We have all seen the rise in power of the dark schemes that are selling their votes. @randowhale, @booster, WhaleShare come to mind first, but I am probably missing a few. These exploits work for a simple reason: you get an about equal return on your investment 7 days later, and as an added bonus you get more exposure in the hot / trending tabs, which usually results in even more generic upvotes/money. Fantastic...
I'm sure I'm not alone to believe that we need to reduce these exploits. And offering a better, more honest alternative could be a solution. The promoted tab in steemit.com is supposed to be what people use to promote their posts. Many users probably don't know it, but the price you pay to promote, gets burned. This is a good, sane way to promote posts on STEEM, and it grows the reward pool. Today, instead, people use the vote-selling bots that give a better near- instant return on investment.
Introducing @promoted
I ended up doing this because my genius friend @fabien recently created the account @promoted, and was looking for someone to run a voting bot with a twist... Instead of selling the votes, it upvotes if you promoted your post normally and burned your SBDs. The bot doesn't make any profit, it just boosts you if you burn money. As an added bonus, you also appear in the promoted tab!
Bot Details
- Maximum: 10 SBD burned => 100% upvote
- Minimum: 0.001 SBD burned => 0.01% upvote
Very easy to understand I believe.
EDIT: Actually, we are constantly changing the settings for the best, soon the @promoted account will post with more information
How to get upvoted by @promoted
Just use the promote button at the bottom right of the post you want to boost.
Step 1
Step 2
Voilà. You will receive your upvote within the next 10 seconds.
At the moment the bot upvotes give much less (about 15%) than the promotion amount. That's because @fabien delegated only 40K SP to the account, which is very low compared to other voting bots.
Helping the cause
- use post promotion instead of vote-sellers
- delegate SP to @promoted (feel free to contact @fabien about it)
- run your own similar bot -> github source
Current Delegators
| Delegator | Time | VESTS | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| fabien | 2017-07-09T16:07:51 | 81522927.660326 VESTS | 0.43209491860150334 |
| robrigo | 2017-07-10T17:42:33 | 5000000.000000 VESTS | 0.02650143551650834 |
| ekitcho | 2017-07-10T18:38:15 | 50000000.000000 VESTS | 0.2650143551650834 |
| arhag | 2017-07-10T19:35:00 | 52146098.000000 VESTS | 0.27638929071690493 |
If we manage to raise the power of @promoted, and offer a better alternative than the vote-selling bots for users, they will burn their SBDs instead of sending it to people manipulating the current hard-fork's weaknesses for profit. By using the promote button, the burned money will go back into the reward pool, to everyone.
As usual, feel free to comment about how this makes you feel, good or bad.