The White Flag of Surrender is being raised all across the landscape as the Juggernaut of NewSteem rolls forward with almost religious zeal. The sustained pressure on the customers of the Vote Sellers has been hurting their profit margins to a significant extent. One by one the Vote Sellers have been realising that the defence of their position as paid promoters in the attention economy is untenable in such a hostile environment. They are yielding to the NewSteem onslaught and desperately trying to rework their business models lest they fade into obscurity.
This probably doesn’t come as any surprise to anyone who has been regularly reading my blog. It was over a month ago that I suggested the Vote Sellers profit margins were in the crosshairs when I wrote my piece Shots Fired : NewSteem Launches Blitzkreig on Trending Battlefield I did save my queries from that post, so if you don’t want to take my word for it, the updated charts below tell the story.
Using the same methodology as before I’ve extended the data series and you can clearly see that the Vote Selling income of the Bid Bots has almost flat-lined. Nearly all of them are over 90% down and that has got to hurt!
Similarly the Instant Vote Sellers have continued to be hit pretty hard too. One of them saw the writing on the wall early and abandoned ship, while two of the others seem to be faring only slightly better than the Bid Bots. I did suggest that these services might be a little bit more robust in the hostile environment due to using a slightly different voting model and that does appear to be the case, but the difference is only marginal.
A little bit surprising is that the yields on leased Steem Power are still holding up. While there has been a predictable drop in yields since my last update it’s only fallen from an average of about 18% to 16% in the last month. The lease market would have to be a VERY attractive option for investors who are trying to maintain an ROI in the wake of the Vote Sellers capitulation. One added benefit of using the SP Lease Market would be that investors could be supporting ACTUAL Steemians and Projects that add value to the ecosystem while still getting their ROI….
So is it time to celebrate? Not yet, I think. It is good to see that these Vote Selling Maximisers have been torn down, but what has been the cost? There are a lot of genuine content producers who have been getting upset as they get caught in the crossfire. I started Resteeming them but there has just been too many. Many were perhaps caught unaware and maybe many others simply did not understand the consequences of The War To End All Wars that was launched after Hard Fork 21. Many of the shock troops who have formed into the Vanguard of NewSteem have been using auto-downvotes and hitting even quality content producers without remorse nor explanation. As much as we hear the talk about a Promised Land where Genuine Manual Curation holds up those adding value to the ecosystem with great content – we’re not seeing it just yet. In fact I was quite dismayed to see one of the new curation projects being buried under retaliation flags that have been left totally unchecked by NewSteem.
It’s all well and good to tear down a system that isn’t working and the demise of the Vote Sellers has been satisfying to watch, but what will replace them? The Vote Sellers have been scrambling since the Hard Fork trying to appease NewSteem by doing things like donating to the Steem.DAO, ensuring Vote Buyers were not getting profitable votes, and then balancing their business with some “manual curation”. I am not convinced. These guys are Maximisers and as I’ve said before, they will find a new way to game the system even if means their Vote Selling is just driven underground. NewSteem may have shifted the goalposts a bit, but we haven’t reached the Promised Land yet and a lot of genuine Content Creators are suffering as they now neither have an effective method to promote, nor effective curation systems to support them. Meanwhile, the value of STEEM continues to drop....
