example for illustrative use only:
bidbot investment $50 ~ $100. payout ~ user payout: $75, -$50 inv = $25 gain
11 followers following no one Joined a month ago 29 votes
Last night I was poking around Steembot Tracker in hope of finding a good return for a modest upvote. I'm not proud of this. I don't like to rely on bidbots to make a decent payout, but most of my posts only make a few dollars after three months on the platform, and that's with the MSP upvote. It doesn't matter if I spend two hours on a post or twelve.
Neither am I greedy - I don't upvote my posts beyond a reasonable value, even though I can. That's why I was shocked last night to see a bunch of different accounts dipping heavily into the big honey bidbot money. I'd seen this before but never really understood the significance or looked into it, but apparently it's quite common.
Step one: save or buy a sizable hunk of spd - let's say 100sbd to get started.
Step two: place a $25 - $50 bid on your post in a bot that has a huge chance of returning a double profit margin. This is best done late at night, when there's little competition.
Step three: do this with another bot with similar payout, and maybe a third, thus inflating your post that had a four cent payout to something over $200, with a net profit of $50 or more. don't put a lot into creation. a photo or a youtube clip will do.
Step four: take your payout and reinvest it into subsequent posts over the period of two weeks. Result? A modest earning of about $250-$500 per week, depending on how much you post.
So why isn't everyone doing this? Can the system sustain it? Is it ethical?
Everyone can. If they have the sbd to spare. The trick is making sure its profitable. In fact, for all you unethical people out there, I urge you to do this as much as you can. I want to close that window that makes huge payouts profitable and risk free. I want to make the method unsustainable.
My question to the Steemit community is -
Is this ok with you? Is this how a free unregulated market looks, where the honest people get a few dollars and the people willing to sacrifice ethics for profit get a huge net gain?
When I talk of ethics I mean it like this. If one person started to litter or steal, that's a nuisance. If everyone decided to litter and steal because those other guys did it and got away with it, we have a pollution issue and a governance issue.
I won't judge whether these people "deserved" the immense profit they got based on their work, but I will tell you one of them gets paid to copy articles off a website onto steem.
Another guy I saw posts art with no proof of work. Just a sketch or computer graphic image. Could be anyone's work. Yes, the work is consistent, to an extent. Does it merit a $50 self vote when the guy hasn't even bothered, after three months on the platform, to network or follow more than a handful of people? Or is this considered abuse?
And the sad part is... they arent the only ones. During any given bot run, chances are I find at least one mega upvote for $50, usually from someone with deep pockets. It's apparently something the platform (or the people that are actually aware of this shit) let slide. But why?
Why don't the bot owners have an ethical bid cap or a system of oversight on their bots?
Some do, I know this for a fact. The truth is, it's work to oversee, and the bidbot owners can make a modest profit if no one complains. If not enough people vote during any one payout period, the bot owners lose money. Oversight takes time and money. There is no incentive for the bot owner to find the shit posters who monetize until there is a cost to the owner in terms of reputation or money.
I talked this over with a few community leaders. Most seemed to feel that theres not much anyone can do about it that wouldn't take a huge amount of investment, in either flagging or prodding bot owners to rescind the upvote.
Flagging is only feasible for a very few people at high levels. And who knows if that one new account with no followers worth close to $10k is a shadow account of someone you dont want to piss off? To me it seems many people are afraid to piss the wrong people off for fear of a huge downvote from some dolphin or whale that doesn't like what we have to say. My view is, I only make a few dollars anyway. What do I have to lose?
Is this an issue that needs a method of addressing, like steemcleaners? Or should we use community pressure to flag and poke the bot owners into acting ethically and responsively?
We need to be discussing this and voicing our opinion instead of shrugging shoulders, like we do with our corrupt government, in a "What can I do, it's not my back yard" hand off. I don't have any easy answers, but I want to be part of the solution. The best way to a solution is discussion.
Feedback? Dissent? Bring it on.