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.