I want to give my take on the whole whale wars and self-voting and bot discussion. I’ve previously been fascinated by the bot ecosystem and voting properties, and if you’ll look at my history you’ll see some analysis posts about payouts, bots and curation. After playing around with all that, I wanted to share what I've come up with so far.
The short of it:
- In terms of value assignment, the system is designed to trust those with more stake. Bots essentially spread out the stake.
- Using Bots on own posts is the same as Self Voting. Apparently, this isn’t obvious.
- The whole system’s success depends on value assignment being “fair” or “accurate” from a market point of view.
- Self voting and bot voting is bad if the value is “unjustified.” Market perception will eventually catch up with us all.
You’ll notice I’ve put a lot of things in quotes there, because ultimately the market (not just people in Steem, but Steem’s investors as well) will react accordingly.
There is a community that wants to see Steemit succeed. And there’s some that are visibly trying to milk the system. I can only assume that those that are abusing their stake to vote garbage are in the latter camp. Milk STEEM’s current valuation until the market turns sour. Even that’s a bit of a risky proposition, given that STEEM POWER takes a long time to liquidate. But such people only serve to reduce the market’s valuation of STEEM, and should be destroyed. We just haven’t figured out how yet.
Value Assignment and the Forces at Play
The higher STEEM POWER (e.g. stake) you have, the more value you can assign as well as remove from posts. This value in turn is influenced by the STEEM price, and the external market decides that.
Now, the number one justification anyone will see concerning self-voting is that a person should be able (and should be allowed by the community) to exercise their stake however they want, because they bought into the platform.
But this is flawed, because the whole point is that STEEM as a whole is trusting those with that stake to reinforce the success of STEEM. The external market can lose faith in our value assignment, and the price of STEEM will eventually reflect that.
Any outside can look at a garbage post on STEEM and go “This gets 100$? What the hell is wrong with the world?” Even if they agree that there is potential value in a decentralized social media platform such as STEEM, they end up justifiably skeptical about the future prospects of the platform. Especially if nothing can be done to thwart such blatant abuses.
The same goes for whenever a large power stakeholder flags without good cause. If it's perceived widely as unfair, and this large power stakeholder has free reign to run the place, it makes the whole thing less desirable, and that would also reflect on market values in the long run.
If Steem is not a great place to be, soon these whales will be ruling over a dried up pond.
Bots and Self-Voting
I see bots as an extension of self-voting. It enables self voting for people that are not whales. Okay, it allows whales to dip more too, but they don’t need to. Given the above, the same rules apply, any value assignment needs to be justified, or the market will react.
What’s the hold up? If there’s so much abuse, and abuse is so bad, why haven’t we seen a correction? Well, the STEEM game is young, and I don’t think we’ve fully understood it. Also the crypto market is still crazy speculative, you can’t really trust it. But think fundamentals. Think about all the exciting development that is happening around STEEM. All these factors mixed in make it hard to isolate the impact of abuse. Some might say this abuse is the hold-up that is preventing STEEM from rocketing. Who knows. Bleh.
I know the other point of view concerning the bots is that the bot operators make a pretty penny for this service. Should the community that wants STEEM to succeed react based on that? I’m not so sure. I do like the fact that it provides a way to extend one’s stake for a fee.
Countering Abuse
We as a community seem very efficient at identifying when payouts are out of control, and drawing discussion to it. As well as when whales are being too oppressive. This discussion is a good thing, because it means we are reacting to the abuse.
Earlier I mentioned that the higher the stake, the higher the value you can add or take away. The good news is that with current rules, it is proportional to STEEM POWER (SP). This at least gives a fighting chance for lower SP holders to negate the actions of an abusive whale.
Why haven’t we been doing that? Well, because it is so disruptive, and there is a fear of retaliation. If only there was a tool that could make a group of people react as one to negate the abusive whale, without fear of retaliation before enough SP is amassed… One can dream, I suppose.
Where Am I?
I had a previous Voting Declaration about how I wanted to use the bots and self-vote. I’m sure nobody really changed much given that behavior, since it really didn’t amount to much difference, but in any case I have stopped doing it. Mainly because I started to take the position of using bots for promotion instead.
In the current state, it is really difficult to compete for attention. There's a promotion section to burn SBD's with, that is just silly. I don't know a single person that looks at the promoted section (let me know if you do!). There's tons of garbage being sent to the hot and trending sections with high values.
You might put me in the abusive camp as well, and I can't say I disagree with you. I don't know how much my posts are worth, but they surely are worth more than that upvoted garbage we all keep complaining about. I know, it doesn't justify it. I'll admit to being a bad person.
There's one thing I've been noticing, though. This might just be wishful thinking, but lately I've experienced that bot returns are going down, and bot votes are more scarce. Could it be that the demand is much higher than supply? Are we moving towards saturation of the bot voting market so that it has self-corrected to a point where they are all barely worth anything at all? (Well, except for the bot operators). Not sure... but that will ultimately be a good thing for STEEM. The bot with no return, used for purely promotional purposes (harder to use to get immediate returns).
Anyway, we should focus on looking for those that really are poisonous to the STEEM community, if we don't want to dry up the pond.
