I've been thinking about this a lot today, and I need to investigate the 'getting seen' aspect further. But, at a glance, it seems to me that a lot of people who are putting about 25 SBD on bots are getting around 50 views within the first day or so.
Now, if I pay facebook $20 AUD, which is about 8 SBD, I can get a post in front of 340-1500 specifically targeted people (e.g.: interested in cryptocurrency) per day, for 3 days. Sure, the engagement rate can be pretty bad, but if even only 10% of people click the link I'll have 100 views for only 8 SBD.
Now, none of those people directly pay me anything, so it's not the same as here, and obviously I need to look further into what the comparative views are over a longer time period. But I think we should think hard about this 'being seen' angle that we are being sold here.
Also, and I need to flesh this out a bit too, appeal to advertising assumes that advertising is in itself morally acceptable. To your credit, at least you defend the view openly not everyone gets that far). But equating bidbot usage with advertising fails if advertising is not an ethical practice.
Finally, yes, bot are allowed. But I don't accept this 'code is law' argument from an ethical viewpoint. There are lots of things that you can do within the code parameters on steemit, but you wouldn't say that they were all morally good, or that they were helpful for the long-term sustainability of the steem economy.
Banning the bots is one thing. But how do we get people to look at things and support them financially? I know a number of FABULOUS artists who are totally under-recognized because they are not getting the right exposure. And god-awful art that gets rewarded by strong marketing. I was lucky to make a living with my paintbrush - but very few artists are able to to that. What can be done to remedy this? If artists don't get rewarded for what they do, they have to spend hours and hours doing other things just to survive. And as a result the general quality of the art suffers because it requires full time work to arrive at a high quality result.
If you can come up with something better than the bots, more power to you. They are far from perfect. What we need is not to remove what already exists, but provide more viable solutions and people will gravitate to them.
Yeah, I feel the same way about my writing.
This is a problem both on and off Steemit. Part of the problem is artists believing good art is, or should be, enough.
Good marketing isn't using money to get in front of the most people. Good marketing is figuring out who the right people are, why they want to buy your art, and how to present it so the right people will see it and see something they want.
What we have here with bots isn't marketing, cause there is no way to discern who is seeing the message. And many of the automated votes come from non-human accounts with steem automatically delegated to them as new "members". Delegated from whom? All those artists. You, and me.
This is long but if you'd like to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...
Believe me @wholeself-in, it is a problem I know quite well having been a self supporting artist for the last 30 years. Finding your audience is what it is all about. At some point you need to extend your audience, having sold work to all your current clients. Now steemit should be good for that, right? Actually the bots have brought my work to the attention of some like-minded individuals who would never have found me otherwise. I feel like everybody is ready to criticize, but no solutions are forthcoming. I am not computer savvy and my creativity is not in that area. So maybe we can appeal to people who have those abilities to create tools to diffuse the right information to the right people.
in your opinion because they financially don't back their own endeavors they are better?
I ran Arkahdia Arts Studio for 16 years and am an Artist myself..
You need money to build a following......
The reality is Art is subjective and those spending for position with something people aren't interested in will go broke...
So they will be like most other artists....