I agree, I use bots myself, but I see them as a necessary evil. There is no way my posts would get the views or upvotes that they are getting, even though I am very active on Discord. The ability to promote your stuff is just to big of a wall to climb if you are just starting out. The ability to be able to almost double what you put in and then move that reward to SP when you get your reward is huge. There is no easier way to increase your SP except buying it outright with fiat.
Discord is more for chatting than for exposure for your posts. The post promotion channels in all sub forums on Discord are useless. If you increase your engagement on Steemit instead you will get better results.
I agree the post promotion channels are pretty worthless. I have established relationships with groups on Discord that have reaped far more rewards on Steemit than I have gotten from inside Steemit. I don't think the two forms of engagement need to be mutually exclusive, but so far Discord has been far more beneficial for me.
@bozz - To each his own. I don't disagree but yes you can build some lasting relationships on Discord but you do need a sizable time investment in order to do so.
But let me also explain a bit more of where I come from.
There are 3 things that you need for good post visibility:
A 5-figure SP or at least 5000 SP with which each upvote is worth $1 SBD. When you drop a 1 SBD upvote just like that on a comment or post made by someone, not only will he or she start following you - but everyone else who sees that will also follow you. This may also explain why leased delegation is in high demand.
Which leads me to the second point. You need followers in the thousands - 5000 or more. Your post will start appearing in their feeds - not that everyone watches their feeds but some do. Many Steemit users actually look at how many followers you have, because they tend to follow those who others follow!
Your rep score has to be 70 or above. Some look for how high it is before they upvote a post, as they presume that it stands for a person who produces high quality content, and is also very consistent in posting to their blogs. They think he is some sort of Steemit guru and start following him.
You will notice that most of those who receive a large number of upvotes without the help of bots usually have all three things.
The faster you have all three the easier it becomes for you to get visibility for your posts and as a consequence, upvotes. And that is possible only if you spend more time on Steemit. Hope it clarifies. :-)
Yes it does. Thank you! In addition to the interaction I try to do on Discord and Steemit, I have also been using upvote bots to try to get me to those numbers quicker. With the gap between STEEM and SBD being so significant lately, I find it is better to put my SBD into buying upvotes for my next post. The idea of a 185% to 210% return is better than the loss on a SBD to SP conversion. There are factors I could be missing though!
Thanks for your quick comment - by the way, I corrected some inadvertent errors in my last comment.
Buying upvotes if you are able to get a good ROI is good, but the problem is that a good ROI is very rare - especially one in which you get the SBD that you spent back in order to repeat the process for another post.
It's possible only if there are very few upvote bids in a round and hardly any high bids, at the time that you make a high bid - the highest actually, much higher than the closest if you want a 100% ROI or more. Unfortunately it's not possible for a situation like that to arise every day.
I don't think you would have missed anything if you read my comment because the faster you can get to the three things I listed above, or at least one of them, you will start feeling the difference in visibility. At least from what I have observed - and believe me I've spent a lot of time studying Steemit since July last year.
Hope you get there soon - and wish you all the best!
Hey, no problem. My wife would disagree, but I am a pretty quick reader :) I understand what you are saying for sure. When I started on Steemit a couple of months ago I did each of those things you mentioned. Looked for people that had high rep, looked for people that had a lot of followers. I have tried to use bid bots, but like you said, unless you can be that high vote you aren't going to get much return on them. The services like Smartsteem and minnowbooster have yielded the best results for me so far. Especially if you can get on the whitelist for them.