Vote Buying, Was it Worth It? RESULTS

Last week I played a little experiment with the Steemtrackerbot.com voting bots to determine whether or not vote buying is actually profitable. Here are my results:

How much I got.

How much I spent.

Is vote buying profitable? In a word: maybe.

Several went negative

Some went positive.

Overall my impression of the vote buying bots is that they are simply gambling. Sometimes you break even or even profit, sometimes you lose a ton. I played around with several posts, buying votes and seeing what happened. Overall it was positive, but only about a 1% return, nothing huge.

What really hiked up the vote count was the pay to resteem bots. I got 123 votes on one post! But alas, those votes were all in the low range so the total earnings were still only at about $2 SBD.

So buy votes, or don't. If you got the money to spend it doesn't hurt, if you don't, you're better off putting your SBD into SP and building yourself from the ground up.

While researching these bots and such I discovered a whole underworld in Steemit. It seems there are battles going on all around us little people that most of us don't even notice.

There are whales who spend their time flagging all sorts of posts they don't like, or having an army of followers do it for them. There are whales that do nothing but flag each other all day over petty differences.

There are those who say this whole platform is dying and that we had better all cash out before the inevitable.

There are whales who refuse to vote people who have been upvoted by bots and there are whales (@jerrybanfield) who have made bots of their own.

In short I discovered that Steemit is a lot like the rest of the world. You have the big wigs and you have the nobodies. You have those who have bought their way in by buying a ton of STEEM and those who have had to climb up from the depths to get where they are. You have the capitalists who try to improve this place and the anti-capitalists who complain that there are too many whales. You have battles in the upper echelons, but the vast majority of us simply don't give a crap. We don't have time to get swept up in the petty battles of the rich and powerful, we have better things to do.

I also discovered that this place is a lot like the episode of Black Mirror called "Nosedive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive) in which the fear of being downvoted forces us all to shut up and play nice. We all want good reputations, so we only post "nice" things. This forces those of us who do care about the nonsense of the rich and powerful to keep our mouths shut and let it all slide. It's the built-in censorship of Steemit.

In the end, do I care? No. Not really. I'm still doing alright down here. And from what I have seen the cranky whales are the minority. Most of them do care about this platform and do put good things into it. So I'm just going to keep on Steemin' on.