RE: Speaking into the VOID... Nope, just commenting on some high reps.
Comments. 30-40 comments from his followers but, almost zero replies from him on almost every post I checked. Is that what is called engaging with the audience?
I have stopped following some large whales who I was voting for when I first started because no matter the quality of my comments (or anyone anyone elses) the author didn't bother to reply. At which point there is no benefit to trying to engage with that author. They are just sucking up rewards and taking the approach that just because I'm bigger then all you piss ants you should vote for me.
Now I know we've had differing thoughts on the vote bots, but you are starting to win me over I think. My tests haven't proven to be overly productive and the part I wasn't taking into account was the amount of time invested in trying to make sure to get profitable or at least not loose to much on my paid votes.
That time could have been used to create more content or spend more time commenting. Not sure what way to go yet with it, but I am leaning more and more your direction.
When I started, I was the same and the competition was even lower. Some actually did engage back then though but I think it was both that entitlement crept in and the amount of spam increased significantly. Filtering through nonsense is not so fun.
Yeah, the bots do take some time from what I understand. A friend of mine has been running a little experiment and realised that unless you are going to overbid, it is a risky game with less return than organic in the longrun. However, many aren't willing to take the path to build organically.
It's not that I'm unwilling, but if I can play catch up by using capital then I will. Just need to know there are results. As they say you can always make more money, but you can't make more time. So when someone new comes into this game and is trying to catch up to those that had the massive advantage of just being here first it's hard not to look for ways that can make it happen. Because no matter how good of content I produce or how often I produce it there is absolutely no way for me to catch up to the whales without trying to find an edge. At that I don't even think a new member has a way to catch the dolphins without finding an edge like paid bots.
I don't think that the paid bots will get them there either unless they will do it for quite a while and at the lower end, people are already finding that they are being squeezed out. the tower is climbing, as is the buy in.
I'm not sure it's the solution either, but to decide I test things. If I loose a few dollars it's not the end of the world if what I lost it for the right reasons.
Think really the best bots profit wise for an author are a couple that are geared towards smaller members. The profit is not massive, but each .01 SBD will return a minor profit. These bots aren't worth my time, but for someone that is just starting it could be a minor boost to speed up their growth from the lowest levels.
Might be something that would be a worthy cause to have a large enough delegation to allow for plankton and minnow votes only and guarantee a small ROI. Say give a 10% profit on each vote to allow the little guys a chance to make a little something when they first get started to help keep them around. Make it a max vote of 1.0SBD so the most they profit from the vote is 0.10SBD and a max of 1 vote per day. This would be enough to keep some small members interested in steemit and yet not enough that they are able to manipulate the hot page or make any large changes to the reward pool.
For it to work some whales would have to be willing to make less profits and be willing to delegate a large amount of SP at a discounted rate.