If you follow @penguinpablo, you will be familiar with the daily and weekly Steem stats report. These report an a variety of activity going in the Steem blockchain, such as number of posts, comments and ammount of transacting accounts. One aspect I am interested in is the number of votes, and percentage of bot votes.

If we look at the most recent weekly stats report we can see, that bot usage ranges from 0.5% of all votes to 0.62% of all votes. When we look back at the report from around 3 months ago, we can see that bot useage was more rampant, with a range of 0.84% and 1.15% of all votes - thats a decrease of usage of up to 50% in three months! So what is causing this decline?

Decreasing profitability

One reason could be that in general bots are becoming far more tightly controlled, and thus less profititable. Looking at steembottracker.com, all but 2 of the bid bots now have controls for a 'maximum ROI' - gone are the days of bidding, and having a possility of making a nice profitable upvote. Im sure the falling price of Steem is also leading to bots being less profitable.

I dont know if someone has written a post recently about the profitibility of bots, but if you have I would love to read it!

Morality

I remember when I joined Steemit, and I found out about bid bots, and I thought I had hit a goldmine - mean really I can just buy votes, and my post will have a higher payout??? However, Im sure I am not the only one that found that over time, this had a negative impact on my time here, and felt a bit shady about paying for votes, rather than relying on manual curation. Now I dont pay for votes (apart from the very rare competition to increase its visibility), and it is a much nicer feeling when I get upvotes and comments from genuine people who have actually read my content.

The rise of Dapps and delegation options

Recently I have become intrigued by the ammount of fantastic new Dapps on the blockchain, and how they offer value in so many ways. These Dapps generally take delegations for supporting there project, and offer certain benefits in return. I know that if people delegate to bid botd they get daily returns, but I find that delegating to a community I am a part of is a much better option for me.

@steem-ua is a perfect example - you can delegate from as little as 25SP, and in return you recieve upvotes based on your Steem-UA score. The great thing about this is that encoruages users to improve their content, and their engagement. Rather than just being able to upvote any post to treding, Steem-UA offers a more long term approach, and encourages constant development.

What do others do? Do you delegate to bid bots, or where does your delegation go?

What does all this mean?

I still think bid bots have there place here on the Steem blockchain - for example when new Dapps or projects are released I am all for them bidding up the introduction posts to trending so I am more likely to see it. However, it appears that for the everyday user the use of bid bots is steadily decreasing, and we are seeing many options and alternatives to using bid bots.

Bringing new money and investors into the platform is the key to the longterm success of Steem - in the past the options were mainly to invest in bid bots, and thus abuse became more rampant. However in the lead up to the release of SMTs there are now many more 'moral' ways for investors to spread their money, and help build the future of the Steem blockchain.

Do you still use bid bots? Are they still profitable for you? Are you delegating or supporting and Dapps - if what and why?

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