Totally agree man - ppl hide behind the lies they tell themselves - I tried to play fair my first 2 months here - no bots ever - spending hours or days creating content - got no where - I lucked out with a Curie vote - rolled that money over into a month of scheduled bot votes - .250 -10 sbd a post made a bit of coin - not planning on cashing out ever - I used his bot - wasn't happy with the return. Next month I'm going back to no bots / converting all my SBD into STEEM power - the sad thing is there is very little engagement - I've got over 500 followers and only 10-15 are active and vote / comment / resteem - that dynamic is the incentive to use the bots - there may not be ads here or algorithms persay but the vote bots have created a pay to win paradigm. I wrote 2 posts calling out some big players a while back
And then this one a day later when coincidentally the view counter was removed
https://steemit.com/steemit/@emwalker/view-counter-removed-from-posts-f-king-horse-shit
Once they pulled the view counter I kind of said fuck it and doubled down on the bots. Next month will be interesting to see how much I make from all my hard work.
Anywho thanks for replying. Take care.