I've been meaning to make a post about this for some time but didn't want to feel like I'm complaining or whining about the state of things. It's a bit unfortunate how some things are but it's the same all over the world, the ones with the loudest voice, best marketing, fake numbers and support from those who don't know better will come out on top than those trying to do good things for the platform as a whole.
It took us a long time to launch 
Hive account@ocdb, that was not cause it was extra difficult to get it going, but having been a curator for the longest time and not wanting to falter to "bid bot" alternatives we tried to prolong it for as much as possible but unfortunately things did not seem to want to change while more and more stake was being locked up in bid bots. Why do you hate bid bots so much? Well it's not like I hate the bid bots itself, every platform has their own tools for promotion and if used correctly they could be good for stakeholders as a whole. With the overreacted bear market and lack of a big active userbase it caused them to either go idle or be used for anything, that's the part that sucks cause it clogged up trending with literal garbage while no one wanted to downvote them down cause it cost them voting power and potential curation rewards, at least to those that the rewards were big enough to matter. So yes, it was a symptom of broken economics but at the same time the "competition" between these "businesses" probably has a whole rabbit hole of things going on such as faking buys to pretend they are being used by sockpuppet accounts or just bidding during the same bid window to take a cut from the others because to them it doesn't matter, they are getting a cut off of each bid either way and that was my biggest concern with it. Most of these bid bots are just clones of an opensource one so their "business" is nothing else than having been at the right time, cloned the right bot and gotten a delegation from the right whale while they make a ton of Steem for doing absolutely nothing than damaging trending of Steem. Not all bid bots are the same of course, there are some that care how theirs are being used and take action, but let's just say I still don't think the rewards are deserved.
So we went along and launched Hive account@ocdb the lesser evil, fully non-profit which meant that the only people receiving a profit where the 3k+ authors that 
Hive account@ocd had curated in the past and a few extras that got in from recommendation posts we did. To be able to pay out the curation rewards to the delegators though required that we fed Hive account@ocdb liquid Steem on a daily basis since curation rewards are returned in SP. Over time it would be fine cause the account would catch up to the required amount of liquids needed to be paid out when the powerdowns were able to cover it and thankfully 
Hive account@anomadsoul stepped up and powered all of his accounts down to take care of it as he had created Hive account@ocdb and had the keys to it (he's part owner of 
Hive account@ocd-witness since 
Hive account@steemonboarding joined forces to tackle some Steem problems together, mainly onboarding and curation/retention). Now with HF21 coming up though it means that there will be a much bigger need for liquid Steem as curation rewards will be going up and he won't be able to cover it alone, that's one of the reasons I've been powering down lately and will be keeping it going for a while longer. Well, that and some extra bills I've had to get rid of lately and some investments I decided were worth to start on Steem to hopefully increase the userbase even though the price is probably at a definite bottom right now, time will tell if that works out.
So a big cost has been opportunity cost, my stake not being powered down could've easily returned to me a nice daily reward from Hive account@ocdb itself but that's the cost you pay when you want to risk it in a bigger investment which will hopefully pay out in the long run. At the same time there's often been some payout errors with ocdb which have required me to pay the delegators from my own pocket (thankfully it didn't happen with the big ones) but it sure added up over time. Then if you count all the time you've had to answer to countless questions about Hive account@ocdb from whitelisted authors, potential delegators even though there are plenty of posts and FAQs around explaining things in detail, and the sense of entitlement some authors and delegators get even though they should know by now that this side project of Hive account@ocd is just what it is, a side project, the lesser evil "distribution bot" in a platform filled with passive stake only being delegated to bid bots. It gets a bit annoying having to deal with all these questions and users feeling like they are doing us a favor by delegating to Hive account@ocdb even though again, it is fully non-profit, it doesn't matter to us if there is 50 million SP delegated to it or 50k. Of course we care about it in the sense that it is helping distribution for all authors willing to use Hive account@ocdb on a daily basis and it better be going to them than bid bot owners but it just gets tiring over time, you can probably understand how that would feel.
I've been thinking to start changing some things around in the way we operate though, at least with the marketing part with HF21 coming up. Curation projects have been undervalued for so long and curators underrewarded. Even with Hive account@ocdb 3.5m SP out of 4.2m mostly come from 2-3 big users which is a bit of a let down as you'd think many more would be interested in distribution the stake as wide as possible on our platform to strengthen our currency that's built in DPOS. So over the next few weeks we'll be trying to push and dare I say bid bot our announcements of Hive account@ocdb changes and other initiatives we'll be focusing on with Hive account@ocd which will hopefully bring the most value to Steem. I hope to see other curation projects do the same as they surely will need the extra support come HF21 after this long 2 year broken economy that has left them with barely a million SP to curate with while there's maybe 50 million in bid bots. Kinda sad but it is what it is and there's no point looking back and keep crying about how things used to be and look forward to how things can be in the near future if we try our best to curate, downvote and take care of the rewardpool better than we have in the past.
To everyone who's been trying and ignoring going for max ROI through these times, I want to thank you and hope you still have some strength to try for a bit longer and hope things will turn around here for them. Even though curation is very underrated, think about how many ask why you upvoted their post compared to why you downvoted them, or at least be thankful for curation they receive instead of feeling like the blockchain or curators owe it to them compared to how fast a downvote gets them all riled up - I'm hoping things will change for the better and we'll have a healthy content discovery and curation onto deserving content no matter the size of the author behind the posts. If HF21 won't fix it somewhat then I don't really know what I will do, probably take a long break and focus on myself for a while.
