I was going to make this post a few days ago already but some personal problems came in the way. I'll try to keep it brief and explain my perspective and would love to hear the thoughts of others about this.
The EIP and bid bots.
As you know, compared to most other bid bots @ocdb was working on manually curated authors only, so the odds that they would get downvoted compared to 90% of garbage that bid bots sell their votes on usually, we would have had a good chance to operate without seeing much downvotes and possibly been one of the last bots standing while everyone was starting to downvote bid botted posts. The reason we did not continue selling votes is because it undermines the EIP and makes it unfair for the rest of stakeholders and authors.
As an author you get less rewards due to the curve if your post doesn't make it to 20 steem post rewards, same thing goes for the curators and they'll only make curation rewards from honest voting.
As an author using bid bots you get an unfair advantage because they return profitable votes to you no matter the content and at the same time delegators receive both the bids and curation rewards (such was the case with the non-profit @ocdb at least).
So as you can see, anyone buying ocdb votes was directly taking rewards from anyone who didn't, both authors and curators. This is because the rewardpool only consists of a certain amount of Steem daily/weekly.
Same thing is true today, those buying bids, if they don't get downvoted, are directly taking rewards from everyone else who didn't.
Since @ocdb went fully manual, we have been downvoting posts that receive purchased votes for this main reason. There are many others attempting to do the same, the psychology is changing fast with things such as even if your post is worthy of all the upvotes, it is still unfair to curators to get the majority of rewards from bid bots. Same thing with promoting your post, it can just be a cover to gain that ROI over everyone else so if it's mainly for promotion then you won't get flagged if you burn part of the rewards to not make it profitable for yourself.
Bid bots that we have been targetting have been: upmewhale, rocky1, sct.voter, steemmonsters, appreciator and bdvoter. The good news here is that most people with common sense have stopped using them, so much so that these bots have started curating seeing their voting power constantly idle. Most bids still going on are usually from posts older than 2-3 days on garbage content, but as I mentioned above, the content doesn't even matter at this point cause the bid bots, due to how little competition there is for votes, are always giving profitable votes to authors which directly means they are making more than their original bid, giving bid bot owners and their delegators more returns and undermining the EIP.
There is always a cost to pay when you stick your neck out to downvote these posts, I was fine with it and didn't make much noise when the first downvotes started occuring on my posts from a 1m sp+ korean account because we downvoted him due to very concentrated curation on himself and a couple other accounts only. I also didn't care much when some bid bot owners started retaliating on my posts because of the first ocdb downvotes on their customers.
Now they seem to have banded together though to downvote the compilation posts of @ocd which go 100% to the curators and that does not seem very fair to me. The reason I say banded together is because they all seem to be doing it around the same time:
Before you get all "it's their stake they can disagree on rewards like everyone else does", well, if that was the case that would be alright with us.
Matter of the fact is we noticed early on into the EIP that the @ocd posts were getting a lot of rewards and toned it down so we don't hog trending constantly. We used to give a 10% vote per nomination and decided to change it to a more focused and quality 6 posts per day compilation and once there is more worthy underrated and deserving authors over time we could branch out to more posts. Once we realized that certain bid bots (who are now downvoting us instead) were curation sniping the posts because they were forced to curate when the bids were running dry, we decided to stop self-voting as we were making around the same amount of rewards now to reward the curators for their efforts.
This is what the posts look like now, bear in mind I haven't been voting much on the @ocd posts myself until these attacks started occuring:
So here's what I'm wondering now.
Do these bid bot owners think that they can intimidate us with these downvotes? It's pretty obvious by now that if @ocdb wasn't downvoting them, many other accounts in favor of the EIP would instead. How would they retaliate towards them?
As I mentioned earlier, ocdb was in the beginning (when we were still a "bid bot") breaking off voting rings that were mainly rewarding eachother, even though we have plans on going back towards that in the near future, we figured bid bots were a much bigger issue for now.
We never downvoted these bid bot votes to 0, it is only meant to make them as profitable as curation is.
Bid bots need to change their ways, the time for easy rewards with others delegations while making this platform a mess is over and even if ocdb were to stop downvoting them, others wouldn't. They have to become a hybrid were idle vp is used for curation and if they want to sell votes for promotion they need to make sure the posts are burning some rewards or are young enough to actually affect hot/trending or don't give the authors a profit. Advertisement and promotion doesn't give you a direct ROI this way anywhere, it is not sustainable and it comes to a cost for everyone else on this platform. Promotion has been their main excuse for over two years now and it's pretty obvious by now that barely anyone uses them for promotion, most of the posts ocdb flags are older than 1 day.
OCD has always been rewarding it's curators with these post rewards, they aren't just a list of "what we have done today", they consist of descriptions of the posts and authors and we have a lot of followers that follow our accounts to find these new authors we highlight. We are not going to negotiate with threats of bid bot owners. We have not countered these downvotes with the @ocdb account as we want to keep them separate, but I figured this is something the community should know as many have been asking me lately why the @ocd posts are getting downvoted.
OCD is not the only curation project that rewards their curators with post rewards, just because @cervantes and other curation projects aren't using their downvotes to assist the platform and the EIP it seems very unfair for our curators to face these retaliations and threats. Even if we were to adapt to another form of rewarding our curators, do you think this is where it ends? It wouldn't take long until they would instead retaliate on our manual curation just to get us to stop downvoting their bid votes they are double dipping with.
If any of the bid bot owners are reading this, I want you to know that every downvote cast from @ocdb has been on my order, so if you want someone to retaliate on, feel free to do it on my posts. Doing so to curators who work hard to find these posts and have nothing to do with this sounds like some collateral damage you don't want hanging over you.
I mean, come on, it's getting pretty ridiculous when bid bots are selling their votes through other bid bots cause that's how desperate they are to earn more rewards than everyone else and undermine the EIP and proof of brain.
100% of the rewards on this post going to @ocd for the team of manual curators that have been affected by these downvotes.