Hmmmmm... As a marketer and entrepreneur I try to avoid black hat tactics and this is definitely black hat. It's my belief that it'll always come around to bite you in the butt later.
But the comments below are mostly positive, so I'm genuinely curious: What are Steemians views on things like this? Do most people not care? I know you mentioned a whale downvoting, is that just a single case or what?
I'm genuinely curious to see whether the community views these tactics as unsavory or not.
It's a really funny place, basically we are seeing what happens in early societies. Naturally some original members split into groups and cliques and started jockeying for power and fighting over what each side sees as fundamental rights and wrongs. This is happening freely without input from mods/administrators. Pretty interesting stuff, but I think it goes over most peoples heads.
hmmm. good point about it going over most people's heads. The average user just won't know if he's buying votes or getting them organically, so you're definitely right - it's up to the groups with power to decide, and so far they don't seem to be pushing against it.
Using upvote bots is not black hat. It may seem disingenuous to use paid promotion on a blogging site where nobody's really selling anything, but the fact remains that if you want anyone to see what you're producing them you have to use them.
I don't at all think it's disingenuous. It's natural and sensible if anything. And I can see from the response to this post that upvote bots aren't black hat on this platform.
But on other platforms they are. If you pay for upvotes on any other social media platform, it's blackhat and you can receive penalties as a result of it. So that's why I was asking whether they were considered blackhat here. I'm still new and didn't know it was acceptable practice here on Steem.
I actually just bought my first upvotes today to test how it works out, and be familiar with the process. I'm planning to compare the effectiveness of giveaways, buying upvotes, and paying for promotion to see which has the highest ROI.
@capnsostre
I feel that "black hat" would be to send a whale a "nice" zip file with a keylogger, and then trade that whales steem on binance.com to monero or some other dodgy privacy currency and then use it to buy a bunch of dodgy shit on the darknet...
What this guy is writing about is not "black hat", he is giving us all the information we should have gotten when we first signed up...
As a half-failed artist, paint-eater, & entrepreneur, who wants to go back to being a semi-beach bum living the laptop lifestyle, I think this sounds awesome, anyway @capnsostre what do you think about?
😸
Making money from deluding poor people in the third-world into thinking they can become rich only by blogging from their broken secondhand smartphones... What kind of "hat" is that?
This is one of the most sensible comments I have ever read.
I'm kind of sick of whales and dolphins who are witnesses, bot owners and bot users giving us lectures on why us poor people are abusing the system by trying to profit with content that is not worthy by their personal standards.
Im kind of sick of tutorials for "plankton", by "bot using minnows" where they tell you how you can make it on steemit, just by interacting and posting quality content and grow "organically",
"-Don't give up guys!"...
"Organic growth" might work if you have a very appealing body/face (not going into gender-debate) tasteful but jet revealing (without being vulgar) clothing, in which you make yoga- videos and post photos of your vegan food and recipes, preferably being "english-first language speaking" and a "free spirit", but in a semi-luxurious tropical place for a backdrop, whilst your "partner" (who you are pretending not to have) is filming and taking photos with an (usually the partners) expensive camera and light-rig.
For us who don't want to expose ourselves in this way, or have a "partner" we can pimp-out, the only way to make a scratch here is either by miracle upvotes from some merciful whale, or by using the method @yallapapi explains here in this post...
I'm definitely following you, good coments
Thanks @polarg, I have my moments... I can get a bit sarcastic sometimes to, so don't take all my comments too seriously...lol
following
I mean - I think the delusion is across the board, and happens on any platform. In fact, that's not a "hat" so much in the sense I was speaking. I come from marketing where you have black hat and white hat seo/social media marketing and other tactics. Buying likes on any other platform is considered black hat, but I guess it isn't considered that here. Which, is interesting.
I get it, before black, white & grey "hats" where more like different types of hackers... Etc...