delivered (on purpose).
Ideally with #newsteem people won't purchase votes for "unworthy" content in the first place because it will be a money-losing proposition due to the downvotes. So if this works bot owners won't need to remove votes or use a whitelist because the system will police itself.
As for a bot war, I find that unlikely since I think most of the bot owners are actually pretty responsible. If they don't care what they are promoting it's usually because they just don't care anymore and not because of any malicious intent.
Doesn't this just create an easy way for someone to gain immunity from bot downvotes: Just buy a small vote from most or all of the bots. The bots (in your vision) won't remove the vote and presumably won't downvote something they already upvoted (this would be the same as removing the vote).
Exactly. Lol. Matts post was basically pointless.
"Responsible bot owners" my ass...
Posted using Partiko Android
I don't really know how things will play out yet. The point here is just that there is behavior we want to encourage and behavior we want to discourage and I'm hoping we can work together using the new tools available to do that.
More specifically to your scenario - the bots are not the only ones who can downvote things. It only takes a relatively small downvote to wipe out the profits made from a significant amount of purchased upvotes, it's not 1-to-1 since the profit from buying votes is typically 10-20% at most.
Yes but the main point of your post was that bots, as long as they continue to receive large delegations and represent a large portion of the voting stake, should be playing an important role in downvoting. I question whether this will be the case in the model you laid out, especially over time as people realize they can immunize themselves from those nasty bot downvotes (which you want to encourage) by buying tiny votes from each bot (or at least the ones active in downvoting)
I think your approach needs some iteration here. Overall I agree on not knowing how things will work out, and the iteration can certainly come later.
The problem is not that shitposts are promoted. The problem is that any post can be promoted, while STEEM does not profit from this advertising. The only people profiting from it are delegators and bidbot owners, at the expense of the coin price. So it's not even clear if they are profiting from this compared to a scenario where they burn a percentage of the returns.
Having bidbots as a sink will help the price, make it more fair to everyone (since you get exposure only if you loose something for it), and will also make everyone feel better about seeing posts they are not interested in on trending.
How does it hurt the price? I would say that it does not hurt the price but actually helps the price. Delegators and bidbot owners are hodlers, which is a value. Inflation harms hodlers, but hodlers allow their stake to be reduced slightly in order for high quality content to draw more people to the Steem platform.
Bidbot owners and delegators are the ones invested heavily in STEEM, propping up the value of it. The content producers are not the ones creating the value of STEEM directly, but indirectly. While the direct value of STEEM comes from investors buying up STEEM and holding it. These people want as much of an ROI as they can get, logically. Bidbot services were a useful way of optimizing investor ROI, while providing a useful value (promotion) to content producers with the potential of gaining some percentage of profit on top of the initial investment. This is shared profits, which is good.
At least, this is what I believe to be reasonable. I can respect that you might disagree.
Thanks for your long replies.
Of course hodlers like to have a return, but I would say that most investors are first here for many other reasons, not returns on investment. Also, most people don’t even know about the possibilty of having that return before investing in steem.
If ROI was a great selling point, then why not increase the inflation to 100% per year and give it to hodlers and delegators? They’ll love the profit and buy more steem? I don’t think so.
What I was proposing is to reward delegators, but reduce their ROI by 20%, and burn that 20%. They still have a profit, but they also help burn steem :)
Posted using Partiko iOS
Fair enough.
I wonder what content/accounts the bots will be targeting then as it sounds like unless the work is scam/plagiarism, the downvotes will be few and far between.
Would you consider downvoting a content creator who produces ten posts a day, which receive next to no engagement, only to apply their own stake?
I DO condone vote removal and I find it amazing you think one person should earn the Steem from selling votes to shit posters and I in turn should downvote it.
If the bot owners set some standards and enforced them things would be much different now.
It's not right for someone to sell a service, accept money for it, and then purposefully not deliver the service. That is just stealing whether it's for vote selling on Steem or anything else. It's also not just as simple as asking the vote selling services to refund the payment for any removed votes, because while they can remove the vote they cannot get back the voting power that was used.
The whole way Steem is set up to work is that if the community feels that a post has more rewards than it should, they can downvote it. The problem was that in the past it cost money (in the form of reduced voting power) to downvote. With HF21, that will change, and it presents an opportunity to make changes to how vote buying and selling works on the platform.
It's very easy to yell at bot owners to "have standards", but people have been yelling about that for years and it will never happen. With the free downvotes we now have the opportunity to solve the problem from a different angle - take away the profit from shitposting and buying votes - so then it won't even matter if the bots have "standards" or not.
So, yes, I do think you and I and everyone who cares should use their new free downvote to downvote shitposts upvoted by bots. It only takes a relatively small amount of downvotes to counter all the profit made from buying votes, and once "shitposters" stop making money buying votes they will stop altogether and all will be well with the world.
I've been downvoting this entire time, without free downvotes.
Yelling about having standard.. .It's as simple as posting ... Don't use my bidbot to upvote 1 picture posts, or links from youtube. "It will never happen" is utter bullshit and a cop out.
Anyway here we are and it least it gets cheaper.