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In the past I have been very vocal in my anti bot stance. I was of a mind that my content earned whatever perceived value my readers thought it deserved. I dismayed every time I accidentally clicked on 'Trending', seeing posts that in my humble opinion were worth a fraction of the pending reward payouts.
It's clear that bots are here to stay and, like lots of other things, they are a tool that can and are abused. Therefore I started experimenting a few weeks back, throwing bids at bots through @yabapmatt's Steem bot tracker site. My opinion has indeed shifted. If I can afford to invest in myself and my account, getting an average of 10% back on my investment, I would be crazy not to. I don't look at it so much as post promotion because honestly I never bid that much, but the increase in my rewards is welcome. As an added bonus, the bot votes increase the curation rewards of those organic voters I get.
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Another thing I was most vehemently against was self-voting. I preferred to spread my votes among friends and great content, supporting my fellow minnows. As you may know, I recently took out a loan to be able to afford flights to the US for a Writers' Block meetup in Gatlinburg, TN. Again with a view to backing myself to grow my account, I have begun throwing votes on my own posts. Initially, it felt icky but I have to think first 'how I am going to pay back this loan?' and second 'how better could I support fellow authors on the platform if not by increasing my vote value?' If I could afford to invest money into Steem, I would, but that is not an option for me.
Does this make me a hypocrite? Possibly, given my previous thoughts on these matters. I would be interested to hear your opinions.
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I am a self voter and a upvote bot user. I am one of those users if not self voted and purchased votes I am likely still under a reputation of 40! Yeah maybe I am a flaw rather than steemit lol.
Like other responses here it seems your goal of self voting is for good reasons. Well at least a lot better than mine. My goal now is try to become a dolphin lol. I will see how that goes ;)
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It is our right to use our investment here as we see fit, either by time or money or both. We could use it in very harmful ways, but because it would step on big people's toes, it evens out fairly, which is great.
We can't forget we're also in this for ourselves. Besides, it's a lot easer to help others if we're able to stand on our own feet first.
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This is all very true.
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You know what, I couldn't agree with you more! There's always two sides to a story, it's our decision how we look at it...even the most positive, innocent effort can be twisted and used in the most evil of ways..bwahahaha..all i'm trying to say is that bots have their purpose, in theory, it's a decent one...How that fact actually plays out in reality, is another matter...but that's beside the point, bidding is fun and let's face it, there's a lot of quality material that deserves attention and if bots are the way to achieve that, so be it!
Great article! Oh and btw, I don't think you're a hypocrite :-):-):-):-)if our opinions didn't change after gaining new experiences and knowledge, we'd still be living in a cave :-):-):-)
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One has to keep an open mind
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For sure, always...
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It is a quandary. I see people saying it's okay to buy votes as it's not 'against the rules'. But there are no rules here. We should each do what we think is right and be prepared to be judged for it by others. I've not self-voted for a while, but others say it's okay as it boosts you SP. I may be doing it on a few selected posts to make a little more. I don't plan to power down, but I may use some of my SBD now that I have a card I can use with crypto again. I prefer to use my votes to help others. We need to build up more bigger minnows and dolphins to spread the voting power. I still won't buy votes as I don't think it's such a good thing for the platform. It's made the trending page useless. I see others are creating alternative trending lists that exclude 'bot' votes.
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I use bots occasionally and @yabapmatt 's tool is excellent in this regard.
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I know this is completly off topic, but you have a Slovenian name...you're not from Slovenia, are you?
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It's more complicated than that, and it is a Czech name, too)
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I don't think you're a hypocrit, you are just triying new ways of achieve your goals. Also if you self-vote, your power is going to increased and you can give more to the community, I mean in rewards, of course. And on the other side the bots gives more visibility.
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Running Discord on my laptop makes it freeze, then shut down, sadly. I believe that you should be able to vote for yourself. If I didn't vote for myself, I would earn nothing. It's my pat on the back. But I don't like the robots.
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Good think and nice post keep it up
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sounds to me like you're adapting to the current reality and getting the benefit of doing so.
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