Voting bots - good or bad?

in steemit •  8 years ago 

I'm quite new to steemit and I was reading up on what you should do and one of the suggestions I came across was to sign up for one of those voting bots to get the curation reward without even doing anything.
That sounded great and so I did!

It worked really well too and soon enough I've got some SP for not even doing anything. Well, not a full 1 SP of course but nonetheless.

So I get money and the posts that are being upvoted get money as well. That's what I'd call a win-win situation.

But is it really?

saulo-mohana-152320.jpg

On the other hand what I really like about the concept of steem is that good - whatever that means - content will get rewarded by the community.
The whole point of the curation reward is that you - wait for it - curate new content. It's a reward for finding a good piece of content that's worth your vote.
Arguably giving that work to a bot that just upvotes semi-randomly content makes the whole system fold together - sure, you can set rules to upvote just particular users and similar but at the end of the day you still say "This is a good piece of content that more people should see" without ever seeing it yourself.

And that is why I personally turned off the bot quite quickly again and spend quite some time in the 'new'-tab myself.
Are you using a voting bot? How do you feel about it?

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This is interesting. I used some bots. Now I have to think about it.

I have a few authors that always get my upvote -cause I know they also do good. All the others are upvoted manualy:)

Yeah, I think that's a fair compromise and if they stop doing good you can always remove them from the list anyway, can't you?

True, I can:) So I use it not to miss my favorite authors post:)

I think you did the right thing, if we let bots take over then steemit will become a pile of rubbish, as you said curation should mean, what it means.

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