I was worried this was coming when I saw the public announcement of . While OCDB was semi-stealth and whitelist-only, it was the last vote-buying service that was worth using, up until three days ago when it became public knowledge — and the vote amount was drastically reduced.
For all the talk of it being a new kind of bot, OCDB is now a less-functional carbon-copy of Minnowbooster and Smartmarket, returning a fixed 150% of the send, which is marginally profitable in theory and not really worthwhile in practice.
This has been coming for a while. Profitability fell drastically over the summer with the price of Steem, or more accurately with the price of SBD. The market's been driving money away from voters, but not the market for votes. Instead it's the market for delegation, as the bot owners have been in a full-force price war giving higher and higher returns to keep their delegators.
It's been eating the bot market alive, slowly, clandestinely. I did a haphazard profitability check not too long ago and the conclusion I came to was that unless you're postpromoter or Smartsteem, operating a bid-bot is at best a proposition of buying yourself a drastic overtime tech-support job.
The discounters haven't come off better. Minnowbooster has cut profitability repeatedly and is still struggling, with delegation less than one-third of when I started using it. Tipu had to cut profitability and force votes later to get curation rewards before the fork.
It's still possible to make money off of some of these services, but it takes a lot of work. Just getting the bigger votes from Minnowbooster requires skill, watching the account's voting power, and sending at just the right time. And once you can get them, you have to constantly be aware of what the price of Steem is doing, because a drop in the feed price can wipe you right out.
All that for a dollar or two per post. I've been pretty well convinced I was going to stop buying votes after the hard fork anyway, and this just reinforces it. When SBD was $3 and it was making me $50 a post, putting 45 minutes or an hour into being good at buying votes made a certain amount of sense. Now there's maybe five dollars per post to be had, and those skills aren't useful anymore, at least for me in the US.
Some people – maybe those in poorer countries – will still push at them. showed us some stats today that indicate the vote-buying market is consolidating into a small group of very-high-volume users. Which makes sense as it's getting less and less user-friendly to buy a vote and actually get anything out of it, and matches what I'm seeing as a Minnowbooster affiliate. I've invited more than 4000 users, but there are only about five who are making me any noticeable money right now.
We may actually be on the verge of seeing bots being used for promotion only, and the thin veil of respectability becoming the service they really have to rely upon, which would be pretty funny.
This could all come back, especially if an SBD pump injects a bunch more money into the system, but I don't think the delegators, having worked their way up to returns this high, are going to allow the market to come down again. My prediction is that vote-buying as a means of making money is in its death throes, and it's time to move on to something else.
In the words of John Gorka: "If the world ended today, I would adjust."