Earlier today, I found myself writing a collection of comment/replies that really deserved to be combined into a full post of their own, as I believe the insights they hold are beneficial to all fellow steemians as well. The first set of comments began as a response to @ura-soul's post: ALERT! Steemians Are LOSING $1000USD Per Week To Randowhale When The Vote Isn't Completed Fast Enough!

In itself, this is great advice for anyone using services such as Whaleshares, randowhale, booster, or MinnowBooster. However, the part where I "took objection" was this:

At the time of me writing here, Randowhale has earned its operators 522.775 STEEM POWER In the previous week alone just in curation payments, which is nearly $1000USD per week that could have gone to Steemit users that all went to Randowhale's operators instead!

What do you think? Is this a fair situation? Ultimately it all depends on how much profit/reward is in it for you the 'customer' of the service, but when some of that profit is syphoned away without your knowledge, you are not in a good position to make the best decision.

This led to a series of responses on my part that I believe could help others better understand the system.

Here was my first response:

@alexpmorris: It's not that it's fair or unfair, it's just part of understanding the "game" that is STEEMIT! To say it's "unfair" would also be saying that it's unfair to incentivize people with curation rewards to vote. Ironically, the 30 minute algorithm was implemented as a way to give manual curators a chance to vote over bots that would immediately vote the second a post went up. You may also be interested in this post around the time the change took place: "Latest Curation Reward Solution".

Regardless, it's great that you wrote an article that helps more people understand this dynamic! :)

At this point, @financialcritic chimed in with this response:

@financialcritic: I kind of agree with @ura-soul... and this is coming from someone that uses @randowhale a lot. The part that does seem unfair is that randowhale is marketed as a service to help minnows. If it was really there to help minnows in full transparency, then this info should be made available by randowhale...and maybe it should be a non-profit bot, as opposed to making so much money.

To which I responded with the following:

@alexpmorris: a slippery slope, if ever I heard one. perhaps the blockchain should also limit the price of STEEM as well to make sure no one overpays, in case they don't know any better? Just like putting "smoking kills you" warnings on cigarette boxes, still won't stop people from smoking anyway...

And who judges what's "too much money"? Maybe the blockchain should take that $2500 post payout and "redistribute the wealth" to everyone else? That person will never post again, and we'll now each be 0.01 STEEM richer, yay! lol Abusive behavior is another story, and that's a "cat and mouse" game that the community continually seeks to address in various ways (including how the 30 minute rule came to be).

And along those lines, some steemians think it's in "bad taste" to use any of these services. If they had their way, they'd be banned altogether. Hmmm... "censorship" sounds like perhaps the perfect solution! See what I mean about those "slippery slopes"?

For a while people were making a case for why BOTs shouldn't be allowed on STEEMIT either. Of course, they didn't understand that by banning BOTs, you'd also be blocking STEEMIT.com from functioning at all, since they basically all access the blockchain in the same way!

And just for the record, since we do seem to be picking a bit on @randowhale here, I'll kick it up a notch for ya. This "dynamic" also will affect @booster, @minnowbooster, Whaleshares, and Beyondbits as well.

One more point worth mentioning is that this dynamic has been accentuated post HF19. Before that, even though you may have been giving up more in curation rewards, the N^2 algorithm meant you could earn 10x your money due to the additional "vote gravity". I can definitely say using rando and others pre-HF19 provided a much greater "bang for your buck". I've written about this in a few recent articles.

Since HF19, however, it does seem more advantageous to use these services early on, as you may also have a greater chance of hitting the leader boards as well (not to mention the additional curation rewards you'll receive as well).

Better stop here, cuz at the rate I'm going, I'll soon be "reinvented" the "Wallstreet Disclosure Prospectus"! lol

As always, buyer beware, do your own due diligence, and if you do discover anything helpful to the community, please feel free to post and share about it! :)

After this, @financialcritic presented this reply:

@financialcritic: I'm all for bots and capitalism. My perception is that randowhale is being promoted as a minnow helper, when it is not that.

To which I responded:

@alexpmorris: Actually (and I could be wrong on this), I believe other users are promoting it more as a "minnow helper" than @randowhale is! If anything, you can say it's more for "degenerate gamblers" hoping to get that big 'ole 5% vote! (joke!)

I just searched through a bunch of rando's posts, and none of them really mention anything about randowhale being a "minnow helper". But please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that! :)

To which @financialcritic realized I may be correct on that point and replied:

@financialcritic: I looked back at the previous posts and you are right! My perception was incorrect.

I so use randowhale a lot (maybe even on every post)...but there was definitely a learning curve trying to figure out when to best use it. And I don't see it as a way to make money...it's more for the tip jar effect. You don't want to have an empty tip jar.

Lessons from this Interaction

Needless to say, @financialcritic is correct in saying there's definitely a learning curve, and I hope others can better understand some of STEEMIT's "inner dynamics" as a result of this discourse. One can't even necessarily say that any of these services are "bad" or "good", or that one is better than the other, because even a service's "viability" and potential "ROI" is cyclical, based on the timing of when it's used, as well as the price of all various crypto-currencies and tokens involved, etc. Top that off with the rapidly-changing STEEMIT landscape, and it becomes even trickier to navigate (ie. are you reading advice pre-HF19 or post-HF19)? Which leads to a comment that @ura-soul added:

@ura-soul: It would be fair if the operators of the Voting 'Services' informed people that this is the situation - since the 'profit margin' is sometimes slim with these services anyway. I have just stopped using the 'booster' service after a couple of days of testing, since I found that once the curation payouts are removed, I was probably losing money - not gaining anything.

To which I later replied:

@alexpmorris: That's what tends to happen to all these services, especially post HF19. To some degree they become outright arbitrage for those who feel it's worth it to pay X for the chance at approximately Y. Pre HF19, the more "vote power" you received, the more "valuable" those votes became, which was a unique value proposition in itself. Sadly, that aspect has mostly, if not entirely, diminished at this point. As always, buyer beware, and do your due diligence.

For example, I noticed very quickly with booster that a few of the first people early on got HUGE payouts. Within a day, the arbitrage was also mostly gone, with 1 SBD returning approximately 1.5 SBD give or take. Still not bad, but that's perhaps an average, and with all the various price fluctuations, still tricky to quantify with all the complexity and "moving parts" involved.

However, if you get lucky some morning at 3am when people have "given up" on booster, who knows, you may get lucky with a near empty pot, just like catching a great low bid in a wide spread market! Just gotta keep on top of it, easier said than done of course! :)

I've written so much here now, I think I owe it to myself to turn this all into its own post! lol

You see, so it's not to say that @booster is "bad", but that too many people have learned about it and have now mostly "arbed" away the "opportunity"! Perhaps if people start giving up on it, there may once again be an opportunity to "catch a deal" with it. It's really no different in the stock market. People run things up to the moon, then cry when it comes down to earth. As they all get bored and "rinse & repeat & cry" on another stock, the original stock finally comes back to life and suddenly, seemingly "out of the blue" a secondary wave of buying unfolds! And ironically enough, here's what unfolded earlier today on the STEEMIT internal market for STM/SBD:

(short "preview" of my next post on my other "comment spree"!)

In fact, I can also tell you that I recently discovered just such an "opportunity" with Whaleshares! Given current prices of STEEM, SBD, etc, with each WHALESHARE equivalent to a 1% @officialfuzzy vote worth about $1.12 (a bit more given the SBD exchange rate), someone came in on the bitshares DEX and sold a bunch of WHALESHARE at 2 bts each (approximately 44 cents). Now, of course, there's always the chance that "if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, it's probably you"! However, so far it does seem that I'm probably more or less correct on this one.

(a bunch of those WHALESHARE tokens that traded at 2bts were purchased by yours truly, market is now 2.20 bid / 5 bts offer)

Between the added benefit of potentially boosting a post to the "hot" lists, combined with acquiring tokens at such an advantageous price, it's kind of a "gimme" to grab 'em all up at those prices! Luckily I was there to notice it, lest someone else scoop them up ahead of me! I just bought a few more at 4 bts the past few days, which still seemed like a decent discount at the time, so they really seemed more like a "gift" at these prices.

Finally...

Of course, an even better way to maximize your ROI on a token such as "WHALESHARE", is to acquire some for FREE! Keep an eye out for posts by @jphenderson and @officialfuzzy on potential upcoming competitions that you can participate in. Also, if you hang out in the Whaleshares Discord Chat, and catch Walrus' Secret "Phrase of the Week", you can also win some FREE WHALESHARE tokens!

• Here's a contest currently being offered by @gmuxx: Contest: GG Giveaway - UPDATED! INCREASED PRIZES!

• Another offered by @jphenderson: Whaleshares Minnow Support Contest #4 -- Nominate The Most Undervalued Steemians for a Chance To Win Whaleshares! + Last Week's Winners!

• And yet another by @rawbinhutt: CONTEST -- Win 20 WHALESHARES on Looking for Niche!

• You can find other Whaleshare contests and giveaways posted in the # contests channel at the Whaleshares Discord Chat!

Once again, I hope you all find that this post helps give you a better understanding and perspective on how to best take advantage of STEEMIT "voting services". If you have any other thoughts, experiences, or even corrections, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

As always, I appreciate your upvote, your follow and all your comments!