I have seen this coming for a while too, It's a topic I discuss all the time with @cryptosharon... While bigger users seem to still be resorting to bid votes, users with smaller stakes seem to be going for community bots, those that you can delegate to and recieve a daily upvote based on delegation or you pay for a monthly subscription and secure an upvote a day for your posts for some visibility.

hiya poly so is ocdb then not a good dele? itook mine away from smartseem, steemua and a few others. thoughts?

I've quit using them also unless I think I have something important to say.

All these minnowbooster, smartsteem and tipu provide very marginal and logical returns. Get a real deal using [@yabapmatt](https://steemit.com/@yabapmatt) tool, steembottrack.com

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Don’t worry, there are some others around

At first I was not sure I liked SBI, have gotten used to it now, but did not go hog wild on buying, (if I had more steem I could change my mind), I also was not sure on the new startup inciniboost (i think that is how it is spelled),  5 steem was a lot to save up at my levels.  So far I am pretty happy with them, and I do not need to figure out how to use a bid bot, although I keep forgetting how to get more sbi's and incinboost, but I can find the info when I have the funds. I am still not sure on steemua, I am not sure I like their level/rep system I really have some issues with some of the rankings. But will try to not let it bother me to much as I do get an okay vote from them. 

I think the scaling back/consolidation of the bid bots is going to actually be a good thing for steem and steemit, especially when/if SMT's do become a reality, as a promotion tool it would work good, I think.

I was only using resteem services with a vote that covers my investment @crypto-n-custard does that for 0.25 steem gives you back the same amount with one vote and the resteem to its followers. There the gain is to increase your exposure with an acceptable investment. Most of the bots in the SteemBotTracker simply DO NOT LEAVE PROFIT. No matter what you calculate where the site appears, it will always give you what you put in or less.

The new OCD bot @ocdb that will be a positive change in the rules of the game. Instead of giving you a "ban" when they discover that you do not meet the standards of good use of the network.

If not the other way around, they select users and give them the responsibility of self-financing their growth once they know that the user's passion is to participate in the Steem project responsibly and not by a desire to get rich posting trash.

For my part, I also improved my English (I think) a lot.

There are many independent bots that do not appear in the SteemBotTracker Tool! Guess those are the good ones these days, im returning from to steem and i need to track them xD

Lack of profitability is a good thing, but until delegation to these false curation bots declines, the problems with trending will remain.  False curation keeps eroding the intrinsic value of the platform with early uncurated upvotes while real curation initiatives such as utopian are delaying upvotes to the last few hours, keeping that content out of trending.  I think that if we want STEEM to grow, it should become socially unacceptable to delegate to false curation services of any kind. Especially now with G+ about to end, there is a lot of potential for growth that might need some new initiatives for delegation. I think with a lot of advocacy and community delegation G+ fugitives have the potential to boost the platform by growing the user base significantly and by bringing in new good content. False curation and more importantly funding of false currarion through delegation I believe goes 180 degrees against that potential.

Yeah, those services are dying. A couple of months ago I used minnowbooster but it did not go so well because by the time of payment (7 days later) the price had dropped so much that there was practically no profit.

Thanks for your opinion on the state of bid bots, seems the days of 200% bid to vote ratio is gone unless the price rises.

If you are a Qurator member you can use @qustodian though the upvotes are limited for less than a dollar it seems.

 I've been arguing most of this year that the rise of bid bots was because of the imbalance between curation reward and author reward, exaggerated by SBD premium. With actual rewards divided so unevenly, smart curators figured out how to capture part of the author reward.

 I think the collapse of vote buying services in the face of SBD premium compression is strong evidence, but what do I know?

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Hola @tcpolymath, gusto saludarte, estoy de acuerdo contigo en esta prediccion, un abrazo.
>Mi predicción es que la compra de votos como medio para ganar dinero está en su agonía

SBI has always been the better option to vote buying IMO. It's a lot less flashy since you don't get a 50.00 vote but in the long run more profitable. And I think this site needs a lot more long-run attitude so we break free of the pump and dump mindset afflicting every crypto project.  I used to buy buildawhale votes but only because it is owned by another veteran whom I felt alright supporting, and because it was leveling my account, which despite being a worthless endeavor, looks better to some people, and I was trying to look more respectable before I started running contests.  Since vote buying is at the level where only those with huge amounts of free cash can squeak any kind of profit or visibility out of them, I personally see it just going back to the original Steemit problem of the biggest accounts vote swapping each other.  What's more concerning to me is a trend I'm noticing in the top curation groups is the circle of upvoting being drawn tighter and tighter, specifically to the content being posted by their own curators or friends of those curators.  Which again brings me back to thinking that SBI may be the last saving grace of this platform, where users can earn/buy their own ongoing rewards for activity.

Ocdb was unreleased for a long time due to it being non-profit and development on it being a bit slow, this is not to blame the people maintaining it as we were not in a rush to get it released ourselves the same way as we were not in a rush to restart the normal curation of @ocd as we wanted to align it with the account creation fix with HF20. 

You're right that it has dried up a bit recently but that is to be expected, our delegators are not in a rush to receive max profit (at least not the original ones) same way as they decided to delegate to ocdb instead of other bid bots when it was unreleased knowing that during the testing phases the bot was giving out way too high ROI at the cost of the delegators. This can easily be fixed by increasing the percentage of votes people can buy.

Our primary concern has been with bid bot services serving mostly the owners and that's why we created ocdb to work alongside our curation initiatives. We like to think ocdb is a lot more than just a bid bot but it is understandable that at this time it might not seem that way. We are going to try our best to make this a author friendly bid bot and not leave too many people out of it that we feel deserve to use it to grow on this platform. Entitlement is something strong in the community so there will always be people crying foul but much like everything around here all is voluntary. 

If anything we hope ocdb will raise the bar of bid bots and we hope to see similar competition arise.

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