Hello fellow Steemians,
I'm pretty new to this system but I like researching and understanding systems. During the last days I watched steemit voting bots and wealth distribution on steemit. This is my conclusion.
What are voting bots?
Voting bots are steemit accounts that will upvote posts automatically. Which posts and with which votepower is handled by it's program code. Usually it works like this: User A sends a memo to Bot B with the URL of the post the user wants to get upvoted. With this memo the user has to send his bid or the fixed fee, that differs from bot to bot. The bot will upvote the post and gives the post a value.
Why do users use bots?
It's all about visibility and attention. Like on other platforms, many posts drown in the flood of other content. If you want to make your post more visible, you need to get it into the new or trending section. Or at least have a high number under your post. The bots act like a PR company. You pay them to make your content visible. If you throw only a tiny sum at them, you gain only a little advertising back. If you throw in large sums, you get pushed into trending.
Problem 1: Content quality
As you can imagine, the quality of priviliged visible content tends to degrade due to this system. Sure, there still are non-advertised posts with high quality which made it to the trending page. But many of them are just there because the author paid for it. Other good posts won't be shown there because the limited to get there is higher than it otherwise would. Somehow comparable to google, where you see some advertising first, before you find what you're really interested in. Maybe you think different, but I'm worried about that.
Problem 2: Unequal distribution of wealth
This system is rinsing wealth from the poorer to the wealthier users. In times like this, where 1SBD is way more than 1USD, it's even worse. I will show you what I mean.
Beware: math ahead! The numbers are from a bot tracker site yesterday.
User A is sending $10.0SBD to Bot B which runs in the common bidding-mode. After the countdown is over and all bids where sent to the bot, he gets a vote value of $15.58SBD which is quite good, because sometimes too many bids came in and users don't even get their bid back in vote value.
After the payout User A gets 50% vote value in SBD and 50% vote value in USD in form of Steem Power.
As you can see with this single vote the poor gets poorer and the rich gets richer. Of course the bot is voting all bidders up and gets paid by all of them. In this specific round the bot made over 313SBD only by selling it's votes.
The system would benefit both sides, if the prive of SDB would be at or around 1USD. In this case the payout would be slightly above the bot fee. But at the USD equivalent payout would be far less than today.
My thoughts
Maybe it's necessary to advertise your posts. Maybe it's the same on all platforms. But I started here with the hope this will be a better platform and I'm not sure about that after my research. I read that steemit should give value to valuable content, but to me it looks like it mainly adds value to wealth. This is capitalism at it's worst. I will continue investing my time and create content, so that isn't a good-bye-post. But my view on steemit changed during the last two days and I'm far less optimistic than in the beginning. And I deffinately won't bother with advertising. It's a system where 99% of the community lose.
If you have thoughts to share or want to convince me I'm wrong or I missed anything, please feel free to comment. I'd really appreciate it.