It's like always in life, if you have more money you can make more advertisements.
And nothing else are bots. With the current price fluctuations it's already gambling and often times not profitable.
BUT it can make your content more visible (trending).
It can also have various other effects on human psychology.
Voting something up because many "people" voted them up, so it has to be good?
Voting someone up who you know, that he will use bots after a while, so you can get the curation rewards?
I agree with you partially on the as I say "money calls money".
But let's dig deeper; look this user's post; https://steemit.com/vincentb/@johanalejo/btc-pairs-and-the-altcoins-market. If you see his spending pattern, he posts, then bid on 31 different bots. In that post he spent SBD 136.5. It means that to be a profit he should receive same amount in SBD if not more, plus the SP part. So far as what I see according to SteamSupply tool, he will get 102.70 SBD + 27.115 SP. As you see there is 25% direct loss from doing this. Even considering a 1 to 1 with the SP, a 5% was gone for the Whales.
I like his posts, though, I am not sure if this is the best way to promote. Still, he has 141 upvotes, which altogether do not sum up to what he invested.
He has 326 followers since November 2017, from that amount of paid bots and investment I would expect more (the same modus operandi repeats in each post), even considering is not a copy paste cat and most posts have substance.
Investment ROI, according to this wallet he invested, SBD 1041 which comes from Bittrex, on the pipeline he has 640 SBD + 151.58 SP = 791.58 (assuming a one to one). Ergo, from 1041 invested he is down to 791.58 (+86.45 current acc. SP) > 878.03 this means an ROI of = -16%
I hope this analysis which took me some research time :P will help you to make your mind on the subject.
I love maths (though I suck at them) because they are objective, so best recommendation; do your numbers and find the best approach which works for you.
@TheRealwolf, what would be the ROI if done through Smartsteem? Even considering you would not, yet, be able to pay for so much SBD votes?
You got a 15.63% upvote from @upyou courtesy of @santana33!
You got a 7.50% upvote from @minnowvotes courtesy of @santana33!
You got a 16.67% upvote from @voteme courtesy of @santana33! For next round, send minimum 0.01 SBD to bid for upvote.
Do you know, you can also earn daily passive income simply by delegating your Steem Power to voteme by clicking following links: 10SP, 25SP, 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
I'm not pretty familiar with curation rewards, since I'm not rich on steem. Rich ones can get trending, hot or else as advertisement platforms, I'm not lookin on main page at all. But some dev should give me a place where I can see my friends' comments and likes, where I can jump into those conversations, find mutual interests people etc..
I actually pretty into human psychology and see that steem is not feels like at home. Reason above, we used to use social media like that and this place is not a social media platform yet for obvious reasons.
*edit: Also I'm not digging for $$ I'm looking for really worthy content to read or see w/e. I'm here only for utopian, if utopian weren't exist in this blockchain. I couldn't hold onto this, probably be a tail to an orca an beg for upvotes everywhere.
The feed is for the things you mentioned, with the difference that it would be way too much to show every single action of your friends so posts and resteems only. And you will often hear/see that too many resteems aren't good, as it floods the feed of your followers...
What other social media plattforms do is that they analyze the behaviour of you and your friends and filter the content to what they think you would enjoy most...
It's nothing I want to have on steemit to be honest with you, I want to explore myself and not what some machine thinks is good for me :)
Utopian is really great! :)
It's not up to machine what I was suggesting. I can easily unfollow a guy who floods my feed and he can take his lesson from there.
You can explorer yourself in a notebook too, if you are doing it here that feels like it's not just that, there are better alternative social media blockchains like zeronet better ui, full anonymity yet no payment.
And actually bad part is, I can't even fool around with the people I like. I wan't to post some silly comments under memes for example but it would look like begging for upvotes again. So either I come up with a brilliant comment or not talk at all to the people who I actually communicate with.
And that's the outcome of wealth distribution, which bots making this worse, imo.
I'm not against anything, everyone should chase the money for sure but while doing that people gotta be honest.
If I understood you correctly you want to see every action of every one you follow so you can engage in mutual interests.
But you will unfollow them if they are active and have fun with silly comments, which floods your feed?
I see no viable solution here. Either you want to see everything, or you want to have a filtered version of everything or you go with the current solution to only see the stuff the autor explicitly choose to share.
I'm not unhappy with the current solution, but of course everyone is free to have another opinion :)
And as the blockchain is freely available it is a possibility that someday a more facebook like frontend enters the game, with the features you would like it to have :)
As for me I'm not looking at the comments of a person, so he can be silly all he likes, without me judging it^^ And I'm not sure how many do look at the comments and judges the person according to that.
And if I see a post and there are people laughing and having a good time under it I also don't see it as a problem, but just normal behaviour in a social network :)
So I don't really share your opinion about this plattform.
Yeah let's agree to disagree :)
I'm using some kind of queries to track those activities, as you said resteem is one way of what I've been talking. What I want is for example my followers should see these comments in a way so they can hop up if they want or just unfollow me just being annoying around :)
You can set your upvote to be given only to certain pre-defined users in #Smartsteem.