I choose to not buy votes. I've nothing special to sell here, but I enjoy engaging with the community. It's taken a lot of work to build up my following, but they are people who chose to follow because of what I write rather than because I was up on the trending page. I accept that a majority of them are inactive, but there are enough to make this fun.
Steemit is a new model and people are exploring the options it offers. I tend to think the trending page is mostly trashed now as it's nothing to do with what people like. Of course it was distorted by whale votes before. Nothing is perfect. I hope the community can find some compromises. If we don't have good content then Steemit will fail eventually. We have to encourage the good creators and not just enrich the whales.
You also have over 5,000 steem power which is not loaned out and upvote your posters. If you have at least 1,000 steem power you might be able to get away without using bots. If I got up to 10,000 steem power someday there is a chance I might not need to use bots. Even at 1,000 I might not need them.
Most of my sp is delegated and I don't self vote. It's the following I built up that helps me. That took a lot of work
I think your steem power helped you build your following.
Well I had to build the following first. I only bought a tiny amount of Steem. The rest is earned
I might have been able to do everything without bots but I think things are a lot tougher now than when you signed up. I didn't buy any steem.
It is tougher and I understand why some buy votes, but we still need the good content. I'll support the stuff I see and I delegated so others can vote it up too.
I think if I had 1500 more steem power I could upvote your replies and have my votes count. ;) lol
This comment has received a 0.98 % upvote from @speedvoter thanks to: @mysearchisover.
I respect you and always have! I agree that people are trying on ideas and have different agendas.