How I have decided using voting bots

This was not an easy decision and shift from just posting and waiting for upvotes to using bots to promote my articles. It took me a lot of time to think about. I was concerned about the ethics behind paying for the votes you got and not actually receiving them from the readers. Then I took a step back and had a look at the entire platform and I realized that much of the activity here is built on top of bots, all kind of bots.

There are bots who spam comments and posts in order to attract readers and fish for votes (you know these, we all hate them), bots that track plagiarism like Hive account@cheetah does and Hive account@steemcleaners who do a much wider cleaning here. There is Hive account@originalworks who pretty many people use to get a free upvote but which got a very bad review, there are bots who upvote you for using some tags as Hive account@busy or Hive account@dlive do, and even setting up automatically your vote for some person's posts, even that is a bot.

Bots are everywhere here and using them comes with a sort of responsibility.

For example nobody will like if you are making spam bot. It does not bring anything good to the platform and if there are 100 of them, then we will not be able to talk to each other here because of them interfering. Same are voting bots: if you have nothing good or valuable to share, then using voting bots to increase the rewards of a bad post which shows no effort or brings nothing to the platform, it makes you no more a better person than the one who setups spam bots.

A few months ago voting bots were not that popular as they are today, people were using them and they were very intrusive, showing big images in comments saying how much you have earned after you were voted and who bought your vote. Today we are seeing a great increase in the number of voting bots and I guess this is a healthy thing. The number of voting bots increased with the demand I guess, because the user base of Steem(it) increased too and a single voting bot can not handle the great necessity of votes. On the other side, having a lot of voting bots is good for customers because there will always be competition of prices.

Examples of others made me wonder: Are voting bots okay?

Considering that there are a lot of voting bots and that if you look to their transactions history, you are not able to find one who didn't received a payment for a vote for longer than 10 minutes reveals how active this market really is and how much people are actually using them. It almost becomes mainstream to use voting bots and to have them promote your posts to Hot or even Trending sections. I have seen witnesses who are using voting bots to promote their content, I have seen Hive account@grumpycat complaining about the use of voting bots after it got upset because checkthisout's placeholders got flagged by whales. It was indeed a problem, people were using voting bots to get upvotes on posts after 6 days since that post was made, so they were just increasing their money without any possibility of being flagged. The actions that were taken and the changes that the bots made not to accept payments on old posts I think they are help making this place better, even there are still discussions regarding the reward pool.

I believe that using voting bots is okay as long as you use them to upvote good content that brings value to the platform and that shows effort/originality/whatever a post needs to be good.

Simple math

Just an example where I used voting bots is my last post where I got a potential payout of around 14$. From this payout I am going to subtract the votes of actual people who voted it and a little more in case that Steem decreases so let's say the payout I will receive only because of the votes I have bought is 12$. On this posts I have payed bots to vote it with exactly 4 SBD. But if I calculate the exact SBD that I will receive from that post, I will get 37.5% from 12$ which is exactly 4.5 SBD.

I would be on profit with 0.5 SBD if the things go well until the payout is made. And I didn't took into consideration the payout I receive as Steem Power (which is what actually interests me the most, but that is another topic). But don't get fooled, I was a little lucky that time because I have received a double worth upvote from Hive account@randowhale (I know, this one is controversial) and this doesn't happen so often.

The ROI (return of investment for the new ones) is not so big in usual cases, it depends on what bots you like to use, but there are a lot of benefits to it like increasing your reputation and bandwith, increasing your exposure and why not, getting a few more upvotes or even followers, if your article was good enough.

My conclusion:

Thanks for reading!