Voting Bots, ReSteem Bots, and Curation Bots. Steem is becoming a digital Jetsons home. In the iconic cartoon 'The Jetsons', it seemed that they had a bot for everything. Wash the clothes, clean the house, cook the food. You name it, and there was a Bot to do the job. All created to make things easier for the family.

Steemit and the STEEM Blockchain are becoming more and more like an episode of the Jetsons. Anymore all we have to do to get any 'WORK' done on the platform is push a few buttons and 'PRESTO' Curation, Voting, and ReSteeming is done for us. Just like the Jetsons.

Now I have done my fair share of Botting on the platform. I have used the most popular voting bot, and the only reason I stopped was with the rise in the value of both SBD's and STEEM it just did not make sense anymore. I have also used many of the ReSteem services. Although I have never used a curation/comment bot. While using them I thought they were a great service to have on the STEEM Blockchain. It seemed that they were providing real value to everybody. But again with the rise in the value of STEEM and SBD's I have stopped using them.

I guess that the main question about Bots on Steemit, is “How Much Value Do They Really Give?” Looking at it from a customer of the bot's perspective I have concluded that Bots are good and do in fact offer real value to the STEEM ecosystem. As long as the users themselves are willing to accept the cost. But there is a much bigger picture and a much bigger effect that the bots have.

When Steemit and STEEM were created, it was envisioned that folks would Blog/Create content and other folks would read and interact with the Blog/Content. Folks themselves would then decide how much value to give to it by upvoting/downvoting and resteeming. They could then give added value by commenting on the Blog/Content as well. Those folks that did this were called Curators. In return for taking time and effort to actually curate this content, they would then be rewarded by sharing in a portion of the value that they had given it(STEEM/SBD). Great Idea. Only with Bots, this is not working. Instead of actually reading a post and then DECIDING to either upvote or downvote a post one at a time, we tell the Bots to just upvote or downvote everything by that creator. Some Bots even post a pre-scripted comment to make it appear that the post was read. The biggest problem is that these bots actually lessen the intended interaction with a post. If a post can be both voted for and commented on by a bot, then where is the HUMAN interaction that gives the REAL value to any post. Can a Bot give value if the post was not actually read or even seen by a human being? I think not.

That brings me to the ReSteem bot. This Bot is a little different. Its intention is to put a post before more eyeballs. That means more human interaction, so long as the bots account actually has a majority of active human followers and not other bots then this one is actually good for the platform.

One other behavior I have observed with the users that use bots on a regular basis is their interaction levels have for the most part decreased. Myself included. We are actually posting less and commenting even less. We have in effect become valueless to the Blockchain. So we may have started to use bots so that we could have more time to interact with the Blockchain, but in reality, we have begun to backslide.

In conclusion, I can only suggest and advise that if you wish to continue using bots, that you do it sparingly and be mindful of the fact that you must continue to interact with the Blockchain in order to remain relevant. Go out and welcome new users. Explore the tags. Follow people. Never Stop COMMENTING.

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This post was inspired by a comment on another post by @anthonyadavisii. Go check out his blog.