Hey guys, I take no quarrel with offering votes for a price. I remember when you had to be in the club to exchange votes. Openness and transparency are better than backroom deals all day long. However, I think things have to change after HF21. This platform is undergoing a lot of effort to clean up abuse, award good authors, and stop the endless siphoning of value. You, the bid bot owners, already have a large impact on the platform, but I think it's going to get larger, and more eyes will be upon you after 21 takes effect Tuesday.
I want to help bidbots that are ethical, practical, and care about Steem to grow. That growth I hope will come from bidbots that don't support this effort...
You guys are getting free downvotes. Of course you have the option to sell these. That might be a profitable service, and I have no quarrel with that in principle.
Assuming you aren't selling downvotes as you don't want to get into the questionable outcomes of that then you're going to have a large pool of downvote power. I'm encouraging you to get some guidelines immediately about types of content you'll flag, when you'll flag, and under what circumstances. If you have questions about it I suggest you talk to other bidbot owners, or the folks from steemcleaners (guiltyparties and anyx) about various practices.
I'd also encourage you to tighten up your standards regarding what content you allow to be bid botted. Right now with only a few notable exceptions people using bidbot services are free to shitpost all day long and upvote it to kingdom come. We need to change this behavior. You're going to want to change it anyway because after 21 this entire community will have free down votes and pure shitposts getting your votes are going to get nuked along with your profits and delegators' tolerance.
Right now several of you choose to allow any content of any quality, but if you continue doing that post hf21 I think you'll die a death of a million paper cuts. I'll help lead the effort.
Seriously, witnesses are implementing EIP to support the price of steem and improve content creation on the platform. I'm not going to see it undermined by bidbot owners who don't give a fuck. Steem price isn't going anywhere with large amounts of stake supporting zero-value posts just so bid bot delegators can receive a profit.
Shit's gotta change. Change has to start with me, and I'm going to put myself in front of your profits all day long until behavior is in line with #newsteem expectations.
If you've already done these thank you. If you haven't then I'd strongly encourage you to create the following.
The era of supporting literally anything and everything stops on Tuesday.
If it doesn't stop I plan to run an aggressive campaign against your business, against your delegators, and will try to get Steem delegated to your project moved to a more responsible one.
I'm not anti-bidbot. I'm coowner of steembottracker so that everyone can transparently and openly get the services you provide. Your service can be very valuable. So can mine. Imagine having a bidbot when no one knows when your vote windows happen... I think it'll be harder to engage in your business. Don't you?
I'm less inclined to set standards for you on what is a zero value shitpost. I want you to come up with guidelines that show what your business is doing to protect and grow the value of Steem for the stake holders.
Change is hard. I hope you'll manage.
Yours truly,
Aggroed
