But if this platform is going to grow that means people who are minnows now will eventually level up with the platform, so I don't see followers that have low value now as worthless. If I gain a loyal follower who is genuinely interested in my work, that's not a waste.
No, the people aren't worthless. Their votes simply don't amount to much. Not everyone grows either. It's not a waste, I never said a waste. You can have a look around someday. You might notice quite a few people with thousands of followers, no votes on their work, no views. You saw my blog, you noticed I don't treat my followers like a statistic. Majority of them leave with more money than they had when they arrived. I value those people. Using tricks and shortcuts doesn't work.
Also if the only way to make descent money here is to garner the favor of whales and dolphins I think the platform won't survive. I think the future of Steemit is the power being more distributed, and I think that might be one disconnect point for us. I'm not trying to get rich quick here. I think it has a lot of potential in the long run, but I think it still has a lot of growing up to do. I think the devs are on it so I'm still pretty optimistic though.
If a whale or dolphin enjoys your work, you'll get paid. I didn't kiss anyone's ass. Many of those who vote for me started with nothing as well. We built each other up. Even those votes on comments go a long way. It's teamwork. Find your people, hang out, we're allowed to have rich friends just as much as we can poor friends. We're all people. Bots aren't people. You're an artist. You need views. Bots can't see.
Distribution: If we have 10 bots and majority of the people pay 10 accounts and they're only breaking even that means you're not growing, but those 10 accounts are growing. They earn thousands of dollars per day. Just have a look at their wallets. You're placing that much potential SP into 10 accounts. How is that spreading out the wealth? That's paving the road for centralization.
I couldn't find the stat I came across at one point but it basically showed that some ridiculous number like over 80% of the reward pools rewards were dished out by bid bots. If that's accurate and we as a community and the Steemit devs together don't want things to be that way, it has to be handled at the systemic level. ie Them designing a promotion system that works better than the current one.
Here's an easier way to promote something.
I didn't pay a dime. I'm on the internet using a combination of a publishing tool, words, and fun. Look at the numbers on that post. I took on the role of advertiser, I got paid like an advertiser. I suppose it's just easier to buy a vote or two, sit back, wait? Take action. It works better. Don't leave it up to someone else.
Also, get involved with the community. Look for artists. Some hold interesting competitions and contests or they collaborate. You have the ability to put your names wherever the hell you want. That's free advertising. Make friends. They'll vote for you. Do you use Facebook? Don't answer these questions. How many friends you got on there? How many out of that group actually support your status updates? How many do you actually talk to? If you do something crazy, notice how more people come out to play? Man, I got 265 views on that post where I mentioned Brockman. I watched his following grow while he was gone. All I did was mention his name. You can use your bots all you want but if you want solid results you get out there flyer the parking lot. Pretend you're a street artist in a park or a busker. They don't pay people to come and watch them. People walk by and drop money. It's a new game. ... now I'm rambling.
Dude, I had to put the coffee on to be able to respond to this. I'm tired. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I realize I sent a wall of text, and got one back. Oops. These are tough to respond to. Enjoy the vote. Time is money around here. Remember, this is just my opinion.
Thanks man! I appreciate it :) Also I feel like we can talk about this for quite a while, but I don't want to take up too much of your time or hijack @abrockmans post any more than I have. Also I can't figure out how to add the quotes like you're doing, so this reply won't look as cool as yours haha.
So let me just define what using a bot means to me: You pay to have your work shown in the trending and Hot Sections, and depending on how much you pay, for how long. Period, that's all.
It doesn't dictate how you treat your followers, you could have an amazing community or be an absentee poster, but that has nothing to do really with bots. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
Some of my best friends are rich ;p Hey man, I'm not a wealth bigot either, if a whale likes my stuff that's awesome too. The only thing using bots does is increases my chances of reaching them in the first place.
This is why I said bots are a good band-aid, I don't think it's a long term solution either, but the only way people aren't going to use them are if
And they are effective at doing what I defined above.
Lastly on your last point, again you could do this and promote it and all the promotion would do is allow more people to see it.
Its not like anyone who uses bots cares about the bot upvote. Using @abrockman as an example, typically he'd have over 300 upvotes, like 6 of those are bots, the other several hundred are fans. Fans that would have never seen his post had he not promoted it. Just like this post, I'm following abrockman, but this post didn't show up in my feed. I just searched his name because I was wondering what he'd been up to. I think that's the perfect example of why promoting can be valuable.
Now none of this means you should NOT do all the things you're mentioning above, I think you can and in some cases should do both. Just as you mentioned in your fist post that sometimes you might do an extra special post that you really want people to see, those are the ones worth promoting. At least that's my opinion so far. As I mentioned, a small amount of SBD won't make a difference and a post that you haven't put much time into won't get that much attention anyway, but if you put the work in and make something you think is awesome, I can only see promoting that post as bettering your chances of people seeing it.
This ended up being long again, sorry, anyway, thanks for the upvote, it was good chatting about this with you. It seems like such a taboo subject like a kid brother locked in the attic that everyone knows is there, but people don't like to talk about, haha.
@midlet & @nonameslefttouse, This may be the most content-rich comment dialogue I have ever seen. I appreciate you guys having this conversation here for all to see.
First off, @midlet, it's good to hear from you. I remember you "coming to my rescue" if you will, When this original post was under fire. As a fellow digital artist and just from the way you communicate I see so much of myself in you.
In the book that you wrote above ;) those are all the exact feelings and thought processes I had. I was trying to leverage my SBD into more exposure and essentially make money in more SP. However, it really isn't that simple. I went a little crazy and had almost 3k invested into bots promoting my posts over the last month. A lot of that was rolled over into the most current seven days. By then there was so much money "on the line" that the risk did not even come close to the reward. Because it takes seven days for our reward payout, that money could have easily been down voted or flaged (Totally plausible mind you), resulting in a complete loss of all those funds. For the most part, once that happens you are shit out of luck fighting to get that back. If you paid for those votes (which I did), rather than just getting them from generous whales (nothing out-of-pocket), it would quickly make you consider suck starting a pistol.
In the beginning, I did not fully realize the risk to reward ratio. Also, @nonameslefttouse mentioned it briefly, but there is a reward "slippage". By the time the reward pool is distributed, you take out the 25% curating reward, and the market price per coin falling you are in the hole big time. Also, take a look at your pending payout a few minutes before it is paid, it drops another 20% usually, furthering my point. Trust me, I thought I had a perfect system, but putting that money into actual SP may have been a better move. The only "saving grace" is the amount of followers gained. That is indisputable and very hard to assess a value to. Maybe that alone makes it worth it in using bots? The system definitely needs some fixing and until that happens I am treading very lightly.
It took me a long time to really think about all of this, analyze, calculate and realize the true wisdom @nonameslefttouse was giving me. I would listen to everything he mentioned above and really focus on what he said in a previous post – "Rather than making people pay for attention, let's go back to paying attention to them."
@midlet, is 100% correct that for artists time is money… So it's difficult to continue to post great content with little rewards for months on end. But I guess that also determines who deserves to be here? @nonameslefttouse made the most epic analogy : We are like street performers hoping to garner enough attention to have someone drop a vote in our proverbial hat. It is up to us to have enough hustle to fill that hat up.
If all of us here stick together and help educate others (especially minnows) about what's really going on behind the scenes I think we will all be paid/rewarded enough to be able to focus our time sharing on this platform.
Hi @abrockman,
It's good to hear from you as well. I'm also glad we were able to talk about this here.
So I think what you mentioned above is the ACTUAL best argument against using bots, and that's that someone can just come and downvote you and you can lose everything you have invested. That's pretty scary, and I feel a bit of a problem platform wise.
In this case, there was a presumed justification for the downvote and flagging of your post even though it was more of just a misunderstanding. But that doesn't guarantee that someone couldn't just downvote you because they don't like you or for some other arbitrary reason.
That's why I think this is a bit of an issue with the platform and your situation really put a spotlight on it to me. In this case you lost money, but as you mentioned time is money also, if I spent a couple of week working hard on something and it was doing well, theoretically someone can just come along and remove all or most of the reward I receive arbitrarily. A lot of people have turned to Dtube because they don't like the fact that Google can just remove your content or demonetize it and there's nothing you can do about it, but your situation made it clear to me that on Steemit, other USERS could potentially do that. Obviously that's not what happened here, but it just opened my eyes to the possibility, since what I observed here was that you were accused, judged and punished within a matter of hours, before you even had a chance to defend yourself. Plus as you so eloquently put it, once that happens, you're shit out of luck.
Anyway, both you guys have schooled me on a lot of stuff and I appreciate it. Keep doing your thing man! One day this upvote will be worth more than a penny haha :)