Should I give in to Steem Bots?

Steem Virgin

I’m fairly new to this site and have been reading and researching about this site for awhile. It took me awhile to get approved and that left me with countless hours reading and watching YouTube videos on how to be successful on this site.

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I read postings that recommended that I join follow groups, join countless discord channels, and pay for bots. I was even made aware that very successful Steemians use bots to make their posting more visible (trending) and therefore have a higher chance of getting a bigger payout.

What I did instead

Instead of posting your average #introduceyourself post. I posted a provocative and over-sexualized video on D.Tube to attempt to get more upvotes. It was a video of me pathetically stripping to that Blink 182 song "What's my age again?" Ironically, it didn't become a viral trending post. In fact, it became an awful reminder of how pathetic I can be sometimes. I learned that it's very difficult to delete a D.Tube video after a small period and that sometimes even your biggest attempts to be cool can backfire and make you look so desperately petty.

Could bots help?

As much as I'd like to write a posting that would generate some steem, it's difficult to take someone serious whose biggest supporters are bots. I've seen what some sites do where you can just upvote without even reading the content, just for the hope that you'll get rewarded with votes in the future. I think that ruins the credibility and hard work that sometimes goes into some of these posts. However, I have seen how bots can raise your reputation score: even if your content isn't unique.

Should I give in?

As much as I see how there's some positives to using bots, I currently don't have the funds to buy votes. Also, I really don't want to be known as someone who uses bots. Recently, I was reading a posting about how someone was bragging about high their reputation score was and someone commented that the poster had only gained that reputation score by paying for high upvotes. That made me laugh.

Will I succeed

Only time will tell with this. I mean, there's only 1 million users on here. So I'm really just a small flake on the capacity that this can grow into. Also, how many of those accounts are really bots? I'm hoping to see how long I can survive without having to use bots to make it on here.

Any suggestions?

I would really appreciate some feedback. I know that posting on countless discord channels on the promotion channels don't really generate upvotes. In fact, I think the only people that go on those channels are the ones posting and then they leave. No one just randomly goes there to upvote content. Right?