My thoughts on bidding bots as the owner of @buildawhale, a minnow,...

For those who don't know, I run @buildawhale. So yes, I'm an evil bot owner.

There has been a lot of talk about bidding bots lately and wanted to share my perspective.

I see bidding bots as promotional tools, unlike Steemit's Promote feature, it actually works. Unfortunately, this adds to the entitlement complex that plagues Steemit.

The majority of the users see bidding bots as cash machines and feel they can just give $5 and get $10 back. If they don't see a return like that, they decide to write some hate posts or hate comments.

I can deal with this, I understand the expectation is an instant return investment, even though no advertisement system in existence works this way.

What does bother me, and I think where a lot of the bidding bot hate comes from is low to no effort content spamming the platform exploiting every possible bot available. I see it on @buildawhale, I see it on all the other bots, I see it in the circle-jerk vote circles. The amount of low effort content coming through is unmanageable. I would even go to say the majority of content on Steemit falls into this category.

My goal when I started @buildawhale was to give minnows a way to get some exposure. As a minnow myself, I used to joke about every post I made went into a black hole. This is why I have a team of 5-6 curators who go through the 500-600+ posts we receive a day and find our five favorites and feature them in our daily Curation Digest. I wanted to provide incentives for users to create and submit quality content. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources to provide enough incentive to do so.

All my steem power and liquid Steem is tied up with @buildawhale. I spend around 8,400 Steem/week to run @buildawhale, all of what I make in bids go back to pay the rent. I don't have the resources to provide large incentives to produce great content or the resources to police and filter out all the garbage.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on how these problems can be addressed. As a bot owner, as a minnow, as a Steemian, I don't see bots as bad but I know many disagree. I see bots in the same light as Facebook sending me a message that my post is doing 95% better than other posts on this page, would you like to boost it for $5? I know it isn't the same, and there are differences, but in general, I see it as a promotion tool, not a cash register. I know when I use bidding bots, I get more votes but I also get more real views, more real follows, and more real comments. These provide far more lifetime value than the votes and unfortunately, they are hidden in the pool of follow-for-follow and comment spammers.

I think the problems we need to address in regards to bidding bots:

exceptionally large votes
exceptionally large votes on garbage posts
flood of garbage posts being frequently rewarded
user creating 4-10+ posts a day of garbage posts

None of these issues are exclusive to bot users. Many whales fall into this category as well.

I love the idea of going back to 4 posts a day, but as mentioned there are ways around it. As a Reddit user though, I am used to doing far more than 1 post a day, although I don't spend nearly as much time per post on Reddit as it isn't a "blog". With the way rewards work though, almost every case where someone is posting 5-10 posts a day is spam related.

Increasing the number of votes per day would dramatically reduce the amount of garbage showing up in trending and being pushed to $100+ payouts for 30 seconds of work.

I think the biggest potential reward would be turning flagging into a consensus system, where the more flags you get, you start to get diminished rewards at the account level, and eventually $0. Unfortunately, this can also be gamed, but having more metrics factored in like steem power of flagger, activity level on the platform, amount of flags the flagger has received, how frequently the flagger flags, relationship with other highly flagged individuals (think vote circles). I would take some work, but I think something could be done here.

I also have been thinking about the more aggressive use of our blacklist on @buildawhale. I don't like to be the judge of what is good and bad for content when it comes to axing it because I have tend to see a lot of content as low effort/spam and it's hard to judge a user on one particular post and not as a whole.

Why do I have a tomato as my thumbnail image?

My thoughts on bidding bots as the owner of @buildawhale, a minnow, and a Steemian

My recent popular posts