So recently I have thought about this multiple times...
I have seen several bots that you transfer funds to for an upvote and ways to buy upvotes. Prior to joining communities on steemit, it was the first way I learned how to to gain an increase and was a fan of the occasional upgoat!
Am I missing out on an opportunity for growth over a little pride? Or am I sticking to trying without buying votes because I believe in the community?
Now it seems voting bots are popping around all over and everyone is making them so it's hard to tell which ones are worthy of any and what the results of this overflow of bots is going to have on the community.
What are your thoughts of voting bots?
If you are for or against them why?
What voting bots would your recommend over others and why?
I really hope to hear some great insight on the various takes.
I don't use bots that sell votes. I don't do it because they deplete the reward pool, and because I'm here to get paid for my blogging based on how much people appreciated it.
I realize I make this judgement from a position of relative privilege: I came to Steemit as someone with friends on the platform who support my work, and who have meaningful SP. But believe I'd be willing to put in the grind and make friends and create a brand new audience. Long term, that's how I build my little platform on Steemit, and that's how we, as a community, build Steemit as a platform.
I have no problem with voting bots that automate curation. I'm also okay with community bots that give a small boost to many, many people, such as @minnowsupport's bot.
I agree that growing steemit with people you believe in around you is exactly what this is for! I appreciate your dedication towards creating content that people will enjoy and no doubts you will find that community here. I love meeting the interesting and motivating people of steem it.
What are your favorite curation bots or perhaps ones you've ran across? Also what do like most about what minnow boosters voting bot?
I use Steemvoter to vote for two rl friends who consistently create quality content (@techslut and @poet). Minnowbooster and minnowsupport are different bots. I like about minnosupport (aka reg-msp) that it's a part of an overall community effort to help planktons and minnows. And that it gives, at most, one modest upvote per 24 hours per user, so it's not a drain on the reward pool.
Hiii @brandyb, how are you and how is life going on, I hope you enjoy this platform as a first #adoptaminnow of @whatsup here on this community. you always create a useful and neat articles here. Today here you point out a hot issue about the usage of bots. mostly people confused about them. I Think for new comers, who have not enough followers can use bots for boosting up their posts to get attention of high profile peoples. But we should checked their ROI first then take a vote from bot. Content should be real and original, no copy paste, no plagiarism. i think by using these bots no much profit received now because of changing payouts scenario (50/50).
Thanks @brandyb for sharing and My best wishes and prayers always for your success. keep it up.
Thank you for your well thought-out and well crafted comments. It's a very interesting question and yes I think that people copying posts and posting plagiarism does present a problem in the whole bot situation
I think we'd be better off without them.
I was a little dissapointed after making my first post a couple days ago when I noticed that even writing a fairly well-received and completely original post, my chances of hitting the 'hot' page without an upvote bot were basically zero.
But in this case if you can't beat them, join them! I'm probably going to use one for my next post. Just take pride in the fact that you're at least one of the real people posting real content.
This is an excellent point & exactly why I raise the big question. The thing I love about steemit is the lack of censorship. Original work being a huge factor of the success. What bot will you use ? Do you have some you prefer over others ? Are you a member of any steemit communities?!
Nice snapshot
Questionable lol!
if there will no use of bots in steemit then plz can you tell me who will buy sbd and for what purpose they will buy sbd ?then what will be the price of sbd
You can use SBD for other things... for example on blocktrades you can by other cryptocurrencies using your SBD or you can use it to buy steem..
well sir blocktrade trade on bittrex so if there is no buyer of sbd on bittrex then how can you change it to another cryptocurrency or buy steem ,bots has a very good importance in steemit specialy in sbd price
I have a hard being agreeable that bots control the price of sbd... it is my understanding that steem is to be more valuable than sbd. So powering up with your sbd gives you more influence on the platform. Investing in other crypto, you can even turn your sbd into a Visa card. There are lots you can do with the sbd.... Voting Bots take away from getting votes from real people ... @whatsup once said and this is what really got me thinking is someone could just pay for votes on their content and never actually have a vote from a real person. So they could have the worst content ever and be earning.
I have never used it, I only know that they do offer that service. But there is an internal steemit market where you can buy and sell SBD and Steem. Right now the price is in favour of steem but back in december the price of steem had fallen to 0.12 sbd - 1 steem. I only had 4 sbd at the time but i got about 33 steem for it!
That was a great move! To my understanding steem is meant to be more than sbd and this is a market correction.
It was lucky, but unfortunately I had sold about 50 sbd the week before at a much worse price 0.7 ish. I still got some decent stream out of it but I could have made so much more had I waited.. but there was no way I could have known. I think you are right about he market correction but I am keeping my eyes peeled for the next time the value of steem drops like that :)
our co owner @ned and @dan fighting each other they power down and sell steem at bittrex and also who ran steemit.chat @riverhead power down and selling steem soo its difficult for steem to grow bcz sellers dominating buyers
I have been asking around Discord about this for days - it's like you read my mind! I have been researching various topics on Steemit and voting bots, circles (or pods), etc are a major source of interest for me.
While I'm unfamiliar with specific voting bots, I have mixed opinions about the concept:
It's still a self-driven act and that's where I get hung up. Curie and other curation programs seem like the natural antidote to the need to pay bots for exposure (smaller accounts are what they focus on), but you're still relying on something centralized (voting body with rules) and are limited by time as to how many of your posts can be curie'd.
Overall, I believe humans want utopia but get the wild west, whatever we try. And in the wild west, there are expressions of utopia and expressions of chaos. Finding a personal balance and doing what you believe is right for the greater good seems like the only way to proceed.
Self curation was originally my first leap over this hurdle. When I really thought about it, this platform is designed for you to do so. You have the option of upvoting your own post before you even post it. Thinking in that term make it very justifiable in my mind, although I don't do it all the time because I like to give my maximum voting power to others.
If you think about your content as your business, why wouldn't you promote your business? If you wouldn't why would anyone else?! So I feel it's mandatory for minnows especially to self promote.
I love what the communities are doing to keep it people oriented, bots help maximize efficiency and it would be silly not to capitalize on that as long as you're down for the rules and direction of the group.
Getting back to bots I think the biggest challenge right now isn't using them, it's how many of them are actually bringing in roi and how many times are you not getting what you invest? Which bots are better than others ?
Just found this post on bots! https://steemit.com/minnowsupport/@fuhreresu/6-bots-to-trust-when-thinking-of-upvoting-your-post
My feelings exactly. I appreciate the way you presented these thoughts so succinctly!
I came to Steemit hoping for exactly this utopia that you speak of, while being sceptical due to the fact that we know this "wild west" springs up instead. And yup, it definitely has.
There's still a hierarchy based on "wealth" and only that wealth can help you to do better for yourself. Such is any form of society, in the end, right?
It has disappointed me that quality posts don't often make it up to trending without the help of the "powerful". It further disappoints me that posts that tend to do well are often posts about Steem or Steemit (and I get why this is, at this point in Steemit's life, but I wouldn't want to go onto FB and read posts ABOUT FB as the most talked about, you know?)
As a final and lesser point, upvoting my own post or comment makes me cringe every time. I hate the idea of it and have never done so on FB or Insta, for example, but out of some form of desperation, I do it here.
I personally don’t use the bots or the rare time I donits on someone else post to give it a boost
But many swear by them for increased visibility I am not sure if it’s that or increased payout
I have no issue with people using them I see it as personal preference
You can do well with some and loose on some from what I have seen
Have you seen the bot tracker site very useful if your going to use bots
https://steembottracker.com/
I love that you mentioned using bots to boost other people's posts! I have done this several times but not something that was in my mind atm.
What an incredible resource!! I have never seen this before and for sure will be messing around with it!
Thank you for your usual abundance of knowledge & awesomeness!
LOL with the way my day is going today I think you must be thinking of someone else i am severely lacking in both knowledge and awesomeness right now LOL
Well then consider it a reminder to get back to it then! High five!
High five 🙌 and I will try
A resource as long as you do it right
I like where you are going with the feedback! What is doing it right entail?
You can't use bots for evey post , if every ome will do so it's will have on effact
You should use it when you have something very importent to share
Also you nèed to know how to choose the right bot to get good ROI
Okay, but why can't you ? What will the effect be? How do you decide what is important? What bots do you use or recommend?
It's important to calculate with a voting bot if it's going to give you a good return on your investment.
I don't think there's anything wrong with using them necessarily but I do think that sometimes you don't get as good of return as you might expect.
Indeed, are they Resteeming? Are they upvoting? If so are the followers "dead" followers ? What about curation rewards they are reaping from your content? Do they incorporate this into the price? How do we determine what the best bots on steem it are ? How often would you use them ?
Have used a couple but didn't find them that effective as promoted but didn't lose out on them more a less got back what i invested.
I found @minnowbooster to be the better one @randowhale sleeps to much...lol
But really i would like people to rate you not machines that's why i don't use them anymore :)
You are the first to bring up promoting! I have never used this feature personally and would love to join know more about how it works.
Incorporating the final payout you feel you broke even, does that include new followers & steem rewards or the amount of sbd?
What about Steemit communities?! Do you find them helpful?
I like bots that give us many rewards when upvote 👍
Have you paid attention to your earnings from bots ? How much success have you had? What bots do you use?
I rarely check it and I also do not know all the bots
What bot do you use ?
I was less familiar with bots because I am still new
I would prefer that there be no bots ... but since there are and some are using ... fair game for all I guess
We live in an age where there is no such thing as no bots. Bots are everywhere. Now we have to Integrate them into our thinking it seems. The thing with fair game is that we all have various views on what is fair. Never having to get a vote from an actual person ... Is currently fair in that regard.
Honestly, what I think the problem is people who don't know how to do math. People who don't look at what the maximum profitable bid making the ROI most of the time negative.
Yes I think so as well ... I think it's not just the people and the math, but some bots just don't so what they say they will do. They could have thousands of dead followers. How do you determine your roi followers, resteems, sbd return? What bots do you consider to be the top choices?
I do not prefer it .. maybe I do not know the correct use of boots. so I could not make a lot of money on your experiments .. maybe a few SBD .. you ask nice questions .. I like to get information about boots.
It's interesting... And relevant to how to social aspect of the platform works. With Facebook for instance, there is an algorithm to who sees your information and the various adds you are subjected to. Here it seems to be one of the most popular ways to boost your content as a minnow. So there are so many aspects of thoughtfulness involved.
First great post and good question!!
So its a social platform, i think bots take away all purpose of what steemit stands for. I dont want comupters to rate me, i want ppl to discuss and decide about the information and research I deliver.
Facebook is full of bots, bots that can like, they can write posts and add you, its one of the biggest reasons I have dropped facebook. I dont want bots to infiltrate steemit, if we think its ok for them to cast a vote, we one day decide its ok for them to blog posts too, eventually it would get out of control, as more and more people would develop bots for the purpose to create value for themselves, not for the community. To say this is ok because I can upgrade my rep on my account and make a dollar or two, perhaps has a great short term invcentive for each indivdual user and thus it is tempting, but the longterm results for the whole steemit community ,could be destructive for the platform we love so much.
I really hope steemit will ban and fight bots, the community should flag and fight bots. We are scared AI will control all our lives etc and take our jobs, accepting them in our social media is no longer just the beginning, we are in the middle of deciding what to do with this tech and we are going to have to make a decison fast before its too late.
Well bots are a part of tech that isn't going away. We have to accept them. We can decide supporting them or not, we can decide which ones are helpful and which ones are taking money from people.
It depends on how you use them... If you use an upvote bot to increase your payout then you will loose. I spent a great deal of time when I first joined steemit using upvote bots on my post and then tracking the payouts. Overall, after you take into account the 25% curators get paid for you post as well as the gradual decline in value of your post over the 7 days you generally just about break even.
As a new user i think the upvote bots are valuable in providing some much needed visibility to your posts. In my view its a form of advertising which was borne out of the fact that the built in promote feature in steemit is terrible.
The other issue is that so many people use them no that they've become saturated with vote requests and the value of your bid has to be really high to be worth anything. I've seen people putting upwards of 40SBD into a single bid.
Its a legitimate tactic to use to promote your posts, but if you try to use it solely to boost your payouts you will loose. The math is not in your favour. In the end, like any strategy on this platform, it is an individual choice, and I rarely use upvote bots but I prefer not to use them at all anymore.
Great perspective I think lots of people have agreed that it is a great way to promote the post and I am wondering what sort of return on investment that they considered to be worth the fee as a marketing View for instance how many followers did they get how many Resteems and how do they track that information?
That's tricky I think. You can use things like steemd.com and other third party tools to track your performance but all in all you cannot definitively identify why someone decided to follow you.
I read a similar post the other day about someone's experiments with voting bots. Although they gained followers, the rate at which they gained them was no different than when they weren't using the bots which would suggest it has little effect on followers.
I use them... But not so sure what to think about their effect on the whole platform...
I like this answer. Straight forward. What do you suspect or think the outcome is or might be? What bots do you like using ? Have you had more success with some than others?
Thank you for this post. I am just now confident enough to post and resteem things. There seems so much to learn but everyone says I will get it eventually. Articles like this add to my understanding. Just to know there is an issue helps me learn.
That's great! That's what it's for! I've been on steem a little while and still getting the hang of it myself! So keep learning and being active that's the true key here it seems!
Thank you mam. Peace friend.
I think it is not good way because it create difficulties for newcomer to come up.
I agree with this to that with the voting bots being so prominent, it can be hard to tell who is real people.
Well I use them to support others and myself. As you said it's a good way to promote. They are not going to go anywhere.
I agree with this guy ^
If I think a post is important I will use a bot frequently. I also use them lately as rewards for others' posts I enjoyed or if they win a game or something. Like a thanks for playing consolation prize. The abuse will happen anywhere money is involved, sad but true.
"The abuse will happen anywhere money is involved, sad but true."
That's the quote of the week my dude!
The only benefit is exposure on the trending feed. I never use this feed so I don't see much benefit for me. I have done the math and if you are trying to make money by using the bots, this is not the right approach.
I don't use them but do not hold it against anyone that does. I think that there is more value in building relationships and spending your SBD to power up your SP.
I most certainly agree that the value is in the relationships that you create on steemit. Without the interesting people in content this place would be pretty boring if it were just a bunch of voting Bots that would pretty much suck. So now we have to wonder if we had too many voting Bots is that what people see when they very first get to here before they see the people ?
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STOPthis is a topic that requires great attention. You need to investigate and do the right thing.I want to learn.
This is of course a hot topic, and I am rather well known for making use of the upvote bots. To be perfectly right now they are really not going to return any good value - most of my rewards from a post only just show a profit compared to the amount I spent upvoting them. The extra reward value they provide does increase your visibility and therefore can get you more upvotes because of that - but if I am honest the best thing anyone on Steemit can do to promote their own blog and posts is just head out and comment on other people's work - it's the best free advert for your own blog (of course remembering not to commit the sin of leaving your post link in a comment, clickable banners in comments however I think are a very good idea). My weapon of choice for supporting smaller accounts and encouraging growth is https://smartsteem.com/ because you can clearly see the available upvote amount at any time - and if they can't double what you put in they refund the difference.
#thealliance
I am not a fan of them. I use this test. If I can take a pic of dog mess and pay to have it upvoted, thats a problem in my book. I was here before the last hard fork when there were no vote bots and things worked fine.
I've experimented with the vote bots, but haven't had much luck yet. I supposed I have accepted Steemit as a platform that still operates with a lot of very familiar economic forces... And people buying popularity or position is just one of those familiar economic forces.
I do see Steemit as a revolutionary thing, but it still follows current human trends - things that appear more popular get more consideration, things backed with money get more consideration, and it takes money to make money.
Sure, just like in other areas of our economy, it is possible to do things "the old fashioned way" (hahaha!!!) and not buy advertisements, or votes, or try to win a popularity contest with anything other than hard work. But, that takes longer, just as in real life.
In the end, I think the barrier to entry to success on Steemit will continue to rise. Voting bots are part of that, but so is the fact that there are more and more people joining and more and more big accounts. Bots can help boost minnows that are frustrated, but they create other issues as well.
That boost to a minnow can keep people from getting frustrated and quitting.
Who knows? I think the bots are both good and bad, depending on what part of this little universe you are examining.
@booster is a good one, i use them when i want an important post to be seen. Becuz lets face it, if you don't have a big following or people who just upvote every post you do, your post is not gonna be seen. It could be the best post ever but that 0.03 is gonna put it at the bottom of the list and it gets sweep under the rug. Great post and one love!
Soy nueva en la comunidad y no entiendo mucho sobre los Bots y cosas así, pero lo que te puedo decir es que se siente frustración al no recibir apoyo de personas reales, de repente mis publicaciones no son de calidad y tengo que limitarme a recibir solo voto de mis familiares hasta darme a conocer, por lo pronto seguiré participando en concursos de dibujo donde al menos el que lo organiza toma en cuenta mi trabajo...por otra parte, yo aun no se que tanta información personal u autoria quisiera compartir por este medio, supongo que el tiempo lo dirá y espero que el abandono a la comunidad no llegue primero, porque lo que si es cierto es que me uní aquí para mostrar mi talento y obviamente ser recompensado...en Venezuela en este momento hace falta tener entradas económicas extras para ayudar en casa y si no puedo lograr eso aquí entonces me toca buscar otras opciones aunque me encante participar en los concursos de dibujo...así que si me documento un poco más sobre los bot y siento que es viable me tocara unirme a ellos.
Hello, my opinion on bots is mixed. I am on Steemit for less than a month so I have been researching everything including bots. As I have read that bots are good in some posts and that they are bad in others I decided to test them out. I am still in the middle of testing but here is what I have surmised from reading and personal experience.
I believe that they are useful tool to boost you up those few places that you might miss to get to the top of trending in a category. I edit the blog for eight man studio I am part of, where we develop games and make short films. After a few posts that were written from the perspective of actual game developers with materials that will end up in our game I was a bit pissed by the fact that gaming category is overcrowded with generic posts with a few screenshots of two different games and mediocre reviews. On the other hand steemit doesn't have enough game developers for gamedev tag to be populated. I believe that only way to be noticed in gaming category will be to use bots or beyondbits to boost a few posts in order to show our face in the community of gamers on steemit. After all we are making games because gamers exist, and what is the point of showcasing them on Steemit if the most of the gaming tag is full of videos of two most popular games at the moment (of which one started as reskin and parody of the other).
Other thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of users who have lots of SP and almost no creative posts who circle-upvote each other and continue to grow both monetary and in their visibility on the platform. I also see that there is bunch of new users upvoting them in hope they will get piece of the cake in curation. While that is happening, honest bloggers are struggling to get noticed in the sea of meaningless posts. It is only natural they will reach out to bots to get that visibility, but if that continues to be the case, the whole idea of steemit as the platform is getting a step closer to what is wrong with facebook where content that advertised with money gets visibility.
I understand that the way to successful blogging is no different on steem than on any other blogging platform. You create good content -> you engage with others -> you get followers -> you get feedback -> you learn -> your content gets better and the whole circle repeats. But as whole concept of earning directly from your upvotes and curations is completely new. New users are probably inpatient (I know I am) to start earning from their blog and thus justify hours invested in creating the content and curating the content of others. That is the moment I believe people reach out for bots. They want to see the upvotes going their way. I think this poses a threat to the platform. Due to my lack of experience with the platform so far I don't see the way how to handle this at the moment, but if I do I will suggest it and hope it gets noticed.
On the other hand, one of the beautiful things that bots offer is ability to purchase a vote for other users when you believe they should get more than your upvote can give them. I have not done that yet as I still have close to 0 SP and my first goal is to get to enough SP not to have problems with bandwidth.
In conclusion I believe that bots are not the problem but consequence ot the true problem. If we compare extremes, those who decide to pave their way only by creating quality content and engaging with the community have disproportionately harder time than those who decide to spend a lot of money as their way in. I believe this could be mitigated by increasing the importance of reputation, but again, I need more experience with the platform in order to understand the problem in depth and come up with the real solution.