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!!