Why don't you guys just implement a profit cap? That makes the most sense to me. These bots are supposed to be used for promotion purposes and not to make profit (Directly anyway). By setting a profit cap of 0% all the people abusing the system will simply stop using the services all on their own.
VOTED FOR VISIBILITY
I Strongly disagree with this solution.
If the main problem was people making too much money then your solution would make sense. Your solution would only increase the profits the Bid Bots are already making an encourage more people to make bots...
I think the main problem with Trending is "Non-trend" worthy articles pushed to the top by the same few people.
Either blacklist abusers or changing how trending works in general might be a better solution.
Agree with you my friend @digitokash.
What about separating the posts voted up by bots versus organically voted up. Ultimately, using a bid bot is advertising and one of the things a lot of people here are trying to get away from is advertising.
Further to that, what if the bid bots somehow rewarded the reader? Instead of money going to the bot to vote content artificially up, they money goes to users who choose to read the content.
One of the other blockchain social media platforms is doing that. sola or something like that or ong social. Can't remember which one.
Kind of like swagbucks pays people to watch advert videos by paying them a fraction of a cent for each video. Money goes to the viewer rather than the advertiser.
That won't stop users from buying votes from 5 different bid-bots which pushes them to the top trending spots.
Bids are publicly accessible right?
@oups
yes, they are
Well what incentive would they have to push the content to trending? They are clearly making money from the votes. If they decide that they still want to spend all that money getting to trending after a 0% profit cap they clearly think that they have a good/important article. If this was implemented there is NO way to abuse the bots, sure having a cap on 1 bot might not do much but this would need to be something every bot supported.
Let's say you want to promote your service, ico or whatever - then you don't really care about the ROI of this post but more about the publicity.
That's why ROI capping won't solve this problem.