As we are working on a full guideline to OCDB and be able to link to it when we warn users of misusing it in the future I wanted to bring up two cases that has been occurring a lot lately that I wanted to talk about.
One of them is the bid bot stacking along with OCDB. To properly understand this you need to understand how the idea of OCDB came to fruition.
Curators at @ocd have constantly been curating users that have
- Provided quality and original content
- Author has been under-rewarded (the value has changed from time to time)
- To help them grow faster on the platform vs spammers, abusers, etc.
This is all in mind to help the platform and stake distribution, thus OCDB is completely non-profit as all bids and curation rewards get returned to the delegators and the authors make a flat 10% ROI instead.
The reason we are against bid bot stacking is because it defeats the purpose of point 2. If things have changed for you since the first curation and addition to OCDB whitelist than that is great and that doesn't mean you should not use OCDB because of that, but since we are focused on rewarding and allowing users that don't naturally generate a lot of rewards it will at some point become a bit frowned upon, we are in no way close to that time though as it will require a lot of demand and the max bid to be a lot lower, so low in fact that for many bigger users it may even seem as a waste of time to use OCDB for that extra x% ROI.
The main reason is that we don't want to encourage people to use OCDB's ROI just to break even for using another bid bot that is not non-profit and does not net the author a net profit. Basically, OCDB is not meant to be for promotion like most other bid bots are. We have a queue and the bot only votes once every time it is at 100% vp for a reason, the max bid is then adjusted depending on demand. We don't have anything against bid bots but since there are no non-profit bid bots (from what I know) it'll mean that authors will use OCDB just to justify having used a bid bot that returns -10% ROI to nullify OCDB's ROI for promotion instead. This does indirectly encourage users to use bid bots that reward and enrich their owners which we are fundamentally against. We want users to get a shot at growing their accounts and the platform to be better distributed since the coin itself is delegated proof of stake and the security with witnesses and everything will depend a lot on distributed stake in the long run.
I'd love to hear you guys opinions on this stance as it is quite controversial and I wouldn't be surprised if bid bot owners were to see it as an aggressive stance even though that is not what we are aiming it to be. We've only warned authors so far and not removed anyone stacking bid bots this far but that is destined to change as we are evolving and fine-tuning the guidelines.
Another thing that occurred recently and reminded me that I should talk about is the whitelist. With a whitelist we are not trying to exclude authors that may also qualify to be in it and with time I am sure that everyone will get a chance. The reason I am writing this is because at the time when OCD was a lot bigger and our votes could cover a lot more authors daily we were also curating different languages. As times changed, curators went inactive and our votes could barely make a dent in the daily posts we had to remove language curation. We were curating up to 10 different languages at the time which means there were probably a lot of whitelisted users to OCDB who only wrote in their native language. That's all fine and we realize it's on us that the plans changed and there now exist users that wish to buy OCDB votes for their native language posts, but we reserve the right to warn you not to do so right now as we don't have the manpower to curate or check for abuse that can happen in many ways. As I said in a recent comment even though the chances of abuse existing in the users we have curated is rather low, we just can't be for sure right now that's why we aren't allowing people to buy OCDB votes on other languages than english. If you happen to post in both languages than that is all fine cause through your english post we could then check that there is no plagiarism going on or spinning. Telling us to use Google Translate does not make much sense cause it would be impossible to figure out if a user posting in German has stolen and translated the article manually from a source.
We hope in the near future to be able to allow all 10 languages we have curated in the past for OCDB as well and have users check through them for their originality but as of right now we can't. We hope the majority of users will understand this "problem" we are having right now and they'll respect our decision. Finding out some users have been abusing OCDB after the fact feels as if we have done everyone else in the whitelist and platform a disservice because we weren't able to nip it in the bud in time. So again, we're not discriminating other languages and we don't want to exclude anyone. A few big changes that are coming up for OCDB soon will help everyone get a shot at trying out OCDB through the whitelist.
Thanks for reading, as always I reward discussions and comments in my posts with a vote. We at OCD hope to become an important pillar in the future of the platform and be the cause to a healthy distribution of stake.