Get rid off ALL voting bots and let Steemit be honest like it supposed to be!!
Let me tell you my journey and how my payouts dropped from 20$ to 0,20$ due to voting bots.
I have been a member sinse august of 2016 but I didn't post much in the beginning. I didn't know what I wanted to post about and I didn't want to put out any crap. It wasn't until april of 2017 that I started posting for real.
I have always been a very good artist and the name I choose @realitycartoon was perfect for that. So I started to post my art and some of my first posts got over 100$ in payout even if I didn't have many followers. I felt like this was something for me and I believed that true talent will have a chance. I continued posting and at the peak I was posting 3 new drawings per day. It went really well even if I didn't get 500$ on my posts, I was happy with the 20$ I got in average.
The problem started when the platform got filled with voting Bots. For those who don't know, a voting Bot is a user you can pay to get a big vote and possibly get to the hot and trending page to get more attention. I will be honest and say that I have used bots maybe a handful times but I didn't like it. It wasn't honest and I believed that my talent would get recognized anyway. But I was so wrong!!!
The Bots has increased and now it feels like 30% of the users are bots. 99% of the posts on hot and trending page is rubbish in my opinion and ALL of them is paid for by bots.
Another problem that I find is that people vote to get the curation reward, not if it's a good post or not. For example if a post have 70$ after 5 minutes people tend to vote on that post just because they know they will get more reward than a post that get 0,20$. They don't even read the post, instead they scroll down the hot and trending page just to vote on the ones they think will get highest payout.
When the Bots started to get used alot my payouts dropped from 20$ in average to 0,20$. This is because the reward pool gets sucked up by paid votes and everyone else have to share the leftovers.
My motivation is down and I don't know how much longer I will post here on steemit. I told myself that I will at least post until I get a 1000 followers, but after that I don't know. I don't believe in this platform anymore and if nothing happens if will fail to 100%. The real creative people will disappear and I will be one of them.
Just in the begging, when i registered, i started to read about steemit and how its possible to earn something (i was reading in my native russian language). The first thing i found, almost first, - is that you can earn really much if you buy these bots.. And now i see, that its like a real problem, you are right. It's looks like this project is used for earning money not by creativity, but by hacking system. It's a pity ...
I hope you will not stop do your drawings, because of disappointment. You have a talent
I will stop posting. My next post will be my last I think. I recomend you to just do comments. You earn more on 10 comments than one good post. The comments take you 2 minutes and the post take you 2-6 hours
So, will think about it. Thank you for advice, time in this case will win sure :)
I am new to steemit and having figured out the reward structure yet.
I have been disappointed with most of the posts I've read, especially those in the trending section. Their current algorithm and the bots seem to be encouraging people to create create garbage posts.
BTW, if you are serious about your writing and your art, I believe that the best is to build your own web site and to use social media platforms to drive traffic to your domain.
i agree ban them all this platform will never succeed past beta with all this bot abuse