I wanted to know how many of all upvotes on a daily basis are being done by paid voting services. So I dived into the Steem blockchain and counted all upvotes by all known paid voting bots.
I have made a list of all the known voting bots using https://steembottracker.com.
Here's the result...
Approximately 1.7% of all votes are done by a paid voting service. And as you can see in the chart, the paid votes are quite in line with the total number of votes.
Daily number of votes
| Date | Votes | Paid bot votes |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-03-13 | 745,468 | 11,803 |
| 2018-03-12 | 748,848 | 11,604 |
| 2018-03-11 | 711,500 | 11,283 |
| 2018-03-10 | 662,208 | 11,369 |
| 2018-03-09 | 640,175 | 11,726 |
| 2018-03-08 | 737,293 | 13,058 |
| 2018-03-07 | 777,449 | 13,716 |
2. Weekly number of votes
| Date | Votes | Paid bot votes |
|---|---|---|
| 201810 | 5,078,544 | 88,376 |
| 201809 | 4,935,492 | 89,606 |
| 201808 | 5,099,772 | 89,875 |
| 201807 | 5,083,608 | 86,787 |
| 201806 | 4,712,805 | 77,204 |
| 201805 | 4,931,440 | 86,818 |
| 201804 | 4,675,230 | 82,053 |
What portion of steem rewards (re)distibuted through voting bots?
Could you calc it?
I keep meaning to find the time to do that analysis. But it's pretty difficult as:
o There are many kinds of bots / purchased votes - those on steembottracker but also things like minnowbooster (which upvotes through different accounts so is harder to track, although possible) and "black market" vote sellers too.
o Working out the value of the votes rather than the number of votes is a heavier calculation if you want to do it accurately.
I'll get to it one day!
I think we as a community should come to understanding how bad is it.
Economy of steemit is of great importance and often neglected by developers of the project.
Users are actively using their SBD and Steem through bots making them the only crypto that is actually used in a functioning economy. Isn't that good for Steemit as a whole?
Steem indeed is the ONLY crypto where you 100% understand why you buy it.
Bots are the application where you could actually spend your crypto and enjoy the service they provide.
But is this healthy? I am not so sure.
If they are used to promote quality content they are a good thing in my opinion.
But I see the worst content upvoted for more than 50 SBD. I think the bot owners have a responsibility together to keep Steemit as clean as possible from these content farmers.
But if we can tackle that problem I think paid upvoting is a good thing and makes Steemit into a functional economy for quality content.
What I would find interesting is which group is using these bots more. Are it the already established Steemians or is everybody using them.
I do have a feeling that it would be mostly used by the more wintered Steemians and the usage will decrease when going down the foodchain.
Also requested this at Penguinpablo, if it is possible to dig this up.
Great work guys.
Exactly! I wondered about that too!
@bronevik Talking about bots and curation trail for minnows or anyone with low SP. I guess its really not helpful right? Please enlighten me
Votes less than 0.01 sbd are not even counted anywhere. Most minnow and low sp votes are just load for the blockchain.
Hmmmmm I see. So if I understand clearly, you're saying minnows need not bother voting people. I guess so
I've seen several, they say somewhere around 20% directly, but then another percentage is accounted for in bot follow votes to get curation money. Also, this article doesn't take into account the fact that the bots are using delegated votes, so that one bot casts many votes, under different names. I don't think there's any validity to this math at all.
I only discovered steembottracker.com the other day and it is interesting to see more information related to voting bots.
Could you please assist in providng more information on voting bots:
Hello @mkdouglas Someone said votes less than 0.01 sbd are not counted anywhere, that most minnows with low sp votes are just load for the blockchain. Please how true is it? Can you please explain better to me about it?
That's not true. Each vote is stored on the Steem blockchain.
I think every cent counts, at least up to 0.001 which is the smallest fraction that can be transacted on the Steem blockchain.
I also think all Steemians, even minnows, are useful hooks to catch more users. Network effects works on the fact that somebody you know is already using Steem.
The billions of Facebook users were attracted to Facebook by the first few million users who again were attracted by the first few thousand users. It grew from college students to middle aged parents to aged grandparents.
Wow so much insight. Thanks so much
Interesting. I am curious how many of those upvotes are self upvotes? I wrote article about necessary changes in Steemit in my opinion:
https://steemit.com/steem/@cicbar/steemit-necessary-changes
Please I'm curious about using bots and curation trail for minnows or anyone with low SP. I guess its really not helpful right? Please enlighten me @cicbar
Nice one - I think the Cash / crypto / steem reward generated via bots or booster services is more of interest - @felixxx did a research on that - roughly 16% - check his post:
https://steemit.com/steem/@felixxx/how-much-of-the-rewards-get-distributed-by-boosters
Self voting for people that might be interested in that, check out the post by @felixxx
wow thats alot! Thank you for linking. If he is not far from the exact number, 16% is quite worrisome for the long term health of the platform...
Nice post. It's helpful to see the data. While only ~2% of votes are by paid bots, I'd guess the percent of voting power from paid bots is much higher.
Not sure I love the multiple y-axes in each plot... it's easy to mistake to the votes and paid votes as being on the same scale. I'd recommend plots like these (from my recent blog post):
On the left you've got raw counts (in your case the two categories would be paid votes & unpaid votes). On the right you've got normalized votes. You'd probably want to zoom in the y-axis, given that such a low number of votes are paid.
An alternative would be a faceted plot, where the paid and total plots were vertically aligned but separate.
Keep up the great #datascience!
After a little more thought, I think the best visualization would be two vertically-aligned plots with the same x-axis of date. The top plot would be total number of votes per day. The bottom plot would be percent of votes by paid bots (y-axis zoomed to only the dynamic range). This would capture all the information above without any confusion.
Is the full daily/weekly data you created available?
I must say, I thought it was a whole lot more! It puts things in perspective. Off course some bots are huge whales, but there is really not much we can do about that...
As long as the big majority is normal traffic, I think the platform an keep growing!
Nice insight
Oh well
Interesting, but What proportion of the Pool Rewards is distributed by VoteBots would have been more interesting. I think it would be more than 25%.
Indeed, my first thought was "To how many $ do these correspond"?
However great thought, as always @penguinpablo, thank you!
very interesting, I thought it would be much larger amount
I thought it would be worse. Less than 2% of all votes isn't so bad. We need to keep an eye on that number, though.
Oi, that double axis graph is a little confusing at a glance.
Fascinating data. Thanks for compiling and sharing.
I wonder if more people don't use vote bots due to lack of knowledge, or if it comes down to lack of funds to buy the votes. I know very often the vote-bot doesn't return a positive ROI depending on your timing.
I'd be curious if there is a better solution to the problem of worthwhile posts and post discovery instead of vote-bots.
It's really great to see that you like my idea of this new report because many people using these services and it's really interesting to know that how much steemians actually using these services.great work buddy 😃
ok but i think the votes with higher values are with the bot and the whales, i think that is why most people prefer to pay for bots
very good work buddy. carry on your self. i will check your link.
Steem for bot!
Interesting, 1.7% is quite alot! I think think the results would be more interesting if you could show of how much of the total rewards was distributed by the upvote bots in contrast to the total amount of upvote value.
Hey @penguinpablo! Thanks for your report! I always wondered how the bot votes vs. human votes ratio would look like! 👍 To me, it's very surprising that bot votes are below 2%. 😮
Thanks @penguinpablo
The results of your work is very helpful to us steemit players.
I will wait for the next your update.
Great analysis,Your data shows big number of Upvotes done by voting bots.
So what should be the strategy of newbies to flourish on Steemit.
I'm seeking sincere opinion from Seniors and experts.
thanking you in anticipation.
:)
Thanks for sharing this informative data with us and it's really amazing to see that one bot is upvoting more than 10000 posts every day and it's an great thing. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day Keep up the great day. Stay blessed. 🙂
These doesn't include votes from SteemAuto as that's not a paid service [as yet] , right?
Well technically SteemAuto (like SteemVoter) are real users, not Bots.
Interesting, 11k bot votes a day is so much. Always wondered about this but never knew how to find out, so thanks for sharing this.
Well technically SteemAuto (like SteemVoter) are real users, not Bots.
Thanks for sharing
Great insight, that's a lot of bots. what would the worst case scenario? could this de-stabilize the steem platform as more and more paid bots are deployed? minting the Steem tokens more rapidly could be one scenario, but how that plays out is yet to be known. curious to find out tho..
Que bueno su punto de vista unos exelentes votos felicidades hermano exito para usted
1.7% of upvotes by paid bots, that doesn't really indicate this is a big issue. Perhaps I have to adjust my opinion?
However I think the value of the upvotes is more important than the number of upvotes. As some of these bots could be the biggest whales around. Perhaps you can also have a look at that?
grate...it's helpful for us..thank you for share..good job boss.carry on
Hello, you have a VERY COOL blog and this post is extremely useful. I will follow you and I will encourage you to do so too.
me on my blog PUBLISHES super modeling sessions and DAILY adds new ones :)
it's such a TIME FOR OPENING on STEEMIT :) best regards Gordon :)
I like your statistics, they truly illustrate the objective, which I'm not sure if those bot are a benefit? Is it better to pay?
good work boss, keep it up.
Thanks @penguinpablo, this report will help minnows like us a lot.
Keep up the good work
Interesting information! Well done! Thanks so much for sharing! ;)
The number would be bigger if you also count number of upvotes done via marketplace like @MinnowBooster and @Smartmarket.
That was precise, It's interesting how we utilize resources to get upvote on our work. But I can see there is still handful of community which doesn't use this voting bot system.
a friend you did a job enough but a nice blog
There are some advantages to paid bot votes but I believe authenticity will get you further even if it’s slower.
Non authentic business ideas or fake people generally don’t last long
Nice one
resteemed, upvoted, followed because of good informations about steemit. thx
It would be interesting to know how much Steem power does bots have as opposed to human user accounts. Delegated SP can be counted as their own SP.
Just in case we have a bot vs human war here on Steemit. Who will win.
interesting
I just feel all dese bots are not really helpful to minnows especially with low SP. I stand to be corrected @penguinpablo
Mhh, a lot less than I expected. When I did read the tittle I had a figure in my mind before opening and reading the post. To be honest I was thinking about 30 to 35%.
I think if we would add some groups in the calculations that probably the more richer Steemians are using them. A lot more than the red fishes.
@penguinpablo it is possible to dig this up?
The answer to this question will probably prove that more wintered Steemians are using upvote bots compared to relative newer Steemians.
But I could be wrong!
can you give us information about the bids of all bots and reward that users are gaining through these bid bots if any?
These are the votes made by user boosted by delegated SP.
Bought votes like the system on smartsteem stay under the radar.
I could buy votes, but it doesn't seem to be that profitable and I prefer those from genuine supporters. I don't even self vote. All we do here is visible and we may be judged on it
The REAL question is, do the voting bots help those who use them?
Really so nice post...i like it...
I'm new to steemit, and a lot of this is still away over my head, What I don't understand is that I'm getting a lot of votes from people that haven;t even posted on steem. Who are theses people? Good read, the fog is clearing.
Interesting analysis. I must admit I would have thought bot vote %age would be higher.
In terms of finding out more about manual curation, it would be interesting to know what percentage of votes are cast via auto-voters.
This would be a more difficult analysis and would require somehow picking up votes always made at the same time after posting between the same two parties.
No idea how to do that, and I have no problem with auto-voters - but it would be interesting to know.
I hope Bots will not take the Place of Humans . Lols
it's very good my friend...
I really hope to be like you 😊