Voting Bots -- To Bot or not to Bot?

To use voting bots or not?

  That is the question. Personally I have used them before in some of my earlier posts with questionable success. This post is more about whether or not voting bots work and whether or not they actually benefit the people using them and/or the steemit community as a whole.

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  This post will not be about whether or not the use of voting bots is right or wrong , ethical or unethical ect.

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  So ... Where to begin. In my last post I had used quite a few voting bots. I figured I had a few SBD and thought I would test out different bots to see how effective they were and if they would be of any benefit to that post.

  What do I think? Well ... honestly I don't think they are working as intended. The main reason being is that too many people are using each bot per voting round , and the result being that most people will be lucky to get their money back. Now don't get me wrong here , I'm not trying to knock the bots or the people that run them , I am just trying to review and post my results and what I think is actually happening. Just as a side note , there is even Steem Bot Tracker to try and help you choose which bots will be profitable , which I was using at the time of my last post.

  So ... who's benefiting from the voting bots? The steemit users using the voting bots? At this point I would say you are quite lucky to get more than you put in , unfortunately. However with that said I wouldn't say that that is the case 100% of the time. And like I mentioned before , I think the main problem is that there are too many bids per voting round to the point where each vote is so diluted , you are lucky to get your money back.

  One solution to that problem may be to cap the value of the bids per round to ensure the value going out to the users is more than the value coming in , although now that I think about that a bit , you may have to also cap the value of each bid also to get that to work properly. Ok so maybe that's more of an idea than a solution :) ... Maybe some of you out there have some ideas too?

  Ideally , the voting bots would not only benefit the people using them but also the owners of the bots and the steem / steemit community / platform as a whole. There are some of the bots out there that fund itself and other projects to help the community. Honestly , I think that's the only way to go. If there are bots out there only benefiting itself and it's owner , well yeah ... not a good look and an argument for another post. But if there are bots and their owners out there that are helping the minnows and helping to grow steem / steemit then that's got to be a good thing ..right? or at the very least an OK thing.

  In the end , personally I don't like using voting bots , but I can definitely understand how difficult it can be getting some traction on steemit. Some posts go totally unnoticed. Although persistence usually pays off in the end , not just on steemit, but in most things. And I think the way to get started on steemit is to enter the many contests they have on here , most of them are pretty easy to enter and even if you don't win you still make connections.

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