There is a reason many of us raised our prices. It isn't because of greed or to eliminate certain people. I've explained this so many times I feel like a broken record.
@buildawhale has 2 million steem power, and with the massive spike of SBD, it caused a dramatic increase in demand. This demand has manifested itself as far more bids per bidding window mostly at the minimum price.
We used to have 30-60 bids per window, when SBD spiked that went to 200-300 per window. Each vote takes 3 seconds, and every comment takes 20 seconds. These delays are due to rate limits on the Steem blockchain.
Our voting windows went from 10-20 minutes to almost 2 hours to complete. I turned off commenting for a while to help minimize this but the rate limits were not the real problem.
The real problem was the rounding error that exists on the Steem blockchain. When you have 2 million steam power even a 1% vote is pretty significant. With 200-300 bids in a single window, we were doing votes for as low as 0.33%, but these votes take up as much voting power as a 1% vote. They also reward just as just as much due to rounding errors.
Users figured this out pretty quickly and started to flood the bots with 1 SBD bids getting huge ROI in return but also causing the bid windows to draw as much voting power as two bidding windows.
I've said many times we should have a 5 SBD minimum bid for how much Steem Power we have, but I never raise it unless I absolutely have to. I initially tried 2 SBD but found the bidding windows still went on for over 3 hours compared to 2 hours and 14-minute norm. I raised the minimum to 2.5 SBD and kept it there for a while. I was still noticing too many bids per bidding window causing the windows to take longer and drain too much VP. I changed the minimum bid to 3 SBD which is still too low but it isn't as bad.
If I could keep it at 1 SBD, I would, but I can't due to technical limitations of the Steem blockchain.
That being said, I started a new smaller bot when this happened called @ipromote that has a 0.500 SBD minimum bid. It only has about $25 vote right now but doesn't suffer from this problem as the bid windows are typically 5-20 users.
Curation Digest. This is an enormous task that hasn't had a lot of support from voters but is loved by our users. We started to use a 10% vote daily so we can continue to offer this service for free to the community.As for @buildawhale, we spend countless hours digging through thousands of posts a week to find five a day we can promote in our daily
perception is realityWe are also the most active and public bot in fighting spam. When @grumpycat was flagging we were doing just as much antispam but we were passing it to SteemCleaners reporting on the website anonymously or sending it to @patrice. It was obvious I was being pinned as an enabler because I used the means designed to combat spam and abuse to deal with it. Because this wasn't public, it was thought I didn't care or didn't' do anything, it couldn't' be further from the truth but it didn't matter as . I held off changing from 5 days (we were five days before anyone switched, and were the first to respond publically to @grumpycat to have an open discussion) as for a while. While I agreed with the idea, I didn't agree with the execution and the actions being done when not flagging for late voting. I eventually said fuck it and switched it to 3 days as I had more important fires to fight and I didn't want to see more innocent people harmed in the crossfire as @grumpycat made it clear he will do as much damage to the most responsible users to make the loudest noise.
Since then, I have added almost 400 people to our blacklist, and spend countless hours still finding and reporting abuse. It's a thankless job that very few seem to appreciate and I continuously question why do I even bother.
So in response to your post, I think it is far off base and not remotely accurate in my case.
Glad to have your attention and it does kind of answer my question about Steem Power reflecting the value of the minimum bids. So it's more about the speed of the rounds?
I did fail to mention that, I know many of you owners try hard to keep a list of abusers.
If you care to put it out there... for all the lovely people of Steemit, how much do you typically make on a round?
It is a combination of avoiding the rounding errors and having a consistent round duration. The design is to have 10 votes a day for 100% vote split between bidders. Due to the number of minimum bids and the rounding error, this became impossible. We are still off by a bit, but nowhere near where it was with 1 SBD minimum bid.
Not much as my delegator takes 95%. I have no idea as I don't track round to round or even daily, I just keep things running and work on stopping spam and abuse and work on my projects.
I don't understand the rounding errors. I get votes from people that are weird percentages and often when a bid is bought, it'll say (for example) bla bla bla a 2.37% upvote. Do the bots not actually vote with finite percentages based on the bids but rather round them off? Meaning it was actually only a 2% vote? Are manual votes treated the same way?
This GitHub Entry explains it well:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/1808
So based in that equation, and given the amount of your SP, people were able to 'cheat' your bot? Makes more sense now. Am glad you talked to me. Thanks for putting things in perspective 😎
I love you two guys. I am SO glad to see this end well, as I was reading down through it with a bit of a knot in my stomach. Because I know you are both on the same side on #TeamGood <3