As a lot of people have been and keep asking me what the difference is between 
The purpose of a bid bot is basically, promote an advertisement service to authors wanting to promote their posts onto their biggest front-end; Steemit.com. Believing that many accounts and outside viewers read and browse the Trending section of Steemit and letting anyone buy a vote for their post unless blacklisted.
Checking steembottracker.com you can get a good glimpse at how they operate:
As you can see they run by rounds, picking up bids each round and then the votes come in when the round is over. They have minimum bids and max ones and I assume there's an algo that changes the vote strength of the last votes so it matches the bid and promised ROI while the voting power is slightly depleting from the previous votes. Some of them have a minimim ROI, meaning that if there are too many bidders in that round the bot will send back your partial or full bid or add you in queue to the next round. Those without minimum ROI will just split the voting power between all bidders in that round respective to their bids.
Now as we went through the basics, I want to say some thing. This is all a great service, attention is after all what is Steem's main focus even though it can be blatantly bought right now. Who's to say there won't be other solutions later or if other front-ends become more popular due to the way they decide what gets attention. Buying attention should cost, the Steem that the bidders use goes back to the investors of Steem and at the same time increases the value of our holdings. What kind of bothers me though is that there are some owners of these services that make a lot of rewards for it, and some of them do not give back to the platform by making sure their bots aren't being abused or leading to a crappy trending quality. Not just that, but imagine you wanted to buy a vote and the bid bot owner sees that hey "this is not me", so to make it more costly for you he will at the same time post something on an alt account and bidding against you so you have to pay a steeper price for your bid. They will falsify demand in order for their bid bot to turn a better profit and in turn them getting a bigger cut, it won't cost them a much if they are the main delegator to their own bot. Think about it.
In decentralized systems everything is possible.
Now while I appreciate what bid bots are doing and hope that the rewards some of their owners make daily are enough motiation for them to continuously improve on them I hope there will also be interest in the future to distribution bots. It's a unfortunate time for curators as even being so altruistic with your stake considering how much faster accounts are growing that are delegating their stake to bots, the time will also come where even delegating to completely non-profit distribution bots will be considered as altruistic as promotional bid bots will always have the edge to for ROI as advertisement costs and will only cost more the more eyes are on this front-end. There are however ways to make that more fair too, I'll be talking about that in another post.
For those who know us at 
So we created
So the way OCDB works compared to bid bots is that each bid gets onto a queue, the account votes each post when its voting power goes to 100% and that post receives a 10% profit depending on their bid. Extreme price fluctuations may change the ROI as well considering the payouts occur a week later. All bids go directly to the delegators and all curation rewards as well, but by giving the authors 10% bigger votes than what their bid was worth a delegator receives around 10% less ROI than if he were to self-vote itself 10 times per day. We believe that this small change will keep delegators delegating to us knowing that the votes are going to deserving authors that we have curated and won't be abusing it knowing they'll miss out on this chance to grow at a faster pace with
Our goal with OCDB is not to exclude anyone unless they've proven to plagiarise or abuse it in ways we did not intend our bot to be used. We give warnings to authors that are getting close to that border and only in a few cases have we had to remove authors. At the same time we are adding new ones constantly and we are also going to be increasing the pace with that. We want people to grow along side us and are hoping that there are a lot more unique authors using OCDB daily so that the max bid is lowered and people wanting to use it for promotion won't be bothered to as that is not what OCDB is about, we were just surprised at receiving huge delegations in a short time period which lead to our max bid being 60 SBD at one point. We are happy to have received it though and are looking forward to it helping the distribution on our platform and that good authors and users may grow faster along side so that they'll hopefully use their stake at some point for curation again to give back to the platform.
Thanks for reading, I thing I gave up trying to explain it like you're five in the second sentence... :P
Looking forward to a better distributed Steem in the near future! :)
If you like what OCD is doing, then please check out our website with the whitelist, queue and delegators here: https://thegoodwhales.io/
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