If you ever placed bid at a bot, you should know the upvote amount could sometimes be less than expected. Let's see a possible reason in this episode of steemit in a minute.

Steem Bot Tracker

Steem Bot Tracker is a well-known tool that helps bidder to view and to place bid at upvote bots. I am not going to explain in details about how it works because there are lots of other good articles writing about this tool. If you want a quick and easy reference, here is very good video uploaded by @jerrybanfield.

Steem Upvoting Bot Tracker Shows Where to Buy an Upvote!

Assuming you already have some experience on bidding, let's see a case that explain why the upvote amount could be less than expected.

First of all, bidders should all be familiar with above screenshot. A table that list all the bids in the current and last round. On top of the table, it shows the total vote value. In this example, the total vote value of the bot is 2.29 SBD.

That means a total of 2.29 SBD is supposed to be voted on bidders' posts according to their bid amount. At the time of voting, the bot should be at 100% voting power.

Thanks to the transparency of blockchain, we can always dig out the truth. By simply go to https://steemworld.org/@theBotName, you can see how the bot upvote the bidders in details.

On the right-most column, it is the time of upvote. We can clearly see a pattern that upvotes are grouped in rounds. It is because it takes time for the bot to resume 100% voting power between rounds.

For each round, if we added up all the vote %, we can easily see the total. In above diagram, it is found that the sum of all bidders' votes was only at 54%!!! It was not 100%.

By scrolling down to see the previous round of this same particular bot, it is found that the sum was only at 84%. Once again, it was not 100%!!!

One legitimate reason is that the bot runs a shorter round of bids. That is to say, it spends less voting power each round so that it takes less time to resume voting power for the next round. The advantage is that bidder need not to wait a long time for the upvote (2.4 hours the worst case). But the upvote value is expected to be less as well.

In above example, the time of that two rounds were 8:15 and 10:26 respectively. That is roughly equal to 2.4 hours. That was enough time to resume closed to 100% voting power. But somehow this particular bot offer much less that 100%. And this value changes in different rounds.

In the round at 10:26, nine bidders expected to share a 100/9 = 11.11%. However, all bidders got only 5.99% 😠😠😠

A Trust Worthy Bot

If you care about the upvote amount, it is suggested to firstly check against steemworld, or any other site that shows you the actual behaviour of the bot. A trust worthy bot should look like this.

Conclusion

To be a smart bidder, check out the figures as much as you can. I know that it is a very steep learning curve if we deeply dived into the details of calculation. With my own little knowledge, it is also possible that I still missed something in the picture. Please feel free to give your comment. It is always fun to learn from the steemit community, and that's what we are all here for.

Thanks for reading.