If I don't do that, others will
I don't necessarily agree. If the liquidity rewards were more accessible to others then more would be competing to provide liquidity by leaving more orders on the book and narrowing the spread. The more populated book and narrower spread would in turn would make successful self-trading much harder. Systems like this can reach multiple equilibria, and it is very possible that another one would serve the community better than what is happening now.
I think you should try simply providing liquidity and not self-trading for a while, and if others provide better liquidity, either compete on that basis or let them get the rewards for providing the service, which encourages more and more of it. I can't tell you what to do though, this is just my opinion.
As for the bot losing, well, that is part of the (distribution) game. The final destination of a subsidy in a market isn't always (or even usually) only the first person to touch it.
What I said is about current algo. I admit if there is a better algo it would be harder to game and attract more "normal" traders.
(replying to your reply below, which is at max comment depth)
None of the other self-traders you identify are running full time bots as far as I know. Thus they are not always stacking the queue and preventing (at least currently) smaller liquidity providers from ever being paid as yours does.
If you were to pull back and if it turned out that actual liquidity providers were still never paid (and thus encouraged to continue and even expand), then it would be reasonable to resume what you are doing. But there is no way to find that out without trying.
There are many names on that list who are not being rewarded even though they have likely provided liquidity to the market and would likely do so again if rewarded for it. Providing liquidity also becomes easier for others if they are receiving rewards (even occasionally) since there is no other good way to have access to liquid steem without incurring an opportunity cost.
The most successful tit-for-tat strategies will forgive occasionally to attempt to test a return to a cooperative equilibrium. That is my suggestion.
Thanks for the reply. They were running full time bot before I started to compete to them. I have no idea whether they'll start do that again if I stopped, it's fair to assume they will. If they want to show me that they won't do that again (sounds like I'm police), they can reset their reward points by self-trading on the opposite direction, then I'll remove them from my "bad guys" list manually, and start to compete "normally" . Anyway I don't think it's bad to set a barrier.
What I said is about the current algorithm as well.
Most time I was being nice. Xeldal who provided some real liquidity has ever got rewarded once or two, some of his volume were fed by me though. About others, I'm not sure whether they really provided enough liquidity. If yes, they should show up on the list: https://steemd.com/tools, I'm happy if they can be rewarded. However, some other self traders have set a barrier on the list, so I set my barrier higher than that.
On the list,
Out of the list, the big players
The small players
I will tell you this.. The weight that these self traders generate makes it virtually impossible to compete unless you actually trade against yourself. For example:
adm has a weight of 455,445,235,982,016
and I spent 5 hours trading yesterday and my weight is currently 84,193,654,372
At that rate, it will take me 5409 more trading sessions to ever get to the top of the list that the self traders are at. I want to trade and provide real market making services (that will add to overall liquidity) because of the reward program but it is currently being gamed in such a way that I can't compete unless I start just self trading.
Yes I noticed your bot yesterday, it's smart. My bot had to feed it many times, sometimes it prevented my bot from self-trading. Good profit even without the reward, right? If you can put in more token, I'm sure you can play a more important role.