What are your thoughts on using tools like Steemfollower? I'm not sure if it could be classified as an upvote exchange, since you're only opvoting good content.
The main benefit is that good content gets noticed more quickly since it has far fewer members, thus posts, than on Steemit.
In any case, I've also concluded my experiments with bots, I think I've made a net loss in the end. The money is better spent towards powering up.
I've not used that, so can't comment. Basically it's better if humans do the voting and not for themselves. I'm okay with minnows buying a vote for attention, but not those buying huge votes for pure profit
It's why I have so many very small value upvotes on my posts. It's not for automatic voting, you're still manually curating albeit with a different interface.
For me, it's sometimes tempting to just buy one vote to get things started, but there's still remorse when you finally realize that it just gives you a warped view of the actual value of your posts.