This is really discouraging and explains some of the strange voting I see. I'm manually curating and seeking the max reward in about 50% of my votes. The other 50% are for my friends or comments I get on my posts. I've recently been spending a lot of effort trying to "beat the bots" in my search for good posts to upvote.
What bothers me most about this idea of turning your votes over to bots is the bad posts getting upvoted only because the author is getting the reward of the bots. No one looks or reads or interacts - just gives a 5% or 10% votes without looking. This is to the detriment of everyone at steemit. Instead of having posts we are proud of at the top - what do we get?
I'm still trying and enjoying my time here, but there are sure are curve balls!
Sharon I wrote this post with you specifically in mind based on the comment you made before that I replied to. Making this post was uncomfortable for me also because I know a lot of curators using bots would rather we not talk about this and continue to clean up on the earnings. I grew so frustrated with manual curation I even recently switched to bot voting myself because sometimes we need to let something get really bad before we recognize a need to change. This is why I am choosing to use https://steemvoter.com and will show everyone how I use it because as long as this is possible, it should be an option. If the bot voting gets so terrible we can hardly stand it, maybe we will be motivated to ask for greater bot limitations.
Hopefully this post will help with the ongoing discussion already taking place about voting bots and generate some ideas from the discussion about what might work better. I would like to see what Steem looked like with no bot activity and this may be difficult to achieve with how it is structured. Some auto upvoters have bots that make small votes on thousands of posts every day which also act as incredible self promotion for the user and provide incentives for posting about certain topics. This post is the tip of the iceberg with how deep the bot voting is here!
Thank you Jerry! You have no idea how appreciative I am of your efforts. This place has more twists and turns than anywhere I have ever posted.
I have a post I'm working on about how I curate and the results I'm getting which are very good lately. I am getting better money and better friends through my tactics and I still believe in them. But I did not understand that using bots makes this a "set it and forget it" place for some people. This blows my gullible mind.
I looked at some rewards of people who use bots just now.
I also looked at posts with people justifying the idea and also many people talking about having their power blown out and giving up on the idea for other reasons.
The whole topic makes my head spin and now I will be researching it like crazy. I would love to have a list of topics that bots like to vote for. I have wondered how to attract bots to my posts. Now - do I want them? I guess that answer is yes, if financial reward is the goal.
On other hand, you writing a post for me is a huge fangirl thrill today!!!! Seriously- when I started slowly going through your udemy videos last year; trying to upload a course, I could never have imagined it would come to this.
My badly needed course is not finished yet btw. Something called steemit interrupted me and that is directly your fault! I'm still very happy to be here swimming, but the learning curve is not letting up!
Sharon I appreciate your reply here and your perspective which is helpful for us all to keep in mind!
Good question and topic for a post!
I can't wait to read it! I've been looking at the voting bots for a couple of days now and this is very daunting to understand. I know I am not alone.
Totally agree on this. If the goal of steemit to promote good content and encourage interaction I really don't see how autovoters fit in with that.
So many posts now have more votes than views. Autovoters at work obviously. But that means less and less people are actually reading the posts.
How is that promoting good content and interaction??
The daily stats eg from @arcange are showing comments on a downward slide, despite continuing rising numbers of accounts.
I guess that is a symptom of autovoting as well 😞
I saw that too and also on @penguinpablo's reports the comments are tanking and the number of posts is trending down. Does this mean more people are automating and walking away?
Yes a mixture of more and more autovoting which is probably why comments are dropping.
And high drop off rate from the big bulk of people that joined in May/June/July.
Oh - that makes sense. Now I love my commenters even more!
Hey @fitinfun, you are totally right ofcourse. I think the idea is, that in the long run Steem Power will be used to get people's attention and not so much Curation Rewards. As popularity increases, so will the competition for content. At a given point in the future, it will be smarter to manually cast a qualitative vote - while that may not be your optimal financial choice. Just like companies are paying for advertising now, they will do it here on Steemit in the future. They will not pay for a channel that consists of automated popularity, they will for actual humans.
Interesting to think of this as an advertising platform. I'm doing that with most of my posts - referring people to my other work and products I push. My analytics show action and some of my affiliate sales are up. The traffic here is pretty good for me when I get it.
I think Advertising / Opinionating is indeed the whole point of this blockchain. Just as we have seen on 'old' but similar platforms such as Youtube, Facebook or Pinterest. Popularity attracts investors who then dominate the platform until the peoples leave for a fresh start, where quality still dominates. Like Steemit at this point :P
Very interesting thoughts. I'm am still on fb only for my groups. I am in a lot of them in niches. These places are still very good for interaction and information and sales. I open a few at a time and interact.
But out on my feed? No I don't go there ever. i have to really filter and self-censor in all my social media but for the most part I have good interactions on them.
Sencillamente , eso hace de steemit una mierda, no se premia a los buenos, así sólo se persiguen beneficios, las cosas hay que trabajarlas. Que decepción