“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Delegating to Bidbots as a Refusal to Curate
Users that delegate to bidbots are intrinsically users that refuse the present curation system in Steem. The SP "BidBots" have is nothing more than the SP of accounts delegating to them, whether the owners, other accounts or a combination thereof. Said accounts, by delegating to the bidbots are refusing to participate in the Steem content discovery system, also known as Curation, presumably because they don't think the curation rewards are appropriate. Instead they choose to "maximize their stake", in other words: Making as much money as practically possible without self-voting.
Now, why is self-voting badly seen in the first place? Well, it is because self-voting is seen as a refusal to participate in the content discovery system of steem, aka curation, which is the foundational stone of the platform. Self-voting in essence is saying: "why would I reward anyone else if I can reward myself instead?"
Delegating your SP to a BidBot is, in practice, nearly the same, since in both cases your stake does not contribute to the content discovery system. Moreover, if you delegate to BidBots, your stake interferes with the content discovery system, not only does it not contribute to it, it works against it.
Self-Voting vs. Curating vs. Delegating to BidBots: The Numbers
Let's delve into the numbers. Let's say you have 40k SP, that's about a $1 vote, what would happen if you vote one of your posts and nobody else does? At payout you would get $0.25 worth of SP in curation rewards plus you would get $0.375 worth of SP and $0.375 worth of STEEM/SBD in Author Rewards. That's $0.625 is SP and $0.375 in liquid STEEM/SBD. In other words: you get the full $1.
But, self-voting requires posting content, either from your account or from an alt, and those posts are subject to flags by the community observing the self-voting. Even posting what is colloquially called "shxtposts" takes some time, and your reputation will suffer if you vote said "shxtpost" whether in your own account or others. In short, it doesn't have a guaranteed return, you will suffer reputational damage and is not sustainable in the long run.
What would happen if you voted somebody's post with your $1 vote and nobody else voted for it? You would get 25% under the present curation rewards system, $0.25 worth of SP.
Now, let's see what would happen if you are delegating your 40k SP to a BidBot. It would vary of course from bidbot to bidbot, from window to window, with price fluctuations, etc. but to give the reader a rough average number if you delegated the equivalent SP of a $1 vote you would get in liquid (STEEM or SBD) around $0.50 per each one of your $1 votes. Yes that's double what you would get if you curated and half what you would get if you self-voted.
Have you heard of the EIP? 50/50?
Under the proposed new content discovery/curation reward system curators would get instead of 25% in curation rewards, 50%. That means that under the proposed system people that curate will get at least as much as in average they are getting by delegating to bidbots now: $0.50 for each $1 vote.
The EIP is going to incentivize curation in the sense that since curation rewards are going to double, certain stakeholders that weren't curating due to not being satisfied with 25% curation rewards now will begin curating. This assumes those stakeholders are indifferent to the liquidity of the rewards. Remember, in average delegators to bidbots get $0.50 in liquid for every $1 vote they sell, but under the proposed 50/50 of the EIP they will get $0.50 in Steem Power, non-liquid rewards that take 13 weeks to be withdrawn.
Additionally, even assuming these accounts that were delegating to bidbots were to switch to curating, it is important to note that these accounts have demonstrated that they are interested first and foremostly in maximizing their rewards over contributing to the content discovery system and so the curation they will perform will naturally again be focused on maximizing curation rewards over contributing to the content discovery system.
Now, that 50% in curation rewards is overall, distributed to all the voting accounts, but there is also the new convergent curation rewards curve, what does that mean? It means that if you have a $1 dollar vote and you vote a post you will get $0.50 if the post is at payout at $6 or above, namely, the curation rewards go linear, equal rshares per steem in voting SP at around a post reward of $6, if the post rewards are below that, the voter with the highest SP gets more rshares, a bigger, above linear share of that 50% of curation rewards, under the concept of having contributed more voting power to the post, and those voters that are not the top voting power contributor get a sublinear share of the 50% rewards.
This means that to maximize their curation rewards, "small" stakeholders will be incentivized to vote posts that are or are expected to be at $6 or more at payout or posts in which they are the biggest voter. Conversely this means that "big" stakeholders will be incentivized to vote posts that are not and are unlikely to be at $6 or above at payout, in order to maximize their curation rewards.
Let's Go Deeper
"Small" stakeholders will be incentivized, in order to maximize their curation rewards, to vote for posts that are, or even better, will be at $6 or more in payout.
How to achieve this you ask?
- Voting for already discovered authors, popular authors.
- Voting for accounts that systematically bidbot their posts above $6.
- Voting for posts that already have $6
- Joining curation guilds' trails that vote posts to $6 or more.
- Voting posts that are below $6 in which they are confident they will be the largest voter, as in for example low quality (aka sh**posts).
Conversely, "large" stakeholders will be incentivized -in order to maximize their curation rewards- to:
- Vote content that they feel confident wont exceed $6 at payout in which they reckon they will be the largest voter.
How to best achieve this you ask?
- Voting borderline abuse aka subpar content aka sh**posts that never exceed $6, you need predictability, so you are incentivized to vote accounts committed to posting subpar content.
Your Voice is Worth Something, But Money Talks and You Listen.
Frankly speaking, this is not looking good for the content discovery system or for the antiabuse community. These proposed changes create more problems than they solve. The EIP incentivizes practically all the behaviours that a healthy content discovery system should disincentivize, and disincentivizes practically all the behaviours a healthy content discovery system should incentivize. In short: it is a clusterfuc*
On The Other Hand...
On the other hand this will greatly facilitate, it will make it easy for most stakeholders to maximize their curation rewards and will incentivize major stakeholders not to dump their SP. It is, we reckon, a last resort measure to prevent a massive steem price drop due to big stakeholders dumping. Yes, at any cost to all other factors.
Subversion
In this context, the subversion of the system seems to be the only possible solution to make the content discovery system appear to work. In this proposed system to be implemented in HF21 -and make no mistake, it will pass, for as said above: your voice is worth something, but money talks and you, listen- the only apparent solution to keep quality content authors in the rewards loop and to achieve the so much longed for trending page with quality content is to subvert the system, turn it over, make it do what it is not supposed to, hack it so to speak.
One of many forms to do this is the following:
For curation guilds to partner with certain bidbots, so that:
- Many small delegators that care about quality content join their guild's trail and assure themselves by joining forces that they will vote quality content and posts over $6 at payout, and therefore a linear share of the curation rewards of the posts.
- Posts that are curated by the guild are promoted for free by the guild via bidbots, improving the visibility of quality content beyond their organic SP, in that way making trending great and also further improving the curation rewards of the organic SP in their trail via the posterior large promotion votes.
This could be achieved by a process in which the authors posting for those guilds set an account owned by the guild and the bidbot as beneficiary and then using a rewards liquification system such as 
The Way Of The Future
The reason these issues regarding the EIP were dealt with in this post is because as an antiabuse community we need to not only know where abuse was in the past and where it is in the present, but also where it will be in the future in order to prepare for it.
BidBot, Reward Pool and Content Discovery System abuse are categories that are somewhat borderline and controversial, but nonetheless we believe it is healthy to begin talking about them and about how they can be approached, engaged, minimized.
As denoted by the subversive possible solution explained above, we believe the solution lies in antiabuse initiatives, antiabuse friendly bidbots and curation guilds joining forces.
This is Jaguar Force,
Reporting directly from the Jungle.
Onwards!