Hi @clayboyn, this post was super interesting since I was just discussing bots the other day. I had no idea that they were being used this way and I'm still not informed enough to have a opinion on it.
So far I have only encountered voting-bot as a tool to automate my curation efforts for those I follow and want to support while not online or busy with life stuff.
What is your opinion of those bots? As a service is that harming the platform in any way? I'm interested because I value your opinion and experience and I feel I have been encouraging other users to use this, perhaps very naively?
In my opinion, auto-voting a specific user that you know puts out consistent quality content that you are going to go back and read or just want to support is fine. Curation trails where you basically give your vote to someone else is almost always a bad idea. I thought about starting to ask for people to follow my votes because I do spend the majority of my power on promoting new users, but that really isn't a solution either because the point of promoting the new users is to help keep them on the platform and gain an audience. If you do follow a curation trail, I highly advise you to check into who they actually vote for and if they are just paying themselves then it's actually better to not use your voting power at all in my opinion. Not using your power grows the reward pool and increases value in the platform where as greedy people taking your voting power to continually drain the reward pool lowers the value of the platform.
Thank you for the response. I'm glad you feel that there is space for benevolent bot use.
I had no idea what a curation trail is so thanks for the warning on that. The voluntaryist in me always wants to let people do their own thing. However I've recently join in the flagging plagiarizers.
Here's one question you might be able to enlighten me on, how do we find out what the total combined reward pool is actually worth and now that the reward window is not 24hrs anymore how often does it refresh?
Really appreciating your knowledge and experience.
There is a certain amount of steem created with every block added to the blockchain. On average a new block is added every 3 seconds. Here's a solid and fairly easy explanation of how it works.
https://steemit.com/steem/@penguinpablo/til-how-much-steem-is-added-to-the-reward-pool-per-day
Mega! Thank you so much, you're explanation is clear enough to me, but I'll go study further. Blessings :)