It's been well over a month now since I've started my challenge of not using voting bots for at least a month. The time has come to share my findings and lay out a plan for the future.
A few days into the challenge, I had made a follow up post where I spoke about how I was never going to use them again in the future. Mostly because they gave me a false sense of accomplishment.
I'm certain that I will not use them [voting bots] again in the future. I'd rather take the hard road from now on, by growing on the basis of merit, instead of just buying my success. Even if it means that it will go 100 times as slow as before.
This sentiment still holds true today, it has been very refreshing to see some of my posts do rather well, despite not having used any artificial means for promoting them. Though there are some minor issues I have found out during the past month, which have caused me to slightly adjust my plans.
As you can see in the screenshot above, my rewards have been pretty decent in my opinion. Anything above 1 dollar is pretty good in my book! Do I want to stay at that level? Heck no, but rewards will not increase without more work on my part!
I've been pretty busy in real life, so most of my articles weren't as long as usual, this might have skewed the results a little bit. Currently going through a heat-wave here as well, so any leisure time was spent huffing, puffing and sweating... My little Belgian brain just doesn't work at 30°C!
In conclusion, I'm very happy to keep doing what I'm doing now for the absolute majority of my posts. Which means I'll not be using vote bots for them. I have found some exceptions however, which I'll show you below.
These are two types of posts I might still use voting bots on in the future and for good reason in my opinion. My Pixabay Curation Magazine rewards artists on Pixabay that are featured in each issue, with a part of the post rewards. I've come to the conclusion that this series could use a lot more additional promotion, just to get the word out there.
Any additional post rewards on those articles will flow right to the Pixabay artists. Any additional SP that I receive from it, will be delegated to different community initiatives (300SP currently delegated to @helpie & @thesteemengine).
The second type of posts I might use voting bots on, are those on which I've spent a great deal of time writing them and also benefit the community directly. It is my goal to offer, as many people as possible, ways to become financially independent through cryptocurrency-related endeavors.
On my ICO Bounty Hunter Platform List, I had spent at least half a day researching the mentioned platforms and writing personalized reviews, while it was probably only seen by a select number of people.
I feel that some additional promotion would help getting these types of posts noticed a little bit more.
I'm looking forward to doing some more direct comparisons between posts that have been upvoted by bots and those that have not. It will be very interesting to see how they really compare and what kind of an impact these bots have. Hard numbers don't lie and it's fun to do such experiments. It will give a more clear picture than this past month long challenge.
In reality, around 90% of my future posts will not be affected by the bots. I'm not planning on using bots to promote personal blogs, since they do not really benefit the community. My main focus will still go towards powering up, I've almost reach 1500SP, I'd like to keep that up!
The fact that I'm going to use vote bots again in certain instances does feel like a bit of a cop-out. In the end I'd like to see Steemit do something to disincentive their use or even completely make it impossible to use them.
In the meantime, I'll occasionally use them again on the types of posts I've mentioned previously.
Let's get the discussion going again! Please do share if you know of any other strategies to combat the problems I've mentioned!
Source of first image: Image created by Goodfreephotos and released under Public Domain; Modified by @daan using Gimp
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