I have lately, and more than a few times, been accused of having double standards when I bring the vengeance of the Bidbottophant down on some poor sod (i.e. downvote them). People seems to think that I myself is bying bidbot votes, some of them simply because they think everybody are, others because the have seen upvotes from smartsteem and OCDB on some of my posts and didn't realise that these two profiles have begun using manual curation.
But I haven't bought votes... EVER... that is, I actually did it once!
When the bidbot-services started I didn't pay much attention to it, and it certainly felt wrong to me to cheat and circumvent the rules of the quality curation game. I like to compete on quality, because I am good at what I do, and I never felt annoyed when some girl in bikini, some pseudo-psychologist, some cute, little girl with a flute or other entertainers beat me to the high rewards. I have been in the entertainment business for many, many years and I acknowledges that the easy pop tune always wins. No problem there. But the vote-selling destroyed one central promise of the Steemit platform: That we compete on posts, funny comments and interaction and that everybody has a chance in that game.
None the less I was in doubts as some of the people I like, admire and trust here on the platform also were in doubt about the reasonableness of this. So I decided to try buying a vote and then write a post about it. I also hoped for a good discussion in the comments so I could hear all the arguments. And I did get exactly that.
For the thorough reader, you can see the post here. It is interesting as it shows how much doubt people felt a year ago about the concept.
The result of the post was that I decided not to use bidbots! And I haven't done so ever since. The views I hold about them today was pretty clearly expressed by some of the people commenting. Enough to help me make up my mind.
"Just because I think they don't contribute to raising the value of STEEM or the quality of content on the platform, I don't use them. I don't see myself using them in the future. And I have my (unpaid) voting bot configured not to vote for any posts that have votes from them."
@Slobberchops:
"While it still tempts me sometimes, I haven’t paid for votes since last June when I vowed to stop. You do get the satisfaction that your post has a double-digit pay-out but the number is an illusion."
"Vote buying won't help Katharsisdrill survive on Steemit because ultimately, such action undermines the very community he depends on for his survival; this is generally why morals exist in the first place. "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann kommt die Moral" is quite short-sighted; often, without morals, the food will stop coming, as we all depend on groups."
P.S. I did have some bidbot votes on this post. They were bought by a user who really uses a lot of bidbots. I am not really sure about the intentions.
@remlaps