Bots give multiple draws to newbies. ROI and Rep. Bots voting heavily on a low rep account will provide that account with a large increase in Rep. Why? Because these bots are getting huge Rep simply for voting on thousands of posts per week. So high rep voting on low rep = big rep boost. That's probably why @scandinavianlife has such a high Rep with so few organic votes and so many followers.
Let's also keep in mind the chicken and the egg argument. The whales were the ones who started these bots "to help minnows". Right? Now you're blaming the minnows for using the bots to benefit themselves.
I don't use bots. I've been on Steemit for 8? 9? Months and I used bot services fewer than 5 times, and at least one of those uses was paid to promote another person's post when I didn't have the voting power to support their post myself. Oh, and that was probably back when I was on the platform for a month or two and bots started taking over Steemit. I fought against the bots early, then realized nobody cared, so I stopped. Trust me, I got a lot of responses from dolphins, whales, and minnows at the time arguing that bots were helpful to minnows and not just broadening the gap between minnows and whales...
Good luck in your fight, but I don't see the voting bots going anywhere. Hell, they have a website telling you which are most profitable now! You'll have better luck focusing on removing the scammers than you will getting rid of the bots.
Spoiler alert, scammers are just as hard to get rid of...
"Now you're blaming the minnows for using the bots to benefit themselves
"
Well my post is mainly targeted to non-minnows like Scandinavian life who spend 20-30 sbd or more per post to get upvotes. Read my post again and my comment responses. If there is something to take is that very soon only the established players will be able to use bots and minnows will stay minnows. Just take for example buildawhale. Due to demand the minimum upvote costs 3 sbd which is too big for a minnow. Soon it will be even more. When it started it was 0.1 sbd and everybody could use it.
Definitely i dont put the blame on minnows and I understand why one would buy a vote. Still, if you look at the forest imo its something that works against their interest even if it looks the exact opposite. But as I said most of the blame goes to the bigger accounts not minnows. :)
And yeah I don't see them going anywhere but at least I can complain 😂😂
So to see the Forest through the Trees, it helps to look back at where this all started.
Whales initially built the Voting Bots to profit more, on the backs of minnows, with the guise of "helping minnows". Now even if all you had was 0.1 SBD, you could see a favorable up-vote on your posts, worth about the same value as 0.1 SBD at the end of the day, so you were slightly improving your situation while the Whale was profiting 100% on the 0.1 SBD, plus the curation rewards on their upvote from helping you. WIN-WIN-WIN! (for the whale)
In the beginning, the voting bots were small with limited rep and the impact on users' Rep was very limited and not a consideration. Now there are countless voting bots with 65-75 Rep, which incentivizes more minnows to use the bots because not only do they get their ROI (from their SBD "purchase"), they get accelerated Rep increases, too!
Either way, @scandinavian is still a minnow (under 10k SP). Just because he's not under 100 SP, doesn't mean he's not a minnow. Anyway, we're all playing a rigged game. The initial mining / SP distribution that created the monster whales who we know today was the first strike. The voting bots was the second strike. And the resteem bots (I think most of them are gone now?) was another strike. We've all gotta learn to play within the constructs of the game, or we'll be left behind...
Thanks for your reply :)
I won't continue to argue cause we will keep saying the same things with different words :P
On a totally unrelated note, since I see you are a minnow you may want to engage and post good content on established communities like gardening and science. Bots will get you only so far. Yes, the game is rigged but there are more generous people than you can imagine that actually try to help. :P
Just have a look at the communities supported just by curie https://steemit.com/curie/@curie/curie-weekly-update-11th-february-2018-to-18th-february-2018
Not to mention the countless indepedent whales that upvote stuff and other great projects like dtube, dsound etc that hand out big upvotes to the small fish. If you put the work, and don't give up right away you will be rewarded, with or without bots :D
I don't use bots. I've used them less than a handful of times. Please take a look at my history.
I'm still saying that we're all playing a rigged game. And that game includes bots. Until the bots are taken down by the few (whales), the many (minnows) will continue to use them. It's just math. Or science. Or both. Mostly human nature though.
Cheers 🙂
P.S. Take a look at some of my old posts. I was vehemently against bots from their inception, but the sheep were too happy to use them.
P.S.S. you're a minnow, too!
https://steemit.com/vocabulary/@aggroed/steemit-tips-steemit-is-easy-all-you-have-to-know-is-the-following-list
If you move some of that Steem out of your savings, you could be a dolphin...
Maybe we can just talk a few good whales into sending 30 random vote bot votes to random users to make every round of voting buying a loss for all users. I could do it a few hours per day if I stop supporting certain groups or holding contest.
This way the supported communities like the @spl who give away free SBD to players and those who enter my contest can all lose together and if we take profit away from everyone equally rather they put in the work or buy votes maybe it will start to sink in that buying votes is a singular gain method and has very little or nothing to do with steemit as a whole.
I think all voting bots taking 100% profit for a week would do. People would complain about it, scammers would be screwed over, whales would get filthy rich, and bots would no longer be trusted.
Let's make this happen!!