Hello everyone! @hmagellan here to bring you some info on what's been going on with @lottobot!

Many of you might have read @lottobot's recent post about its new update, which was implemented yesterday. The main feature of this new update is that now, @lottobot will always choose a winner for its lotteries, even if no-one enters one of them!

In the case of an entrant-less lottery, @lottobot will now go through all recent posts and choose a random winner from among them! This way, @lottobot will not waste one of its 100% upvotes. Regular lotteries with one or more entrants will still play out like normal, with a random legal entrant selected from those that entered.

This has already been explained in the @lottobot post I linked earlier. I wanted to use this post, however, to bring my readers up to speed with the future of a different @lottobot feature: the weekly SBD lotteries.

Fate of the Weekly Lottos

(For those unaware of the existence of the weekly lottos, check out this post.)

As I'm sure many have noticed by now, @lottobot hasn't held one of its weekly lotteries in over a month. Unfortunately, this policy is likely to continue, at least for now. @lottobot will not be holding any more weekly SBD lotteries for the foreseeable future. There are a couple of reasons for this, and I wanted to let people know here about them here.

First and foremost, the weekly lotteries represented a significant (for @lottobot) investment. Those who monitor @lottobot regularly probably note that it doesn't pull in huge profits. About 1 full SBD per day is the most the service has ever earned, and that is including curation rewards. I had hoped that the weekly lotteries would drastically improve @lottobot's visibility, leading to more profits (enough, at least, to fund the weekly lotteries themselves), but that was not the case. If the money isn't there, it simply isn't there.

Another reason that the weekly lotteries are ending is that their format (a post that you upvote and resteem) seems to be less than ideal for the time being. It seems as though, for right now, the Steem platform is a bit overcrowded with new posts, so many get quickly buried. I knew going into this project that the trending page is crowded, but it seems that @lottobot was not able to get sufficient visibility even with the use of resteem services like @resteembot. To be clear, I don't blame the resteem services at all. I'm completely satisfied with @resteembot, @resteem.bot, @re-steem, and others that I have used. Rather, I think this platform is overcrowded with people who want to make posts, and has a shortage of readers, especially casual, browsing ones.

I liked this picture I made for the weekly lottos so much, it seemed a shame not to use it again :)

So, for now, the weekly lotteries have been called off. I would very much like to resume them some day, but @lottobot will have to gain a bit more traction and profitability if that is going to happen. For now, I'm happy that @lottobot continues to see daily use for its regular lotteries. I am super grateful for all my customers! Thank you all :)

That about does it for now. Hope to see you all again next time!