Bid Bots are Killing Steem

Dear Steemians,

Today I read @jerrybanfield's article about bid bots (Upvoting vs Voting Bots on Steem!
), and I'd like to share my opinion about how bid bots are killing Steem community. (Below is the comment I wrote on his post.)

I'm a creator of Steemhunt, a daily ranking community for cool new products on top of Steem blockchain. I began this project two months ago, and honestly these are my thoughts/struggles about voting bot issues.

There are three types of abuse in Steemit - 100% self voting, Circulating votings on self accounts, and delegating SP to bid bots. Many people agree that the first and second one are abuse. But not many people agree that delegating SP on bid bots is abuse. There are two main problems with delegating SP on bid bots.

1. First, bid bots do not return any profit to the users who bid. Actually the return is -5 ~ -15% to their paid amount. It only returns commissions to bid bot operators and rewards for delegators. This means that delegation to bid bot is another type of SELF VOTING POOL.

2. Second, most of whale's SP are converged on bid bots nowadays. I can't find the exact amount, but top 10 bid bots' full voting amount is over 250 SBD now. However, upvoting from bid bots are not creating any value for our communities because IT IS JUST AN AD. The voting is not linked to the value of the content. Thus, most of whale's SP pools are just using for nothing.

(Delegating SP on bid bots are another way of self-voting mechanism - image from @tabris)

Honestly, we are quite stressful nowadays because we invested our money to have a DApp business based on Steem. I believe our project can create lots of values for Steem community - I explained our vision on our launching post here - Introducing Steemhunt: Daily ranking of effortlessly cool products fueled by STEEM blockchain.

We have a short-term plan to compete with Product Hunt, an original inspiration of Steemhunt to attract users from more than 8 mil MAU pools. We have also mid-term plan to make HUNT token economy based on SMT platform to create "Product Influencer's Crowd Funding Platform."

To do this, we are running an SP delegation program by giving 5% rewards to the delegators. The explanations of this program are here - Introducing Incentives for Steemhunt Sponsors. So far we gathered 22k SP on @steemhunt account from 14 delegators. We feel very thankful to them because they delegated their precious SP to us even though THEY COULD GAIN FAR HIGHER PROFITS IF THEY DELEGATED IT TO BID BOTS. They delegated to us because they believe that investing Steem DApp proejcts is crucial for Steem's long-term growth.

We really think this situation should be changed. The start-ups like us on Steem are struggling a lot to receive SP delegations from whales because of bid bots. And those bid bots are not creating ANY SINGLE VALUE FOR STEEM.

Look at the current trending taps on Steemit. Most of posts are using bid bots. Even the witnesses are using them. I'm surprised that no one thinks this is a critical issue. I strongly believe that being occupied by bid bots will definitely kill Steem community for three main reasons.

1. It kills the opportunities for quality posts observed naturally.
2. SP pools are wasting because of the self-voting mechanism by bid bots.
3. It kills the opportunities for whales to invest in the hundreds of Steem DApp projects even though many of the projects will bring longterm benefits to the Steem blockchain.

Any opinions on this issue are totally welcome. Please let me know what think about this issue. I know @ned and Steemit Inc. are preparing to solve these issues by bringing several projects - HIVE and Oracles (Account-based voting and Good Person Token). However, we don't know when they will arrive on Steem. More than 70 mil SP on @steemit and 20 mil SP on @misterdelegation are just sleeping there without helping the Steem DApp projects. They are not trying to make other successful projects like @utopian-io, @dtube, or @dlive.