Is it ok to sell your upvotes to a voting bot? Are you sure? Because I changed my mind on this matter since last week.
But first, what is vote selling? Simply put, you allow a bot to automatically vote in your place when your voting power reaches a certain level. For that, you receive a share of the profit.
Last week I was almost sure I won't try to use vote selling, simply because you (your account) automatically votes on certain posts you might agree with or not. This will look like you support the ideas in that post, so it can be a moral dilemma, since you don't really pick the posts on which you cast the votes.
This continues to be an issue, but so is if your VP is at 100% and you practically waste every minute you have full voting power, because it obviously won't regenerate over that point.
As it happens, many of us do have at least a few other things on our minds besides steemit, and it will happen at some point, no matter how dedicated we are, to waste our voting power by not using it to manually vote. Are you sick and in bed? Are you without an internet connection? Are you on vacation and want to stay away of "work"? Many reasons why you can't be there to attend to this tiny task of voting manually.
This is when selling our upvotes would come handy.
There is an alternative to be considered instead or complimentary to vote selling, and it's called auto-voting, in which case you hand-pick the accounts for which you want to cast upvotes automatically at every new post, regardless if you are around to read the post or not. Not a bad idea at all if you want to support a group of close friends!
Selling votes will generally be spread outside the group of steemians you regularly read and upvote, but you can choose to support certain areas.
For example, MinnowBooster is a site dedicated to... well... boosting minnows, as the name says, and I'm up for that. I've sold my votes to MinnowBooster for a few days and the upvoted posts seem quite good, although not all in English.
The other alternative I am interested in is selling my upvotes, which will go on posts of a certain minimum quality. And that's where SmartSteem comes to help, because it is an whitelist voting bot where each user gets up to 3 stars. We have the option to select that our upvotes go to users with a certain number of stars, or at random, or even to hand-picked users.
I still prefer to cast the majority of my upvotes manually, but that may change. I'm still new and searching, poking around and playing with various things. For now I've set my VP limit at which vote selling comes into action at 99%, which means only a few votes will be given by the voting bots, at most, before VP drops below 99%. Then, it's still up to me to upvote what I like (and manage to read throughout the day).