Great job outlining and supporting your observations, @penston! This whole issue of paid upvote services needs to be evaluated before jumping in. I have only tried one service, @bumper. It has been a very rewarding upvote service for me. I think that is because it is a manual upvote service run by a real human who cares about the little guy, and who is minding the voting power of the service to deliver what he is promising. He's building a legit service with standards for upvoting, and refunding when the vote can't be completed before payout. Other than @bumper I have personally felt a feeling in my gut that told me to not bother with it. Now I see why.
I've upvoted and resteemed this article, and I'm following you now, too. I found the link for it in The Steem Engine Discord Server.
Cheers!
@mitneb
I've heard of @bumper but didn't see information about what made it worthwhile. If it's as you described, then I can see how it could be good. Perhaps the admin could tell us a little more here?
@penston i am not sure if you meant us with "Admin". But i could inform a bit about us. First of thanks @mitneb for your great help and support to our service :)
Yes we are indeed not a bot but a service. People can send 0.1 to 0.5 SBD to us and we will cast a vote of 3 times the value they send us. We are aiming to do higher returns later but we have to build our SP up a bit for that. Also what @mitneb said about refunding. We can only do +/- 50 upvotes a day and at the moment i have 92 in queue waiting for an upvote. So it can take up to a few days before the vote is casted. If we were unable to vote before the 6 day marker we will refund the user.
Also if the blog contains plagiarism and or is of very bad quality we will not cast a vote and return the money to the sender. We want to support the bloggers that put effort in their work. But we also don't want to become the next upvote service that stands in the way of Steemit becomming a better platform.
I agree with this post also.. Those bidding bots you lose a lot on and i would advice no one to use them. Those are only enriching the right and not helping the poor sort of speak.
We with @bumper will do this different as indeed we care about the little peeps around here..
I am basically one myself ^^ I just receive a lot of support of the community as i don't go ass deep in all these wars and keep focusing what really matters. Helping each other to grow and build a better future.. No one is able to do it alone ;)
Hope it helped @penston. Wishing you and everyone here a happy 2018 ';)
I like what you’re saying, @bumper. It sounds like you’re doing things in a way that’s fair. Your approach to treating your customers and not rewarding junk content is the right one.
The treatment is most of the time more important then the service itself @penston.