Could the solution to the Bot problem be more Bots !?
I have recently been running an upvote bot for a few days and it made me aware of a huge problem in steemit : Everybody (almost) is upvoting the same authors over and over again!
this creates 2 main problems (and could be the main reason why the value of steem is going down) :
- There is a huge flow of "money" going to authors that don't really deserve that much
- Other potentially good posts are being left out
As authors have been successful in the past, they are added to bot lists and this makes them more successful and then more bots add them to their list. Even people who don't have bots vote for the same posts.
As more and more bots are upvoting the same posts, they all try to get the best timing : be one of the first on the list without giving too much back to the author. For the moment, the author is getting 100% of your voting reward if you upvote immediately 50% if you upvote at 15 minutes and 0% at 30 minutes (yes it's linear)
So as more bots vote for the same authors they each try to vote earlier than the other , some of them voting as early as 1 minute after the post, meaning they give around 95% of their rewards back. This is the good part : it means eventually, the rewards of upvoting the most upvoted authors will get so small that it could start to be more rewarding to look for less known authors.
If a user friendly tool was released, like a cloud service that would allow each steemit user to upvote automatically their favourite authors, this could happen very fast.
As of now, creating a bot just takes a bit of reading, a bit of coding and a computer running 24 hours so it could still happen pretty fast but for most users it will cost more electricity than the rewards they will get out of it.
Something that could be done immediately to start slowing down the huge flow of "money" going to these authors is give the fee taken in the 30 minutes back to the steempower holders. Don't those authors earn enough already. Other authors don't get much votes in the first 30 minutes anyway.
If anyone wants help creating his bot, I'll be happy to help as I believe now that more bots could really be the solution. If anyone is against that please let me know