I lose money every time I use voting bots, 100% guaranteed. Now for clarity let me outline how I am defining a loss here. To me a loss is a total payout which is less than the SBD invested.
This gets more complicated because you invest SBD/Steem but your payout is a combination of Steem Power and SBD. Essentially any situation where the Steem power I receive is less than the equivalent SBD I lose. I.e it would have been more preferable to just convert SBD to SP on the market.
It seems to me that over the years a number of changes to the voting bot model have caused them to act more like paid advertising. One particular recent change is that most major voting bots require a minimum post age of 20 mins.
This ensures the voting bot will get their 25% curation. Now it was never an easy feat to get a bot to upvote you in the first 15 minutes to avoid losing the curation. Plus there was always the risk that other people were doing the same and a last minute SBD transfer would push the whole voting round into “unprofitable territory”.
Should bots get the curation when the voting is all paid? It’s just an additional perk for bot owners, an increase to their overall margin. When payday comes around, I find I lose circa 40% in value compared to just converting the SBD to Steem.
Many bots also have max/min ROI limits, now I have no idea how these limits are calculated. Are they based on total payout or just the SBD component? Either way they don’t seem to be working properly.
I’ve found I lose less if I use the bots at different times, so sometimes I will wake up early and post before work (UK time 7am). Even then I still lose.
I will continue to use voting bots until my SBD balance has dwindled to zero (probably in 3 posts time) as at least they do help in boosting your profile and I don’t see much point converting 20 SBD to SP as it will have a negligible impact.
What are your experiences? What am I doing wrong, or is it no longer possible to break even using voting bots?
I would say to be honest my good man, don't use the bot's, i know why everyone does, its hard to get limelight yeah i get it, but it really undermines the whole point of this platform to begin with.
The best thing to do is focusing on generating good quality content or interesting material and your following should organically come after that.
Now don't me wrong, i don't necessarily produce "quality content" my steemit is more of just a platform for me sound-boarding through metaphor, but, i do produce content from time to time if i am in the mood for writing.
And generally? it does pretty badly, because no one sees it, but sometimes you have to pound the pavement a bit, the challenge is, your stuff is getting lost in other peoples feeds, what i would suggest, when you drop a new article or piece of content, reach out and drop a line to your core supporters, relevantly, contextually, and then let them know you have just dropped something new yourself, 9 times out 10 they will give you a vote back.
Focus on quality content always, but also focus on quality engagement, those followers should not be a cash cow, they should be your friends :)
Nice to meet you.
Thank you for your post @cryptocartograph!
I'm also curious of other opinions. I didn't use voting bots till now and you make me realise that I have to research more to understand better. As a principle I disagree voting bots, but if this helps somehow all users, let it be a "good compromise".
Who knows, maybe I’m making some big mistakes and someone can share some tips!
Yes, I'm very curious what will be the conclusions, based on the users experience, hope that they will share with us an onest response.
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hi @cryptocartograph
great post. upvoted.
in my opinion using bots when SBD is so cheap is never going to bring you profit. once it's over 3usd then it make more sense to use them if you're after making some extra sbd.
Im using bots to make sure that all my curators are being rewarded. That's a solid reason I think
yours
Piotr