I think it was an interesting experiment. And as Joseph savage says
The 'harm' that bid-bots do to the reward pool (if you see it as harm) is not about the distribution of curation rewards, it's that bid-bots change the distribution of rewards from 'quality' driven curation to 'purchased' curation.
But, he's not picked up on the secondary (more damaging) harm that bidbots do to the platform; that of reputation. I know this to be fact as I've seen the amount of people who've quit because they say the steem Blockchain is a con. In my earlier days as a curie curator I saw many high quality content creators quit (as I was watching them to submit to curie), and in nearly every case where they gave a reason in a final post, they mentioned vote-buying bots. Basically, what I'm saying is that the reputational damage done by these people leaving and broadcasting their dissatisfaction through other sites like medium or patreon, can not be underestimated.
The truth is that the gaming of the system by many different people on steem is what causes the low retention rate. I've heard it said by a prominent bidbot owner that if he didn't do it someone else would. To be fair to this person they try to regulate what content gets voted with their bot. But IMO, if the bidbot owners stopped doing what they're doing and formed a whale alliance that flagged anyone trying to run a bidbot into oblivion, then bidbots would be eliminated from steem.
This idea is not without merit both from moral and business stand point. I'm pretty sure that if steem was functoning without vote buying when the bull market returns, both the amount of people joining steem, and the retention rate would sky-rocket.
Anyway, that's my two cents. If any bidbot owners read this comment, please understand, this is not an attack on you. I genuinely think that bidbots are limiting the growth of the platform and that, long term, even the bidbot owners would make a bigger profit/ROI with a $100/steem price. That is a price we'll never see, with steem as a content based platform, while these levels of gaming the system continue.
I agree with you, Rowan. That's the real damage. I never check the trending page because you don't see real quality posts there. It's a shame people have left the platform for this reason, but they have. A lot of them. And that's why Narrative is operating the way it is operating. They don't want the bidbots, and they've got measures in place to discourage them. If they do well and can work out the bugs in their own platform, all those people who left Steem could land there. It doesn't matter how profitable a business practice is, if it damages your reputation among the audience you're trying to attract, the long-term implications will hurt more than the short-term gains will benefit you. Unfortunately, that's a very difficult metric to measure.
Now, that makes me begin to re-think my not joining Narrative.
It should.
Of course, the weaknesses of Narrative are starting to show themselves. I think the difference is that the Narrative staff seems interested in fixing their issues. The question is, can they? We'll have to see, but I'm hopeful.
@raj808
Very interesting observations. I hadn't thought of bidbots as a gamification of the platform. It does put an entirely new slant on it, and raises for me, again, the issue of those of us who code versus those of us who don't and also those of us who game (for tokens) and those of us who don't (game at all), and in turn, who uses the platform for what. So there seems to be a conflict which leads me to concur with your final point: