@tarazkp, our conversations over the past few days convinced me. I removed my delegation from the upvote bot. I will say I do believe I chose a healthy contributing member of Steem to delegate to, and because he was, and is, actively encouraging and supporting minnows on Steemit, I would consider delegating again in the future.
However, I think you are right that we need to be more proactive about making this place great, and I can be more proactive by using my 2300 SP to incentivize good content directly, hand picking quality content and providing my upvote. In so doing, hopefully I can encourage others
to cancel their delegations and instead use it intentionally to reward quality on Steemit.
Bots are necessarily bad, however it seems true to me that the more people who use their SP intentionally and deliberately to encourage and reward quality and sincerity on this platform, the better.
So you convinced me. I undelegated. In a few days I will have ALL my SP back, and I am excited to use it for the betterment of Steemit.
Don't blame me for this. I am trying to get people to earn and power up however they can at the moment without being too much of an asshole by sharing some back also. The bots are one way to do this but my issue with the current bots is that they are too often being used on content that is very low quality or, does not deserve the level of rewards they are getting voted to.
If instead of voting average to 500 dollars they voted 10-15 articles (even average ones) to $30-50 it would be a massive difference in distribution but, that is not how they are working. The people stacking bot vots on top of each other have a pretty egotistical view of the value of their content. Very few of the boosted posts deserve to be taking so much from the pool but, it doesn't mean they couldn't get something. Perhaps a bot will come along that is a middle point.
The bots aren't going anywhere until at least the Hardfork, communities and SMTs can change the way content is classified. Do what you can to grow and help, don't be 'too much' of a dick until then :)
wise words