Introducing the Steem Upvote Bot Tracker!
The Benefit of Voting Bots
I am a big proponent and user of the various paid voting bots and services on the Steem platform. I think they provide a great service to minnows and new users by allowing us to get our posts out there and seen by more people and build our following.
Detractors of paid voting services say that it’s not right that people can buy upvotes and I can see where they are coming from. If people could buy $100+ of upvotes and get on the trending page then I would probably agree with them. Realistically though, if you use all of the upvote services currently available, you can maybe get around $20 max. This is enough to get your posts on the “hot” page for a while and get a little bit more visibility, but not all that much.
I think this is actually the perfect situation for Steem for two reasons:
- It provides a way for minnows and new users to get a little bit of attention for their posts. If the quality is not there then they won’t get far, but if the quality is there it can help grow followers by leaps and bounds.
- It encourages people to purchase and use STEEM and SBD. Steem is one of the only cryptocurrencies I’ve found that people actually use and most often that use is promoting their posts. This should be encouraged as much as possible to help grow the value of STEEM and the platform as a whole.
How to Use Voting Bots Effectively
So now that I’ve hopefully established that paid voting bots and services are a good thing, the question becomes how to use them effectively and profitably.
At first I somewhat randomly sent some SBD to the voting services I knew about and got varying results. I think this is what most people are currently doing. But after a while - once I really started to learn how things work - I realized that I could take a much more scientific approach.
I jumped into the Steem JS API and wrote a quick tool to monitor the status of the various voting bots and services so I could easily see when profitable opportunities were available. This allowed me to earn some great returns on my SBD investments. For example on my last post I was able to get a $5.47 upvote for $1 SBD from @boomerang!
Presenting the Steem Bot Tracker!
Finally, rather than just using the tool for myself, I spent some time making a somewhat presentable web page (which is not easy for me!) at http://www.steembottracker.com so that everyone else who is looking to promote their posts and grow their following, like me, can benefit.
The primary value - as you can see in the photo below - is that it tracks the status of 5 popular bid-based voting bots and highlights ones which are currently under-bid and nearing the end of the bidding cycle. It also suggests the max amount to bid in order to remain profitable. Using this method takes the luck out of using these services and allows you to capitalize on some great opportunities like the 447% return I was able to get with @boomerang on my last post.
The current version is just a quick-and-dirty implementation in order to get the tool out to everyone as soon as possible, but over time I hope to expand the site to be a comprehensive resource for new and even experienced Steemers to learn how to promote their work on Steem.
Please let me know what you think in the comments and let me know if there are any other good post promotion tools or services that you think I should add to the site!
Utopian Contributor Report
I am trying out Utopian.io and writing this as a Contributor Report. Utopian is a great new project by @elear. It is a site based on the Steem platform that aims to reward contributions to open source projects! Check out @elear's post to learn more: https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@elear/utopian-the-begin-of-a-new-shared-meritocratic-economy
oh my....if I have found you before I wouldn't make my website.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@firedream/realtime-data-addition-on-steembotcompare
https://steembotcompare.neocities.org/
I re-invented the wheel...by the way your html is much better than mine :)
FD.
This is incredibly epic! @yabapmatt can you add to minnowbooster maybe the last 5 votes and what they were worth? I am happy to supply an api for this, if json is easiest for you. tip! 5
Sure, i should be able to pull that data using the account history call in the Steem JS API. I'll put that next on the list! Thanks so much for your support!
Like I said we can supply you with a json api with the latest votes. That can save you some time :) and it shows how much each user payed. Because 2SBD are not always 1% it depends on steem price f.e.
Sure, I won't say no to that! Do you mind sharing how you calculate the upvote % based on the bid amount?
We use the lowest % that is at least 3 times vp times send sbd. Check our Frontpage for a js example minnowbooster.net
@reggaemuffin I just updated the vote weight calculation and fixed the text so it doesn't say 1%. Will integrate the /api/global parameters later, thanks again!
Can you also use our minnowbooster.net/api/global to get parameters?
Definitely, thanks for sharing! My apologies for having posted incorrect information initially, I should have done some more research. It will be updated before the end of the day.
Thank you for keeping the info up to date! Here is our latest upvotes api: https://www.minnowbooster.net/upvotes.json
@reggaemuffin just wanted to let you know that the page has been updated to pull and display the global parameters and also show the details of the last 5 upvotes from the api calls you sent. Please let me know if anything is missing or incorrect and I will update it asap. Thanks again for your support!
Looking perfect, thank you for your tool!
If so amazed, what's your rational for upvoting this at 12%? I'm genuinely curious.
I gave it a 5 SBD tip and a 5 SBD upgoat, and an upvote that should be roughly 10%, probably came out as 12%.
Sadly the upgoat was already doubled, so I got that back.
What is the rational to selfvote this comment?
Upgoat? I've no idea what you're talking about ?
Up-votes on comments are used to make them more visible in the sort order.
Is there any level of EPIC that would make you vote @ 100%?
Here, check out @tipu, it is a really good idea in my opinion. tip! 0.1
Minnowbooster upgoat. I like to keep my voting power over 50% so I use tipping features and minnowbooster to reward users. A healthy mix of everything is best.
Thanks for sharing this strategy, @reggaemuffin. Being a fairly new user here this is a helpful little gem of guidance for me. Cheers!
Hi @newsflash! @reggaemuffin is sending you 0.1 SBD tip and @tipU upvote
:)
From @reggaemuffin : If You Like What I Do, Vote Me For Witness :)@NewsFlash Sorry for replying to this comment, not sure how else to reach you. I beg you to reconsider your downvote. I was merely doing an experiment to show the community that it is possible. I paid $30.77 to make this post possible. As you can read below, many minnows have benefited from this knowledge. I do not wish to make anyone angry. If you must insist on downvoting my post (that I put a lot of money and work into), please explain why.
Candidate for tool of the year !!!
@yabapmatt where do we register to be listed on steembottracker?
Please contact me on Discord or Steemit.Chat and I can help get your bot listed.
Finally it's here!) I was waiting long for such a thing
This is great. I used bots too, but have no idea how to optimize my return. This is very useful for me. The website is great too. Now I can use these bots more optimally. Following you.
Man, your tool is the coolest thing since upvote bots!
I will make a video with Steemy about it. :)
I would love a Steemy video!
I will be checking out your website, @yabapmatt. If @reggaemuffin says it is incredibly epic I don't want to miss out! Thanks for being so generous, and sharing your work with everyone! You are a rock star! Cheers, and following you now!
Thank you @mitneb! I'm not sure if it really deserves all that praise - especially compared to the amazing work so many others are doing - but nevertheless I appreciate it and it has given me more motivation to continue working on projects to enhance the Steem community!
Well, after taking a look at your website, and reading through all of the comments here, I'm confident that you deserve all the praise and thanks that you have received, @yabapmatt. It's going to be a very useful tool for all of us who are trying to be strategic with our Steemit resources. Cheers!
Hey @yabapmatt, would be nice with an added feature to get notifications with sounds/text X minutes before the vote of a specific bot. Thank you! :)
Yes, totally agree - will plan to add that soon!
Good news, ty! :)
Just added notifications, check out the update post for more information: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@yabapmatt/steem-bot-tracker-update-notifications
Thanks for the suggestion!
Hope your server can withstand the traffic, given the dearth of tools within steemit itself useful tools such as this could see a real stampede. Know how to build load balancing failover clusters?
The killer 'app' for steemit users would be a dashboard that allows them to see some statistics on the steemit environment as a whole (current tokens value, number of posts/comments/votes in x time, top 5's/10's), some statistics on the own account (# posts/comments/votes in x time, current SP & vote %, account value), and a few widgets to adjust/graph these values, like changing target account from self to other, etc.
Steemians would go mental for that, less requirment to run all over the web looking for info they want in steemit.
Thanks for all your efforts on this and future projects, you're going to prove to be a very valuable community member.
Upvoted, resteemed, and following.
As @reggaemuffin said, it's just a simple web page so I don't have to worry about servers, load balancing, etc - although I am quite familiar with that. The point of failure for my site is the node(s) that the Steem JS APIs connect to going down in which case I wouldn't be able to get any of the blockchain data. I could still always put up a nice error page though.
Out of curiosity, why do you think what you proposed would be the "killer app" for steem users? How do you see that being used?
The examples were just hypothetical and not particularly important, but as steemians know, after logging in, there you are: go for it, and good luck. While using the service you don't have a lot of visibility into the metrics of your or anyone else's account, or content, without simultaneously referring to at least one other service like https://steemdb.com (which is pretty much the dashboard we have), these are just common examples:
If you're a writer with fairly consistent rate of output it would be useful to be able to review an interactive line graph showing articles posted during
<period>where incoming comments and votes and payout could be overlaid; where did that spike come from? Change period to 48hr starting<date>, tick the check box for comments, turns out a recent comment got 147 votes, a couple of them on the larger side. How's my interaction with others looking? Check boxes for outbound votes and comments; I need to spend more time looking at others' work.Basically steemians end up flying blind or using multiple web services, which can make it hard to track output/performance or even peruse the content. Important basic elements of steemit are absent in the web GUI, such as current voting power value shown on the 'ribbon', and a 'previous version' link for edited content.
Just ideas, at any rate. For now steemians have to settle for scrolling down long lists hoping to not miss something while trying to keep a heuristic map in their head, and/or referring to multiple external services.
I probably shouldn't have used the 'killer app' term, I did so glibly, but the term should be reserved for the eventual app that facilitates directly posting from the internet (or wherever) to steemit whatever is currently under the users finger and that may just kill steemit with spam and lawsuits.
Since this is a html/js page on Amazon S3 it will be really hard to overload it 😊
Should we try, as a 'test' ;)
Just kidding.