I must add that I have not checked the integrity of these accounts or posts, I struggle to get 1 data post done a day and I know from talking with writers, good form content can take a number of hours to write and post. However it is also not unheard of for account to produce multiple good quality posts or comments a day.
I think we can all agree that getting out quality content takes time, no matter what kind of content you're creating. Having known some very prolific writers in my day, I would except that someone could consistently produce up to three or four decent pieces of moderate length and moderate quality. The trade-off comes extremely quickly for most kinds of content.
The worst is probably video content, which you know in particular can eat up an immense amount of editing time per minute if you're going to do it well.
Short comments? Well, those can be put together in mass, but you're not checking for those here. (That might make an interesting data point at some other time; the number of comments that new users are interacting with. I would expect a real human being new user to be reasonably active in comments with other users, much more so than the number of posts they make. Seeing a big difference between the number of posts and the number of comments with the other ratio could definitely be an indicator of automated behavior.)
It is also interesting to see that people see voting bots as a profitable venture to invest in. This is evident by the delegation given by new accounts to voting bots.
I'm not extremely surprised that voting bots are seen as a profitable venture, because they are essentially betting pools which take a pretty significant cut out of every operation, and they operate as frequently as possible. Day in, day out, without sleeping, they are able to crunch out curation rewards for themselves.
In a real sense, they are pools of SP which would otherwise be static but which are kept moving on request in exchange for other currency. That's fine if your interest is primarily in getting bigger numbers, which we have already established is one of the primary motivations for posters on this platform, but not so great if you're really interested in getting better content more up votes. The bots, of course, don't care about what content they up vote – they just do what they're paid to do. I can only assume that the people who fund bots (and are in turn funded by bots) share that particular lack of concern for content.
That's not to say that I blame them or that I judge them negatively for that choice, but it does directly contravene what I would like for the platform.
Always best to know what forces work against your intent, I always say.
as always @lextenebris you have left an exceptional comment and feedback.
I think this whole voting bot thing is a big problem for steemit, and its getting so hard to complete for visibility when people are using these bots to promote content that is not, well lets just say...to my liking...
And well when the whales are involved too...what is one meant to do?
Change the definition of the word "visibility."
The voting bots only increase visibility on Trending and Hot. In theory, that provides enough reward for those engaging with them to feel good about their expenditure. If you really want to get more good stuff in front of more good people, you have to get behind Communities – which will do a far better job than bots.
But the truth is that visibility is not why people use the bots. It's the reason that we wish people used the bots. We wish people wanted more visibility for their work so that they could get proper appreciation from the crowds – but really what they want is to play the betting pool game and get more money out of the system, regardless of the content.
It makes us feel better to say that we believe people are using the bots for advertising, but we all know that no one looks at posts based on votes. We just don't. We search for keywords, we follow the work of writers that have made stuff that we like in the past – but we don't look at votes. Because everyone who has been here longer than a day knows that the votes are crocked. The votes don't matter. They can be bought and sold in significant volume.
So the first step to figuring out a solution is to accept why these things happen, and these things happen because it is possible to game the reward pool system by buying and selling access to SP indirectly through voting. And as we've covered before, SP is the only meaningful interaction multiplier on the platform.
Which brings us to your final question:
"What is one meant to do?"
The answer is harsh but simple:
One isn't meant to do anything.
One is meant to work the system as they see fit. If you want to try to make money by creating good content and carefully marshaling your SP in order to reward people for making good content that you like – bravo. You're playing the game like I am. You are playing the game like it's been sold.
But if you want to ride the minigame, if you want to use decentralized SP in order to create leverage opportunities, work really hard at understanding the betting pools and how the timers play out, grab all the augmented curation advantages that you can – well, that is also obviously what the platform was intended to do and that you are meant to do.
The clearly works, for some definition of "works." People keep doing it.
For me, the real question is whether the combination of things which are possible remain viable. That, for the moment, remains an open question.
In the last while i have considered using bots as i am trying different content types that my following are not use to from me.
A good thing about my need to consider this option is the fact my regular followers actually read my post and are obviously not liking my new stuff but still voting for the data stuff.
I am still on the fence about using them, as i am not a bot fan, but i think the shear popularity in use is also forcing the hand of others.
I have worked online for many years and often used paid advertising. But steemit is different and should be treated so. Maybe I would be better paying google for post visibility like i do with non steemit stuff.
Thanks for the food for thought
Here are the basic central truths that we know about bots:
They don't care about content. The people that run them don't care about content. The operation and effective deployment of a bot is orthogonal to issues of content.
Very few people look at or care about the list of people/bots who have voted for a particular article. Implicitly, they care about content more than they care about the activity of the bots.
Bots are a fiscal sink. If they didn't make more for the people that run them than they pay out to the people that gamble in them, no one would run them.
So, we know they don't work for promotion because the only way that they can get content in front of our eyes is through Trending and Hot. Sane people don't look at Trending and Hot; the take away is obvious. We know they don't care about content, because they will upload anything equally as long as you pay them. Having removed the possibility of thinking about it as paying for advertising or as somehow validating your content, we are left with the only purpose for playing the bot game.
You want to make use of some of that pooled SP which would otherwise be motivated toward other content to instead be driven to vote for your content purely and only to increase the amount of funds you get out of the system.
Which I don't think is inherently bad, but it changes the nature of the platform. It's one thing to write what you like and what you're proud of and invite people to come see it and reward you if they like it.
Once you bring bots into it you have changed the nature of the platform from a blogging platform to a vanity press, a publication facility whom you give some money to in exchange for "distributing your book" and maybe getting more money back to you then you spent with the publication house to get the book printed.
At a smaller scale, that's exactly how the bots work.
It's exactly the same ripoff.
Sure, some people have made a fat wad of cash by going through the vanity press. And they are very sure to tell you about every single one of them whenever you wander by, just like the poker dealer at the casino shouting out how much people have won today as you walk by.
Steemit is a very different environment than the online traditional publication architecture. Thinking about bots as advertising does a disservice to advertising, and ad guys are not my favorite people on earth in the first place.