100 Followers and My Thoughts on Bid-Bots.

Hi everyone I just wanted to write a quick post to say thank-you to the 100+ people who thought that I have something interesting enough to say to want to follow my page. I know I am not the most active Steemian but hope to create some habits to be able to write more often.

It took me 3 months to get over 100 followers and I am making a goal of getting to 250 followers by the beginning of April 2018. It would be nice to get my reputation to at least 58 by then as well. Fell free to remind me of this goal especially if you are enjoying my writing and wanting to see more.

As you likely already know I am mainly focused on writing about health related topics and naturopathic medicine. As such I have generally not written too much on politics within Steemit or other topics so as to not go off topic for my blog.

Since this is already off topic I figured that I would make a few comments on the who voting bot controversy.

First of all you have to take your hands off to the person who came up with the whole bid bot idea. It is a way of taking advantage of people's natural greed and selfishness. The number of times that you see someone make a huge bid right at the end of voting, thanks to @yabamatt and his bot tracker app which deserves a witness vote, and making most of the lower value votes go from a fairly good return of doubling to hardly 15% is extremely common.

What most people don't realize is that these bots concentrate the steem supply back up to the top whales. Wealth disparity on Steemit is amazingly high and by using bots you are contributing to it.

I for one will not be making any bids unless I am looking to at least double the value of what I am bidding. If you think about it I am loosing if I am only making a 20% return since the owner of the bot is making a much higher amount since they would be ridiculed for always self voting themselves and so have people pay them for their vote.

Say you give a 10SBD vote and get a $12 upvote. You are only realizing $2 while the bot owner gets a 10SBD profit. It isn't any money from their backs giving the votes out. Especially with the current broken valuation of the SBD. If you are after increasing your own Steem Power you are actually better off just converting it at the current rates with is easily 6:1 Steem/SBD.

What people don't take the time to think about is that the more that everyone bids during a round the less profitable it is for everyone voting. Therefor to really maximize the voting bot value perhaps we should start a culture of only increasing the voting value by no more the $1 so that everyone gets a decent payout. It is our greed that makes bid-bots so profitable.

In my opinion all bid bots should be run as not for profits. If seeded with a bit of SP at the beginning they can easily power themselves up to a decent vote size after which they could redistribute their earnings to the steemit community in the form of contests or a random redistribution to the people that follow that bot or to smaller accounts to encourage them to keep going. That way the money that the bot concentrates would be redistributed to the steemit population and encourage further growth.

So if you read up to here I would be interested in knowing if you are discouraged or incentivized from voting for a post if you know the author is going to use a bid bot?

Thanks for reading and I hope to interact with you more into the future.

Photos modified from pixabay.com