Have YOU played Battle voteBots on Steemit? SmartSteem offers a better alternative (share your experience below!)
Using vote bots is a controversial topic, and I'll leave that decision up to the individual Steemian. If you do use vote bots, or are thinking about using them, then read on. In this Newbie Blog we look at the current oversubscription problem, and how alternatives like SmartSteem can help protect your ROI.
Battle of the Voting Bots
There are a bunch of vote bots on Steemint battling it out for your business. How do you know which ones to use? How to you go about paying for this service? These service can be purchased directly through your walled, or via a SteemConnect payment. Using your wallet is as simple as transfering some SBD to the bot's steemit account.
This is basically the path I took as a newbie, and I'm sure I am not alone. I first saw someone I was following had used a particular service (Minnowbooster), so I gave it a try by sending some SBD from my wallet to their account. (Only later did I realize that they actually offered several services).
I had a good experience using this service, but then I found that there are other services available, and I did not know which I should consider using. My manual payment worked but did not give me any visibility into what the bot is doing, and how it is faring against the competition.
Enter the Steem Bot Tracker
Now this is a marked improvement of just blindly pushing SBD from your account into another in the hope of a good vote return.
Steem Bot Tracker shows you a plethora of information about the currently active voting bots. I admit that the first couple times I used this, I just found a bot I recognized, and clicked the "send bid" button. Now I did get some votes, but not really sure if I made or lost $ in the process. This caused me to take a closer look.
What I found was that many Steemians use this page, and that there is a bit of a trick to it. Look at the graphic above for example. See that first entry? It shows that this bot has a "vote value" of 1.03 SBD. This is the total amount of funds in this run of this bot. Now, look over to the "total bids" column. See that the total bids for this run of this bot is at 1.4 SBD. This means that people have bid higher than the bot is able to pay given its current vote value. This means that you are going to lose $ on this run of this bot.
Wait, I'm going to lose money? What? Yes, indeed, for this run of this bot, if you bid now, you will not make a sufficient ROI (return on investment).
What is the trick?
Well, you can click the "details" button to see what the current ROI is, and also see what the last run of the bot earned. Now you can watch each bot and keep an eye on the vote value to total bids ratio to determine which ones look like they might make a profit, but be careful. Pretty much everyone else is doing this also. What often happens is you'll finally find a bot that looks like it will have a decent ROI, and you will wait to click that "Send bid" button, and then around 2 minutes left in the current bid, or 1.5 minutes, a bunch of new bids will drop in and the ROI will plummet.
This is what I call the 'Battle of the Bots', and to use a quote from War Games "the only winning move is not to play"
Play Smarter with SmartSteem
So after spending a few evenings trying to beat everyone else for that vote bot run that would actually turn a decent ROI, I did some digging and found SmartSteem. This site offers several services that I recommend you take a close look at, but in this discussion we will be focused on purchasing votes.
See how much $$ is available right now, with instant refund guarantee
From this page, you cal select 'buy votes' and will be taken to another page with the all important details:
Notice at the bottom the amounts shown for "total voting strength", Available Unrestricted, and Available Exclusive". Here is where I think the real value of using SmartSteem is found. When I came to this site as a Newbie, I registered and found that my 'status' on SmartSteem was listed as 'Pending'. This is because they did not know who I was and if I was actually producing real content.
As a 'pending' user, I could still purchase votes, but I could only use the 'Available Unrestricted' funds. That is fine, if I wanted to spend 1 SBD hoping for a return a little above 2 SBD, I just needed to make sure that the funds were available in this category to meet my purchase. If and when I made a mistake and purchased for more SBD than the account could cover, within minutes I received a refund with a helpful comment in my wallet history:
Key Idea: Fast and Honest Transactions!
SmartSteem rewards for Quality through access to greater funding
I'll be honest, I thought SmartSteem had completely forgotten about me. I was working hard and making posts, and using their service, while each time I would check my status and find that my status was still 'Pending'. Then one day I was looking at my Wallet history and saw a .001 transaction from SmartSteem with a note informing me that my account had been reviewed and 'White Listed' which made my day.
Now I was able to access some of the 'Available Exclusive' funds which means I don't really have to worry too much about SmartSteem not having sufficient funds for my small purchases.
SmartSteem users that sell their votes to SmartSteem want to invest in good quality posts. It seems like the unrestricted funds are really there to help Newbies get started, but once you improve and your quality is established, then the SmartSteem community feels more comfortable voting for your posts.
I really like this system as it encourages and rewards quality, while also providing a helping had for newbies who are trying to get started.
SmartSteem is a great alternative to the Battle of the Bots!
I have occasionally gone back and looked at Steem Bot Tracker to see if there was some great ROI bot currently running, but the risk for me is not worth playing the game, especially when there are good alternatives available. Now, this is nothing against the tool, without which I would still be completely ignorant as to how these bots worked in the first place. It is just the nature of the system right now that oversubscription is a frequent occurrence on even the best bots and this makes it a higher risk game.
Have YOU played with Bots? What happened?
This is what I have found, but there is a great ocean of what I do NOT know. I would love to learn from your experience! Have YOU used any bots? What did you use, and what was YOUR experience? Let us know in the comments below!
SquareLink Newbie Blog #10: Bot Battle vs SmartSteem
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@phaazer1 [SquareLink]
If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.
Please add any questions, comments, or other ideas below, I would love to hear from you.
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