RE: A newbie minnow talks about BID BOTS
Bid bots are a problem for sure and while the $ value on the post looks great it doesn't mean they actually making that, you have to spend and yes you get a little ROI but it's not near enough to run home with.
Bid bot bids are also just redistributed to people delegating to them so it still helps the cycle of money for a short term promotion of your content. I know its not a perfect system but I feel it can be better solved with UI
If posts simply stated how much of the votes are bought and how much are organic people can quickly devise for themselves if its something they would be keen on and out a lot of people for shameless promotion
I don't really see bid bots as a problem, just the behaviour of people who use them to mine steem without really contributing and those are very small
Bid botting can also be great to raise the profile of a post you want traction on and we should allow that if someone wants to promote their work
Thank you for your response, @chekohler. I have had a look at some bid bot offers and it does look like the ROI is spread out and fairly low, Steem for Steem , but the initial investment is enough to shut out those who might most need the early promotion, so I can see why even 44 hundredths of one percent of votes cast by bid bots upsets the idea of meritorious growth and reward.
I agree with you that it would be of value to see on each post what is organic and what is bid bot driven -- bad content which is not likely to be rewarded but somehow makes big money would be easily distinguished from good content that would be undervalued owing to low discovery rates but is getting bid bot support and thus providing some reward to the poster.
I think that one of the issues around bid bots is that the community has not had a chance to make choices about legitimate uses for such things -- the perception is that the rich are using them to get richer without putting in valid labor, at the expense of those who are honestly producing good content and increasing the value of Steem. What surprised me about the data is that the bid bot votes are so low for all the heat and light they get, but I think that their mere presence is an issue because of the lack of transparency about them.