Bid bots and spam are big topics on the steem platform right now. While spam isn't a new subject, bid bots are still finding their place. So here I want to break down what the current atmosphere is at this time and how to use bid bots properly and with less risk. Everything here is my own opinion and is not of @buildawhale or any other bot or service's opinion.
History of bid and upvote promotional tools.
Prior to HF19 everyone had a total of 40 upvotes a day, instead of 10. Each 100% upvote at that time took only .5% of your Voting Power (VP). After the hard fork a full 100% upvote became 4x stronger but took 4x more VP. This and the change to linear rewards changes a whole lot. I personally think this really hurt steem greatly.
This is why. When the votes became stronger two things happened: 1. It was more enticing to upvote ones self for a larger payout and 2. they could use up more of their VP on their selves without having to post 40 times a day.
This brings up a memory of a good indicator that this was going to be bad. I remember this very well because I wrote a lot about my feelings on the upcoming fork. This indicator was a video by the beloved, hehe, Craig Grant. He talked about the fork and what it was going to do and what his plans were for it. I remember having to correct his data a few times at this point. Remember at this time he was a Steem saint. He grew from a few thousand total investments to hundreds of thousands in a matter of months. This was from both steemit and from bitconnect. OK OK back to the video....
So in this video he explained what he thought this fork would be like. He explained the change to amount of votes accurately and actually predicted how all whales would vote from then on. So what he said was that instead of using 2 or so upvotes of 40 a day on him self at 100% and a few on his wife and friends and the rest on the public, he was going to start using 6 100% upvotes (at 4x the power) on him self, 2 or so on his wife and break up the last 2 in very small increments to upvote his followers comments. At this point in my steem life I was one of his 14 or so that he followed. I had been receiving upvotes from him and others.
So what happened after the fork?
Just as Craig predicted and planned on doing him self, whales stopped curating the minnows and dolphins of steem. They started upvoting them selves for a lot larger percent of their VP and good steem users suffered because of it. Now let me make this clear, there are a lot of Whales and Dolphins out there that do not even upvote them selves at all. But in general this just changed the whole atmosphere.
How does this relate to the bots?
So back to how I see the bots coming into play. After this fork, a lot of things happened. People needed a new way to be promoted and get their posts upvoted. Not only that but the change in amount of a single upvote allowed voting bots and bid bots to become a thing. I believe there were some less successful attempts, but the big one was @randowhale. This was not a bid bot but a random upvote between one a certain percent and other for a set rate. This changed multiple times in the first days and day even so it is hard to be too specific. After that a couple bid type bots came around and eventually @buildawhale.
While this is far from a comprehensive history, it is just how things happened as I remember them.
Spam
So what is steem spam and why is it so important when it comes to bid bots? Even though steem is amazingly fast, thanks Dan and graphene, it can still be slowed down with crap. Have you seen those "Your post is great, followed" and "follow for follow?" Even the notorious @sneak is trying to create a movement to downvote all small (under 15 byte) comments. But the problem gets real bad when people are creating alt accounts left and right and spamming the network and using the bots to upvote them. Trying to define spam is hard. We all have a different definition. This is something @themarkymark and I have been debating for a while now. Not only us but he has been debating this with a lot of the bot owners. One big issue with this is that these users or sock puppet accounts are taking away from the limited amount of supply for rewards ona daily basis. So you might say then we should get rid of bid bots right?
One of the most difficult things about this subject is the difficulty of keeping up with the creation of these spam accounts. @patrice has discussed one such case where one or a few people have up to 20,000 alt spam accounts in their control. Read more about this here. The idea that a small group of people can take advantage of the delegation used to fund new accounts is ridiculus. That is why there is account verifcation first, isnt it?
Supply and Demand:
This wont happen with the current fork of steem. Bid bots arent going anywhere because there is a large demand. But one thing that can be done is help make the bots more of a promotional tool and less of a cash machine (as themarkymark calls it).
Blacklist Movement
The bot owners and others that are influential members of the steem community have been working on changing how they work and effect the steem platform. @themarkymark in particular has been working on a global blacklist project, among other things to improve the atmosphere we strive for. The idea is that people taking advantage of these promotional tools should be banned imediatly and thus wouldn't be unable to take advatage of any of them again. If the junk (spam and worse) is blocked early by the people running these projects it will do two things. First it allows good content to be promoted and seen without having to compete with the junk and second this will give less incentive to post this crap spam and effortless junk.
Themarkymark has worked very hard finding these extremely low effort posts and has been drastically increasing the blacklist for @buildawhale and @ipromote. Other projects are following in his footsteps including @upme, @appreciator and @postpromoter as well. Hopefully many more will follow suite. The blacklist is roughly 250 or so accounts and growing fast.
Curation
If you do not know me then let me explain my part in this. I am the Curator in Chief for the Curation Digest for @buildawhale. One of the biggest struggles as a curator is trying to find good content from the users of these promotional tools within the spam. We can get 1000+ bids a day which is 1000+ posts to check out. Now this isnt possible. It's worse than looking through the trending page for good content 😜. I have been working on my own curation blacklist as well as coordinating my list and the worst offenders with the actual blacklist. My list is around 400 or so accounts. This list removes them from even being viewed for possible curation by the @buildawhale team...AND MY LIST IS ALSO GROWING FAST. While this is strictly for curation, it is doing wonders for for good content and curation.
Check out what we are doing.If you love curating content and are interested in helping out, let me know on discord(nic).
What I want
My goal is for Steem to be long term. To be successful. To be the best crypto blogging/ social media site for many years to come. I believe that by this happening I will be successful in turn so I that is my first priority. I will fight daily to help accomplish this. I do not have much power but I have changed how I do things. I have personally seen the effects of the HF and of the bot abuse. I have seen how my posts used to be $100 + and then after the HF couldn't get $2 naturally. The first step was starting my blacklist then working with @themarkymark on improving his list. I have also stopped self voting completely as I feel that my votes are better used for good content by other users. If we do not vote for others, what is steem good for?
The History of Buildawhale
Buildawhale wasnt the first tool accepting bids for upvotes but it was the first to do a few things. It was the first to give back way more than just an upvote to good content. It was the first to really give a shit about the platform and people surrounding it. It was the first to curate its users work.
Curation became something very important and amazing about this service. It is unlike anything else on the platform. We are a group of people who really care and our intentions are to give back and appreciate good content. This is why @themarkymark has given so much back to the community. From meeting up with other influential people and working to make big changes to donating steem/sbd to steemcleaners and the like.
This promotional tool, @buildawhale, requires users to send in a bid of 3 SBD or more to get an upvote from the account of almost 2 million steem power. Each bid value is computed every 2 hours and 40 minutes (window) and one 100% upvote is distributed based on all bids for that window. By using buildawhale one not only gets a great promotional upvote, but they also have a chance to appear in one of the Curation Digests written by our team.
Who should be using these tools and why
So this is what I think this type of promotional tool (@buildawhale, @ipromote, @upmyvote Etc etc) are for and how they should be used sucessfully for our selves and for the sucess of steem in whole. They are a tool primarily. A tool to promote your posts, to get them viewed by more users and to push them to the top of the Hot list or Trending pages. I think good content creators should be rewarded for using them and effortless posters should be punished (banned) and not rewarded. At buildawhale, ipromote and upmyvote we aim to bring this to fruitition. We want steem to be full of good content and not junk. We want the platform to grow and not fail. We want people to want to come and read the blogs of steem and not shy away because all they see is crap.
Thank you for reading this. If you want to help steem grow, use @ipromote on good content. Not your own but others. I do this often. If my upvote cannot satisfy what I feel a post deserves I will use one of these tools on it. Ipromote's minimum bid is only .5 SBD. Consider this next time you fall in love with a post or author on steemit.
Latest news fighting spam, plagiarism and junk by @buildawhale, @ipromote and @upmyvote:
@buildawhale blacklist update
Uncovering and blacklisting a massive spammer with over 50 accounts
@buildawhale will not accept bids from posts flagged by SteemCleaners
Report Abuse
Know of any users or accounts abusing these steem promotional tools (bid bots)? Report them on the Buildawhale Discord Click #abuse