There have been some positive changes to how Bid-bots operate over the past month or so, but I still think there is room for improvement, if they wish to put the customer first that is.
Blacklists, white-listing accounts, a 3.5 day voting period, but what about adding a new feature to help users not see their 'promotion' attempt fail due to careless bidding or a fat-cat vote?
Do you want to instantly become the best Bid-bot owner? I have something to say that could make you just that.
pixabay source
First though, a bit on the recent changes, both good, and average.
Blacklisting users
There are plans afoot to create a global blacklist of accounts that are 'abusing' the bid-bots. In short, I think this will be a fruitless exercise.
The abuser will simply create a new account and buy votes until this is spotted. Ad infinitum.
White-listing users
This is better than the above, but is a constant administrative exercise. I would not fancy keeping this list up to date, but it does sound like a step in the right direction.
A Max Bid limit
This hasn't really taken off. I'm not sure why, and suspect it relates to profits.
The 3.5 day voting window
You've probably seen this guy knocking around?
But if you haven't, you are not to blame. In the same way good content is often missed (even with multiple curation teams and the awesome #stewardsofgondor), both older accounts, and certainly new accounts can be forgiven with regards to not knowing about #grumpycat's compliance policy.
Even Bid-bot owners using their own 'non-compliant' Bot missed it, isn't that right Jerry?
What is #grumpycat compliance?
Basically, if you use a Bid-bot (listed here: https://steembottracker.com/) that does not have its 'Max Post Age' set to 3.5 days, you risk a huge down-vote from @grumpycat - 'quality content' or not.
This is a method to provide more time to catch 'abusers' of the tool. Many posts and lengthy replies have been written on the subject and it's not the context of my post today.
Personally, I think the 3.5 day 'rule' is a sound move, and suggest to not risk using one of these 'non-compliant' bid-bots. As you can see, there are plenty more to choose from!
This brings me onto the main topic of this post.
Stop accepting bids that take the R.O.I. into the negative
Why are Bid-bot owners accepting bids that will return a negative R.O.I.?
We are not a cash machine
The owner will lose profit
No you are not a cash machine, at least not to the user of a Bid-bot.
It's not difficult to do some rough maths using the wallets of Bid-bots and their owners, and there certainly wouldn't be a new Bid-bot appearing each week if it wasn't profitable to run one.
They are promotion tools
Fine. So if i send 10 SBD to you and then a 100 SBD vote lands sending the R.O.I for the round to -40%, how do you think that 'promotion' exercise will turn out for me?
I could choose at this point to pick the best examples of negative R.O.I. from the link listed above, but I don't need to.
I'm confident that if you check it yourselves at the point you read this post, you'll see that the majority of the (compliant) Bid-bots returned a negative return, or lower promotion level than expected, in the previous round.
Be the best
If you want to be the best and most popular bid-bot, return bids that send the R.O.I. into the negative.
I think that that this move and the publicity around it will ensure your window is full and you will have far fewer dissatisfied customers to copy/paste the 'cash machine' reply to.
Anyone? What about as a trial?
Asher @abh12345