My Paid Upvoting Experience
My Paid Upvoting Experience
I know I’m not alone in having gone back and forward with the idea of paying for votes. On the one hand it seems totally against the spirit of the platform, on the other hand it’s hard to not get a certain sense of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ when you see other users boosting their posts onto the trending page and earning big money as a result. Or seeing users who got in early posting throwaway content and reaping uber rewards every time. After a couple of months of slogging away with articles, putting in the hours on shoots and stacking on a heap more hours writing blog posts to accompany my images and bring the ideas and articles in my head to life. In fact in January I wrote an average of just over one large article every other day – when I say ‘large’ I mean over 2000 words, sometimes closer to 4000! By anyone’s standards 32,000+ words in a month on top of endless commenting and taking photos constitutes quite an investment in time.
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The turning point
I have to say, I was actually surprised how quickly I saw some return, with a few of my posts getting curation upvotes from some big users and a couple of them even taking me to the trending page. I was hooked! But, as you all know, it’s not a straight line up to becoming a super Steemian, and after a while the buzz of the curations faded as I saw post after post go unnoticed. It was around that time I saw a post from another user on, essentially, how to make it big on Steemit. At the time I rejected the idea, considering the article to be more of a justification of that users willingness to ‘cheat’ to get ahead, than a piece of useful content. But the figures and the words lingered with me, and as I continued to post what I considered to be underappreciated posts the idea reverberated around me. Amplified by time and my sense of injustice I found myself waking up to check how an article had done and deciding enough was enough, it was time to ‘play the game’.
The rules
It’s weird, I absolutely hate being told what to do, yet I have a thing about rules. I actually quite like them, especially when I’m setting them for myself. I didn’t want to sell out completely, and the last thing I’d want is to dilute the Steemit talent pool further by promoting shitposts all the way to the trending page. I decided that I would only pay for votes on bigger articles that I had spent a lot of hours on. Single images would have to fend for themselves and rely solely on their own merit and the strength of my growing Steemit audience. Oh and I would stop when it wasn’t fun anymore. Like a responsible gambler. I also decide I would measure my success of failure with paid voting, and use my wife as a basis for comparison. She started Steemit a few weeks after me, but puts in the same amount of time and effort as I do, so it felt like a fairly good point of reference. I also fully acknowledge that my rules aren’t by any means universally correct. They just felt right for me!
Maximising my ‘investment’
If I was going to do this you’d better believe I was damn well going to do it right! So I set about learning which bots would provide the biggest returns and went to the bot tracker online. I watched the bids and selected the bots based on return. Although I quickly found that those last few minutes of bidding are worse than the last few minutes in an eBay auction for a sold our kids toy at Christmas. The truth is my well prepared and reasoned approach kind of went to shit here. I realised that I was in the wild west of Steem where fairness and justice went out of the window. One thing I did quickly realise is that every penny spent on votes really does increase that divide between the plankton and the whales. Something that didn’t really sit right with me from the word go.
Round 1
The first week I felt pretty nervous as I sent my hard earned SBD away having done my best to pick the best bots to send my bids to. That morning I had made the decision to pay for votes, set my rules and done my research. I felt like I was doing something almost illicit, sneakily subverting the community based reward system that had drawn me to Steemit in the first place. But it was ok right, I was doing it for the greater good, I was promoting work that had been shaped by hours of thinking and creating. I satisfied the nervous voice in my head until the votes started coming in, then felt my nervousness turn to excitement as the numbers racked up. I posted two articles that week, we’ll call them post 1 and post 2, original right! Wait, that feels a little too easy, we’ll call them Nigel and Phil instead.
Nigel and Phil – the Figures
So I spent a whopping 36 SBD on Nigel! I’d worked hard on him but I felt Phil was the finer specimen, so cleared out my wallet to spend a further 43.5 SBD on good old Phil. Not one to count my chickens I tried not to look at the potential payout too much until the posts cleared the 7 days. I do however obsessively check various Cryptocurrencies, SBD and Steem being my first two each time I turn on my phone. Seeing SBD surge from $5.60 to $8.50 a couple of days after my spending spree wasn’t the best feeling. A 50%+ increase is hard for anyone to ignore! At the end of the week my worries were somewhat abated when I realised my gamble had indeed proved profitable, if not as profitable as I’d have liked. The upvotes I’d paid for on Nigel pocketed me a not too shabby 41.2 SBD Payout, and a profit of 5.2 SBD or +14.4%. Turns out I was right about the sly dog that was Phil, my 43.5 SBD of votes earned me 51.3 SBD and a return of 7.8 SBD (+17.9%). For these figures I only counted the upvotes I’d paid for, not the ones the posts had on their own from the followers I had already gained.
Round 2
By the time I posted my next article the shine of paid upvotes was already starting to fade. Not least because my control subject, AKA my Wife, was pretty much level pegging with me at this point, only she didn’t have the sleepless nights filled with self-loathing. Well, that’s a tad melodramatic, but I didn’t feel great about paying for my votes. Clicking ‘Redeem Rewards’ didn’t feel as good as when I had really earned those rewards. But, I was still in it, and as such all of my SBD Eggs went into the basket of my new post. We’ll call her Shirley as I was particularly proud of her. And obviously there’s nothing more imperious than the name Shirley.
Shirley – Facts and Figures
All in. All of the accumulated SBD I had gained from my previous posts, plus what I had earned through my single photo posts and news roundups. That was a colossal (for me) 97.3 SBD! This really did feel like pushing all my chips into the centre of the table. Those butterflies in my stomach turned to pterodactyls as I watched Steem and SBD plummet in the days that followed. I’d known this was always possible and my worst fears were coming to life before my eyes. When it came to the payout Shirley staggered home with just 79.13 SBD, a loss of just over 18 SBD and 19%. Of course SBD its-self had plummeted too, but the problem is there was no HODLing when all of my SBD had been spent. 
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Quitters never win
I’ll be the first to admit that two weeks and isn’t exactly the most thorough testing, but at the end of my second week I was done. I’d felt crappy upvoting my own posts and it had taken the fun out of posting, I was posting less because I knew I was just going to pay for the big ones anyway. I’d ignored my followers and my feed because that wasn’t what was going to pay, my own SBD investment was what was going to pay out!
Hitting the ground running
When I made the decision to give up on paid upvotes I decided I was going to do things the old fashioned way. The one way I know is guaranteed to succeed. Perseverance. I started waking up to check my feed, comment on as the users I was following and interact to the max. I was going to make myself as valuable as possible in as many ways as possible, not just my articles and pictures.
Lets talk about the elephant
I know, I’m skipping a couple of big advantages to bidding for votes, and in the interest of fairness I’ll address those here. The first is the followers that getting on, or close to, the trending page earns. I can tell you, from obsessive fact and figure keeping, that the impact of upvoting my posts was absolutely ZERO on my total followers. I gained followers sure, but I gained approximately 7 new followers per day, exactly the same as I was gaining before I started paying for upvotes. There’s also the Steem Power issue. This one there’s not too much to argue with, even if you break even in terms of SBD, you gain in Steem Power. I will put a couple of counter points to you though, first of all we’re ignoring the value of liquid currency. If I had kept the SBD in my wallet, and spent traded when SBD was over $8 in that first week, and buying my own SP, I would have earned a hell of a lot more SP than I gained by paying for votes. Ok, this involved trading which may or may not be in your skillset, but even for a crypto newbie like me, there were trades to be made that nobody would have missed.
Control Subject
Oh yeah, my control subject, my beautiful wifey. Well once you take out the money I spent on upvotes I netted 150 SBD during that 30 day period, while my wife earned (unlike me, fully legitimately) 179.29 SBD. She also earned SP, roughly 75% of what I did during the same period. Not bad considering she had the added spring to her step that comes with a good nights sleep, not to mention the feeling of clicking ‘redeem rewards’ and feeling like she’d earned it!
It’s not for me. Was that obvious?
I know, I’ve probably come off a little sour. I’m honestly not at all, totally the opposite in fact. This whole experiment has completely put to bed any ‘grass is greener’ thoughts I was having. I’m still confident that the posts I put out have value, and I know that the time I’m investing in this platform is time well spent. Not least because the people I’m getting to know are pretty bloody fantastic. And that’s the other reason that I feel better in myself going it alone, that is to say without the upvote bots. Rightly or wrongly I feel that by paying for votes I was mocking all of those users who were in the same boat as me, but carried on paddling away, creating content and making friends regardless of the attention they received.
There IS a guaranteed results method
I’ve already said it. Perseverance. This is a universal truth, be it sports, careers or just interests. Those who persevere succeed. I know this in my everyday life, where I my wife and I started shooting weddings with a goal of being known worldwide in the industry. It seemed ridiculous, and many people told us as much, yet we found ourselves speaking at one of our industries biggest conferences on the other side of the Atlantic. It seemed too hard to imagine, but we kept shooting and working and eventually a magazine came through the post that we had been waiting for, the worlds biggest Portrait magazine with an article naming US as two of the worlds best wedding photographers. None of that’s intended as a brag, we weren’t necessarily more naturally gifted than the hundreds of other wedding photographers who start out each week, we were just more stubborn. So that’s what I’ll do here. I’ll stick at it, keep putting in the hours, creating content and pushing myself. Trying everything to make my mark on Steemit. I have no idea if it’s the fastest way, or the best way, but I know it will feel damn good to look back at this post and feel good about how I have made it happen. Be that in a year, two years, or a decade!
Thanks for sticking with me!
Anyway it's with that I give you the new me. Well, if I'm honest I made the decision shortly after upvoting Shirley. And since then I have made more effort than ever before to be of value in this incredible community. Thank you to everyone who's followed me so far and to all of the users I now consider friends. It's something pretty special we've got here!All Images are mine and copyright belongs to me.
Please RESTEEM if you like my work.
Please Upvote my work to help support my content on Steemit
You really did go all in, woah! It was good to read your whole experience. My upvote is not worth much but I hope the resteem brings you more followers, you’re worth every single one. If you keep up the good work and put in the time and effort, I’m sure you’re going to do good in here some day :)
Thank you so much @eveuncovered :) I think your resteem must be fairly responsible for the response this one has gotten and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it! When I logged on this morning I couldn't work out how I had gone up 20 followers, but now I get it! That's 3 days worth of followers for me!
I’m so glad that you got some well deserved attention :) So it seems that my resteem has some worth, I might need to use it for good more often :)
It definitely has some worth! I had more comments on this post than any I can remember!
I recently jumped in and tried the vote buying too. I didn't lose nearly as much as you (I didn't have as much to lose) but I still found myself losing. I might still do it occasionally just as a gambling thrill, but it's definitely not the way to make your way here.
Haha well I'm glad that at least you didn't lose as much as me! It's a tricky one for sure, for me it's a no go but fair enough if it floats your boat!
Thanks for spending the time and effort to do what I was dreading. I'm very new to Steemit, and the idea of buying votes was unclean. It felt a little scammy, the money pool is only so deep. After reading your excellent post, my thoughts have been reinforced and I will simply keep doing what I do--keep posting "good" content and keep investing in this idea. Thanks again. ~Cheers
Yeah, it's a really difficult one, like I said, there's no right or wrong answer, just the right or wrong answer for YOU!
very interesting your article. Congratulations!
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it
Thank you for spending the time to write this...I am new to steem and this really speaks to me! Keep sharing and I am going to resteem this
Thanks @chrispike, really appreciate the resteem! Welcome to Steemit!
First time I've come across one of your writings. Very impressed. Thanks for your hard work. I will heed your advice. Hey at least you got one more follower out of this.
Peace
Thank you, it's always great to get a new follower and equally nice to hear you've enjoyed my writing!
Because of your effort you reach the unexpectable thing you had now, thank you for sharing your experience, I will make you as one of my inspirations, and I like your pictures and posts. :)
One thing that I learned about steemit is, do not use your sbd to promote your own posts. I spent hundreds of dollars doing so over the last 7 months, to get no where. Unless I am totally lost, I do not see the value added in doing so.
Absolutely, there's definitely no added value, my initial interest was the idea of added returns, but as you can see that didn't work out!
inspring and educational. I am a newbie here. Don't know which way is up, but I hear all this talk about easy profits. I appreciate your story and its lesson. The light you shine will help me find my way. Thank you
Thanks! I'm not sure about easy profits, like most things you get back what you put in!
Great story & beautiful images. I recognise the temptation of using all kinds of tricks and bots, but somehow it simply does not feel right using Steemit this way. All in all I think that Nigel and Phil and even Shirley must be proud of what you've learned going through the experience .
Thanks for sharing this :)
Thank you for your kind words :) It's definitely a learning experience!