How Many Whales and Dolphins are Truly Legit?
A while back, I had written a post comparing the similarities between Klout and Steemit. The fact of the matter is that both are very similar.
Once again, Klout is a measuring platform that keeps tabs on your social media engagement. The higher your score in Klout, the more influential you are because that means you take the time to be very engaging, and the same goes with Steemit. The higher your rep is, you are more respected in the community.
Klout is no longer a relevant way of measuring your social media influence because it's far from accurate. Not to mention, many times high Klout scores have been known to be created by gaming the system.
Klout wouldn't know the difference if you created fake social media sock puppet accounts to fake engagement. In addition to that, you could pay influential people to retweet your content on a consistent basis.
I don't see an issue with that of you need a boost here and there once in a while, while you are legitimately doing your work. However if all you do is use sock puppet accounts and rely on paid influencers to share your stuff, you are clearly gaming up a high Klout score. Very few people care about Klout nowadays because it really is useless but my point is this: Many users are gaming Steemit as well!
Yes, some have created sock puppet accounts on Steemit as I know of one individual who is gaming the system this way. But the real way to game Steemit is to keep buying votes from bots!!
I don't see an issue with doing that once in a great while to get a boost while you are doing the work by engaging with others. However, if you are buying votes from different bots daily and are going from a reputation of 30 to 60 within a matter of weeks- I'm sorry you are gaming the system!! Whatever influence or power you appear to have is non-existent. It doesn't matter even if you are writing good posts daily. If you are buying votes on all of them, it is not a legit way of becoming powerful within the community.
I am seeing many members do this and climb up as a result. That being said, who really are the real Whales and Dolphins? Because if you are buying your reputation while creating fake accounts to upvote you all the time, you are as fake as a three dollar bill. My 2 c folks.
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"Whatever influence or power you appear to have is non-existent. It doesn't matter even if you are writing good posts daily. If you are buying votes on all of them, it is not a legit way of becoming powerful within the community."
You are so right Miriam. I do think some bots are okay like original works for instance. I like minnow booster but I have never paid any bot or such "service " like that. You know I am also not a fan of voting cliques either. It is like a bunch of stupid zombies. And what sucks about that is a lot of the people doing this shenanigans are selling themselves short becayse their content is good, if they were patient they could get all real votes instead of fake bs
Rstmd to get this message out
@chelsea88 thank you and yes minnow booster is fine and having a boost every now and then is ok too. I'm talking about buying votes from these bots everyday. And voting cliques are stupid as I agree with that. It is too bad that those who buy bot votes all the time, create SP accounts to upvote and who rely on these cliques are ruining themselves regardless of the kind of quality they share. Thank you for your support 😊
Your Welcome. If someone wants to summon a bot for my post, it's always appreciated i just don't personally pay the bots. Getting extra accounts just for sp is greedy. I hope the steemit creators can figure out how to limit this behavior in the future. We're still in beta so
If someone does that for you it's one thing but buying votes yourself daily is not cool, just like creating sp accounts for that purpose too. And hopefully the creators can find a way to keep it clean here.
Hi there, @miriamslozberg, unfortunately the desire for anonymity and the "very unrealistic" zero censorship policy, coupled with delegated SP and account proliferation, there is very little one can do. So ... personal responsibility is all one can exercise here! This explains the minimum age required on all accounts as a parent.
Yeah well that does tarnish the community unfortunately. Since I have noticed this, I had to put it out there.
Some very good points you've made there.
I've never been a huge fan of bots as they don't add real value to the Steemit ecosystem. That said they are part of Steemit code and some people will always find the loop holes to game the system.
@stephen-somers thanks for commenting and you are absolutely right. These bots just help you get a rep and ego boost and that is it.
I may be in the Dolphin category and I'm pretty legit! :) I've been here every day for the last 400+ days, up voting and commenting. Haven't posted in forever, I'd rather give whatever share of the reward pool I can to others when I up vote them. I make a little on votes on my comments and on curation though. But I come here to enjoy the community and read interesting posts. I love it here on steemit!
Congratulations and you are probably the exception and not the rule 😊
I just want to provide some insight to your article: going from 30 to 60 in rank is not a particularly difficult thing to accomplish in the span of a month, with or without paid bots. If you think of it in terms of XP in a video game, the lower levels are easy to breeze through (which is why people jump from 25 to 30-something purely from an introduceyourself post many times). Your rep score increases in large part based on votes from others with a higher rep score than you. Bot votes can certainly help increase payout, but once the threshold for rep score is reached in comparison to the bot, they have little impact on increasing your reputation. Case in point, if you were to make a primary account and then a hundred sock accounts that did nothing but upvote your main account, your rep would increase dramatically for the first few posts before hitting a plateau.