In order to get votes, or upvote a new post that will take off, people have stooped to using bots to inflate their accounts. The problem with this method is it decreases the value and power of actual users taking notice or liking a post, thus it lowers the popularity and destroys the purpose behind Steemit all together.
A method people have more recently been turning to is SteemFollower, and you may be asking how it's any different. Steemfollower uses real votes from real people for one. Granted more votes do end up going to posts you like, and your story does get more notice initially, but in all fairness this is by people you yourself follow or that are following you. So say your like me and enjoy cryptocurrency, programming, and just about anything related to science or finance; well all the people you like that are in those fields, and all the people that follow you who are into the same things, end up seeing your content first and contribute towards what you (and your followers/followed) enjoy. This means that a random post that has no content, and users comments, get ignored.
Doesn't this lower the value still? no... the currency goes towards actual people who both notice and get noticed for their comments, spreading the wealth to other posts with value. This takes away a bot who goes through all listings hitting the upvote button, and generating thousands non-existent of new users just to like one post.
This in itself isn't enough to sway most of the hard critics of the program, but for those of you, like me, who want to see steemit take off, get notice, and don't want the system to crash due to heavy botting, it does provide a nice alternative that gets attention. Similar to paying google for your website to be put higher on the search list. The difference between it and google though is the price. It's free. It also scores a 87% trust rating when doing a search to check the legitimacy of something that almost sounds too good to be true. I'm not saying its something you should do, I'm just saying its similar to clicking on a friends facebook page, seeing all the posts he liked that you might like, or adjusting the settings to have it come up in your feed. Check it out, read, and research, then decide. That's all I'm recommending here.
