This is a great guide. To be honest when I first started I thought that if I continue to write good content or at least good by my assessment that people will notice and that it will get upvoted.

I was dead wrong haha! I started with posts that literally had cents. Then there was that story that exploded of some whales choosing to just lease out their voting power because it pays them more than to manually curate posts.

So bid and vote bots were all the rage and people were using them but I was still not. Then the whole Zeartul scandal exploded and people became distrustful of bots again.

I have given up at this point and said I will not care anymore and had wanted to quit but I did not and stayed for the therapy of writing and looking forward to the posts of friends.

Sometimes I would earn more from curating rather than my own posts and it sucks for me. So since I am spending my time here might as well get something from it so not I have started using bots.

So far it has not been that high but better than what I was getting before. I have started looking at steem bot tracker to utilize the system.

The rewards system is not perfect and at times I question myself if I really want to be in a community that gets more votes from bots but then you got to do what you got to do to survive and just keep trying to that number next to your name higher so people can recognize and upvote you more.