Long Live the Minnows
There are more minnows than dolphins and whales combined, minnows are the heart of steemit and without them steemit would not be the lively and exciting place it is today. With minnows being the heart of steemit, they metaphorically pump blood, AKA blog posts, throughout the entire steemit body, AKA platform. For providing the blood flow of steemit, minnows should be Rewarded and Recognised (R&R) - as browsing tags would be stale and exciting content rare - thus, if we want steemit to be an exciting platform full of new and cool content we need the heart of steemit to be healthy i.e. minnows need R&R.
Keep the heart of Steemit Healthy
When we do not take care of our hearts and treat it well we get ill, similarly if we do not treat the heart of steemit right the whole platform will begin to weaken and suffer. However, it is not a difficult task to treat the heart right, the heart of Steemit as stated before are minnows, for minnows to be healthy or in other words continue to use steemit, they need R&R. When minnows fail to receive R&R for their content, they end up leaving the platform and hence weakening it. To treat the heart of steemit right a comment, a resteem and most impactful of all, a upvote on their post are all that are needed.
There are many curation trails that have been born for the very purpose of rewarding and recognising minnows, however they are not enough, there are thousands and thousands of posts published daily on Steemit, and these curation trails are run manually and humans can only sift through so many posts. Therefore, a different form of minnow R&R service is needed, not to replace curation trails but to work in parallel to achieve the same goal.
Introducing voting bots
Voting bots allow the shift of onus, to an extent, from curators to the minnows, these bots enable minnows to R&R their own work, therefore minnow's no longer need to rely on lady luck to bless them with a powerful curator. Of course there are drawbacks in enabling minnows to R&R themselves but I would argue that the benefits outweigh them.
Drawbacks include:
- Using R&R on spam posts
- Bot voted posts dominating the trending section over community voted ones
- You need money invested in steemit to use voting bots
Benefits include:
- Allows minnows to kick start their steemit career by getting a quality post into trending and hence building a following quickly
- Voting bots have Terms & Conditions that outlaw abuse of their service - they also monitor and actively blacklist abusers
- Voting bots can be used by anyone to give R&R to anyone else
- Quality users can profit off voting bots making self R&R and active contribution to steemit sustainable
I implore you to weigh up these drawbacks and benefits and come up to a decision yourself. But one this is for certain, voting bots are here to stay in one shape or another.
Using a bid-bot for R&R
Bid-bots are one of the many great ways for a minnow to get R&R and can sometimes be the most profitable. By simply sending SBD or STEEM (in other words a bid)to a bid-bot with the link of your post in the memo, you purchase a weighted vote from a bid-bot that generally will have a far greater vote value than your bid. Most bid-bots have T&C and have various parameters to prevent abuse and protect and satisfy bid-bot users, most of which can be found on the bid bots blog or on steembottracker.
One such bid-bot is 
I also understand that minnows may be unfamiliar with how to use bid-bots and hence have created a detailed visual guide. Please view it here
Join and help minnows receive R&R while earning daily rewards
If you wish to help me in my journey to give minnows R&R you can delegate to
, and for your delegation you will not only help minnows receive more R&R but you will also be earning daily rewards. Click here to delegate. Expect to receive an APR of 29%.
Delegators receive 100% of the daily rewards meaning I do not take a cut,
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and I hope to see you as either users or as part of the delegator team. I you have any questions, concerns or feedback, please feel free to reach out me on discord