Should I feel dirty for using vote bots?

I recently found and tried my first vote bots. It was a conflicting experience, on one hand there is an excitement knowing you can use your own Steemit worth to bump up your post when you are a minnow and maybe more Steemians will see it. On the other hand is it cheating or are you cheating yourself and fellow Steemians?

The day I found out how to use the vote bots on Steemit I also found Steem bot tracker. Steem bot tracker is a site developed by Hive account@yabapmatt. This is a great site to learn more about what bots are available if you are interested. I spent a couple hours on Steem bot tracker over the course of a day watching and trying to figure out what was going on. Once I thought I was ready I jumped in feet first, no testing the waters, I'm a all or nothing kind of guy and I learn the best by making mistakes.

There were some mistakes made....:( All the mistakes could of been avoided if I wasn't so quick to try. I wasn't familiar with the rules on vote bots but I think I broke a cardinal one. I over bid one of the bots by quite a bit and destroyed my fellow vote botters profit. I felt so small, like a puppy that just pissed on the rug because it didn't know any better. (To those who I screwed over on that vote bot transaction please forgive me and accept my sincerest apology.)

If you are laughing and shaking your head saying, "noob", I have more for you. Yes I made more mistakes.... I tried 10 different bots in 1 day. Here they are: Hive account@minnowfairy- bidding round was full and I got a refund. Hive account@boomerang and Hive account@sleeplesswhale I messed up the memo, the whale swam away with my steem and the boomerang refund came back. Hive account@therising I exceeded the max bid and got a refund. Hive account@shares, Hive account@mercurybot, Hive account@pushup, Hive account@sneakyninja, Hive account@smartseem Hive account@aksdwi are the others I didn't mess up, besides the over bid. So depending on how you look at it I got a 50%-60% success rate. That is me on the left. :)

Once I had tried the bots out for myself I wanted to know how the Steemit community felt about this subject. I found and read many posts. As you can imagine there are many opinions ranging from totally against and some people love them so much they want to build their own.

Out of the posts that I read there wasn't many good comment sections discussions except one. Hive account@squdsi1 has a well thought out post called"Vote bots: Great tool or destroying the Steemit Community". In this post, in my opinion, there are lots of good comments from both sides. It is well worth the read.

So with my own experience with voting bots I can see some negatives and some positives. I personally felt, after playing with the vote bots, a little like a cheater and a tad bit dirty. Was it because most vote bots posted comments on my post I used them on? I think that is a part of it.... Hive account@sneakyninja isn't to sneaky if it leaves a comment is it? ....or is it that this is not the idea of this platform, human to human not bot to human. I think that is part of it too. On the other hand you do have the option of boosting your posts when you feel like you have done a good job and want to share with as many people as your Steemit wallet will allow.

That said, I may use vote bots in the future, if I do it will be sparing. Everything in moderation... I would love to know what you think. Maybe you have a different angle or perception on this topic, I would love to hear it.

If you made it to the end thank you,
Brandon

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