i admit i am poor at economics but why does the law of diminishing returns not be applicable to delegated SP? if there is not enough good posts coming in to be upvoted and poor content gets the votes then it is mystifying because there is no new money coming in, right? if there was more good content then there would be value appreciation (not inflation).

it almost feels like we paid 10 bucks and got 8 back. we put in 4 more and got 9 back. around and around we go until it is not clear how much we should put in to get our original 10 back! sounds confusing to me!

Just curious!

<p>This post has received a 4.18 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @whatsup.</p>

First let me say, that you've really unloaded here! GOOD!

I remember when I joined steemit (last days of January 2018) and the first thing I had to wrap my head around was bot, that my (future) buddy used to push up my post... soon I was asking people about the bots, and there were various answers, but you could probably divide them into three basic categories:

1.) I use bots, cause otherwise nobody's gonna give a shit about my post
2.) I don't use bots, cause it's immoral or whatever
3.) I use bots, but I feel dirty afterwards (for real)

But soon I noticed, MOST OF THE USERS have been using bots if you count occasional users or one-off users.... really.

It's kind of self-explanatory, but I cannot say I remember "the good ole' steemit", when you could actually attract a whale and I can only confirm, that we're living in whaleless reality in which you won't find one even with a top notch bait!

My highest single upvote up to today has been like 2.50 STU and for something I wrote half-lucid, totally stoned, cause I didn't know the ropes! 

Otherwise I lucked into @curie once... and the rest has been circle jerking basically, cause to use the word community for what's going on steemit would be a parody of a judgement.

Yeah you won't get a lot for this "negativity", cause it's very - let's face it - anti-American and you should be hyper optimistic to keep steem's price up for the whales and dolphins, so they can perpetuate bot bidding services  and cash in on signed blocks.

It's really become clear lately for me, why bernie aka. nextgencrypto had to shovel THE SHIT against the tide almost by himself and no (haejin-bribed) witness or steemit inc. related account moved a fuckin' finger!

<h1>Let's face it, money moves mountains here! And the bigger the pile of it, the more it moves!</h1> 

<h1>Otherwise we can go fuck ourselves, which we do (see the point about circle jerking)!</h1>

But do I complain? Here's disclaimer for the morons! No, I simply try to establish the facts, that go beyond the flat earth.

**But how dare you spreading FUD in flat earth? And that's exactly the problem of steemit!**

Looks like you appreciate real interaction and genuine reactions. So I figured lets share a few thoughts. 

You're right about losing focus. Nevertheless it was good to read. I usually write and speak in the same way.

I really wonder how it was before the bots? Nowadays I only get spammed with 100+ new bot followers per month and 3 real humans. 

Looking at the bots I wonder what percentage of SP is used for self upvotes? If that's close to 20% or even 30% then the majority of upvotes is used for paid bid bots and self voting. Which results in no one ever being able to succeed in beating the paid bots and self voters. Which most likely means the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer.

Anyways my feeling is that newbies shouldn't come here for the financial aspect. But only because they like the social aspect.

Not only a great in-depth criticism of what is wrong here but you are also a skilled writer. I wish I could experience the 2016 steemit too.

Vote bots are pretty lame, I don't really see the point over all. I just take the "spam" approach of making videos and blog posts like 123021397123 times a day and hope people notice, and so far I've gotten one whale vote in about 6 months, which isn't too bad. I also invest a lot myself, but there's not much content on steemit that I also like (video games, speedrunning specifically) so I don't really interact with many people here other than myself as a result :P

Youll probably never see this comment, cause I've been away and missed this post by a crap ton of days, but I just thought I'd stop by and show my human support. Im pretty sure I found you from one of your trending posts way back in the day, I remember thinking you were one of the sortof big guys, but I actually thought you were a girl back then. I liked it better back then too. I got lucky in the beginning, bernie found me very early on, I think on my first or second post. I loved how I could just post photos and people would vote on them because they liked them. I eventually got on some whale lists, I used to get votes on the regular from ned, but I squandered it by not being around enough. After HF19 I dropped off the face of the planet here, now I make a modest 4-5$ from every post I make, I think mostly because I never powered down, which was more just from not being around than an active choice. Anyhow, whatever it is, is whatever. You know I always love your content, even if I'm not around to catch it all. And I'm with you on being bitter for the good old days.

>I can especially think of one example who's openly stated to not giving two shits about the platform, the people, the chain, anything, and I mean anything, that has to do with the site other than the amount the person can dump. And my God it's infuriating to see the community bend over backwards to throw money at that person's way just because the person is so good at playing everybody.

I have only one guess, but I'm about 90% sure, who this person could be.

I love your post and I appreciate that you took the time to write it. Focus or no focus :)

I am with you on this love / hate bot relationship. They are a way of making some income and gaining some visibility. Both are shallow, though. They are not organic.

On the other side, it is so hard to achieve *organic* recognition. So ... bots are *the easy way out.*

Do I use them? Not at the time and very rarely if at all. I do delegate to two of them so you can find me guilty.

Bots are a phase in the evolotionary development of the platform. Not every route taken is a route of beneficial progress. As in the real life.

Yes, this platform is a game and a mirror to real life which is an ultimate game.

Losing focus too :)

<hr>

Ps: since I am a devoted steemworld use I regularly check your posts to see what's new.

Ps2: I am late for upvoting the post. I will make it up on some other posts of yours :)

Ps3: keep on writing out of your expertise and your passion. That's the way to go.

I mean you could have topped off the irony of the post by using a bidbot to promote it, but still well said.

When I used to see crap at the top of trending I could generally determine a reason, like "Oh, this whale likes memes or obviously this whale likes to smoke pot" When there wasn't an obvious connection you would dig a little deeper and find some people vote trading or close geographical community promoting their own, etc.. I might not have liked it all but it made sense to me.

Now I see random garbage at the top and just ignore it, there is no deeper insight needed, they just paid to get it there.

I can still be friends with someone that uses bidbots...but I will totally judge them for it. They're undermining everything this place stands for, and are a small part of the downfall of the entire platform.

Sure, that might sound a bit over the top, but really, look at trending. The shit that gets rewarded now has nothing to do with quality. What is this place worth when it's just a joke where shit gets rewarded, not because it's worthy, but because the person paid a bot or runs some vote circle jerk?

It's interesting how the whole bid bot justification seems to have shifted from making money to marketing @schattenjaeger.

But, I would also guess

>that the additional support is not very genuine, and definitely not long lasting

But it probably makes people think they are doing something that is getting them somewhere.

Certainly if you look at the figures without doing the maths returns can look quite good.

I've not heard about writing for whale votes before but that explains why people make a big fuss about what a waste of time it is trying to attract a whale vote. That was always pretty obvious to me but the fact that it wasn't always like that makes sense of why people would need to say so.

This post had me interested till the last sentence. I am here for a year now. Since June, 2017. I have seen some of the botless days and that worked for me well because I didn't have money to invest in SP or bots. My content was appreciated a lot and I quickly rose to a little fame. 

The platform has lost it. In the name of decentralization, free market or whatever. Steemit has lost it big time. It's no more a place to flourish. Not as of now. 

Some thoughts I expressed [here](https://steemit.com/steemit/@ilyastarar/why-would-a-64-rep-score-steemit-account-with-good-flow-of-money-stop-being-active-on-the-platform).

> Steemit Inc's focus on SMTs ahead of improving the immediate implementation of Steem blockchain (i.e. Steemit) is misplaced.

> Steem enabling heavy delegations and empowering bid/promo bots to have the biggest stake in the platform is a grave mistake which very well contradicts the vision of making humans with stake to decide where the quality is.

> With so much wealth at Ned's disposal—and at the disposal of Steemit Inc.—it should not be hard to rectify the mistakes in the code or its implementation.

> Removal—even identification—of bad actors in the platform is non-existent.

> There are bad actors in the platform who are free to operate at the expense of platform's future and bad experience of other users; like myself.

Dear @schattenjaeger, I found you for the first time today and I must admit that I like you.

Are you exactly on Steimite since 206?
"In 206 when I joined Steemit, the gimmick of the site was presented to me as follows:"
And Whatsup on https://steembottracker.com/#bid    no. Good information. I'll also try this bot. Thank you! And good luck!

I understand how you feel I feel the same .. it is frustrating to spend an hour doing 1 publication and not have a favorable vote in my case I have 767 followers of which only 1 actually follows me and I have to resort to using the bots so that my publication does not remain at zero.
Currently there are many new account that is already including a vote of one whale per publication. I do not know if it will be luck or everything is coldly calculated.
As you say Steemit is no longer the shadow of what it was before, now everything is based on what you have to buy vote to be seen or to get additional votes, but most are minnow as you said before and it is reality.

>Our brain tricks us into not noticing. That's why we never realize our hypocrisies.

I know this is true, at least some of the time. But it's so hard to believe. In both ways: hard to believe that others are unknowing hypocrites, rather than conscious of it. And hard to believe that I'm an unknowing hypocrite at times. (I need to figure out how to figure out what those times are...)

Definitely worth keeping in mind.

My main interest in Steemit was always if it could solve the "Quality"-problem. The first experiments with this i think was Slashdot's karma system. I am still interested in systems that can support artists directly, but as for quality, Steemit has convinced me that humans do excatly the same way online as they do in the flesh.

The corruption you talk about, because that is what it is when you go nepotist behind the curtains in what should be an open system, the creation of institutions (like Steemcleaners and Curie), the endless opportunism and lick-ass attitude towards the powerful... it all mirrors how any other state is created. Funny to have been here for two years to see the anarchist commune become thrifty pirate-gangster haven (actually what happened at Christiania here in Copenhagen), but not that funny when you could see this happen every other place on the globe.

I have earned more from Bitcoin donations from people on other free sites (Diaspora), than I have earned here with my comic and my art (which is professional quality). It is not that I have not benefited from the community, I have very much - two people translating my comic and helping out, a few large donations, actually lots of funny connections and intelligent people, but money-wise I can see that communication and not quality is what gives you money. That is exactly like the art world I left five years ago.

I think this place needs a middle class. It wouldn't make Steemit Utopia (it hasn't done so elsewhere), but it would make the system less arbitrary and erratic. I just use Steemit as another platform to promote my art. I early on saw how people stopped voting for power-downers, so I didn't. I have powered up instead to see if I can get closer to actually let my self-vote count for something. 

Anyways... before I write a whole post. Interesting things you write - mostly not new to me but at least we share view on a lot of things. I hate the vote-selling because it is not promoting quality. I know how the world work, but that doesn't mean I like it.

my friend @schattenjaeger, the analogy in bid bits and ads, as long as it is retained: I do not want to buy advertising here, as it makes the content discovery more difficult than it is, and it optimizes large wallets, even skewing even more. When I come here Then I stood up steamet. I'm going to be wrong, of course, in this case, consider this comment void.
### upvoted and resteem

It was a interesting read. I am not in favor of bid bots but I still use them because I can't find any other way around this platform. Without those my posts will organically earn less then 10 cents.

Steemit won't survive if the platform can't keep the newbies.And they won't stay once they realize they are irrelevant. (My own family member abandoned the site for the same reason).Then what are all the whales gonna do with their investments?

I think that there is a larger vision to steem, beyond steemit. While I understand that bots suck and steemit generally sucks, the potential for the blockchain to be the engine of all securitarized websites is far greater than what steemit is capable of.

with that said, I also think that people aren't being creative enough with the way they make money because bots are very easy to create.

Looking at steembottracker today vs just a few months ago, youll see dozens of new bots being created (and I suspect this has to do with the fact that the bot code is up on github and everyone just copies the same code). Eventually the land will be saturated and it will become very competitive to make money for the bots since they have to pay back their delegators. 

By that time, I hope that people would be focused on new ways to get centralized content and power it off of steem and people wont even realize they are using steem anymore.

>That said, I can't force anyone to like A) me or B) my content, which is why I've settled to just focusing on what I like to do and would do for free.

also, this is the key.

I'm unconvinced the analogy between bid bots and advertising holds, as bid bots have effects advertising hasn't. As far as it does hold: I don't want bought advertising here either, as it makes content discovery even more difficult than it already is, and it favours the big wallets, skewing the distribution even further.

I prefer people investing time in their content over people investing money in advertising their content. The latter goes against all I thought Steemit stood for when I came here. I may, of course, have been wrong then, in which case, consider this comment void.

Sometimes, I use bid bots, particularly when SBD/Steem rate is not proper for a power up (not easy when you're plakton). So if conditions are met, it can be a good opportunity to change some SBD to SP, but as I cannot invest very much in bots, I never made profit of it.

But in general I'm not pro-bot either.

Brilliant post - I agree with you on all of it (apart from the vegetarian bit) and feel the same.

But I don't follow you because you resteem a lot and I'm not into resteeming.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/is-resteeming-the-scourge-of-steemit


We are all different...

![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbmvLocpMKwykfMKBKqVftJVhgztQ7x9KXeN3qwp7yRso/image.png)

Thanks for the post. I'm worried the bots are breaking down the [economic engine](https://steemit.com/steemit/@somethingsubtle/a-tale-of-two-steemits) of Steemit. 

I have yet to hear how bidbots are not a ponzi scheme that just relies on new bodies entering Steemit and investing real dollars. The majority of the gains float to the top, and weaker and weaker content reaches the Trending page. 

If no one comes here to post, curate, and read good content, then all you have left is the first ever decentralized blogging platform for bots.

I am in agreement with you for the most part, but I find it worrying that there are trusted members of the community propagating this bullshit that vote selling is any way acceptable from a moral stand point. 

If you - or anyone else - knows who the most mature and least arselickish member of this community who is for bidbots; please do ask them if they would be willing to debate me very publicly on the issue of votebots. 

Thanks-

Thanks for sharing! A link to your post was included in the Steem.center wiki article about [Upvotes Bots](https://www.steem.center/index.php?title=Upvotes_Bots). Thanks and good luck again!