This is an amazing post!
It's super cool to see it all laid out like this.
With your ROI for the votebots, did you subtract the 25% curation that goes to the voters? If you have a post valued at $10... at payout, you'll get 75% of that in SP/SBD... so potentially your profit might not have been as much as you might have thought.
Using the BotTracker, after a super quick click around, most of the bots are way too popular and are producing too small or a negative ROI. I think too many people are slamming bids in at the last minute and negating everyone else's return on investment.
The last point is that if you promote a post you created today for say $5SBD. You're paying today's SBD value rate for that service... that doesn't pay out for another 7 days. If SBD value drops in that 7 days, that also affects your return on investment. If it rises or stays the same in that time then you're totally fine.
I have no problem with people using bots personally, nor really do I have a problem with people getting paid for delegating their SP. They're not helping build the platform, which I personally think is the duty of all of us, but it's not fair to impose my own ethics onto others. They gambled early on a system that had no guarantee of success. I do, however, think people might not understand the return on their investment... which only serves to make the bot owners rich.
Hey @aussieninja, YOU ARE SPOT ON. I failed to calculate the distributed 25% from each of those votes which I'm sure would whittle down my return to nearly nothing... great catch, my friend. This post is a primer for a larger, more investigate/comparative piece so you bet I will be calling myself out for not illustrating correct math, and further highlighting the realities I've experienced using bots.
Thanks Amelia! I set up a whole spreadsheet myself to see if my initial bot amounts were worth it. I worked out that if the BotTracker said about 80% ROI after it closed, that's when I came out ahead... if I remember correctly 50% ROI was about break-evenish and anything less than that was a loss. It was a few months ago though, so don't quote me on this.
Don't be too hard on yourself though, it's rough... it honestly does feel like free money.