I wanted to take this time to talk a little about the number of bots that we have in the steemit ecosystem and how they will integrate with Smart Media Tokens (SMT)
Well when new users come on the site they start to wonder why they are not getting as much payout as others. This does cause a lot of people to just give up which I guess is part of the weeding out process.
For me I like to use the bots to upvote others just as much if not even more than I do myself. I think sharing the wealth is a big part of the steemit community. Not everyone follows this line of thinking and end up trying to abuse the system
If you haven't heard of whaleshares managed by @officialfuzzy and
@fuzzyvest you should really check it out because I think it is where steemit is headed with SMT. They use bitshares to issue their tokens and users can use them to upvote post.
SMT will allow anyone to create their own tokens and I see the first use case being the peltra of bot on this platform creating their own tokens so people can use them to upvote post similar to whaleshares.
I think 2018 will be a really good year for steemit. It's hard to get a count of how many users we have on this site but I think it is less than a million for sure. When SMT comes out that number could go exponential. We will just have to wait and see.