I am a Hypocrite and my Sincere Apologies...

Last month I took a firm stance, that I now realize was foolish. I have always tried to be the champion of goodness, but as I get older and wiser I realize goodness is in the eye of the beholder. What bothers one person is usually a reflection of their own self inadequacies and troubles.

The stance that I held: upvote bots are bad. I took many occasions to use the platform as an opportunity to say how dangerous I felt upvote bots are, and to an extent I am wary of the future of a promotion only world. But after six months of building relationships and community and realizing that Steem is my new part to full time job - I have realized that this was a mistake to take such a firm stance. Now I can see that with good blogging and relationship building on the various steem platforms, it IS possible to get a healthy dose of steem - either by a single upvote, or by a small payout from many people whom you have networked with.. I have even seen a large chunk of Steem be awarded to someone for their very first post, and many times that is a Steemians greatest opportunity, and they may not even realize it.
This Steem can then be recycled into voting bots to provide even the poorest of users a great financial chance on this platform.

I have debated this with many old and new Steemians, minnow and dolphin and whale, and by and large I am alone in my foolhardy position that bots are destroying the system. As I have looked deeper into the issue, it has become clear that most witnesses have their own, or are heavily supporting an upvote service. Ultimately it is up to us what we want to do with our upvote, and as for right now, anyone that has a problem with it - well its just that, their own problem. Whether this is someone who self votes, or someone that only votes their friends, or someone who accepts money for a vote worth more than the money accepted, I suppose it really doesn't matter. As the majority of witnesses are in favor of bots, they are here to stay and probably will proliferate.

I am committed to this platform and I hope that everyone with whom I have debated can see that - but now I realize that me spending 5-10 hours a day on Steem and remaining a minnow for the rest of my time here is neither beneficial to myself or those that I wish to help in the future. I want to directly apologize to @purepinay for the debate we had some time ago. She is a great Steemian, and I hope that she can support many, many people and become a Steem leader of sorts.

My other reasons are a bit more selfish - I have become committed to producing videos daily for the platform, and although I may not always succeed in my mission, that is my goal. I am just one person with many commitments outside of Steem, and while this blog will probably take less then 30 minutes to author and publish, sometimes a video from start to finish will take 3-6 hours of scripting, filming, and editing - and when all is said and done - even with 1000+ followers it is not uncommon to make less than 10 cents for my efforts, as well as less then 10 people seeing my video that I worked so hard on.

I hope that you all can forgive me for being such a hypocrite and in exchange I will make you a promise: I vow to never use robots to upvote content that I have not poured my heart and soul into. I can not say it will always be 'good' content, because maybe some people will never enjoy what it is I produce, but I can say it will always be meaningful to me, and therefore meaningful to the most amazing blockchain in existence : Steem.

I thank you for reading and your time.