I was having a look at some of the numbers from the 
Hive account@ocdb bot to see how it was performing out of curiosity and it is pretty interesting. Firstly, the bot was never meant to be a boosting bot but as it has got sizable delegations that has made it quite a large distributor. Delegators have the added benefit of it being a non-profit bidbot meaning the bot itself makes no return itself, only the users and the delegators. It also offers a flat rate return and works on a queue standard with a limit on the send amount. This limit will be adjusted depending on popularity.
The initial plan of the bot was to support whitelisted users (users who had been supported through the manual curation efforts of 
Hive account@ocd) during the down times and for the delegators, be able to support users who had shown they can create decent content and hopefully, those who will look long-term (I will get to that later).
When it comes to the delegators to Hive account@ocdb, here are the major ones. While the largest delegator is Freedom, you will recognise a lot of the names on that list as people who have supported Steem for a very long time and continue to actively do so. These aren't (including myself) people who generally sit back and take passive income.
Now, Freedom is an interesting case here as the account is the major delegator to all of the major bidbots with nice round numbers which means it is a decent account to use to compare the returns. Here is how much it delegates to each of the four:
And the daily returns for Freedom from the last 24 hours:
I will use the Steem number and add some extra for the SBD that was sent.
Hive account@ocdb has 2000MV delegated to it and returned: ~501 Steem.
Hive account@therising has 3000MV delegated to it and returned: ~615 Steem.
Hive account@appreciator has 3000MV delegated to it and returned: ~620 Steem.
Hive account@rocky1 has 3000MV delegated to it and returned: ~667 Steem.
Hive account@upme has 3000MV delegated to it and returned: ~600 Steem.
As you can see from these numbers, with the flat rate bids and returns Hive account@ocdb offers, if Freedom had the same 3000MV delegated to Hive account@ocdb (currently 50% less) it would have returned ~750 Steem. Not only that, the users are earning around about 10% more with almost zero risk (unless large swings in the market) due to the flat rate and no competition on bids.
Obviously this depends on the orders but if hypothetically the four bidbots returned the same as Hive account@ocdb, Freedom would have made ~470 more Steem than it did.
Obviously, the bot isn't there to make any income itself but it does have a purpose of increasing the size of the accounts that use it so we have to take a look at some of those numbers. I don't have the earnings amounts but we can have a look at how many accounts have used it.
There are 365 individual accounts that have used it and I estimate that about 70-100 of them have sent to it but had their request rejected because they weren't on the whitelist. 225 accounts have sent twice or more. The bot has only had large delegations the last 2 months or so but has been in operation for 9 now. Initially it was returning a few dollars on a vote and was 50% or less utilized.
But, this is not the interesting part in my opinion as its idea was to grow accounts and other than a couple of days where the prices were a mess before 
Hive account@yabapmatt updated the code, Hive account@ocdb has always returned positive numbers that could be used to power up or not.
Out of all 365 senders to Hive account@ocdb, only 25 are currently powering down. Not only that, only 7 of those who are powering down are actually whitelisted users, the other 18 are people who tried to send but got rejected. This means that if there are 280 whitelisted users who have sent to the bot, only 7 of them ~2% are currently powering down. As a bot that was aiming to steadily increase the stake of users, that is a very decent result.
Not the future
While Hive account@ocdb is doing a pretty good job of distribution to content producers in its community and giving decent returns to delegators as a whole, it is not an ideal solution for the future by any means. The initial premise of blockchain was to cut out the middlemen though and as a non-profit bot that doesn't take a fee, that is partially done as it connects the user directly to the stake seller without fee-leakage in between to middlemen.
We all know however that the incentives encouraged by the code on the platform are misaligned and that in time, there has to be better solutions found that can support consumers, contributors, developers and investors adequately. One of the things that delegating to Hive account@ocdb has allowed me to do is grow at a slightly faster rate and still return to real contributors. I am lucky that I am able to still have significant active voting stake too and I don't recommend small accounts to delegate to any of the bots as they can be more influential staying active. Freedom of choice though right. I do use the bot myself but hope that as more of the whitelist start growing through it, the maximum send can be reduced significantly and it can support more and more users. At that point, I will stop using it as it will have enough users to keep the queue full.
In the future though, I am hoping that there will be changes to the platform that will offer all stakeholders on the platform incentives that satisfy them without having bidbots at all. In the end, the bidbots could be used for true promotion only and offer no return direct return. I am hoping that the users of Hive account@ocdb keep powering up their stake and when prices increase, take the opportunity to become a collective distributing force themselves.
There is a long way to go in the Steem game and the view today is far from complete.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
A link to the Hive account@ocdb whitelist
As you know, I can't get these numbers myself mostly so asked 
Hive account@abh12345 to help me out. Thank you.
