Source: giphy
There's been a lot of discussion around curation bots, trails, Steemvoter and potential abuses of auto bot voting. If you want to view some of the controversy, go here for a full viewing: @marcgodard/steemvoter-com-stats-dec-4th-2016
I'm not going to weigh in on the controversy but I will say that massive amounts of automation is showing its vulnerabilities. I think there are two things going on that are problematic:
When people who sign up for a service are not fully warned of some test that the service provider is doing, trouble can brew. Lack of transparent communication is a true killer in business. It seems that people got offended when their votes were used to upvote a comment, were not aware of this and the presence of curation trails made the situation worse.
Curation Trails can be potentially problematic because your vote may not be going to places where you feel comfortable. I highly discourage you from having your upvotes follow another user's upvotes. It just doesn't seem to be a neutral thing to do and I think it's inherently problematic.
For the first 5 months while I was in Steemit I did all my upvoting manually.
I didn't use any automation at all. I was like hardcore against it because I felt that the auto upvote bots were killing this platform. The rub is that I was being rewarded heavily by bots when I first arrived in Steemit, so naturally, I had fuzzy feelings towards them. The real reason I didn't get a bot set up is that I am very cautious with my posting key. I really don't like the idea of someone else or a different server having access to my key.
Now I have a pimp bot and I couldn't be happier.
Well, after doing manually voting hardcore for 5 months, I crashed and burned, found myself mired in some sort of deep depression and I realized I needed to take a break from Steemit and all electronics. I decided to have @ontofractal make me a personal pimp bot because I saw the possibilities of getting curation rewards while I was offline. I got over my fear of having my posting key in someone else's possession and after doing an intense interview with @ontofractal, I felt like I could trust him.
I'm happy with his service and he's a good communicator. I haven't had anything fishy happen while he created my curation bot, so I'm content.
The main reason besides the Steem rewards that I had a curation bot made is because I am actually a crappy voter.
I'm very stingy with my upvotes due to my overly critical nature.
I'm also moody as hell, so there are days that go by that I only vote for say two authors. Having my own personal pimp bot evens out my hyper-critical nature and spreads out rewards more evenly. I might add that I usually manually upvote new authors when I'm on Steemit, so my bot adds a regulated layer to my curating. I still upvote new stuff every day, and try to comment as much as possible. I feel that I'm in control of my bot, and how it votes, which is my #1 number one priority in here. I don't want to be part of the auto upvoting bot problem. Because I certainly recognize that it is a big problem which makes the rewards uneven.
I will say though I upvote only authors that I really believe add an interesting dimension to Steemit or whom I like.
I also make use of a blacklist and I don't vote on accounts like Steemsports. I try to balance out the authors and I'm always adding new ones to it. So far, I am exceedingly happy with my bot and I feel silly for not doing it earlier.
I wanted to write this because there are some users who are saying that the bots are the problem. Sloppy users who use bots in an indiscriminate way are really the problem. And bots are certainly the cause of some issues, too. But the bots help me play the game of Steemit better, so now I'm pro-bot. I gave up trying to make Steemit my place, and instead, I started playing the game. Is this kind of crappy? Yes, but since bots are never going away, I decided to embrace them.
The bot vs. human wars are on I guess.
Steemit is a blogging petri dish, bringing forth a new crop of digitally growing species every day. What will you grow tomorrow?
