The issue of voting bots is one which have caused a lot of controversy on this platform. Some people outrightly hate voting bots and the prime reason is because some Steemians use it to promote shit posts which end up in the trending section
Now this have some Implications to both Steemians and Non- Steemians. Outsiders who have visited this platform see these trending posts and conclude that Steemit is just a place where anything goes
Steemains who don't understand how the bot voting system works gets discouraged because they feel that quality of posts does not matter on Steemit.
The truth is that Voting bots were originally meant to bring more good than harm, but the reverse is the case at the moment. Most good writers are afriad to use voting bots because of the bad perception behind it. But the truth is that they are the ones who need it more
In This Post Steemain witness @aggroed appealed to all Steemians to use voting bots or they will lose to the shitposters
I believe that this is true. Voting bots will be a good weapon on this platform for visibility if good authors use them. I say visibility because I never for once believed that voting bots are for profit
Steemit posts gain visibility based on the amount of pending payout and for you to get more views, you post needs to be trending. So when someone who invests in good content constantly uses voting bots then his posts will now get the attention of those who value good content and he/she will get more followers that will give him/her more upvotes
A lot of people get frustrated because voting bots don't give them way more than they Invest in it the same thing goes for leasing Steem Power, but I will talk more of that on another post
The Goal of voting bots should be visibility and not profitability.
I would love to hear from you on this and I also have some questions that I would like to ask the community
Do you think that voting bots are a good development, for whether good or bad reasons ?
Do you think it is acceptable for anyone to use voting bots on every post if the person writes quality content ?
When is the sensible time in your opinion to boost a post from a curation standpoint ?
DO you think that voting bots will make a good writer become Lazy with time ?
Thanks for reading, I am looking forward to your comments
Image Source : Pexels
I wouldnt be a fan of them in general and would rather have none on operation but since they do exist and are highly used i find myself using them to give my posts a boost at the start and more visibility.
I think that posts sitting on 0c really struggle to attract attention where as posts with ten dollars makes people more curious as to why so they look. I do post and try to add good content so for me its about attracting people to it but there are plenty out there just using the bots for profit.
Its not as much an issue now as i have regular followers and commenters so i never see 0c anymore but that took a while.
Thats true @niallon11. Zero payouts are frustrating
I happen to disagree. If all the good content stops using voting bots then they would be left with a dilemma. Keep supporting garbage or find a better business model. Now I understand that never going happen.
Steemit should not have to be about spending money just to keep up. Votes are free to earn here. Why people want to spend the money for more is just crazy. It is like walking up to my bank handing them $5 and them saying congratulations sir here is $6.5 back. Expect that’s nothing to be happy about at all. That is called inflation.
I think voting bots will make people lazy. If at end of the day they know they will make $50 profit on something if they spent 10 hours on it or $45 profit if they only spent 2 hours. Naturally only spending 2 hours for that kind of reward is far more amazing than 10 hours. That saved time could be filled with writing more blogs to buy more upvotes...
It is disappointing the kind of upvotes these people can buy are so huge it takes a large stakeholder to piledrive them into the ground when they are using plagiarised content, spam, or just low effort stuff that only took moments. These things leave the reward pool open to those that could not give two cents about the platform and just want to pillage and murder the reword pool and laugh at how easy it is to game the system.
It seems you were pondering what I was pondering......thats exactly my point.
The more troubling part is not if they make a profit or not. It is their reputation gains from using vote buying in the first place. It could take me month(s) to get to my next reputation level. Meanwhile, someone spending enough money just days.
One of the people I follow has joked about how bad vote buying has become here (referring it to a drug addiction). To the point he says things like “my couple dollars’ worth of an upvote is not good enough for some.” The more they all spend the more it will cost to keep making it into trending and hot tabs for the tags they use. Sounds like a wonderfully profitable issue for the vote sellers.
thanks for sharing this wonderful information @ogochukwu.
In my opinion, voting bot is good, nothing on earth does not have good and bad side.with reference to your question, i think, it will make good writers lazy, because what ever you post, you can get good credit for it.As good steemians, we need to go out of our way to be creative and get captivating information.
Thanks for sharing @princessfrank
I go with @nairadaddy, that voting bot has its good and bad side, but for me it has more bad than good. Newbies don't have much SBD to make their quality post trending, so they continue writing and not getting much reward for their hardwork while people who don't produce good quality post but have much SBD get rewarded. I know we use money to get money, but that shouldn't be the case for steemit platform, where people should get rewarded for quality and not SBD availabilty.
Of course Voting bot makes good quality writers lazy, because they know once they bot, they get trending and get rewarded.
Imagine a steemit platform without Voting bot. cool right!!! Only quality posts and Influential steemians get trending.
@ogochukwu thanks for changing my perception, that Voting bots are for Visibility and not profitability.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts @menoski
voting bots were originally used for profit. The promotion tab is supposed to be used for visibility. Voting bots are not profitable anyways because the amount of bids exceeds the votes "worth" anyways.
I don't think that the promotional bot is effective for visibility. People rarely visit it @bearbear613
Hey @ogochukwu, as I have come to realize, everything has its advantages and disadvantages as well. Voting bots are good if used well. Expectations must also be managed. It can be seen as advertizing for visibility instead of profit making.
Seriously, its better to select specific posts to boost expecting the best. If you boost all posts, you may spend all your SBD. Lolx.
Also boost within the first 30mins for maximum exposure and appearance on the hot page.
Voting bots are good and bad. We all have the freedom of choice to use it for whatever we choose.
Cheers bro!
Its been quite a while. Hope you are good!
You are not far from the truth. But my worry is its indiscriminate use
I am fine bro @nairadaddy. School has been hectic. Thanks for sharing your thoughts
As a newbie in this wonderful platform, I have taken my time to study steemit, how it operates and most of the techniques required for someone to grow in this platform.
I have also read several guide articles by different authors in this platform but I haven't heard anyone mention about this voting bot until today by you.
From my experience so far in steemit, the whales are the one really enjoying based on their reputation and followers.
As newbies, you have to begin with comments and good comments at that in order to draw their attention. Even if as a newbie and one make good post, without the help of these well established people on the platform resteeeming post, the post might not really gain enough audience that will upvoted or comment.
This is really a disadvantage, as it might discourage the person, the boils down to the fact that patience is needed.
I have seen a whale who just posted a picture and wrote unreasonable thing on it, to my surprise in less than thirty minutes he had already made about 50dollars.
Quality content draws the attention of people to read a post but if this voting bot is used by people who don't have the creativity, then steemitbis likely to loose it's integrity as the platform that rewards creativity, innovation and intuition.
Steemit encourages unique ideas and frowns at plagiarism or indolency.
I really loved steemit when I joined it because if how the system operates, and I have been enjoying it so far.
I am totally not In Support of the voting bot as it will no longer encourage creativity rather like you said above, give the lazy ones the leverage to post articles that are not meaningful.
When you have in mind that your article will only be rewarded based on the quality, one will always tried hard to make it unique but if otherwise, they will just capitalize on their voting bot for success.
In a nutshell, I am not in support of the voting bot except it's use in the promotion of quality content.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts @cyprainj
I'm somewhat new here and still don't understand how voting bots work. I hope I get to learn with time.
You will learn more with time @paigegirl
There seems to be much focus on the people using the bots, rather than the people running them. They are the ones making money of its use, so they are in the end the ones responsible for the utter lack of quality checks. They make enough from their huge milk-cow bots, so why can't they at least put in some minimal amount of work into assuring some minimum level of quality ? Maybe the best thing to do with our excess voting power would to only use vote bots of bot owners known to moderate, and possibly to actually downvote random "unmoderated" vote-bot upvoted content , in order to prompt those bot owners to start doing some bare minimum moderation for their bots as well.
Look at it like spam mail and open relays. A vote bot without any moderation is like an open relay to spam. Given the marginal ROI for users, it only takes marginal downvotes to make the ROI negative for users of unmoderated bots.
So rather than "rewarding" the bot owners for being lazy by using their unmoderated services, use the money to rent SP and downvote random unmoderated vote bot upvoted content with it, if you want to help the platform. Oh, and to upvote content upvoted by "moderated" upvote bots. If we can help making the ROI on moderated bot usage slightly positive while making the ROI on unmoderated, open relay spam type bots slightly negative, our SBD would truly make a difference.
Well if I have to add to the post, I think yes, voting bot is cool only when aimed at visibility. So I think it should be the work of those incharge of bots to maintain quality before allowing the use of bots