This is an interesting thought exercise. If everyone chose to delegate their stake to a bid bot, then there would be no flagging, and it would be a sort of wild place with free market effects. Here's the thing about bid bots:
- A bid bot is as profitable as how full its bidding rounds are.
What does this mean? Suppose that a bid bot, supported wholly by one whale for simplicity, has a vote worth 100$. Suppose the bids only fill to 50 SBD. This means the whale pockets 50 SBD for that round. Let's also suppose for simplicity that it's a 0 minute votes, so no curation is involved. 100$ worth of votes are distributed to the bidders. That means bidders collectively pocket 50$ as well, subtracting out their 50 SBD (let's assume the peg is working, again for simplicity. We can add it in but it detracts from the main point). From the point of view of the rewards pool, the net effect is that 50$ worth went to the whale and 50$ went to bidders. This is probably not new to bid bot users, but I included it for completeness.
Rather than the whale self voting for all of the 100$ vote value, we've got a nicer distribution. And that's really the theme behind bid bots: greater distribution than the strictly self vote picture.
Except... There's the very frequent scenario that bid bots are over bid. In this case the whale gets much more than the bidders, sometimes even leaving the bidders with nothing! I think this is more of an education problem than anything else. People simply don't understand bid bots and are getting screwed. This is mitigated by bot owners establishing caps on the bid bot rounds. But for maximal distribution, it should really be set lower than it is now.
If people were fully knowledgeable and rational, they would band together to milk the bot pools by taking turns in underbidding the rounds. This takes power away from the bid bot owners. Of course, this is also completely unrealistic. But there starts to be the potential for a free market over the rewards pool.
It's funny... Those people we see clogging up trending by use of overbidding on bots? They are literally bleeding money (unless they are actually making it up with real votes, but somehow I really doubt it).
So anyway, my point is there seems to be an education warranted for garbage trenders. Also, we can achieve the same effect by actually flagging overvalued trending posts to make their bid bot usage less desirable (given that they haven't figured out they are bleeding). Well, that certainly can't happen if everyone gave their stake away to bots ;)
Now about the state of this world. It obviously sucks. Nothing is driving community valuation of posts, so we may as well be running some weird form of universal basic income or something. So we must reserve some power for downvoting, and I think it becomes somewhat stable (in that bid bot and flagging becomes the way we arrive at the valuation).
Better if the algorithm is tweaked to give better community valuations of posts though. I have no idea how.
An extensive exercise, thanks for this.
They don't care it seems, it's for publicity only. The money isn't an issue to them, but it's going to the BB owner and the main delegator, right from the rewards pool.
I really do dislike 'wasting' VP on downvotes, but I agree we should all perhaps reserve some energy for it.
Thank you.