A Fun Little Experiment: Bot Votes vs. Human Votes

Every week for the past 30+ weeks, I publish what I call the Exchange Transfer Report. You can see the latest one here. It's a report built out from some PHP code I wrote to dig through the blockchain data and figure out how much steem value is heading out to an exchange as a withdrawal (from a user to an exchange account) or coming in from an exchange as a deposit (from an exchange account to a user).

Since I joined Steemit in June 2016 and starting posting later in July, I've been working to create useful content like this to build a solid following. Eventually I got the attention of some Steem Power holders who like curation rewards (and, hopefully, some of my content) who put me on their voting bots. As such, it's not easy to know if the content is appreciated directly or if it's just a matter of supporting an author. To test out how this report is received (since it's essentially similar content each week, with my commentary thrown in), I tried something different this time.

I declined payout.

I also added a comment and asked people to vote up the comment if they'd like to financially reward the post. I figured the rewards would be a tiny fraction of the "normal" (if there is such a thing) payout. For a baseline, here are the last few reports I've done with their payout amounts:

And here's the result of my test:

I'm actually surprised and impressed! $4 is more than I expected.

I took a few things away from this:

• Those who do like my report (or at least the 20 who voted up the comment) seem to have high enough Steem Power to convert 20 votes into $4.
• People vote less on declined payout posts. I was getting around 200 and got 81 this time. That's not really all that surprising, but it's neat to know people care about their votes to spare them and that some bots may be programmed not to vote up declined payment posts.
• I got more comments then usual on this report (sometimes it's just @me-tarzan, a regular commenter who often thanks me weekly).
• This idea kind of worked. If you want to know who's reading your content instead of bot voting you, maybe give this a try and see what happens. Just don't be too surprised if not that many people are watching. Manage expectations accordingly.

I love playing around with stuff like this on Steemit. I hope you found it useful too.

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, voluntaryist, and blockchain enthusiast. He wants to help create a world we all want to live in.