RE: Is all this Bot Delegation a Selfish Act?
Thanks for sharing this perspective-a thoughtful critique of bot delegation. I delegate quite a bit of my SP to a handful of users, including one bot, so I'll chime in with the perspective from the other side.
(Note: I don't use the bot as a proxy self vote. I have used the bot I delegate to once, by sending it some SBD, just like everyone else. Otherwise, my upvotes come from other Steemians.)
Personally, I have used Steem to blog and earn cryptocurrency by doing so, which was a huge motivator for me to keep writing. I like writing, but as a father of four it competes with a lot of other tasks. When writing on Steem came to be a source of actual income, I bought more Steem, powered up, and got on board the Steem wagon. This was last August...ish.
I've meandered a bit on what to do with this platform, and explored some of its uses, like Steepshot, which are very cool. Once I discovered I could make passive income by delegating my Steem Power, I was hooked.
Early on, a great deal of my daily rewards from delegating went back into Steem Power. Lately, I'm selling Steem for other cryptocurrency (as I'm heavily allocated to Steem in my portfolio) and even dollars, as an extra source of income.
One of my biggest delegatees is a content creator, who I think does a good job of using his SP to build his brand and award engaged followers.
I've been alerted by people in the past about abusers, and have removed SP delegation from those upvoting their own comments on day 6 after making them. These last minute upvoters are, I think, the worst abusers of Steem.
Even so, your post has made me pause and think more carefully about my delegations. I'm considering pulling way back from my bot delegation, and after I get the SP back, to delegate to a project like SteemPress or SteemSTEM or something similar.
Thank you again for the thoughtful post!
That's a big reply, I guess people could vote on their own comments on day 6, I have never really taken the time to look but as I don't delegate its really their business.
A couple of people who are in my feed do this up voting on their own comments but the general thought is its 'not acceptable', yet they still do it. I do wonder if they know they are really not doing themselves any favours?
As regards the bot voting, I don't have any problems with it.. but in this case there was nothing left for others, it was extreme.
I like my daily votes as much as everyone does, but I want to give others my big vote if they do something good, not a $0.00 one.
I have no problem upvoting my own comments to get them above the noise on posts with a lot of comments. I also consider voting late to be better form than voting early, since I reward all my voters with curation instead of robbing the curation pool on my post.
Obviously, both of these things, when abused, are obnoxious and bad for the platform. But I don't believe they are bad acts in and of themselves.
I delegate a lot, in fact to some of the same projects you do. My stake is my business. But you can tell a lot about a person by what they do with their stake. Everything is public here on steem, as you know with the steemworld tool :)