People abusing them is not going force me to go and blow all my hard earnings on upvotes (least for now). Anyone off the street can come into Steemit stick out a $5 bill and get a good time. Even worse people will be cheering them on for doing such things in public and say “good job.” Even worse far after the content is called out for plagiarizing the hordes still flow. Say their junk comments and upvote like it’s the best thing they have ever read in their life.

I’m a little slow on producing content. Maybe a short story or a poem, if I’m lucky, can be done in under an hour. I also have a couple I have spent 30 to 50 hours on. I was grateful for the couple of bucks I got out of it and I did not feel a need to go out and spend SBD buying my attention. The main point was to have them in a place where I’m not spending money and I can share a link to show just how wonderful creating content here is.

4 Types Of Bot Votes I’ve Received In Past Month Or Two.

One I get for being in a community where I just get upvoted by the main account when I post a blog. I invest many hours a day and a lot of effort into that community. The couple of cents I get in my post I’m more than willing to accept and I’m more than happy for getting.

People like what I read and they want to help me out more than their own upvote can do and on a regular. I have in past had two people buy me memberships to receive up to 1 upvote a day on a blog. In addition, people might ones in a rare moon buy me an upvote form one of many advertisement services running on the blockchain. Who in their right mind would turn down free SBD/Steem for someone showing their admiration for what you are doing? I certainly won’t.

In supporting me people choose to auto upvote my content. While I choose to manual upvote these days I am grateful a couple of people have chosen to honor me with such a gift. It makes me think a little more about what I put out into the blockchain. It’s not just my voting power being drained every time I post someone else’s as well and I respect that. While I don’t always put out that great of content I have turned down doing a few things just because I don’t want to be disrespectful towards those who have shown me such kindness and confidence in giving me the upvote.

If all the “good” content stop buying upvote then the upvote services would be left with a dilemma. Keep voting in the garage or change your business model. I understand they are here to make money and that is the main reason they are even holding SP in the first place.

I am at least thankful for a couple of services that spend the time daily to try and weed out the abusers. It is going be an endless amount of work and people trying to exploit them for money. The great thing is if they catch it soon enough and if the buyer was dumb enough to spend thousands then they have a massive chance to lose way more than they put into our ecosystem. I like to think some of the scum bags out there that got greedy lost more than just a couple hundred bucks.

I don’t like it but it’s here to stay. I just hope those running these services have enough respect for the reward pool and wanting to see this platform grow to spend the time in dealing with people looking to abuse them for money.

Two Things I Fear

More and more every day I see everyone buying votes. One of these days I’m just no longer going say no when I spend 5+ hours on something special. Some of the people who are kind enough to show their support to me once in a while will stop. They don’t like what’s it doing to this platform and they won’t support people spending large sums of money on buying votes. As a result, I might get depressed for losing a couple of good followers and quite Steemit.

The other I get sick and tired of endless buying by everyone around me and I choose to leave. In fact, I have had a few conversions with some people who are at their wit's end and sick of seeing how easy it is for someone to flash a few hundred SBD and be on trend with whatever stolen garbage they copy/pasted off the internet.

While very few people would miss me leaving. They will be in for a shock of a couple that are sick of the greed, abuse, and disappointment they see on a daily bases going on. I can only hope by then many of the upvote services come to gather and make a better outline for limiting usage and abuses going on. I thought the whole purpose was to allow people to showcase there best of their best. I spent days writing/creating whatever and I want everyone to know about it. Not just some shitty meme that took 2 minutes to edit together or stuff they copy/pasted off google.