Dustsweeper

I was hoping to live a bot free life, but the problem with steem dust is so intractable that I finally gave in and subscribed to @dustsweeper .

The steem dust problem is simple: The value of upvotes for new accounts is significantly lower than the rounding error. It would take a half dozen votes from new accounts before the author of the post received a reward for upvotes.

It appears that a 100% upvote is under the rounding error until the account crosses the 60 SP threshold. So, I am 77 days and 344 posts into my account. Despite having received a thousand upvotes, my account still has only about 11 SP. At this rate, it will take another 800 posts before my upvote is above the rounding error.

In a quick search, I found that over 50 of my comments had steem dust.

Egads, most of the upvotes I've received have vanished as dust. Since I usually vote for small accounts, most of my upvotes have disappeared as well.

The problem is especially pronounced for comments. It is rare for more than one or two people to vote on a comment.

The preferred way around the problem is to either buy steem power (which I can't do at the moment) or kowtow to whales, which is against my nature.

I tried pushing posts above the rounding error by upvoting my own comments. This didn't work.

The bot solved the problem. I simply fed the bot 0.25 in steem dollars. The bot began upvoting four and five day old posts. I've already received payments on comments for five posts that would have vanished. The investment paid off in just four days.

I made an image of me sweeping sparkling dust into a dust pan to demonstrate the process:

This bot actually makes me feel better. After all, who needs friends when we can hire bots.