My Personal Stance on Voting Bots - One Month Without Paid Upvotes Challenge
This post was inspired by @slobberchops his recent post, where he talked about no longer using voting bots in the future. After thinking about some of the points he raised in his post, I've decided to put myself to the challenge of not buying any votes for a month.
I'm currently still having a lot of doubts surrounding the thought of completely stopping my use of bots, but the only way I can give a fair assessment is by just testing out the effect.
My Stance on Voting Bots
I'm not really against people buying upvotes, I understand that it's extremely disheartening to see your post not get any rewards, while you may have spent hours on writing it. The thing is though, I've always felt a little bit bad myself when I spent 1 to 5 SBD for promoting my own posts. That's why I'm giving myself this challenge of not using bots for an entire month.
It might be the case that after my little test, I'll completely stop using them or I might start again. It all depends on what the results of the test are. I'm perfectly willing to make a little bit less than before though, as long as the impact isn't too big.
As for when other people buy upvotes to promote their posts, I would still give them an upvote, though my standards would be a little bit higher. Especially when hundreds of dollars have been spent to artificially get it on Trending. For me, this seems like a fair way of sharing my upvotes.
Reservations
One of my biggest worries is that my Pixabay Curation Magazine will fail to get any sort of traction among the community. That would ultimately cause a decline in donations to the featured artists. To combat this, I'll be adding some of my own funds to the donations, at least for as long as this experiment is running.
It is also to be expected that I'll miss out on some organic upvotes from people finding my post through the Hot section. I'm wondering how big this effect would be, but I'm leaning towards thinking it's going to be negligible.
Personal Rules
For the next 30 days, starting from today, I will no longer use any services to purchase upvotes. These include: any bots listed on Steem Bot Tracker, Minnowbooster, Smartsteem & Steemfollower Market.
Regarding using Steemfollower, I will not use the market to purchase points, though I can still gather points by curating content on the Steemfollower website.
Expectations
The best possible outcome would be that I can completely stop using voting bots in the future, without sacrificing too much in return. I definitely think that it would add a lot of credibility to my blog in general, it's no secret that a lot of people aren't very fond of voting bots.
Recently I've been experimenting with buying Steem Power delegations, this is a far better approach I would say. My self-vote percentage hovers at around 5%, but I'm still able to give my own posts a nice upvote. Might be worth it to spend more on delegations, instead of on upvotes. That way everybody wins!
I'm still not convinced were are actually making more by using these. The people who host them are though.
That big number we see is just that, but its been paid by ourselves. I was using them simply to gain reputation and because the SBD/STEEM conversion was terrible.
The latter is still not good, but I feel the benefits of respect and possible curation love outweigh this now.
I don't know about that, I've gotten a profit sometimes when using buildawhale, at least a couple of times. I'm sure I've also made losses too.
That said, I'd be very happy if my earnings stay somewhat the same :)
Good on you @daan. I personally think that bidbots are what destroy steemit's reputation for a lot of new users who come on the platform, as a lot of them just disappear when they realize they have to buy there way up to any decent payout.
Good luck being bot free ;-)
Yeah I really hope that I'll just be able to continue after the month is over :) I agree that it's definitely weird for new members when they find out the trending page is full of bought votes.
I never use them.. Did do a test a few times I guess about 2 months ago. Wanted to see if this is the answer to the posts that are undervalued. Results were bad.. Stopped after those few tests.. Much better to lease power indeed :) Good luck the next month!
I have heard people make the argument before that buying votes increases visibility for the post, but I just don't see a lot of evidence that this is true. Unless you are spending enough to get a post to trend in a tag and even then it often doesn't actually even drive any engagement. My guess is you will have next to no difference in the amount of views (not that you can see view count anymore), comments, and organic earnings on your post without bid bots. Cheers - @carlgnash for @c-squared
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
I was always under the impression that some people found my posts through the Hot section. Sadly, there's no way to prove this. It would be interesting to see some data on how people find posts.
Good for you man! It is worth a shot for sure.
Im not too fond of bots myself, have using them a couple of times, was not too happy with the results most of the times. I dont mind if others use them, if it is with 'normal' amounts.
Getting out of the sea with 0.01 rewards is really difficult in the beginning tho!
Yeah that's true, I think it might be successful for me because I'm a part of many discord curation groups. I'm 100% sure that I won't get any posts with just 0.01 dollar rewards ^^
Good luck on your experiment, I think you will be just fine without any bots.
At the beginning, I was not using them. The price of STEEM and SBD were closer then though, so you didn't lose as much when you powered up your SBD. After a short time of gaining followers and SP and still not seeing much of an increase in my rewards, I started using them. Additionally, the price of STEEM and SBD moved far enough apart that it just made more sense to spend the SBD on that.
The information I learned the other day which I passed along to @slobberchops that indicated I might be missing out on other things because my posts had artificially high pending rewards has made me reconsider. It's not like I was making a ton using the upvote bots anyway. I still have a long crawl to any reasonable amount of SP, so I might as well do it organically. I as well will be limiting or eliminating my use of upvote bots for the foreseeable future.
So you didn't get any noticeable increase in rewards from using voting bots when you did? I think some of my posts got a little bit more attention. On the other hand, who knows how many votes I've not gotten just because I was using bots.
It's hard to say. My account has always been pretty small to start with. I will see how much SP I am able to add over the next couple of weeks and then I will have a better idea. I've been networking a lot on Discord too lately, so that is something that might skew the assumptions.
I'd still count the upvotes gotten through Discord. Without that it's nearly impossible to get anywhere.
For sure!
I had also a pause of about one month of not using bid bots at all, until a couple of weeks ago when I threw some SBD in exchange of upvotes. I wanted to see if there was any extra attention added to my posts when they had some good amount of upvotes, but it wasn't anything different. In that month though when I haven't used it at all I had pretty nice upvotes so I concluded that, for me, they're of no use. I consider very important to share some pretty good quality posts and have some wealthy audience in order to be successful around here. These are the two important things that I am investing in right now. Improving my blogging skills and creating a network of steemians that upvote my work constantly.
Good luck with your one month without bid bots!
Good to know that you had a positive experience, I hope it will be the same with me :)
I personally prefer a Steemit without bid bots. But asking everyone to ignore them would not work. Cause then I would definitely use them. And also post a lot of bullshit. You probably understand why 😬
I just mentioned in another comment on a post explaining the voting system that the system itself, and its relation to rewards vs. content quality is so complex that even if you want to reward quality with votes, doing so while still trying to get some rewards for your vote seems to necessitate an algorithm. There are too many factors to consider and a human cannot possibly process all of the information in time. I’m new here though, so I’m still learning.
For instance, I just upvoted your post, but you were first to upvote. And since my vote was after just a few minutes it means... And my vote is also worth almost nothing... Still, I liked your article, so I upvoted.
You mean to earn from the curation rewards? You can kind of guess when to upvote a post to get most out of the curation rewards.
Not just curation rewards. My question is how best to reward quality posts on Steemit by using upvotes. I'd like the highest quality posts to get the highest rewards. To keep things simple and in the spirit of the Steemit whitepaper, lets say that I want to maximize the reward for posts (and comments) that I personally feel are high quality. Others may disagree with my assessment of quality, but I am only trying to maximize my upvotes. I'm also considering the reward as being both the increase in reputation and the payout to the author. I would also like to be rewarded on the quality of my posts, which I have some say in by upvoting. I've read a lot about how all of this works, but there are so many variables, that it is still not clear to me that I am voting to achieve my goals.
As a new user should I upvote my posts? Will someone get upset if I do? Should I wait 30 minutes for mine? for others? But what if someone starts voting before 30 minutes? And what if the author upvotes first? Oh and then there is my voting power that I have to watch. Should I vote a post older than 7 days? (I'm not expecting you to answer these, my main point is actually next.)
So its clear that this system of voting power and payouts was/is based on game-theoretic principles. However, it is not clear how and when and on what I should vote to maximize quality. I think that is a fundamental problem, especially for new users. In most other social network systems the rule is simple: if you like a post or want to support it, then upvote it and share it. Adding limited auto-refreshed voting power makes sense to avoid people who just keep voting, as well as Sybil attacks. But adding the rest of the Steemit economic rules (for which I know there are good reasons) suddenly complicates the upvote decision, bringing with it a rather high cognitive cost per vote.
Interesting question actually and I did some research into that. So, it appears that it's indeed better to wait, if you want to maximize other people's curation rewards.
Source: https://steemit.com/curation/@yabapmatt/why-you-should-wait-to-upvote-your-own-posts
I also think that there's nothing wrong with upvoting your own posts, though it won't make that much difference when you're a new user.
In response to your last paragraph, I think most of those additional economic rules stem from the equality update (hard fork 19), which made drastic changes to the way post rewards were distributed. IMO it makes the whole process of voting too complicated, as you mentioned. I'm also not sure if it does have the desired effect of rewarding quality.
In hindsight, the section in the Steem Whitepaper called "No Micropayments, No Tips" seems to be wrong, or at best extremely naive. The paper rules out micropayments because the cost to the payer increases cognitive costs, thus increasing barriers to participation. It goes on to claim that steem upvotes don't suffer from this, because the cost is not paid by the voter, but by the system. This is supposed to decrease cognitive cost to zero, because the vote doesn't cost the voter anything. However, if we want users to vote for quality, there must be some cognitive costs! In addition, even though the vote is paid via new tokens, since everyone knows a vote is worth a certain amount and a user can vote themselves (or sell/loan those votes to others) a vote in steem does cost the user. There is a fixed allotment of new tokens, so in any given time period voting is a zero sum game. So Steem votes ARE micropayments with significantly higher cognitive costs than the traditional micropayments that steem votes were trying to avoid!