Ultimately I think most of us want our posts here to be of value - which means to be seen and to be of use. This is measured through comments and votes. When I first heard about STEEM I was so excited by the idea. Like a child I couldn't sit still and I couldn’t wait to get my account. The days it took for approval dragged on for an eternity. Then I got in! And I sat there, for hours, wondering how am I going to do this. This went on for days and weeks as I spent so many hours researching the platform and trying to find the gems of answers hidden within the mass of information.
This post was actually started as a comment to this great post by
@paulag. Check out her blog as she does a lot of great analyses and she also shares the how to behind it in case you want to learn how to do it yourself. Her post is about bid bots and for this post I'll try not using any.
The main issue I was facing as I thought things through was that the time and effort I put into posting (my posts take hours and days to write depending on the research etc) looked like it was going to go to waste. That no-one would read them. So why spend my time on that instead of other more productive things. But the platform itself is so ingenious. So groundbreaking that I wanted to do something. I had so many ideas. Different business ideas that could be implemented on this platform. But none of them would work because only a few people, if that, were viewing my posts. And I couldn't see how to get over that hump. I wasn't going to suck up and pander to whales. And I don't know how to market in other ways.
As I read and read I saw other great posts with extremely useful information and they earned a few cents. And I saw stuff that I considered of little value that was getting ridiculous amounts of return.
Obviously no-one wants to waste their time. It's precious.
I saw some bring their following with them. Eg 
This of course is the same issue that all steemians face. Nothing new there. Some crack it but I didn't know how.
I tried competitions but that didn't build an interested following and at 0.001 return the ROI was not worth it. I played some fun poker through 
I don’t have a lot of money to invest but I did ponder getting some investors together. However, their investment might be worth nothing in 1 year so I’m cautious on that front.
I looked into bringing money into the system as STEEM. Tokens kept as STEEM diminish in value due to the inherent inflation in the system. Converting that STEEM to vests (powering up) mitigates that loss. There is a return on having invested your own money as vests but voting on your own stuff too much is frowned upon so mostly you're "hoping" that the value of steem will go up so that you can get some return on your investment. But at the same time STEEM might be worthless in a year or 2 as well. We don't know what's going to happen in this space. IMO STEEM is one of the best cryptos as it has implicit value as a blogging platform and a base to run a business but that doesn't mean it'll be successful necessarily. And reality is few exchanges list it.
So I dabbled with bid bots on some test posts and I saw that if I timed it right (didn’t partake in an overbid) I could actually get some return. So I spent a bunch of hours writing posts and went hard core buying votes. I was getting more and more followers and an immeasurable amount more engagement (though the quality of those followers and engagement is varied). The process was very satisfying and I was moving forward, even if it was very time consuming.
The reality is that I've mostly timed my vote purchases with a crash in the market so have lost a lot more than I've gained in terms of SBD but I've gained many more followers and engagement than I think would otherwise have happened. And I’ve learned much too :)
I like certain aspects of blockchain techs. One is that the rules are set and policing is automatic. You can or you can't, there's no politician and corruption getting in the way. Trust is enforced by the system and not by a small group of people. And whether certain rules take hold is a more democratic process. A regular Jo can add to or change the system and if good it will be adopted “by the people”. Plenty have forked BTC but only a couple of those forks have really been picked up. And when that system no longer serves its purpose – buh bye. Imagine being able to say that to a bunch of corrupt politicians! ;)
One view is that there seem to be roughly 2 groups. Those who are into the idea of a community and those who are into the idea of STEEM becoming a huge thing that includes “whatever” happens to happen. An open ended approach where bots exist and whatever else wants to exist.
I think keeping it a “community” mitigates its potential to be particularly “yuge”. But the other alternative is a wild jungle. And if investors are going to bring the kind of money in that will add substantial value to STEEM then it’s not going to be a community. Those investors don’t care about community. They care about returns. And if bots give them the return that’s what they’ll put their money into.
There is another possibility with STEEM. And that is that it becomes its own ecosystem. A place where people can work together and transfer value within the system without needing to exchange it for fiat. But that is beyond the scope of this post.
