Tools for Steeming

As a transparency measure, and as helpful info for folks who may be looking for ways to up their Steemit game, here's a quick accounting of the tools I use on the 'chain!

Busy.org

Busy is an alternative frontend for the social media/blogging side of Steem. It's a little more polished in aesthetic than Steemit, and has a few features Steemit lacks: you can control your voting percentage from the beginning instead of having it gated behind 500 Steem Power, and you can see the SBD value of each upvote you receive. I still occasionally use Steemit.com, but prefer Busy overall.

There's supposedly an upvote you can get by including the tag "busy" on your posts, but I've tried it and not noticed any out-of-the-ordinary vote activity. It may be Busy has gotten too popular for that to be a thing?

Steem Follower

If Busy is an alternative frontend for composition and feeds, Steem Follower is an alternative frontend for content discovery. It's a little complex, and the UI doesn't explain itself very well, but this is my understanding of how it works:

1. Once you're signed up, you're presented with various post feeds: new, by tag, etc. These consist only of Steem posts by other users of Steem Follower.
2. As you upvote these posts using the Follower UI, you accumulate points. These points exist only on Steem Follower, not the blockchain.
3. If you've upvoted at least five posts in a 24-hour period, your own most recent post will start showing up in other Follower users' discovery feeds. If they upvote your post, the value of their upvote is deducted from your points. If your points reach 0, or the next 24-hour period comes up, your posts stop appearing until you upvote some more to recharge.
4. At certain score breakpoints, you have the option of "promoting" your post at a 2x, 3x, etc. level. This shoots your posts to the top of the discovery feeds, but every upvote you receive during promotion chews up more points than usual.

As odd as it all sounds, I really appreciate that it's a meritocratic, organic, human-eyeball-based way of getting more viewership and upvotes. You have to give before you can get. There are no bots involved, and there's incentive to create good, eye-catching content instead of copy-pasted garbage. My strategy has been to do the 5 upvotes per day to stay on the charts, then kick in a promotion when I have a couple thousand points. The activity that comes without promotion is pretty minor, but the promotion benefits are palpable, so it works pretty well!

Steem Voter

Steem Voter is a simple app that automatically makes your account upvote new posts from accounts of your choice. I use this to fulfill my upvote obligations for guild membership and to ensure I don't miss upvoting any posts from my mentor @danmaruschak. I want to also get mentor @clweeks in there, but the free version of Steem Voter only allows three voting rules, and the 3 SBD per month premium fee is a bit more than I can manage at my current "plankton" level.

Steem Power leasing

Getting by on my own Steem Power alone would make my upvotes barely register. So I lease about 150 SP from a marketplace, i.e., I pay a fee in Steem for someone to delegate that chunk of Power to me for several weeks. The Minnowbooster marketplace works well for this purpose.

Guilds: Qurator and Minnow Support Project

@qurator and @minnowsupport are Steem mutual-aid societies. They have requirements for membership: a modest joining fee in Qurator's case, a follow-and-upvote agreement in MSP's, and in both cases you can lose membership if you start spamming or plagiarizing. You can also obtain higher tiers of membership by delegating Steem Power to their accounts. In so doing, you get access to certain benefits:

• A Discord server where you can chat and network with other members. Sometimes they have other services available in this context, like help with post editing and proofreading.
• Frequency-limited upvote bots. Typically you can get one automatic upvote per day (@qurator, @msp-shanehug) and one additional paid upvote per day (@qustodian, @minnowsupport), though rules vary based on guild and membership tier.
• Occasional curation or reblogging by guild leaders

I like to think that the membership requirements, including standards of post quality, makes such groups a sound ethical choice. But some folks feel that any bot-based upvoting of this sort is detrimental to Steemit's long-term health, so your mileage may vary! Certainly there are some whale-tier curators who refuse to upvote any post that has received a bot vote, so be warned that you may be trading some jackpot potential for consistency in post payouts by employing these guilds' tools.

What DON'T I do?

I've drawn a few lines as to what tools I'll use, because I think they're not ethical or sustainable for the Steem platform. You won't find me doing any of the following:

Self-Upvoting

I will very rarely upvote one of my own comments to drive it toward the top of a post's discussion area, if I feel it's necessary to give it higher visibility on a post (e.g. corrections to my posts that are too old to edit). Other than that, I don't waste my voting power on myself. I would much rather take the opportunity to reward other users' good content, and maybe build some Steam Follower score if my feed is uninspiring! I get dribbles of Steem Power back as curation rewards for doing so anyway, so I don't think I'm really shooting myself in the foot by taking this approach.

Content-Agnostic and Bid-Based Upvote Bots

There are many, many very popular pay-for-upvote bots out there not associated with any support guild. These don't care if you're upvoting a blog masterpiece or a crappy plagiarized dMania meme. There are also bots that are effectively gambling games, where you put in some SBD and hope that it returns a juicy upvote. I swear I will never touch these.

"Upvote for Free SBD" Payout Rackets and Lotteries

You can also find a plethora of accounts that post nothing but posts begging for upvotes, that then promise they'll pay out the resulting SBD to one or more of the upvoters. I briefly played with these early on, but I won't anymore. I find them inane. There's nothing illegal about them--hell, under Steem's goofy "decentralized" ethos, nothing is illegal anyway--but they siphon coin from the reward pool without creating any view-worthy content. Some folks argue they're doing something valuable for the community by letting "minnows" get money, but "sign up for Steemit so you can get free money" isn't an ethos I want to see thrive. My upvote means "good job, do more of this!", and there is no situation in which "UPVOTE FOR FREE SBD" is a thing the world needs more of.