As upvoting bots have exploded in popularity with the SBD and Steem price increases combined with the tool by @yabapmatt to track bot upvotes, the amount of bids coming into voting bots has increased so much that minimum bids are increasing on many bots including mine!
The new minimum bid for an upvote is now 0.5 SBD or Steem on my bot. Make a bid for an upvote by sending at least 0.5 SBD or Steem to @jerrybanfield in a transfer along with the URL to the post on steemit.com in a memo. Bids for less than this will be automatically refunded. If a bid somehow is placed and does not result in an upvote after 5 hours, we can ask for a manual refund in my discord channel linked at https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ with the link to the post and a screenshot of the transfer along with tagging @jerrybanfield.
Why not include smaller bids?
The higher a voting bot's total value, the higher the minimum bid needs to be also because of how Steem rounds smaller votes and because of the time it takes to make the votes. On the @jerrybanfield bot, the last round of voting dropped voting power from 100% to 97% instead of 98% because of the amount of 0.1 SBD bids being rounded slightly up and the minimum time between votes being 3 seconds. When the voting power goes below 98%, the bot is operating less efficiently with longer times between votes and incorrectly calculating the value of bids leading to a lower return for delegators and projects while increasing the returns for those sending smaller bids.
Bids to @jerrybanfield fund projects!
50% of the earnings from the bids received by the @jerrybanfield voting bot pay out directly to projects funding Steem via @budgets while the other half go back to delegators every day in automatic payouts. In the first month, we have funded the following projects with our bids for over $20,000 in Steem and SBD!
- The First YouTube Ad for Steemit in 2018! by @joeparys
- Proposal: Quickly and easily add a Creative Common Attribution International License watermark for sharing by @pegarissimo.
- 50 Million Ads for Steem on Facebook, Google, and YouTube! which is my ongoing project to advertise Steem.
- STEEMPUNK-NET -- MMORPG on the STEEM Blockchain -- already in open beta testing -- attracting players from outside STEEM by @steempunknet.
- SteemPlus budget proposal: Empowering Steemit and Busy users with more features by @steem-plus.
We also have pledged support to several contests and are about to announce a huge contest to build what might become the world's top app for peer to peer exchanges of fiat with cryptocurrency! Our goal is to collaborate together in promoting our posts, help investors earn a consistent return by delegating Steem power, and fund projects helping to build our community which will ultimately contribute to a higher Steem price.
Every witness vote for @jerrybanfield at https://steemit.com/~witnesses helps increase the funding available for projects because I do not receive a payout on the 101,000+ Steem power I have contributed and am effectively giving what would be about $1,000 a day for me in earnings back to @budgets and delegators!
Thank you very much to @freedom for the top deleagtion and witness vote! In 2018 we hope to see more projects submitted to help ensure we fund the greatest variety of people and ideas! Thank you for reading this update and for collaborating with us to continue growing our community here!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
@jerrybanfield, Today I made 10sbd transfer and you did not upvote or refund me. Please double check your wallet transactions
I really feel this self upvote by proxy stuff, what is basically what voting bots are, is hurting the platform. There is lots of great but undervalued content deserving of curation based rewards, but with all the vote bot voting power going to proxied self upvotes of mostly crap, don't you think the platform would be better served with powerfull upvote bot owners fitting in some actual , even if it minimal curration into the upvote service? I understand you want to make maximum profit from your high curration power, but I'm sure you guys could come up with a system where you at least do quick curration and reject (+refund) powerfull upvote request for crap posts. Without checks like these, I feel vote bots will end up destroying the quality controls for the platform and threaten the long term value both of the platform and of investments made into the platform by the people running these bots.
What is your opinion on this assessment of the current vote bot craze and on your own use of providing such a service?
I have been in these bots of a few weeks now and I do not think most of the posts are crap. Many, many of your fav steemers are in there, I am sure of that. I see many big names daily.
I see at it as a way for whales to help us without having to stop doing their important whale stuff.
I would like to see the bots coordinate with places like @cheetah and @steemcleaners. That would knock out most of the garbage to the extent it is using the bots.
I'm using them daily now to:
The bots are huge win for me on all counts. I just pray to the Gods of Steemit not to take them away.
I do not use them in the first couple of days. I think "trending" and "hot" are not worth my effort since I never look at them myself.
Agree with this post except from the naive trust in Steemcleaners and Cheetah.
I have to remark that Cheetah despite some of its bad deeds is still not as bad as Steemcleaners, which is not entirely bad, but bad.
This comment has received a 22.73 % upvote from @steemdiffuser thanks to: @fersher. Steem on my friend!
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Think "vote" bots are a huge drain on the platform. Greedy whales aren't a problem. Lazy whales aren't a problem, but lazy greedy whales IMO are. By running these bots they are diluting the reward pool with fake curation power. If they would just have been lazy and wouldn't have voted at all, everyone real's voting impact would have been bigger, but then they wouldn't have earned any curration rewards. If they would have used the voting power for real votes, they would have done real curration so increasing the percentage of real vote payout from the reward pool even more than if they didn't vote at all. But what do the lazy greedy whales do? They run bots that vote indiscriminately on anything that they get paid for to vote for, what usually means they are self upvote by proxy. They do zero work for max profit. And for us small guys? It's a prissinors dilemma of sorts. We would collectively make most from the reward pool if nobody would use upvote bots and only real votes would weigh towards reward pool distribution and worse if everyone used them. Yet for an individual user/prisoner, either using the vote bots or ratting out your partner would seem the best, and in fact it is if but only if the other guy doesn't do the same.
I really hope one of the whales will consider doing some good with his/her voting power and will start running a vote bot vote neutraliser bot. I'dd absolutely would donate my spare time to writing and maintaining a good vote bot vote neutraliser bot to help out.
I don't have any time to worry about what the whales do or what their motivation is. I can only take advantage of what they offer and hope another whale doesn't hate the idea enough to kill me.
Someone is already working on the bot neutralizer but then some other person decided to do some threats to the bot runners and they changed some rules. There are a lot less spammy type posts in there now in the last week or so based on all that.
I can see the eagerness of many here for killing minnows, so maybe you will get your chance. They die at rate of 97% already according to @arcange daily reports so apparently they are not valued or needed.
I'm using my prisoner status to take advantage of what is given since I made it this far. Think of this like a video game and maybe you will have less stress. In 8 years years of pushing my weight loss message - this is the most lucrative place even down here in minnowland. And all my other sites are getting great traffic; book sales and affiliate sales are up etc.
As long as the Alexa ranking holds, I'm working as many angles as I can. If I decide to start worrying about "fairness" of the reward pool I'm way off track to my purpose in life.
In the prisoner's dilemma, two prisoners have a choice:
If both stay silent, both get a decent outcome. If one rats out his mate that one will get the best outcome while screwing over his mate to get the worst outcome possible. If both rat out the other, the result is crap for both.
This same model applies to the use of paid for vote bots. Yes, you are in a good place using them, things are looking good for you because you use them and many others do not. And as long as people who realize the ethical issue with how proxied self-upvotes screw over minnows and especially redfish who with the growing use of vote bots might never even gain minnow status.
Please understand, I'm not against whales being paid for their 'attention'. That is, if you have good content, and would pay @jerrybantfield to look at it and either upvote you if he likes your content or give you a partial refund if it's crap. I'm against the indiscriminate upvoting by his money accepting bot that would upvote a silly status report of my @croupierbot in exactly the same way it would upvote a blog post by you where you spent a full month on figuring out how to cure obesity by eating nothing but cheese and radishes.
You might deserve the upvote, my automated status report sureley would not and running a bot, Jerry promotes false upvotes and purely narcisistic self upvotes.
Yes, @steamcleaners is doing a great job and I have high hopes for @freezepeach, but there are really two big problems remaining that could use a more thorough approach. The first one, tag spam is probably the most dificult to tackle but also arguably the one that hurts the platform most.
In second place is basically the use of upvote bots. We really could use something of a combination of @steemcleaners and @freezepeach. @freezepeach aims to neutralize false flags what I think is an amazing concept and an initiative deserving delegations, but how about the other side of the spectrum: false upvotes. Don't they deserve a similar initiative aimed at neutralizing (neutralizing, not flagging, the upvote is the target, not the post, so care must be taken not to exceed the rshares of the comment bot upvote) false upvotes.
But then there is the point you mentioned, minnows will be flagged out of existence for sticking up for themselves. Run a bot to clean up the steemit eco system and before you know it some dolphin, orca or whale with a vested interest in keeping false flagging profitable will take it upon him/her-self to threaten you and flag you into oblivian. So unless a few orca's or a whale decides to help protect the small guys, we'll all just keep being screwed over by bot owners and their narcissistic minions.
Just an idea what we'dd be up against, and the kind of abuse anyone getting behind an anti-false-upvote bot would be up against, I ran a tiny little test of a concept bot like that.
As a mere minnow I won't dare to run a bot like this myself, so I can only hope there will be whales who really care for us minnows and really care for the platform and its long term value enough to run better versions of bots like mine in order to attack the business model that enables this type of platform abuse at its core. But then I'm afraid with the current flag-war mentality, even a whale who agrees with the concept will think twice before risking vote bot owner going 1920s Chicago style flag-war on them.
Good Lord - You have big things on your mind. I have interest in none of it and will just carry on posting my photos and taking advantage of what is here.
I have been on too many failed platforms for worry about such details. This only one I try to improve at my level is the kill rate for new minnows.
Trust me on this one - Nobody Cares.
"kill rate for new minnows" ? Well, using and running vote bots is likely to contribute to reducing that as it reduces the probability of new steemit users to even reach minnow status to begin with.
So if your goal is to decrease the kill rate for minnows by increasing the kill rate for redfish, you are really contributing.
Just have a look at how new redfish are doing on , say fiction where often my measily $0.20 worth upvote could be the bigest part of their total reward for a truly talented author, but then it's a great platform, because a minnow can self upvote a fuzzy picture that most people would have thrown away as unsuitable to post on any social media, through proxied self upvote and reap $2.00 in vanity rewards while screwing over those worthless red fish in the process and stopping them from reaching that coveted 1 MSTEEM minnow slider bar.
And the great thing, If you keep it up, next year, a fuzzy photo self upvote vanity reward will get you that well deserved $20 instead of that meezely $2you are reaping now and an the price? Just an other litle graveyard of talented red-fish that gave up because they never managed to reap any benefits from their work. Yeah, no time to worry about the details?
I've used these bots in the past because I really didn't understand how the reward pool works then, but if you tale a little moment to understand, you will grasp that the vote bot economy is a big red-fish killer that turns steemit from a meritocratic system of rewarding good content into the social media variant of a vanity press.
Not having time to worry about the details is what allows this type of reward pool abuse to flourish as it does.
Just remember, if we keep this up together, steemit is likely to end up as just an other failed platform as you and your votebot running whales would have effectively sucked all the lifeblood from it.
And trust me, it's not that nobody cares, I've had some out of band responses on my bot efforts, also from bigger fish, and it's that nobody dares to go against the overwhelming voting power of the flame-war ready vote bot owner crowd. @jerrybandfield is one of the friendlier big guys, so I'm confident he won't flag my reputation into nothingness for asking him to consider manually curating his service, but with some of the other bot owners, I would have been whiped out of existence for such a suggestion.
+1 @pibara - ABSOLUTELY! Why use bots? Can a "bot" decide about the quality of a post (where the word "quality" itself is "subjective" in the first place)? This will definitely hurt the community, because it's AGAINST the nature of a SOCIAL PLATFORM! Why don't we sign-out and let the bots socialize then? Does it make any sense?
voting bots should not exist u_ú
Thank you for helping steem so much.
Hi @jerrybanfield. It seems like the recent rise in bot popularity has caused many bids to return negative ROI after curation. Is there anything that can be done to limit demand to maintain the quality of the supply?
@jigstrike - Great Question :-)
@jerrybanfield, great post - resteemed, Jerry would you be interested in doing a post sometime, on optimising curation rewards, I am sure you know a lot about this, but it seems to be a topic that many Stemians struggle with. Cheers Scott
How much is an upvote from this bot worth?
me interesting too.
I just used his bot. I bid 3 Steem and got about a $5 upvote.
The amount of your post is then split between you and curators, so the 5$ wil be distributed as well, right?
I used to pay for bots to randowhale, but then realized it wasn’t any advantage to me. Am I wrong?
Ask me again in a week...then I will know.
not worthy
Just used your bot again jerry on my new post! Love your cause of the bot and love your account plus content. Keep on going you got my support!
How do I use the bot?
the answer is in the post above,
@jerrybanfield Thank you for all the COOL Stuff you do to make STEEMIT the best place of all to Blog and Earn. We are so Blessed to be involved at this point in Time. 2018 will be HUGE !
thank you this is very useful
I know that some people on here have turned their nose up at these bots, but I think that they offer a more level playing field in the competition for the reward pool. Yes, you still need the resources to make the bets, but acquiring those resources is not as difficult as trying to essentially win the lottery on here. I view them more like a marketing tool, using them to help users gain the visibility they need to build an audience. Looking forward to trying out your bot, @jerrybanfield.
@jerrybanfield If I send you 1SBD and a link in the wallet menu will you upvote my post?
Never knew you had a bot also Jerry! Will look to use this in the future. How profitable are they for you? It intrigues me. :)
Hlw my dear @jerrybnfield i love you because i your fan. have a nice day.
Thank you for sharing @jerrybanfield amazing work for what your bot does! Great Win Win!
You have my vote, Jerry. Would the community be interested in a bot that uses PageRank of the poster to decide if it's worth being upvoted - we the $FLOW team call this "Proof of Flow" - look at this proposal for more info:
https://www.yours.org/content/a-letter-to-doge--proof-of--social-value--b8d33102f720
Hi Jerry. Do you have a video on how to delegate steem power to your bot?
Thanks Jerry. i use your bot almost everyday. Keep up the good work!!
Thank you
hi I m mounir from algeria and I m new I want to learn from you how I get steem friend and how I get the mony from coment and shair
Always success for you sir @jerrybanfield
I vote you wetnest
Up up up
Good lucky
@jerrybanfield - It doesn't matter to increase the minimum bid as you will bring back certain benefit to our Steem Community. What my concern is the services of Bot. Bid (qualified bid) but no upvote and ignore when raise question. This is really pain in the ass and gradually destroy Steem Community as a whole. @btcnoodle @mutitum
I'm still brand new in this platform and community. I am still learning how it all works. Thanks to you I decided to participate I saw you post on Facebook. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
💛 Thanks for sharing 💛
Love you too Jerry!
Why all bots and you people changing minimum bid to 0.5....?
Great steem
Terima kasihh telah berbagi ini sangat berguna
Good post. Nice info yor fren
Let us earn!
@jerrybanfield, Bugs in Streemian. First tag does not appear in category list. Plz help me.
Thanks @jerry
allow me to translate to india this information is very important, for the steemit user in indonesia know and i will take your special name, i really like you, please allow me to translate this to indonesia and i explain to the user steemit in indonesia
Thanks for the post. Was of great help. Thumbs up!!
Thanks for post!
Why didn't you make a separate account for it with a different username instead of having a bot with your name?
Branding!
Nice info Jerry. Didn't know about all those projects.
I will definitely use your bot. As a new steemit member its hard to promote post without using a bot :)
Hey @jerrybanfield. I'm currently working on a budget proposal to present to your team. Where can I drop it? Welldone for the good works you are doing for the Steem blockchain. This is what it really takes to be a witness. Not just saying it with the lips. Cheers!
@nairadaddy tag it with #budget as the first tag and that will help me see it!
Hey. jerry that’s very generous of you. Everybody should vote this post so you can keep doing what you are doing.
Hmmm Whole game depending upon upvotes :D
Very informative post
i love all your post you do
thank you jerry
You are indeed a change maker.
Awesome / @yabapmatt that is a hell of a link, much to explore !! TY
This awesome, i would use your bots. I have been your fan, right from the youtube days.
If I give u o.5 sbd then how much will u give me...
you are good and thank you
I will give your bot a try soon. I think your bot have a good upvote value.
Very sad too lose 1000 sbd every time .....I t hurts so much to to you ...
I guess I should try using your bot this next week and I see the minimum bid is favourable for even minnows.