A Pragmatic Approach to Combatting Bid Bots

Why do people use Bid Bots? Profit is a motivator for some, but with the advent of the clever SteemBotTracker it is getting harder to milk the Bid Bots for profit. The most legitimate use of the Bid Bots is for Post Promotion. In a sea of often-rubbish content it can become necessary to use Bid Bots to get your post in front of a few eyeballs and potentially just buying your way to the trending page. We even have some of our most prominent witnesses admitting that we need to use Bid Bots or the shit-posters win. But was STEEM designed to be used this way? What if there was an alternative way to promote your posts?

This is the question I have been asking and I believe I have at least part of the answer. Small communities have been forming and building on STEEM for a while now and we have started to see the emergence of new types of Bot. The Subscription Bot has emerged, where a set fee is paid (often per month) and the Subscription Bot will Upvote each subscriber’s posts from a pooled Delegation. It is still a form of post promotion and for the most part it still has a profit motive, but it does encourage subscribers to post regularly to get a return on investment so there is an improvement there – Subscription Bots are encouraging regular content creation.

Now take one step further and we start to see what the next evolution might be – I am calling it the Not-For-Profit Community Subscription Bot (yes, ok the name sucks but it does describe it). The idea here is that a growing community gets a few volunteers together to set up a Subscription Bot for the express purpose of supporting its community and NOT for any individual or owners profit. Ok, so I just heard a thousand clicks as many readers who made it this far just closed their browser in disgust, but if you’re still reading – Thanks for hearing me out.

We already see a great number of minnow and dolphin users here on the platform going above-and-beyond to try and build and support their communities and they do it for no personal gain. They do it because they love their community members and/or they love the thing their community is built around. There are a lot of passionate people here, whether it be for a love of photography, flowers, cryptos or any number of diverse interests, it doesn’t really matter what your community is built around. If these growing communities can get their act together and start building community bots to promote their members, all of a sudden we don’t need these Bid Bots any more. If investors are given a choice between Delegating to a Bid Bot for a % return (which includes the for-profit Bid Bots profit margin) or Delegating to a Not-For-Profit Community Subscription Bot for a potentially greater % return and the extra benefit of encouraging actual community building and value-adding content to the platform – It’s a no brainer even for the shrewdest investor.

All of a sudden we get Steemians who are lining up to join communities who share common interests instead of spending money to feed Bid Bot owners and trying to go it alone in a desperate attempt to hit the trending pages. Does that sound like an evolution for STEEM that’s worth believing in? It is for me. I am sick of watching people fighting for scraps on this platform like seagulls fighting over a chip. If this place is ever going to realise its potential and fulfil the vision of its creator(s) then the communities here need to step up and get their act together to start supporting each other. To me it’s just common sense.