I want to share an idea I have been communicating in comments for a while regarding the problem of bid-bot aggravated crap posts. While many have identified the problem, most seem to think the problem with bid-bot aggravated crap posts lies with people abusing a perfectly fine service, for example by making use of the different levels of bid bot activity at different times. I want to argue though that the problem is the bots themselves, or more accurately, the bot owners.

Playing the system

The platform and its value are determined by the value of the content. Creating amazing context, curating amazing content. In the end, it is the content quality that determines the intrinsic value of the platform and all pumps and dumps aside, in the end, the cumulative value of STEEM and SBD should eventually end up as a fairly accurate representation of the value of the platform. Curation, true curation is absolutely essential for the long-term health of the platform.
Playing the system isn't the problem. Truly it isn't. How the reward pool is distributed isn't that big a problem either in the end. Though it can be annoying if I spent over a month giving birth to the epilogue of my first novel and the post ends up making less than $1 , while watching some Orca or Whale level account make a dozen cut+paste comments on his own bleeding post and self-upvoting them making $1,000 easy, none of us is hurting the long-term value of the platform. He is playing the system, but as he is upvoting comments, not blog posts, he isn't actually polluting the platform by mis-curating content. Yes, he might be "raping the reward pool" as the saying goes, but no, reward pool rape isn't currently the biggest problem. Forget about the reward pool. Forget about comment self-upvotes, tag spamming, comment bots, etc. The biggest problem is "false curation" of low-quality blog posts. So, if you are going to play the system, play the reward pool, play the comments system, but don't do it by "raping the curation system". There are multiple ways to rape the curation system:

• Post 10 times per day or more only so you can self-upvote your posts.
• Use vote/bid bots at strategic times for ROI, not exposure purposes.
• Set up uncurated tit for tat voting circles.

Paying for attention rather than for votes.

So what could a bid-bot owner or, more generally, a voting bot owner to help solve the problem? The answer to this question I believe is 'moderate'. I want to suggest that the whole concept of 100% automated bid bots and vote bots is flawed and by its very nature promotes curation system rape in the same way the three ways listed above are. It is quite understandable IMHO that whales and orcas want to earn some passive income from running comment bots, just like its understandable that smaller fish want to make close to passive income from using bid bots in the silent hours to make a profit on their ten seconds posts. But how about we make things clear and make them clear in a way that allows the rest of us to exercise our SP powered democratic rights. I believe we could distinguish three potentially unconfusing types of bid/vote-bots:

• Self-upvote by proxy bots: Bots that allow unmoderated paid for self-up-votes on blog posts. These bots mainly hurt genuine curation. This currently is the common type of bot.
• System playing bots: Bots that allow paying for votes on comments. this allows both bot owners and bot users to play the system (and rape the reward pool) without hurting the concept of genuine curation. These bots currently don't seem to exist, but I think they should.
• Attention bots: Bots that sell their owner's curation time only. You pay for the whale or orca to pay attention to your post, look at its quality and upvote according to quality.This type of bot currently doesn't seem to exist, but I believe it should.

I would like to argue that it would be best for the platform if all bid-bot owners would move from the first type to one of the other types, or at least that bot owners consider they have a choice, a choice that others on steemit may apply their SP given democratic right to if they disagree with what the bot owner's business model is doing for the platform.

Away bots as democratic tool

Let's talk about away bots. When we as regular users don't curate content because we don't have time for it for a while, our voting strength will grow up to the point where it no longer grows any further. At that point, a little personal bot can kick in. An away bot will keep track of your personal voting strength, and when that strength reaches (or closely approaches) 100%, it gets activated and starts looking for something to vote on. After the bot has voted, it goes dormant again until the voting strength has grown to near 100% again.

An away bot might be used to play the system a bit by voting for content likely to give decent curation rewards, it might be used to factually boost the curation power of trusted friends, or, and this is the thing I want to discuss next, it might be used to downvote what its owner considers harmful behaviour.

Note that an away bot is likely to be active during the silent hours. Exactly those hours when bid-bots get abused the most.

Leverage of downvotes for vote-bot upvoted content.

One interesting property of bid-bots is the relatively marginal ROI. A bit less marginal in the silent hours, but still relatively marginal. If we as regular users downvote a vote-bot upvoted post, even at just a few percents of the upvoted amount, this will cut deeply into the ROI of that post. The marginal ROI on bid-bots creates massive leverage for consecutive downvotes. If your 100% DV worth $0.50 is directed at a bid-bot upvoted post that received a $10,- upvote, this DV will have a huge impact on the ROI for that post and may even make the ROI slightly negative.

So imagine what would happen if thousands of minows and dolphins would start running their personal away bots that all wake up at seemingly random times and downvote the first bid-bot facilitated self-upvote that is close to its effective leverage strength.

The ROI on bid-bot usage will grow highly unpredictable. The average ROI will go down. The ROI in the silent hours that are currently giving the most problems would go down the most. At lower ROI at current prices, the prices will inevitably go down to compensate and with that the income for the bot owners.

The net effect is that personal away bots, if used on a reasonable scale, could use our excess voting power to democratically create the market incentive needed to make bot owners fix the problems that their unmoderated bots are causing to the long-term value of the platform.

Renting SP as further leverage

For those who really feel they need to contribute to the long-term quality of the platform, the ROI leverage of an away-bot could use a second layer of leverage by actually renting SP to downvote with. I won't do the math here, but it is quite interesting to see how much leverage one could achieve against a bid-bot user by using the money you would use for buying votes, to rent SP and cast leveraged downvotes against bid-bot upvoted content.

A valuable democratic tool or start of the worst flag-war yet?

While I truly believe the away bot described could help improve the platform by providing an incentive to bot owners to take their responsibility and to move from unmoderated pay for votes to either a pay for attention or a pay for comment-upvotes model (though I can imagine some people would use their SP democratic voting power against reward pool rape as well), I also have seen how nasty things can get when people think they are being attacked and need to retribute. Depending on the comments I get on this post, I'll start working on multiple convenient versions of the personal away bot described above.

So if you managed to read on to this point, please let me know what you think. Will the away bot described contribute to the value of the platform by creating an incentive for bid-bot owners to move to a model of operation less decremental to the curation based quality guards for the content of the platform? Or will the broad usage of such a bot do absolutely nothing in terms of incentive other than sparking a horrific flag war?