I've made some sarcastic posts about my thoughts on vote bots before and while I think the sentiment and satire was mutually enjoyable for myself and many others, today I'll try a different approach. I'm going to explain why it's actually insane and harmful behavior from a more serious perspective. Feel free to discuss your thoughts on it below, but as always I will ask that you please take the time to read what I write before engaging me in a debate on the topic. I have been around steemit for a long time and I have a solid understanding of how the system works and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything that isn't mathematically provable.
Last time I discussed the fact that paying for a vote from one of these services rarely has any actual net gain. As of the current fork, 75% of post rewards go to the author and 25% of post rewards are split between the curators. If you pay $1 for a vote it would need to increase the value of your post by ~ $1.35 to break even. There aren't many bots offering a 35% or higher premium on the amount you pay to boost your post value. The fact is that it's simply more profitable for the same people to upvote their own content and wait the 7 day period for reward payouts. Let's not dwell on this topic as it's simple enough to do the math and figure out if you are actually making anything at all.
Paying that fee to basically break even isn't really gaining you anything and is probably costing you something. There are many curators on the platform that go around specifically looking for undervalued posts to promote and help newer authors gain a following. I try my best to do this and often re-steem ten times the amount of posts I make per day in an effort to help people grow on the platform. I'm not the only one and this isn't some act of self righteous benevolence so I don't do it looking for thanks. The fact is that I believe in growing the platform and helping new content creators gain an audience so they stick around. More users will over the long run make the platform more valuable and help us all out. I'm one person and I can't get to everyone, but luckily I'm not alone in trying to work at things from this direction.
The worst thing that I think happens when you use those voting services, and whether or not you think they are beneficial, is the unintended consequence of hurting the value of other's posts. I'll give a brief overview of why this is mathematically a fair perspective on this situation. The reward pool can be easily calculated by taking the block reward for one block of steem that is "mined." The witnesses get a share depending on their order in the witness hierarchy which I wont waste time getting into as that is a whole can of worms in itself. After the witness share there is so much steem produced per day. Over the seven days the vote weight of the posts paid fluctuates until payout day and is assigned proportionately to stake weight. To put it simply, the higher SP votes make more money and the lower SP votes make less.
When you pay to get a higher stake weight vote on your post you are in turn lowering the value of the posts that do not use these services. So while you may feel your post is undervalued, you are also paying to say that everyone else's content is overvalued. If you aren't drastically profiting off of that use of funds, you are just screwing over those of us that refuse to use them and see them as a negative impact on the platform. You are also most likely missing out on solid followers that are looking to find your content as they are most likely not going to vote or share your post if you are making their jobs harder and costing them money. Please consider that you may be doing more harm than good by using voting services and thanks for your time if you read this. Namaste.