I have been experimenting with @inertia 's trailing bot script for about 5 months or so and I had a few issues with it. If you want to see the original post look at this.

https://steemit.com/radiator/@inertia/drdoogie-rb-vote-trail-bot-update

I dug through the more recent posts and @inertia had fixed a few things.

https://steemit.com/zappl/@inertia/radiator-fix

So I did the "bundle update" command and it updated a lot of stuff.

After that I went ahead and ran it and it seemed like everything was running good!

The reason I initially wanted to run the voting trail was to see if the accounts that started with a small amount of power could build up passively overtime. In a lot of ways those accounts don't have enough to really build from curation. Also sometimes it makes it look like a comment or a post is way more popular if there are several votes. It kind of creates a herd mentality and most users don't know who is operating those other accounts so they could tend to vote for them.

Ultimately when running them they seem to quickly get to a point where they don't have enough power to even make a vote. They go under the dust threshold so I'm going to power up a small amount of STEEM to see if one of them will build from that point. Another reason why I locked down a couple of the accounts were to have them kind of like domain names. If the STEEM blockchain becomes super successful accounts could become more valuable overtime.

You guys should go check out @inertia 's stuff. He is a boss and certainly understands this blockchain on a deeper level than most.

Conclusion

Currently I'm trying to do too many things and there is the technical side of things like this that I need to dive much deeper into but initially these things don't usually pay out as well as just posting stuff on Steemit / DTube that will be more for the masses. The goal is to eventually set up a witness node and hopefully get voted higher up so that it is profitable to run. If I could focus more on the technical side of things I think I could gain a little more respect among others coding and running witnesses and seed nodes so that hopefully I could join the crew!

Ultimately it is going to take me either hiring others to help with certain things or get to a point where others are helping me to some capacity.