Understanding the four major types of paid upvotes on Steemit.
If you're like most of Steemit, the part of every post you pay the most attention to is the little number at the bottom with the dollar sign on it. I believe true Steemit Zen is manifested in being able to ignore that number completely, but until you can do that, it's important to understand where it comes from.
1. Self-voting
In some ways all self-voting counts under this, because you're either spending money or not cashing it out to get your SP. But particularly what I want to focus on here is the practice of leasing Steem Power purely for the purpose of self-voting. Users can buy and sell delegations from places like the MinnowBooster leasing market, and some of those users use their leased SP primarily to upvote themselves. Essentially they're spending STEEM to get more voting power, and then voting to get more rewards.
2. Subscription Services
These are places where you buy in either with liquid currency or with votes, and get votes in return, with a promise of profit. The methodology varies considerably. @steembasicincome offers votes for life for a one-time buyin. @make-a-whale is an account with a group of users who strengthen its voting power by voting for it, and it then returns votes to them. @qurator does some of each, in a very complex system of tiers.
3. Discounters
These are services which act as a clearinghouse for voters wanting to sell their voting power, either directly or through delegation. They give users the opportunity to buy votes for liquid currency at a discount on the value of those votes, with most of the money spent going to the voter, and the service taking a small commission. Not long ago you could tell a discounter because it would advertise a fixed percentage upvote value, but recently a new form has emerged, pioneered by MinnowBooster, that offers a consistent return adjusted dynamically for curation and the price of STEEM and SBD. Services like this range from huge efforts like @minnowbooster and @smartmarket to tiny initiatives like @treeplanter and @earthnation-bot.
4. Bid-bots
A bid-bot conducts a live auction for its vote, usually voting every 2.4 hours when its voting power reaches 100%. Users send money to the bot during its bidding period, and at the end of the period the bot's vote is divided among their posts based on their percentage of the total money sent. There are a lot of these; some notable ones are @buildawhale, @upme, @smartsteem, and @postpromoter. If you're interested in bid-bots, Steem Bot Tracker is an essential resource.
Hybrids
It's also important to recognize that many of the operators and companies behind these services do more than one thing. MinnowBooster is primarily a discounter, but also runs a delegation market. SmartSteem is a bidbot, but the same people run the discounter SmartMarket. Qurator is a subscription service, but they also run the discounter @qustodian exclusively for their members. Sometimes using the same service for multiple forms of vote-buying is beneficial: despite its small limits Qustodian is a significant part of the value of a Qurator membership, and selling votes or delegating to SmartSteem can increase a user's limits for SmartMarket.
My approach
So far I've tried to be neutral in my descriptions, because I think it's important that you have the information to make judgements about purchased votes and the users who use them on your own. And I'm not going to make grand moral statements here, either, I'm just going to talk about how I feel about these options at the moment and why I use the ones that I do.
I use both subscription services and discounters
I'm heavily subscribed to Steem Basic Income; they currently upvote each of my posts about $0.75, and they'll keep doing that forever (in fact it should grow) even if I never give them another Steem or vote. I like that a lot, and I think it's an excellent tool for promoting user commitment and long-term thinking. A lot of contests have been giving away shares as prizes lately, so it's also a really easy service to get into for free.
I'm also a Qurator member, and I use their Qustodian votebot. There's a lot of math involved in figuring out the value of the various Qurator tiers, and it might deserve a full post of its own. For now I'll just say that I see profit in the membership.
I'm a big fan of Minnowbooster. In fact between my last post about them and this one they made me a moderator of their whitelist Discord forum. I'm still just a volunteer, not an employee, but I'm there a lot because I see a lot of value in their service. I think allowing users to sell their voting power when they're unable to use it themselves is absolutely essential to maintaining a system where Steem Power is locked up for long periods of time. And of course I'm a fan of the way they allow me to buy those votes at a substantial profit for myself.
I also use Smartmarket. They've had a bunch of technical difficulties during the last few weeks that make them less appealing than they were when I started investigating vote-selling services, but I like their developer and I hope he'll get things straightened out again soon.
I'm not eligible to use Earthnation-bot, but if you're a tiny user you should investigate it. It's the most profitable voting service on Steemit, albeit with tiny limits.
I don't self-vote, and I don't use bid-bots
In fact I've decided to stop even the regular form of self-voting, even though it will reduce my post rewards. I'm not here to tell you it's wrong to self-vote, because I believe strongly that the system only works at all as long as people are allowed to use their SP as they see fit. (You will find self-voting in my comment section to be counterproductive, however.)
I am going to tell you one different reason not to self-vote, though: you are missing all the fun. Being able to wantonly fling small amounts of money at people because I like their work is the best part of being here. I'm doing all of these other things so that I can fling larger amounts of money at more of them. Because it is great.
When it comes to bid-bots, I really dislike the auctioning system that they use, and I think on average they're predatory on their users. At best they're like video poker: possible to make money from by thoroughly understanding the system and being extremely disciplined in your decision-making. Which is something few users do, and even personally, I'm not convinced that learning to profit from them would be worth my time with all of these other options available.
I'd be interested to see some other auction approaches investigated by bot operators. There are many types of combinatorial auctions out there, and the state of the art on Steemit is pretty much the worst one unless your only priority is bot-owner profit.
Conclusion
I hope I've helped your understanding of how things work on Steemit, and I'm happy to answer any followup questions in the comments. This is a subject on which a lot of users have difficulty treating each other respectfully, so I'd like to ask you to be intentional and friendly about your commenting.
i think voting bots give more value to steem
All of these systems seem like they are trying to fix a fundamental flaw in steemit.
Personally. I don't think they are fixing it very well.
Thanks for the summary.
I don't think they can agree on which fundmental flaw they're fixing.
I also wonder if it's maybe a fundamental flaw of the attention economy as a whole, and in that case the fact that they're making any progress at all is encouraging to me.
You make a pretty good argument against self-voting, I personally still do it on my blog posts, never my comments. I think it's about time to stop doing that, especially since I'm putting more effort in seeking other options.
Bid bots are indeed a bit like gambling, but I do really like that @buildawhale also manually curates entries. I don't know if there are other bots that do that as well.
I do like the buildawhale curation initiative.
Excellent post. I’m still trying to figure out a good way to use these systems. I’m embarrassed to say that while I’m a member of minnowbooster, I still don’t know how to use the services efficiently to both help others and help myself. Especially as a small minnow.
Stick around, we'll work on that.
This all seems so complicated.
How is steemit supposed to grow a user base and retain said user base with all this stuff going on?
I realize that everyone here is using this platform for their own reasons, with an overwhelming majority probably trying to score some $$$. Personally, I like the many contests that people have put together and some are driven by passion, but I don't sense any form of relation between curators, authors and the casual user.
Similar to the complexity of this ecosystem, I'm unsure where my reply/comment is headed... lol
Anyway, great post on trying to explain these things to us. I hope this platform evolves into something that keeps my interest and not go the way of the dodo bird (aka MySpace... or some abstract form of GeoCities? lmao).
OFI
I have some of my own plans for this, but if you look at what @sndbox is doing, I think that's an interesting model.
As for the dodo bird, I still have an active Livejournal account, so I'm pretty familiar with the experience of sitting around on Mauritius with the rest of the chickens.
Snap! @sndbox has some great ideas in mind.
"We believe that interdisciplinary practice paired with emerging technology can revolutionize growth and independence"
Quite the initiative to bridge offline + online. I will defo be following them and their project(s).
As for your plans, are we to expect a posting sometime soon regarding this? :D
And LJ? Wow lol
I need to make a ridiculous flowchart first.
lmao
good luck, man! :D
This is incredibly helpful and I like the fact that you didn't make it about a moral judgement, like I've seen other people do. I think there's a lot of misinformation about this subject (I know very little) so I really appreciate this kind of posts that are descriptive, informative and to the point.
I've used MinnowBooster and SmartSteem before. I personally have bought votes for some of my posts because I'd like them to have a bit more exposure, especially if I've spent hours writing and designing them, and I see they get too little to almost none exposure at all.
More than wanting to gain a huge income I expect some feedback because I actually put a lot of effort into my posts, and I've noticed that vote-buying has put me in a little map (I don't spend more than 2 sbd per post, really) and I've gotten at least one comment from a previously unknown user, which I also like because I keep meeting more people and that makes me feel a part of the community. I do, however, admit that I still got a lot to learn about these services and what's behind them.
Leaving this kind of comment will probably do more to get people to interact with you than the vote services will. I'm still fairly skeptical of the promotional value of buying votes, although it's been working ok for me so far.
One of the things I've really enjoyed about working on the Minnowbooster whitelist project is that it's getting users out finding out about other users they like. I'm pretty sure you've made a couple of fans out of that.
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm also a bit skeptical about it but so far it's worked okay for me as well.
I am still not accepted to the Minnowbooster whitelist, though. I've been using their bot service but I was told I had to receive a memo from them and that way I am let known I've been accepted? I don't know. I've had a lot of questions about that. I can see the whitelist board but it says "pending", so I'm assuming my application is still being reviewed?
We've been having a huge backlog in admin reviews. I hope you'll get accepted soon. You've had your five user yes votes for several days.
Yeah I figured you've had a lot on your plate lately haha but thank you for letting me know! I was a bit shy to ask hahaha
I don't get to do that part, so I can't speed it up. (And it shouldn't be my job; I'm getting better at figuring out what they want but still entirely baffled by how they decide at least 5% of the time.)
Hahaha well in any case knowing this makes me feel less anxious. Waiting makes me anxious haha
I have been searching for this information.i only knew about buying upvotes but clearly there are Lotta other options to explore.someone out there needs this info so I'll gladly resteem
So how much have all these services cost you? And what is your Return on Investment?
There may be a post on that in the future. I have a big spreadsheet, and there's a lot of data to work with.
Looks like I'm not the only one who's not into bid bots. In my opinion 8 of out 10 times someone will get negative ROI while using bid bots.
By the way I never knew steembasicincome could be profitable. I was under the impression that you'd have to send hundreds of STEEM before you get meaningful upvotes.
Are you getting $0.75 from your original 1 STEEM investment, or did you buy more shares.
You buy more shares, i see for a life time it's a good investment.
Sounds like it. It's beneficial for those who are in it for the long haul.
I have 115 shares. Which is obviously quite a lot of STEEM to put into it, but I have confidence in the potential of the system. It's not going to pay back quickly, but as long as I stay here, it's going to keep paying.
That's definitely a lot of STEEM, but it's a great investment if you believe in what steembasicincome can do.
You're reaping the benefits after all.
Interesting analysis and summary. There are also a few "limited membership organizations" like @sndbox, @steemitbloggers and others where you pretty much have to be invited to join based on the quality of your content; content is hand curated and the organization has its own upvote facility that gives upvotes based on the merit of each post.