@midlet & @nonameslefttouse, This may be the most content-rich comment dialogue I have ever seen. I appreciate you guys having this conversation here for all to see.
First off, @midlet, it's good to hear from you. I remember you "coming to my rescue" if you will, When this original post was under fire. As a fellow digital artist and just from the way you communicate I see so much of myself in you.
In the book that you wrote above ;) those are all the exact feelings and thought processes I had. I was trying to leverage my SBD into more exposure and essentially make money in more SP. However, it really isn't that simple. I went a little crazy and had almost 3k invested into bots promoting my posts over the last month. A lot of that was rolled over into the most current seven days. By then there was so much money "on the line" that the risk did not even come close to the reward. Because it takes seven days for our reward payout, that money could have easily been down voted or flaged (Totally plausible mind you), resulting in a complete loss of all those funds. For the most part, once that happens you are shit out of luck fighting to get that back. If you paid for those votes (which I did), rather than just getting them from generous whales (nothing out-of-pocket), it would quickly make you consider suck starting a pistol.
In the beginning, I did not fully realize the risk to reward ratio. Also, @nonameslefttouse mentioned it briefly, but there is a reward "slippage". By the time the reward pool is distributed, you take out the 25% curating reward, and the market price per coin falling you are in the hole big time. Also, take a look at your pending payout a few minutes before it is paid, it drops another 20% usually, furthering my point. Trust me, I thought I had a perfect system, but putting that money into actual SP may have been a better move. The only "saving grace" is the amount of followers gained. That is indisputable and very hard to assess a value to. Maybe that alone makes it worth it in using bots? The system definitely needs some fixing and until that happens I am treading very lightly.
It took me a long time to really think about all of this, analyze, calculate and realize the true wisdom @nonameslefttouse was giving me. I would listen to everything he mentioned above and really focus on what he said in a previous post – "Rather than making people pay for attention, let's go back to paying attention to them."
@midlet, is 100% correct that for artists time is money… So it's difficult to continue to post great content with little rewards for months on end. But I guess that also determines who deserves to be here? @nonameslefttouse made the most epic analogy : We are like street performers hoping to garner enough attention to have someone drop a vote in our proverbial hat. It is up to us to have enough hustle to fill that hat up.
If all of us here stick together and help educate others (especially minnows) about what's really going on behind the scenes I think we will all be paid/rewarded enough to be able to focus our time sharing on this platform.
Hi @abrockman,
It's good to hear from you as well. I'm also glad we were able to talk about this here.
So I think what you mentioned above is the ACTUAL best argument against using bots, and that's that someone can just come and downvote you and you can lose everything you have invested. That's pretty scary, and I feel a bit of a problem platform wise.
In this case, there was a presumed justification for the downvote and flagging of your post even though it was more of just a misunderstanding. But that doesn't guarantee that someone couldn't just downvote you because they don't like you or for some other arbitrary reason.
That's why I think this is a bit of an issue with the platform and your situation really put a spotlight on it to me. In this case you lost money, but as you mentioned time is money also, if I spent a couple of week working hard on something and it was doing well, theoretically someone can just come along and remove all or most of the reward I receive arbitrarily. A lot of people have turned to Dtube because they don't like the fact that Google can just remove your content or demonetize it and there's nothing you can do about it, but your situation made it clear to me that on Steemit, other USERS could potentially do that. Obviously that's not what happened here, but it just opened my eyes to the possibility, since what I observed here was that you were accused, judged and punished within a matter of hours, before you even had a chance to defend yourself. Plus as you so eloquently put it, once that happens, you're shit out of luck.
Anyway, both you guys have schooled me on a lot of stuff and I appreciate it. Keep doing your thing man! One day this upvote will be worth more than a penny haha :)