6 Years On | Did Banning Bid Bots Help?
Hello, SPIers! Buckle up because I’m about to stir the pot. This question has been simmering in the back of my mind for years, and I can't wait to see how riled up it gets some of you. So, what do you think, 6 years after we heroically banned upvoting bots and services? Did it help?
Disclaimer. I was a supporter of bidding services so this post is biased. Im just writing it because i think will be interesting to hear what people have to say. Im missing tons of facts and this is wrote from my POV (SSUK) so if you where in support of banning voting bots, you'll need to take this with a grain of salt.
(Randowhale Voter)
A Little History Lesson for the Newbies
For those of you who strolled into STEEM or HIVE after 2018, let me fill you in. Before 2019, a smorgasbord of services was offering upvotes for STEEM through direct transfers. They came in all shapes and sizes: small voters, large voters, and everything in between. Some required you to hand over your STEEM or SBD directly, while others had caps, no caps, bidding formats, and subscription models—truly a buffet of options.
(Snapshoot from 7 years ago showing options to bid on to receive)
Then came 2018, the year of the infamous "New Steem" movement, led by a self-proclaimed squad of STEEM police whose sole mission was to wipe out bidding bots and paid vote services. They were like a crusading army, shaking up the platform and driving away countless users in their righteous wake. By the end of 2019, they had succeeded, leaving a beautiful disaster in their path. If you were there, you know the chaos; if not, lucky you!
My Personal Experience with Bid Bots and Services
Now, let’s talk about me. I was a huge fan of bidding bots. When I joined STEEM in 2017, I used them all the time. I built my HP balance from post rewards and spent my liquid STEEM like it was going out of style to buy or bid for upvotes. It was a magical time, and I was thriving along with many others. By the time bidding bots were banned, I was so burned out from writing about silver-related content every day for 2 years that I converted all my HP into HE tokens and retired!
Yeah, banning bod bots was a stroke of brilliance🤣. I was against it then, and I’m still not backing down.
If memory serves, New Steem had a penchant for targeting bidding bot operators. and downvoting anyone who dared to use them. It was like a digital witch hunt! People were too scared to voice their opinions because they might end up on a blacklist, effectively rendering their future post rewards worthless. Get on that list, and you're never coming off it. This drove countless users away. Can you believe it? We used to have tens of thousands of active users!
The Spectacular Results
So what was the grand vision behind New Steem? The brilliant idea was that SP should be used for upvoting and promoting “quality” content. The thought of monetizing SP and the reward pool was, of course, deemed unethical because we couldn’t have people spending a mere $200 on bidding services to influence their way to the top. That would just ruin the "quality" of content!
Oh, how noble! But let’s be real: people went to STEEM to make money from easy blog posts, so cutting off SP's biggest use case was a stroke of genius!
The fallout from banning bidding bots was catastrophic! It obliterated our ability to monetize STEEM POWER directly, instantly killing the demand for SP leasing and delegation projects (note, this was all before we had hive-engine). Millions of STEEM disappeared into exchanges, and thousands of users packed their bags and left. Now? Dlease has a whopping 0 active leases because HP has become as useful as a chocolate teapot. When bidding bots got the axe, many folks just stopped buying STEEM altogether. Bravo!
Content pre-banning vs Content after banning
Back when we had bid bots, you’d write a post, invest 50% of the rewards into bigger votes and you could see your account grow and slowly compound as you grinded. There were lots more users, follower numbers mattered and most curation was manual. You could set a reasonable goal of hitting 1,000-2,500 SP in a year and hit it. What a time! This created a vibrant economy within STEEM, allowing accounts of all sizes to flourish. Sure, the organic route was an option, but why bother when you could pay for a boost? Back then, we paid to boast our post-payouts and influence. The more you posted, the larger your influence got.
Now, we’ve traded paying for upvotes for a new strategy: collecting autovotes. It’s all about begging in comments and Discord servers, delegating HP to "curation trials," holding HE tokens/NFTs, kissing some whale's ass and hashtagging like it’s an Olympic sport. Honestly, how many of you even know how many follow your account? Spoiler alert: it’s irrelevant. It’s all about racking up those auto-upvotes! Today, we collect autovotes and dont directly pay for anything. We're so ethical...
Starting from scratch on HIVE as a newcomer? Good luck! We lost half our community thanks to Justin Sun and the whales have never been fewer and stronger! You'll need lipstick
So, What’s Your Take?
- Do you genuinely believe the content on HIVE today is better than it was back then?
- If bidding bots had never been banned, do you think HIVE's market cap would be soaring or sinking?
- If we brought back bidding bots, would that be a game-changer for HIVE’s ecosystem, user base, and token price, or would it just stir up more trouble?
- Would you even use them if they were available?
Feel free to share your thoughts without fear. I highly doubt anyone is going to add you to the New Steem blacklist.
And just to be clear, I’m not above it all. SPinvest does exactly what everyone else does, minus the begging part. We play the same game, folks! Half of our posts are templates that we slap some content onto—mainly to share fund performance info with investors—but hey, those autovotes are pretty cool too!
Getting Rich Slowly from June 2019
| Token Name | Main Account | Link to hive-engine |
|---|---|---|
| SPI token | @spinvest | SPI |
| LBI token | @lbi-token | LBI |
| Top XV token | @spinvest | XV |
| Eddie Earners | @eddie-earner | EDS |
| EDS miners | @eddie-earner | EDSM |
| EDS mini miners | @eddie-earner | EDSMM |
| EDS-vote | @eds-vote | n/a |
| EDS DOLLAR | @eds-d | EDSD |
| DAB token | @dailydab | DAB |
| DBOND token | @dailydab | DBOND |
| RUG token | @rugem | RUG |
Stay up to date with investments, and fund stats and find out more about SPinvest in our discord server
Ah man, I kind of miss those days. It was more like the wild west and it was kind of crazy. The other reason is because back then I didn't have the liquid funds to support it. Now I do and it would be interesting to see what I could do. I think services like the ones that had a whitelist weren't that bad, but again, I was pretty new.
I forgot about whitelists, lol. That was another thing. I think if we still had them, there would be alot more money within HIVE but we'll never know i guess.
Yeah, probably not. OCD seemed to do a reasonable job of vetting users for the list. That one run by the wolf guy had one too I think.
haha, yes "thewolf", i wonder what happened to him,
I think he still kicks around on Discord, but I don't know about HIVE.
I'm not sure what the affect of bidding bots would be on Hive. I enjoyed using them on Steem but remember it being very frowned upon by the "holier than I" bunch.
I definitley don't think the content is better here than it was on Steem and I miss loads of people I enjoyed commenting back and forth with.
The saddest bit of your post was ""New Steem" movement, led by a self-proclaimed squad of STEEM police". Seems to me they are still around on Hive just in another guise. Still bullying posters for their own grandification.
I wanted to add the post that on HIVE, "NEW STEEM" have rebranded and get DFH but dont want to be inviting downvotes, lol.
Yeah. it's pretty sad that we have to watch what we say lest we get downvoted. Not exactly my idea of decentralisation of free speech. 🤷♀
I'm against bid bots. If you just want to make money then buy HBD and let it grow. I know that most of us post here for the rewards and there is little to no quality content but there is no incentive for writing quality content. You get a few votes on day one and then the post disappears.
I though that leo were going to take on this issue with ads and evergreen rewards for bringing in views which would be a reason to write good content and advertise it on other platforms but they didn't follow through. It's a pity since you could attract more writers with a real business model where they earn revenue from the views that their content brings in so there is a reason to try and promote it.
Autovotes remove all need to put in effort after you get a few backers and you can just post daily and watch the account grow.
Personally I would get rid of the rewards altogether on layer one, create a stake to earn hive system like every other chain and keep rewards solely on the second layer with easy to create SMT like tokens.
People could earn a nice 10% APR on their hive without all the voting issues and flagging issues. Each community could moderate their content by themselves and with inbuilt ads and revenue to back these layer two tokens you could have a healthy market with actual demand for them.
For me it's no to bid bots, no to autovotes and no to self votes. They are all a negative in my opinion.
The incentive to post better content back then was you knew you were going to be paying for a big upvote and lots of people would see it.
LEOfinance has alot of good ideas but fails to execute them properly.
It would be very interesting to remove the reward pool, move it to a second layer run by SMTs. That would be the best case in my mind when I think about it for a minute.
!INDEED Great post!
Sad
I'll just say that freedom to use whatever service you like is a core value in crypto
Yeah, you'd think so. Do-gooders will always wreck it for the rest.
(1/10)
@spinvest! @digi-me Totally agrees with your content! so I just sent 1 IDD to your account on behalf of @digi-me.
I had forgotten all about "randowhale" and some of the other bid bots. One of the most exhilarating attributes about the STEEM/HIVE chains is the endorphin rush the blogger gets from a big upvote. If you're new and can't attract a whale to upvote you to get your HAPPY BRAIN JUICE hit, the ability to purchase a little something is a decent substitute and a decent ROI. Like a "buy a 777" option on a slot machine.
It did seem like the content was better then. Perhaps because bigger rewards attracted better talent?
Exactly, some semi-famous person could show up and get $500-1000 from people buying upvotes to that post. When I knew I was going to pay for a big fat upvote, I made sure the content was good knowing lots of people would see it.
Randowhale was on of the ones I remember using early on cause it was like 0.50 SBD a vote. But there were so many, there had to have been 100 at least back then,
Ah the good old days. I remember all the unofficial rules that had to be followed or you'd get a scolding from some account or another and maybe even a down-vote or two.
via Inbox
I don't disagree with you. But you already know that from our talks in the Bro server.
We had a lot more crap in those days, but we also had a heck of a lot more "quality posts" as well, many more than now.
I never really understood the point in banning them. Except making it harder for others to do what many whales and orcas had already done.
I have no idea what your username is on BRO cause someone changes them every few weeks.
There were alot of reasons to ban them. They promoted it as a way to cull STEEM of shitposts and stop people from buying influence but it was to protect the reward pool. Whales back then lost the most from voting bots because the reward pool was being diluted.
I never had a problem with bid bots. That seemed like a great business venture
I low key wish we could bring them back.
"Hardfork" 🤣
I haven't known any web 3.0 blogging back then, so I could not say in any specific way.
Right now it is not only about kissing some whale asses... Whales get lazy and they appoint some curators, and now we have some megalomaniacs thinking themselves some hot shots due to those whales' backing.
All sounds very decentralized.
Back then, your success on STEEM was easy if you grinded. You would write your post, upload it and pay 1 HIVE for an upvote yielding 1.2 HIVE after the curation split. Back then post rewards were 70% to Authors and 30% to curators. Next week, you'd pay 1.2 HIVE and get a 1.4 HIVE yield, the same again week after week.
As you say, it's more about kissing the ass of some pleb that is a minion for a whale.
I probably would have used it if it was still around. Bid bots might be a lifesaver for some users when the price of HIVE is still not rising. I might try to make a drawing post per week (which I have abandoned for a long time) because even if I get a few upvotes, I can rely on Bid Bots.
And if I get a big upvote, maybe I can put it aside for power-ups. Unlike now, most of which I can only use for my daily needs (because the payout amount is not yet sufficient).
Is there a time when users bid more than the upvote they later receive?
If there is, then the vibes will be like memecoins (maybe?). The difference is if memecoins they are racing to get memecoins at the lowest price. Then in Bid Bots, they race to get upvotes for their posts.
The user base may increase, although there is a possibility that it will be flooded with low-value posts.
The price of HIVE depends on each user. Will they hold on to it? Will they sell everything when they reach their target or when the bull run is over? Or do they have their strategy?
Back then, voting bots were mainly used to people to increase there own rewards but projects used them as well to get many eyes on things. I used to be a member of the silvergoldstacking community and we used to use voting bots to promote raffles and contests we were hosting for STEEM. Mostly they were used for self voting but they were used to promote as well.
There were times when people were paying for then they were getting back. For instant votes services, like send 1 STEEM and get a 10% upvote we could see what a 10% upvote was worth before paying. With bid style platforms, it was a gamble, the more people online the less the return and many times negative. I do remember when post rewards switched from 70/30 to 50/50, alot of voting services want into the red regarding ROI.
My point with the price of HIVE is, that HP would have so many more use cases if it could be monetized. Few people buy HIVE today, all hoping the price will go up, back then, lots of people bought STEEM to use it. Today we can either use our HP to curation to delegate it to some project that uses it for curation and gives you a HE in return.
The pages showing posts promoted using the method originally designed to promote, namely HBD burning, are missing. https://hive.blog/promoted
Send HBD to @null with '@author/permink' in the memo to proceed.
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