RE: How To Use Me - Introduction & Guide
After reading this over and then sleeping on it so that I had a chance to let it all sink in, I've decided that this service is not for me and that it is not a good thing. The reason that I say this is because now no one will be able to use @randowhale without using your service, thus you are extorting a fee off of the work that @randowhale is doing. It is like standing at the door of a specialty shop and forcing people to pay you a fee before they will be allowed to enter, which is wrong. I hope that you will voluntarily take down this service and use your talents to create something good that will add to Steemit and not take away through some form of extortion. There are probably plenty of other people who do not feel as I do about it, and I may be thinking of it in a wrong way and with a wrong attitude myself. But for me, as long as your service is in use I will bypass the @randowhale service.
I appreciate your feedback but I think you've misunderstood this post and the service that I'm offering. I will give you a simple analogy to better understand my service. Right now sending bids to randowhale is like waiting for a store to open for Black Friday Sales, there are hundreds of other people waiting in line before and after you and no one is going to follow the queue once the door opens (randowhale wakes up). My service is that I have a list of the items you want (your post and 1 sbd/steem bid fee) and will be standing in line on your behalf, going into the store and trying to get your item(rando's upvote on your post). For doing so I am charging a small fee. I see nothing wrong in doing this. However, I will make a new post to better explain my service and fees. I am in no way trying to extort fees off of randowhale and no one is obligated to use me as the only way to get an upvote from randowhale.
Thanks for the added explanation and I understand what you are saying. For now I'll stay on the sidelines and see what others think. I am using the bots because they are here, they are not breaking any current steemit rules, and they are helping me to get a good start. But personally I think that all of the upvote bots should be eliminated and only approved information bots should be allowed.
I appreciate what you and others are trying to do and if I were smart enough I would probably be doing the same thing, I also am thankful for the much needed boost that I'm getting from the upvote bots. But I do think that they hurt the overall spirit of what Steemit should be and turn the focus more towards the money side and not towards the creation side where it rightfully should be. I would not be against the elimination of the ability to self upvote also for the same reasons.
So I'm not trying to completely condemn what you are doing and if there are no rules against it then i wish you well with it. But I'm barely comfortable using the upvote bots themselves because I have seen some negative comments about them, and I would be even more uncomfortable using your service.
The right way to decide these things is through the governing process. If something is hurting Steemit or is causing people difficulty or grief then it should be corrected with rule and or software changes and corrections. As long as there are no rules against something and no one is directly injured by it, then I'm not going to hold it against anyone who takes advantage of an opportunity.
Thank you for your understanding.