RE: New to Steem - Tip 5 - Steem or SBD's ?
Thanks so much for this tip, @meno! Also nice you delivered it "face-to-face" :-)
This is how I go about it, and I hope someone here, or you, can hint me if this is good or wrong or sensible or stupid:
We can choose to get our rewards in two ways: 50% steem plus 50% SBD, or 100% steem. For I while I thought about doing 100% steem because I'm in here for the marathon, not the sprint. But, after checking the various upvote- and resteem-services and discussing them with you and others, I decided to keep at the 50-50 strategy. The aim is to grow as much steem as possible, the HODL-option, so I thought this goes faster when I invest SBD in upvote services; The 50% steem from that extra income is more than the 50% I would "gain" by going for the 100% directly...
This brings with it a dilemma about the moral behind using those bots; all of us in Helpies at least agree that Steemit should be driven by humans to ensure that those who deserve it, the post that generate actual interest from actual human beings, get rewarded and ranked accordingly. But on the other hand we hurt ourselves if we let the unwanted content grow faster: their advantage would only grow and real content would only lose marketplace. That's why I compromise by using the only two upvote bots I know of that use a whitelist and a blacklist: Minnowbooster and Smartsteem.
At the risk of being called a hypocrite, I'd like to ask what your opinion is on this as well as from others who might read this.
Thanks again, for being a guiding-light for us, @meno! :-)
These are great points, but I dislike the idea of gaming the system via bots, primarily because I feel it destroys incentives to network and actually care about our human compatriots. I even go so far as to frown on trails for the same reasons, I do all voting and resteems manually because I want to read and connect with all the posts I support. Your point about the visibility environment makes a lot of sense to me, sure it's settling to the status quo, but at least it is done with good intent and purpose.
I'll have to admit, I too have used a few bots/resteem services on a post, more to satiate my curiosity than anything. Even this exception feels a little dirty to me and not because of the before mentioned intent, but rather it opens the door wider to bot usage and may come at the detriment of valuable lessons and benefits that come with the organic path(growth). To me it seems axiomatic that usage will also come with some level of temptation, the old power corrupts metaphor.
The experience that has always helped me with things like this has been gaming. When ever I have used cheat codes in a game sure it was fun and there where benefits, but this was a shortcut to a sense of accomplishment. When ever I got impatient and desired the end game more than the game itself, I always felt I had lost something great. This translates to the journey itself, it's not a race, slow down and you will see all the small things that make up the whole more clearly. Here you will find beauty, the imagination, growth through skill and hard work, problem solving skills, improvise, compromise and a whole host of other important life lessons.
This helps us to grow, connect, express ourselves, share, interact, learn, adapt, develop friendships, help each other, find our purposes, find our love, grow, grow, grow - shortcuts to me are the same as "money buys happiness." It's an error not of misplaced intent, but of missed objective.