The voting behaviour on Steemit fascinates me. When I post I will generally get a few votes almost immediately by accounts with very low SP. If I'm lucky then I'll get a whale vote like those from @wang and @rainman below (from SteemStats). Those will be followed by dozens of bot votes. You can see that the whales will get a partial SP, but most of the bots will earn nothing.
So what are the bots trying to achieve? If you look at any of them you will see that they may earn a tiny amount of SP in a week. Their total won't grow fast enough to significantly change their voting power.
There are other ways to accumulate SP. There are the @safecrack and @steemsports games, although I've not had a payout from the latter recently. Steemsports gets hundreds of votes on the post, but less on the comments that actually get considered for distributing the winnings. Even if you randomly vote on one of the comments you stand to make something each week.
Mining Steem may be viable after the hard fork as that will use a different algorithm that requires lots of memory and may be less productive on a GPU, if that's what the main miners are using. You'd still need to leave a PC on 24/7 and the electricity cost may exceed the rewards. I'm trying some cloud mining on Eobot, but it's taking a long time to earn back what I paid in. I'm using what I made from faucets, so it's no big deal for me.
This new economy will attract speculators, but it's been designed to make life hard for them. The hard fork may change the game a bit, but I don't know which way it will swing. I'm just happy to make something from my posts, but the interactions I get have more real value. You will see I'm using some of what I make to build my guitar pick collection. I don't expect it to change my life for now.
Steem on!
