I wonder what the difference is between a vote frontrunner and a legit follower? Do you know what I am talking about?
Let's take the bidbot angle out of this and look at the shining beacon of steem foretold in the Dead sea Scrolls as the highest and most esteemed of Steemians..... or something or other...
This dude has 30331 followers and gets upvoted around 250 dollars by himself and one other user. Here is a picture of the latest post (hard to keep up, there are 10 a day) with only the vote from the large whale. There are about 240 votes but, only the first 20 or so have any that register above a cent. Also, there are only 8 comments.
In fact, all of his posts are similar when it comes to engagement:
Considering he has 30,000+ followers and gets , that is a pretty low comment rate. It is reminiscent of this account which is one of Sweetsssj's family:
Although for some reason the frontrunners aren't following all of the 10 or so of them getting upvoted hundreds every week. Perhaps it is because they are upvoted after 4 days and the front runners are lazy and like the trending authors...
But, engagement is low even though the content actually isn't bad at times although, it seems to have dropped down a lot. When 200 dollar votes are guaranteed. Here is another one:
Do you see the problem here? At day 3 they have about 50 votes for 10-13 dollars but very low comments. This indicates a lot of autovotes or, frontrunners (the value comes from other family members?). On day 4, the whale vote arrives but engagement doesn't go up. What does this say about highly voted posts? .. well, unless they make it into trending (these don't) they aren't going to be seen anyway.
Another thing that is happening is there are services that follow the orders of the bidbots and frontrun them in an attempt to increase their curation return when the large votes arrive. This is essentially what is happening with Steem's highest reputation user also, people frontrunning the whale. Take away the whale and what is left when they realise the curation boost isn't coming? Well, you can see that without the whale and the self-vote, there is a few dollars at best. This is similar with the family, take away the large whale votes and there are a couple dollars remaining, maybe. Not exactly community supported value.
What about the trending posts boosted by the bidbots? How many are gaining real followers and how many are getting frontrunners? Does it matter? Well, not for the bidbot owners but perhaps the users who think they are getting real followers and support might be interested. Or not.
I don't know if there is a way to discern follower from frontrunner in the numbers but, what it means is that if a user stops bidding on their own content thinking they have now gained enough support, they are going to find that many are going to soon drop-off their voting as it isn't the content, it is the boosted curation return. The difference between engineered followers and organic is very large when it comes to long-term support.
Now, there are some people who use the bots on decent content and gain actual followers also and they are likely to be okay if they ever stop boosting themselves but, they will be surprised that the gap between is a lot wider than the numbers indicate as the frontrunners will drop away. I don't know what that gap will be but there will be one.
As far as I can tell from random observation over the months, for a lot of the followers are not actually following for the content at all which means, where is the promotional aspect? As for the content of the TA, who is interested in investing into Home Depot or Johnson Johnson's here? Get out of Fiat and into crypto? Hang on, they are fortune 500 companies aren't they?
This is just through my own basic observations and thinking but there are certain aspects that just don't seem to hold up. For advertising is one for the most part, as is for visibility because prior to the little view counter being taken away, many posts with hundreds of dollars had views in single digits. And just think, the poster's view counted every time they refreshed that page too.. I saw one that had 2 views and was 190 dollars.
This platform is a complicated beast but, the incentive to use it for the purpose intended as a social media site where content gets rewarded and engagement is valued, is the least incentivized part. Strange isn't it?
Who knows what the future holds with SMT's and hivemind for communities but currently, it is not looking healthy for content when these kinds of things are the norm. There are a lot of loopholes and scam potentials due to the complexity of the system and it seems that the concept of community has fallen through one of them. I wonder if it will ever be found. Where is the balance point between community and scam?
Well, at least it keeps the place interesting since the content hasn't been too mind blowing lately.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]