Greetings all! Even though my passion is permaculture and digging in the dirt, if you met me now, you may think otherwise. Steem has captured all of my attention. I love this platform. All the different nooks and crannies that exist. Soooo many rabbit holes. And so much knowledge that can enhance or improve my user experience on SteemIt. My garden wilts as my steem account gets watered.
Are Vote Bots Good or Bad?
TLDR version: While some bots have conditions that make them less free to abuse and less spammy, there are obvious concerns about people using bots to upvote crap content, just to make money and build rep scores. What is the feeling of the community on the use of bots?
So, as a newbie (I am still totally a noob, just not sure how I got my reputation score up so fast...yet another thing to look into), I recently began hearing about these Vote Bots. It started when a friend sent me 2 SBD to join @qurator, through which I found out about @qustodian.
Vote Bots basically accept transfers of SBD dollars in exchange for upvotes, with the idea being that the upvote is worth more than the SBD you sent the bot.
To me @qurator seems like the most harmless of the bots. This is because in order to join, you have to have your posts be checked out and verified by humans that make the call of whether to let you in. This presumably reduces spam posts and such. Once accepted, they will upvote one of your posts every 24 hours. The more you upvote their content or the more Steem Power you delegate, the higher percentage of the upvote. Great. I like to think this helps the newbies get a bit of traction and I am grateful for the service.
Then I found @qustodian, which is like your traditional Vote Bot. You send them a certain amount of Steem Dollars (SBD) and in the memo line of the transfer, you paste in the link of the article you want to be upvoted by the bot.
Once you send the transfer, at some point throughout the day, the @qustodian bot will upvote your post. Some nice things about @qustodian:
- You have to be a member of @qurator, which require human verification, ensuring post quality
- The bot will guarantee a 2.5x return on your transfer. So for every 1 SBD you send, they will give you an upvote worth 2.5 SBD. If the bot cannot provide a 2.5x return (his vote power is down due to lots of vote requests that day), he gives you what he can and refunds the rest of your transfer, in order to make sure he still gave you 2.5x.
- You can only use it once a day.
These sorts of conditionals help make the @qustodian bot pretty chill. I am proud to be a member of @qurator and thus I do not mind seeing the @qustodian bot comment on my post. It feels a bit exclusive or something.
But What About the Other Bots?
I have since discovered a whole world of bots. Bots that give refunds and bots that do not. Bots that are obvisous scams and bots that are really trying to help minnows along.
So I dove in and played around.
I found this great tool for tracking bots called Steem Bot Tracker. This tool has everything you want to know about loads of the Bots on SteemIt. It provides an upvote calculator that gives an estimate of what sort of upvote you would get for a certain amount of investment. It shows traits of each bot, like whether there are refunds, how often they vote, and more.
The last two of my posts, I went crazy, playing with the bots. Beep Boop Blip Blop...I'm a human playing with robots.
And it worked. I have all kinds of little spreadsheets I made now that help me determine the actual profitability of the bots I used. (tempted to share them too, but maybe that is for another post)
But honestly I dont know how I feel about it.
Here are some of my concerns:
- It looks spammy to have loads of bot comments in the comment thread of your post.
- Maybe the whales and dolphins that happen across my post will be turned off by the use of bots.
- Maybe my #homesteading and #permaculture community will start hating on me for using these bots.
- I feel the growing urge to just post anything in order to use bots to upvote my own stuff.
And obviously, this brings us to the real question here.
If SteemIt is really supposed to be a platform for the people, where do bots fit in?
Are Bots part of this community. Do people worry that if some users just rely on bots, they will just post complete crap and just tweek the system to look popular?
I truly am curious about this. I do not have any answers. Part of my thinks I will start waiting until day 5 of my post and then going crazy using a mix of 10-15 bots to get the most payout right before the post passes 7 days. That way, there are 5 days of the post looking normal, potentially attracting more attention of curators. But this also feels a bit 'shady'.
##I really want to hear from the community on this. Are steem bots good or bad?##
Please comment on this. I am very very interested in what the people say...
As always, this post is full or original content and photos.