Over the past week or two, I've read several posts that were talking about voting bots in general, and the possible ethics of having them and using them. At least one post talked about large stake holders selling their votes rather than doing manual curation, and how they make more sbd from just selling their votes. I also saw some talk about this in a discord chat. I found the discussions, and especially the chat discussion to be quite interesting, and a bit of a disappointment at the same time.

The fact that someone with a lot of SP would rather sell their votes with a bot of one kind or another than manually curate tells me a couple of things. One, they're mostly just interested in making money, and another, they don't care much about the content of the posts that their bot upvotes. Original content isn't important to most voting bots, nor is effort involved in the post. A meme with 2 lines of text will often make a lot more than a well thought out post about some subject. Of course, that's only partly the fault of the bots, what most people upvote often leaves me wondering what people upvote, and why.

This subject leaves me a bit disillusioned about steemit. It's probably mostly my fault for thinking that this website was much different than any other website where people write and post stuff. Sure, this website is almost unique in that it pays people for what they write, based on other people liking the post, and most of the people who use the platform make a little bit of crypto. But let's face it, this website is just another money generating platform, and the lion's share of it goes to the large stakeholders. This website is built on the capitalistic notion of greed. If you have a lot of money to invest in steem, you actually don't have to do much at all here to make a good return, just sell your upvotes.

I guess that I was perhaps expecting something different from steemit, a place that was more about involvement and interaction than just about money. Perhaps I expected too much. I see a lot more involvement and interaction on the PAL group on discord than I ever see here on steemit. Perhaps that's because it's not driven by money, but rather by community.

So, what do I want to do because of these trends that I see on steemit? Not much, I guess. It is what it is, not what we might want it to be. The vote bots continue, and I use a couple of them. Why not, everyone else is using them. It seems the only way to generate any crypto for some people on steemit, and it usually adds a few cent's of crypto to the value of my posts.

There's plagiarism, copy-paste posts, lots of accounts that are created specifically to upvote a person's posts, and I'm sure there's other ways to mine steem in unethical ways, but that's what happens when it's about money.

In the mean time, I'm just going to keep on doing what I've been doing on steemit, making posts, hoping some people like them, hoping some people upvote them, and using the upvote bots that I've been using.
To me, this is as much a place with an audience as it is a money making platform. I have no way at this time to turn steem into U.S. dollars, so it's not like I'm here for the money. The primary reason that I hope for large votes is because I turn most of the post rewards into SP to give me more voting power for my curation efforts. Untill the last month or so, I didn't have enough SBD to buy any votes. I had my posts set at 100% power up. I go back and forth between 50/50 and 100% now just so that I will have a couple of SBD for the vote bid bot that I use.

I have accumulated 800 SP of my own now, all of it earned through my posts. I figure that's pretty good considering that I've only been on steemit since the beginning of May of this year, a bit more than 6 months at this point. I don't see myself investing any U.S. dollars into steem any time soon for 2 reasons, I live on social security which doesn't go all that far, and I have no way to convert U.S. dollars to crypto to trade for steem. I guess I'm not in any danger of making dolphin status any time soon. Right now, my full 100% vote is worth about 8 cents. It ain't much, but it's a lot more than when I started.

My curation efforts are not along specific tags, they're more random, I never quite know what I'm going to be interested in when I log on to steemit. It mostly depends on what I find interesting that evening. I upvote what I find interesting, as long as it's not what I consider low quality posting just to get votes. I tend to mostly curate the people that I'm following, but sometimes I'll look at resteems if they get my attention. I don't have the time or SP to cruise the "new" listings or the "trending" listings looking for things to curate, I'm usually only on the computer in the evening, and this computer is my only link to the internet.

If you've made it this far on this post, thank you for reading the entire post! I really appreciate that.

Feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like, I'm all for interaction on this platform.

Heep on steeming on!