Preface

This is probably the age old question on this platform that should you sell your votes to bidding bots?

The answer to this cannot be given as a simple Yes or No. There are a lot of dynamics that play here and a mere single word answer would probably raise a lot more questions.

What is Vote Selling

Vote selling is a phenomenon, whereby you empower a bot to place upvotes on articles on your behalf for which they receive upvote requests from respective authors.

There are two types of upvote bots :-

1. Instant vote bots that provide upvote instantly after a request is made. For example @minnowbooster
2. Bid bots that do upvotes after every 2.4 hours after receiving bids from users. For example @jerrybanfield, @buildawhale, @sneaky-ninja etc..

There has been numerous debates on this topic whether people should be selling votes to upvote bots and to be honest both sides have given some solid arguments to support their respective narratives. I will list down few of these pros and cons for the appraisal of readers:-

Pro Vote Sellers

1. If your voting power is sitting at idle, then it is better that it should go into rewarding someone’s efforts.
2. Maximisation of profits since your SP is your investment in the blockchain and you reserve the right to get profit on that investment.
3. Availability of boosters for those who don’t have a lot of following but want to promote their articles.
4. Supporting minnows.

Anti Vote Sellers

1. Rewarding without reading content is unethical.
2. Steemit is a social media platform not a business place.
3. Bidding bots are handled by whales who are getting more rich by feeding on minnows.
4. You might be unintentionally rewarding an article that is either below average or plagiarised.

Author’s Opinion

I used to be a staunch opposer of vote selling even though i have frequently used upvote bots. Though some of you might say that i am a hypocrite but i am not. Actually i made sure that every such post on which i was using an upvote bot or bid bot service, was never below average and that it always contained valuable information.

Despite using upvote bots services, i never really tried to sell my vote because i was afraid that my voting power could be used to reward a below average or a plagiarised post.

Lets be honest here. We are on steemit to earn money (a truth in its most crude form yet a truth nonetheless) and even though vote selling is a lucrative option to maximize our profits, i have always been afraid to do that because i value my credibility as a blogger and as an appreciator of good content as well.

Is Their An Ethical Way to Sell Votes?

The term “vote selling” can never be free from being controversial. However, at this juncture, we now have certain means to address most of the “wrong” things associated with vote selling.

HOW?

SIMPLE ANSWER : USE SMARTSTEEM

Disclaimer

At this stage, i want to strongly point out that i don’t have any personal relations with @therealwolf or @smartsteem. I am compiling this so that other steemians can be educated about a wonderful upvote bot through which you can sell your votes to appreciate authors around the globe whilst being sure that your upvote is not being abused by a plagiarist or a crappy post creator.

What is Smarsteem

@smartsteem is a hybrid bot.. means it is both an instant upvote bot (goes by the name @smartmarket) and a bid bot (goes by the name @smartsteem).

The brain behind the smartsteem project is @therealwolf.

To use @smartsteem or @smartmarket, send desired SBDs to these accounts and provide links to your posts in memo to receive an upvote..

But we are not here to know about how to receive upvotes. Are we? We are here to talk about vote selling.

How Vote Selling is Better Via Smartsteem?

Adequate profits

When we talk about Vote selling, the first thing that comes to mind is profit. With @smartsteem you can get upto 85% of the share of profit that smartsteem makes by getting SBDs or Steem. Furthermore, the curation rewards you will receive on your casted upvote is additional to it.

You can choose to reduce your profit from 85% if you’d like to aid in development of smartsteem.

Ability to Select Vote Users

Now this is what i most like about smartsteem. It gives me the ability to choose that where my upvote will go.

You can choose from following three options i.e

• Anyone who asks for upvote from smartsteem
• Your choice of authors only
• Only to those authors whose content is either good, great or excellent (as filtered by smartsteem’s smartscore star system)

The option window is as illustrated below :-

What is Smartsteem Smartscore Star System?

Smartscore star system defines the quality of content of a user and is approved via smartsteem whitelist program. Any user who wish to become whitelisted can submit an application on smartsteem’s page smartsteem.com.

The moderators will manually check the profile to see the quality of content written by user and will respectively award the user with one of the 5 options:-

1. The user can get “good quality” stamp of approval from smartsteem and will have 1 out of 3 stars rating.

2. The user can get “great quality” stamp of approval from smartsteem and will have 2 out of 3 stars.

3. The user can get “excellent quality” stamp of approval from smartsteem and will have 3 out of 3 stars.

4. The user can be denied to be a part of whitelist program if the quality is not upto the mark.

5. The user can in turn be blacklisted for writing plagiarised content.

I am a smartsteem whitelisted user with 2 out of 3 stars rating and i have selected only those people eligible to get my upvote through smartsteem who are whitelisted.

Friendly GUI Packed with Features and Options

Another reason for smartsteem to be my pick is the availability of alot of options through their carefully yet friendly designed GUI.

Smartsteem’s page is packed with features like vote history, settings, balance information etc. and it gives the vote sellers full control of their vote selling contract. See the illustrations below to get acquainted with what i have described above:-

Option to Choose Voting Power Threshold

Though this feature is already incorporated in most of the upvote bots, yet i wanted to highlight this for those who are oblivious to this feature all together. You can choose your voting power threshold and smartsteem will only use your upvote if your Voting Power is above that threshold.

Currently, i have placed this setting at 90% VP so that my votes can only be purchased when i am idle with my VP at 90% and / or above.

Why Did I Become a Vote Seller Through Smartsteem?

As i have been mentioning in my previous posts that i am an extremely busy fellow who juggles around work, gym, my son and domestic issues everyday and mostly my VP sits at 100% in idle position.

I want to reward good quakity creators on the platform but I was reluctant to sell my vote fearing that it would be misused by people who have absolutely no respect and regard for steemit.

By using smartsteem, i have made sure that i keep on encouraging good content writers while keeping the ethics of vote selling alive when i am unavailable on the platform.

Conclusion

I would suggest the readers to go over smartsteem’s page and give it a read. If you like what you see and if you are a bit liberal towards the idea of vote selling on steemit then smartsteem is the way to go in my opinion.

Regards
JBN

I would greatly appreciate if the readers could upvote and resteem this post. Questions or comments are always welcome.

Thumbnail image is designed on free canva tool. Rest of the images are either taken from pixabay or they are screenshots taken from mobile device.