Bots are overvalued
I have come to the judgment that these are a waste of time and money.
As their popularity is on the rise, it's also the rise of unprofitable bids. Also, the rising price of Steem makes that from the STUs you receive, you now get even less Steem Power, and on the other hand, SBD loses track, which makes the whole thing less attractive from a USD perspective.What next then?
After getting in peace with the idea that I will not get rich myself from using bots, and that the only solution is to grow mostly organically and that profit would come eventually. I rather prefer to spend my hard earned SBDs into Steem power that keep making bidding rounds over and over again, and be drained by greedy users who do not understand the basics of how STU works, and that you only profit if the ROI is over 150% or above (which never happens).
SmartSteem the new upgraded solution
There is this cool German guy, who comes to be a great developer, and it also has a good sense of business development, you may have heard of @TheRealWolf. He has developed this new Market for vote buy and sell called @SmartSteem. You may find their website 2.0; I have to tell it looks even better than Steemit. SmartSteem link
There, as mentioned above, you can buy upvotes, which work in two different ways, a low-value upvote, which works for everybody (except blacklisted) and, to my opinion, the best, the Curated version. To access the second option, you need to apply for a whitelist approval. They will verify you are not blacklisted and that your posts have a minimum of quality. I prefer myself this second option, after being certified I know my posts have a minimum of class and makes me have a clear mind that I am buying what I deserve. Buy site link.
They have three different types of White listed users;
-1 Average Content
-2 Good Content
-3 Excellent Content
After applying for the Whitelist, I got a "2" which makes me happy and at the same time pushes me forward to keep improving.
Selling your Vote
Besides buying, you can help this tool to grow by also selling your vote, this works same as a voting Guild but with certain functionalities which are great. You can choose to sell only a 5% of your vote, and then leave it for your own curation. Also, you could leave it down to a 50% of your voting power, that depends on you. In the website, there is a well and simply explained FAQ.
Personally, I tend to vote only when the Post moves me to write an answer or discuss in profound something that mentioned there. So, I am happy to delegate my vote on the Guild, and then use it myself when I see something moving.
I am not a "bootlicker" in life as we say in Spanish, meaning I do not follow people on a personal interest, I know this is the strategy of many who will comment only hoping on a positive upvote or a follow from a Whale. Hence, Smartsteem is my time-saving tool, and it gives me a profit while helping quality writers to climb up. Sell site link.
Furthermore, you can even choose if you will only sell your votes to those who are whitelisted. Besides, to add richness to its features one may choose to only vote for Rank 1, 2, or 3. The last makes the whole voting guild thing much more interesting and fair in my view. I have seen voting bots, with people getting 500 upvotes, and the whole STU after curation being 1 STU, really depressing.
Talking about honesty
Let's be honest bidding votes, are pure gambling, and same as in Vegas, The House always wins.
My recommendation, invest your SBD in steem power, that will give you a higher voting weight. Then, either delegate some SP to SmartSteem or grant permissions to sell your vote. At the same time, apply for a Whitelist status and start purchasing higher value votes. In the end, you will get a refund if your payment was above the received upvotes value.*
- [*] As long as it keeps working correctly.
Keep the good work #SmartSteem team; this post is my humble and small grain of salt to support your work!
Hey @santana33,
a big thank you for this post. You made some very important points!
One of the reasons why I personally also nearly exclusively use smartmarket, is because of how amazing it is to also support small users - who want to sell their Votes.
Instead of one big value, you will receive many small votes - which add up to a big-value.
I'd also like to clarify one more thing:
The difference between the normal and the exclusive Vote-Value, is that some Vote-Sellers have decided to vote only on Whitelisted Users (and also depending on the Rating - you got a 2/3, which is already really good).
But they work the same way - just with the difference that you are only able to use the exclusive Vote-Value if you are whitelisted and have a specific Rating.
Last but not least..
That is also my recommendation! Steempower is extremely important and can add up - even small amounts of Steempower.
Thank you for using smartsteem, @santana33!
Thanks a lot for your direct reply @therealwolf, also thanks for the clarification. Looking forward to seeing this tool grow, which will make it a sustainable alternative to the bidding bots.
Ich wünsche dir viel Erfolg!
This is a very well written valuable post and it totally relates to my own concerns and vision. I've started paying more attention to ROI and the overall bot efficiency since that one time you pointed out to my mistake at the bottracker bidding . Believe it or not, I somehow managed to come to the same conclusion as you are expressing in your article. I registered with smartsteem already and got one star so far. Which, I think, is a direct consequence of the fact that I simply don't have enough time to dedicate to creating my posts and making them more substantial. I know people who turned Steemit into their full time job. It's not my case. Yet))) On the other hand, I 'm very pleased with the fact that somebody does such evaluation of content and I can trust them with delegating my upvotes, choose the desired level and so on, if I decide to take this rout.
Anyway, I'm glad I ran into you that first time. Or you ran into me)))
Тоже, что-ли, попробовать этот ускоритель процесса)
Попробуйте. Он в корне отличается от аналогичных сервисов на Голосе. По сути, это как депозит в банке под небольшой процент. И, что главное, не имеет значения, насколько сумма велика или мала. ROI одинаковый. Что даёт возможность даже пользователям с небольшой SP хоть немного прокачать свои посты. Конечно, это не позволит за неделю поднять рейтинг с 50 до 70 или заработать кучу SBD, как это происходит на Голосе. Но мы же все знаем, чего этот т.н. рейтинг там стоит. Да и что в топе поисходит тоже видели(((
Спасибо, на днях займусь
I am glad that my constructive critic was well taken. That is my main goal, to learn myself and then share what I've learned with others in order to spread awareness on how this thing works. I could've taken the easy path of making Steem Contests and rip people off, but I do not see myself doing that for sure.
I foresee there will be different apps, and each of us will take different paths according to what we like the most. In one end "The Kardashians" of Steem and on the other @Utopian.
Thanks for your comment and for resteeming my post. I think I will promote it since I received some good feedback.
I knew smartsteam for you and my earnings have increased a little more, thanks for making me know this good tool very useful
UPVOTE AND RESTEEM!
Hi @jospig, muy contento de que te haya servido. Thanks for the upvote and resteem!
great post @santana33 I'm new here studying steem , the bots , people from steemit that want to help out. I've already read some of your articles that helped me understand exactly , all my concers. Since steemit is pretty new to me , I still have a lot to learn ...but with people like you , we really can get well educated since it is a complex process and a lot of information to digest in a short period of time. You have my vote + follow , even if thats nothing.. since I'm new. Keep up the good work !
Hey @thewaytogo, thanks a lot for your words, and do not worry even Whales started as minnows (at least one for sure hehe). That is actually my goal to be of use for new users, and not that new. I hope to be able finding new ways, rest assure I will share them with you.
Should we all go out and leave this place to bots they can poke each other, I just don't like bots.
Wasn't the main idea to reward good content? So only rich ones produce good content huh?
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 :)
Hi Oups thanks for your message. I agree personally I do not wish that. For bid bots I agree you only can afford them if you’ve invested previously or you are doing really good with the blogging part.
For the part related to Smartsteem I would say, not necessarily, as you see you can “lend” your upvote. For the buy upvotes part, you only can pay a small amount, not more than 0.3 SBD. I don’t see this fits you your mentioned scenario.
If we are worried we should make our vote to have power when voting for Witnesses, @yapbamatt is full in with the bid bots, while @therealwolf has a more sustainable solution while attending those looking for a market.
I see you are active in Utopian, personally I love that community. I wish I could program more than a few lines to provide anything useful over there. I see the real added value in that kind of projects and not in a gambling low quality bidding game. @aggreoed is someone also we should listen more, he is also concerned with the rewards pool reaping.
Thanks for detailed information, as I said before I'm not against it. Bots can be used as an advertisement asset, people who wants to grow their account faster and make money from it can use it bots as an investment but in the meantime some of those devs needs to help other part of the community who wants to stick around, enjoy good content, communicate idk this kind of stuff. Yet I didn't see any particular attempt for it. Maybe I'm just missing, maybe it's still in progress somewhere.
I agree that not many devs are looking beyond their own pocket, and for that matter, bots are the biggest profitable thing. You sell your vote for a 90% of its price, if not more, and then re-invest the revenues into making your value even larger. Long time we are just feeding the Whales into been futures Leviathan no one will be able to tame. At the same time the ROI for investors bidding is null or even negative.
Check my other post on that; https://steemit.com/steemit/@santana33/steem-robots-stop-losing-money-and-how-to-be-a-pro
Sorry, I had to use a little Russian in the comments. We have users here who are transitioning to Steemeit from a different platform, Golos. You might have heard of it. There has been a sort of Clash of Titans going on on Golos lately between major investors. So, people are forced to explore Steemit)))
No worries, you can maybe make a Russian version of this, please just mention my name over there. I am aware of the Golos situation, heard they will adapt the Steem STUs tokens for Golos, is that right?
@santa-barbara is this true about Golos? I was wondering if we (Steemit) would "compete" with them or work together.
Hi Anthony, sorry to reply before Santa, but I think that it will be a joint work, Golos is taking the SMT which works on the Steem Blockchain protocol.
Hey Santana! No need to apologize. Thank you for the personal touch and replying.🙌🏼🤩 I’m not sure what SMT is but I’ll def look into it. That is exciting to hear they might be linked somehow. I just recently started looking at Golos and thought it wouldn’t make sense to have to have to be working in opposite directions. You have a new follower my friend! 🙋🏻♂️ I think I have a lot to learn from you.📈
As a matter of fact I’d like to send you a small tip for this helpful write up and generous reply.📥🙏🏼😌 Blessings!!
Wow, that's heartwarming, thanks a lot. Only people liking my posts, commenting and following is rewarding enough, believe me. Is also a pleasure to reply personally to everybody, as long I have time I do it happily.
SMT = Smart media tokens, is like a Steemit solution that you could use in every website, even calling the tokens as you wish, i.e. you have a blog site, with merchandise, and you reward people for rating your products with "Digital 1 Tokens", which basically are steems but called in a different way.
BTW, what how do you do to get so many upvotes per comment, ping me on disscord @santana33. Cheers!
Thanks again for the info! Let me know if that tip comes in. It seems like it left my acct but not yet showing in my wallet.
I’ll send you a note.🤖📩
Hello and FYI, I'm a Smartsteem whitelist member and purchased an upvote for $4 SBD. Smartsteem shows the highest available upvote for members which was $41 at the time I submitted.
I received a return of almost 1 SBD and the return statement stated that was the highest available at the time. There is a discrepancy with what is shown and the amount of votes that are sent.
I do not know if you know this already? It has happened a few times already.
Hi Glenn thanks for your comment. Indeed, it happens to me a lot of times. The thing is, it depends if those users have already voted for your post in the past. The chances are that bigger upvotes get drained quickly.
Other chance, is that unless you are ranked as excellent in the whitelist those with the higher upvotes, are reserved for that rank; hence, you do not fall into that.
I think the 100% secure one is the "Highest vote for everyone" one.
Cheers and, I liked your mix of MTB and cryptos. I wish I get some beautiful weather soon to go Nduro and MTB :D.
I hadn't thought of it like that. I agree with both you and @stevekelly and I will stop using paid votes.
Thanks for reading @felipejoys, indeed though somehow useful for a short time, greed from people turned them only in a place for spammers, and also a tool used by whales to perpuate their power inside Steemit. By no means this is helping minnows /redfishs. Try SmartSteem and let me know what is your feedback.
I'm waiting until I get my undelegation done before I try it out.
I tried it and I think it's pretty good. I don't quite understand why it's vote value diminishes a bit over time, but I found it very helpful for tag-specific promotional purposes.
Hi Felipe, it is actually related to the Steem price, when it goes down the upvote value do the same, as also the contrary when it goes up. This is related to the blockchain and not to SmartSteem.
I am glad you are enjoying it, keep steeming!
I see. Since the rewards are based on USD instead of SBD, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the heads up!
Actually not, the rewards should be based on the STUs system, but sideways get affected by the USD steem price. I would look for a better explanation.
Found this on a steem post via google;
I would add that since a portion of your upvote value goes as SP, the lower the price of the Steem is vs. USD, the more SP you get via rewards in SP, but it should be leveraged by lowering your SP upvote value, this is, the indirect amount of SP you get as curation.
I guess is just a way to avoid people getting thousands of SP if the price sinks all of a sudden.
So one big factor is how many people are voting "today". If it's more than what's normal, it fluctuates down. Another big factor is the sbd price. Ok, I think I got it.
very nice article on a very good "app" on steem. I have been using it from the beginning and it just keeps getting better.
I just love using it to sell my vote when I do not use it, that means its making money for me in my sleep.
Its not massive but it does add up to about 1SBD per day
I have also delegated some SP to the site for added income.
Now I am splitting up the SBD income into SP to power up and SP to add to the delegation in 50/50 split
This platform is just the best
Fully agree with you! I see you live in CH, whereabouts? I would love to start doing Steem meet-ups and get a nice support community over here. I think the more SP we get within time plus a bigger public for SmartSteem we will see better returns. Also, try buying some curated votes, is totally worthy.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting (I owe you my upvote, have to recharge).
Upvote with 50% by @votebuster
Thank you @santana33! I have also tried to use up-voting bots but without any success. This looks like a great tool and seems to promote the authors who write powerful and high-quality content.
I've made an account and applied for being whitelisted right now. Can you elaborate a bit further on how getting whitelisted and the 3 levels you can get can help you grow on Steemit!
Big thanks for writing about this tool!
Alin
Hi Alinhimself, thanks for your comment. About the Whitelist part, as seen in the screenshot below, only those whitelisted can access to a bigger portion of the voting pool. This is due to vote sellers, setting their account to vote only to those users with a minimum threshold of posts quality. I.e. I put only to vote on Whitelisted users with "average content" or above. This is since I prefer to only vote to verifies "non-spammer" users, as myself many "higher" SP prefer to do the same.
Got it now! Thanks.
What's the average roi on that category right now?
I would say around a 10% though we need more vote sellers since as the demand grows, the number of votes available for purchase decreases. accordingly. Also, I recommend putting a limit to your voting power, like saying vote only above 80% so you still can use your own votes manually. I.e. for upvoting on comments in your own posts.
Release the Kraken! You got a 1.36% upvote from @seakraken courtesy of @santana33!
Thank you for this info. Will surely try this out. I just hope this will be a great thing a minnow/redfish should do..
For sure it will do, even more with users like you who have a nice quality content. Keep the good work and let me know should you have any question on the tool!
I definitely agree with you Santana.
Smartsteem is just among the best projects on the blockchain and I can vouch for @therealwolf's integrity. The guy is great and "one of us guys".
This allied with the fact that the GUI just works and makes everything easy just makes this an OP Tool.
Cheers
Thanks a lot for your meaningful comment @spiritualmax. Indeed having a proper working web based GUI is of outmost importance. I swear, I am looking forward to SS growth to stop using minnowbooster at all.
I remember when your cards post got flagged, I respect you a lot. It’s an honour to have you comment here, it means I am doing it right, hehe.
Care to explain why your comment has so many upvotes? It isn't smartsteem is it?
Do you use Discord?
Rukka Nova#7589