Welcome back @transparencybot

The never ending fight over steem dollars needs you. For a year now, the bidbots has tightened the grip on the joy of giving. Bidbots do just that by amassing vast amounts of steem power that can be used to boost payout for just about any shit the average steemer decides to put out there.

@transparencybot and what it does

It is quite simple. It tags posts with bids in excess of $50 with a breakdown of what went to it and what can be expected as payout. Consumer friendly for the bidder -who risk not meeting the expected turnover and revealing for curators and readers.

The information on display is publicly available if you know how to look for it. But let's just face it: most don't want to check with an explorer and calculate it. And even if they knew, it would be time consuming.

The argument against @transparencybot

Boils down to basically one thing; it's revealing.

The straw arguments I have seen are:

• it is spam
• it clogs down the blockchain (!)

Well. We live in a ecosystem full of spammy bots. I could mention a dozen of them and so could possibly any user that has used Steemit for more than a month. And the argument would be valid if there was an uproar from the opponents against bots in general. But there isn't. So this straw argument is BUSTED.

The next argument: it clogs down the blockchain! That is serious, right? WRONG! It consumes about as much as what the bidbot did in the first place. So it makes no sense whatsoever.

it gets dirty

Apparently @transparencybot is bad for business. A business that must be lucerative when pure mafia tactics is used to stop a bot that only displays public information. Have a look at this and memorise it:

So @booster, one of the largest bidbots there is wants to beat up opponents in front of family and friends? Come on! That is something drug lords would do!

And you as consumer should realise that this of course is unacceptable.

@transparencybot is back online

This time with an improved feature: the ability to opt out if you don't want to know the breakdown of what you can expect for a bid in excess of $50.

Of course it's power and visibility is less than it used to be, due to heavy flagging from @booster, @fyrstikken and @fyrst-witness. Yes, you heard right. A witness engaged in flag abuse to protect his own business. Because it is very well known that the owner of bot the witness node @fyrst-witness and @booster is @fyrstikken.

But the requested feature to be able to opt out was apparently not enough for @booster. This is what I found this morning:

So clearly adding a opt-out function was not enough for the bidbot mafia.

What to do, what to do, what to do

• first: unvote @fyrst-witness if you happen to have voted for him. I did it months ago when I realised what a hypocrite he is.

• second: don't use @booster. Who in their right mind will use an abusing mafia tsctics service? I wouldn't. Neither should you.

• third: support @transparencybot by either upvoting it or delegating some steem to it.

And don't forget that Steemit was meant to be a gifting economy. A place where you can show appreciation towards total strangers for their thoughts and expression. It seems to be forgotten in the race for another steem dollar.