How much of the voting done on Steemit is automated these days??

Well, as many of you may know, there are a lot of options for automated voting on Steemit nowadays.

To me this is an incredible thing. I remember way back in the day when automated voting was exclusively the domain of bots and those that controlled them. There was a lot of SP to made in those days if you had the right skills, or knew the right people. There were also a lot of discussions going on about bots and how they affected the Steemit community. Many believed that they would basically be the end of Steemit, but like many other things Steemit has continued to endure and evolve.

I remember back then thinking about how cool it would be if I could make my own bot, but I don't have those skills, and I don't know those people. Oh well, that's ok, I'll just keep plugging away on Steemit as I can, and post and comment.

Months down the road we started to see things like curation guilds, then the upvote bots came, then SP delegation, paid SP delegation, Dr. Otto and the rise of the bid bots, and along with that, more recently we have seen services like Streemian and more importantly Steemvoter.

If you haven't heard of Steemvoter before you should deffinitely go check it out, I believe it is part of the Minnowbooster project, and they do incredible work.

Essentially what Steemvoter is, is a site where you can sign up with your Steemit account, and all you need to put in is your posting key. Then you can set up your steemvoter to vote on posts on your behalf. What this does is allows you to create a list of your favorite authors, then set a percentage of upvote you will give to them, and set the time that you will upvote the post as well (it's best to set the vote time to around 30 minutes after the post for curation reward purposes). This way you can automatically upvote and support your favorite Steemians, and not have to manually search through your feed every hour to see if they posted, and potentially miss one of their posts.

This system works perfectly for a person like me who follows enough people that I can never see every post, but I want to make sure that I continue to support the people that I follow and like. Then when I have time I can scroll through my feed, click on posts from users that I vote for, and usually read the two or three posts that I missed as well.

Well there has been an issue recently with Steemvoter. The Service has been down in fact. I noticed a few days ago that posts I should have automatically upvoted were not receiving my vote, so I went onto the Steemvoter discord channel and found out that they have been overwhelmed and needed to migrate servers.

At about the same time as Steemvoter went down I started to notice a drop in payout rewards for quite a few Steemians, and it got me to thinking: "Just how much of the voting done on Steemit is actually automated these days?"

My guess would be a lot. And of course the next question is of course is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Well I know for myself there is absolutely no possible way that I can even keep up with those that I am following, never mind actually searching through the new or hot pages (I haven't bothered looking at "trending" in months) So for me it's good that services like Steemvoter are around as they enable me to keep up with and support Steemians that I want to without necessarily having to spend as much time as I could. But I also understand the argument against automated voting.

What are your thoughts? Are you into Steemvoter? Is automated voting a bad thing for Steemit? Have you been missing a lot of votes since Steemvoter went down?

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Thanks for being alive

Dexter