Are Bots GOOD Or Bad?

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)



Anyone who has been on Steemit for more than a day will realize that it is pretty much a bot driven platform. Posts appearing on the trending pages are not necessarily the most popular or even the best posts on Steemit. Far from it.

Almost all trending posts are manipulated in some way or the other to be up there getting the maximum visibility. A large part of the visible posts have been pushed there with the help of upvoting bots.

First a disclaimer or rather an honest confession. I use upvote boys myself not just for a friendly push to my posts but for other reasons as well that I will explain in a bit. I spend a lot of time creating readable and useful content unlike 90% of so called Steemit authors who produce trash that they themselves would not read if they saw it in the feed.

First the bad. Well debatable but because they are doing something that should have taken place organically i.e helping in post visibility, they are considered bad by some. But the argument is that even large companies use advertising to push their content so why not the poor guy on Steemit.



What is definitely bad is that bots are artificial pieces of software who don't have any brains because they have been programmed to work as per what their human creator wants them to do. So they tend to also vote for utter trash including posts that are devoid of any proper content - quite a few times not even a single line of text to read.

Some authors stoop to the extent of publishing content that they copied from elsewhere or someone else's images and then get them upvoted by bots. Shameful!

Bots earn a lot of profit for their owners and is big business so at least they(the owners) are happy.

Authors are happy too when they get their posts upvoted by bots. Depending how much money they spend on bots they can get their posts upvoted, and also get them up on the trending pages.

If you choose bots wisely, you can get a fair return quite a few times. Sometimes you may not get the SBD that you spend in return, but you will get compensated with Steem which forms a part of the payout. So if you take both SBD and Steem payouts together in the ROI it is a good deal because you get a large part of the SBD spent, as well as Steem which gives you more Steem Power.

To conclude bots are the poor man's whales, who are always ready to upvote your post in exchange for a fair sum of money.

(¯`•._ _.•´¯)

Would you please UPVOTE and RESTEEM this post so that it can reach others too? Also do FOLLOW me for more useful and interesting posts.

#thealliance



#qurator

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You are spot on with this my friend, I have never been one to hide my own obsession with the bot’s - but then I remember when they first came out on here - just 6 or so - look at how many now!

I see both sides of this from People, I really do understand and agree with those that refuse to use them - it does go against the fundamental of rewarding good content - the bot’s just care how much you pay them to upvote a post.

You have to work hard with the bot’s, make sure you watch the steemitbottracker like a hawk and only use a bot that in the last few minutes of the round has a good size of profitable bid left - that is key because once a bot has zero profitable bid is when you start to loose money.

If you put the effort in you can get the SBD back you started with, plus gain Steem Power. But it’s a gamble, and you can loose out easily as well.

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#thealliance

You are spot on with this my friend, I have never been one to hide my own obsession with the bot’s - but then I remember when they first came out on here - just 6 or so - look at how many now!

I lost count but especially after one of them spammed me! I just look at the old proven ones now and ignore the rest.

If you put the effort in you can get the SBD back you started with, plus gain Steem Power. But it’s a gamble, and you can loose out easily as well.

It's a lot of hard work, almost like watching the trading charts for quick profits, one reason why I use them so less now.

For almost everyone who uses them, it's a loss- looking at both time and money spent. It's more psychological I guess, especially for those who spend hundreds of dollars pushing their posts to the trending page.

If you look carefully you will find those posts have a few big bot votes and then 0-value or 1-cent votes. They don't add up to much - and the whales don't vote on bot voted posts. Not that they vote much on good content anyway.

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.

The bots themselves arent the problem its the way they are being used and abused to shortcut hard work. We all know that cut/paste articles/short meaningless articles arent worth hundreds of dollars. Unfortunaly makes it very hard for minnows who actually spend time writing good content to get any recongition.

In terms of ROI on bots I have just finished an experiment where I found they arent all they are cracked up to be (atleast for a minnow like me with a small SBD budget!):

https://steemit.com/steemit/@conradt/the-great-bid-bot-experiment-final-results

It seems the more you spend the more you get in terms of visibility.

Steemit is no different from other platforms. The more money you spend the better visibility your posts will get. This also includes trash that mostly appears on the trending pages - by now it has become a hallmark of Steemit.

I am starting to find these days there are more and more Steem 'advertisements' and 'news' on tredning from witnesses etc or people building new apps on the blockchain which is a god thing otherwise I wouldnt know about these.

But yes people can also just post trash and boost it to trending - maybe there needs to be some criteria around using bid bots

I used to be able to say I seldom or closer to never use the bots, I just had a personal thing against using them, but had no issue with others using them

But the last few days I have bene experimenting a little, I put a lot of time into my photos and posts and see some posts with little effort or copied content using the bots and seeming to make a lot so I decided to play with them a little bit this week and then decide if I will use them or not going forward

I agree, your posts do deserve more exposure considering the high quality. Hope you get good results with bots, keep us posted.

I dont know why but I feel bad using them so I may cut the experiment sue , Will decide this evening

Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by Maxabit from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.

If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.

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