More than two months ago I decided to experiment with an upvotebot on Steemit

I wrote a post about me starting my experiment: https://steemit.com/bots/@bitbrain/give-the-bots-a-chance.

As I said back then: "I'm a purist and I believe in doing things properly, the right way, the old fashioned way."

That means no bots.

But being curious and willing to experiment with things, I explored the world of bots a bit until I found something that looked a lot better than the other bots.

In the last paragraph of that post I wrote; "I'm going to test it out and perhaps I'll write about the results in a few weeks time. " - well here I am making good on that promise.

From https://pixabay.com/en/robot-artificial-intelligence-woman-507811/

Give the bots a chance (Follow-up post)

I STILL don't like bots

The problems with Steemit that I mentioned in my original bot post haven't gotten any better since I wrote it. Because I know that not everyone will have clicked the link to my old post, I want to repeat them here. They are important for the future of Steemit:

People use scripts and bots to automate these downvote processes against those they don't agree with, and similarly they use them to upvote themselves and their cronies. So the majority of Steem rewards get circled among the few major Steem holders, and the new posters, the good posters, those who should be getting the incentives - they get marginalised and ignored. Try to fight the system and make it what it should be and you actually end up downvoted.

What the hell Steem?

Realising this I put my mind towards a solution. I realised that for Steem to work how it should it would mean that:

• Bots would have to be banned - you do all your curation YOURSELF!
• No Resteeming. It creates a circle of brown-nosing. If you want to draw attention to a post then you should link to it from your own posts.
• The end of reputation scores. All Steeminians are created equal, but some Steemians are more equal than others. This system is being abused. With no bots around it would become unnecessary. You don't need reputation on Facebook do you?
• Anonymous voting. Same as the resteeming. If you don't know who voted for you, you won't try to vote for them as a reward (and get more of their votes in return).
• You'll vote only for good content that you enjoy! No more buddy-buddy systems!
• No more promoted posts - I hope that this much is obvious.
• No trending posts - same as the promoted posts. IF people see a good post, let them talk about it. I don't want someone else's idea of a good post shoved down my throat while it gathers a disproportionate share of rewards.

If all this is done then the cream will rise to the top and the abusers will disappear - their incentive to keep spamming and scamming the system having been removed.

In addition to "Trending" and "Promoted", Steemit has now also added "Hot" posts. With lower entry criteria, I think that this is a small step in the right direction. Hey, it's better than nothing.

I thought that an honest bot may be the answer

I joined ShadowBot (https://steemit.com/@shadowbot) on 2 May 2018 because I liked the look of the ShadowBot system. It appeared to be a system that rewarded quality posting and could help new users to get votes. Here is how I have done so far with ShadowBot:

From https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/dashboard.php

As you can see my posts are not really earning any votes. It would be unfair to say I've had no votes, I did get a few last week, probably about 20 votes in total. But that was the only time that I got votes, certainly not very impressive and definitely not enough to contribute anything more than the smallest handful of SBD cents, if that.

I must say that I have been disappointed so far. I was hoping that this was a bot service that would help minnows. Instead it seems to reward those with really high SBD, or the first few members that joined. For the rest of us, the normal users, the "Shadow Rank" and "Pool Priority" climb painfully slowly (the "3" in the picture above is my Shadow Rank, it has gone up 1 point per month. Without higher ranks, you don't get many votes.

The system makes sense in a way, you don't want new users coming in and getting votes for nothing. But here I am; I've been powering up all my SBD into SP (I haven't withdrawn a cent from Steemit), I've had my vote used on many occasions by the platform (even though it isn't worth much, just $0.01 or $0.02 or a really good day) and I'm trying my best to write a quality post every day: all original content, more than just a 3 line post and a picture etc. Fair or not, the system certainly doesn't work for minnows, not unless they fund their STEEM wallets with hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars of SP!

Another way to optimise your power on the system is to let it do all your voting for you. "Fine" I decided, and didn't touch my vote button for a good few days. But what happened? Well my vote power hit 100% and then it hung there... From time to time it would get used, but too often I would login to find my voting power at 100%! What good is an upvote bot if it's not using my vote? So from then on I went back to voting manually as well, I'm not willing to waste voting power like that!

I think that in many ways the ShadowBot service is still a work in progress. They post about changes every so often, so I'm trying to take that into account and not be too judgemental toward the platform yet. Most new software needs time to iron out its faults! They have e.g. reintroduced the "analytics page" not too long ago and they have significantly changed the "casters" page (the list of vote casters). I actually preferred the old page where you could see how much you had contributed and how much had been contributed to you (in SBD). It must have been defective though, because my contributions always stayed on "0", even though that was impossible because my vote was being used and they track contributions down to eight decimal places.

The old page:
From https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/casters.php (captured 02 May 2018)

The new page:
From https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/casters.php

Conclusion

The bot is obviously not the minnow helper I had hoped it was. It's not going to solve my list of Steemit issues.

But that doesn't mean it's bad and I certainly still consider it to be far better than most of these corrupt Steemit bots which are making the platform miserable! So I will be fair to ShadowBot and run this test for a while longer before judging it, after which I will report back again and give it my 👍 or 👎 vote. (Hopefully not a "🖕"! 😅 - sorry, I couldn't resist!)

Patience is important; I didn't expect instant results, but I do expect some sort of fair result for the effort I put in. I may not have a ton of SP, but I put in all I have and I have been writing like crazy, things that the SteemBot FAQs say should raise my rank. I simply don't have fiat money available to buy more SP. We will see what transpires in the long-run and I'll post about ShadowBot again.

Until then I suggest that minnows (everybody actually) support the Minnow Uprising movement, at least for the month of July: https://steemit.com/steem/@taskmaster4450/july-1-minnow-uprising-kicks-off

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

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Published on

by Bit Brain

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