voting bots were originally used for profit. The promotion tab is supposed to be used for visibility.  Voting bots are not profitable anyways because the amount of bids exceeds the votes "worth" anyways.

As a newbie in this wonderful platform,  I have taken my time to study steemit,  how it operates and most of the techniques required for someone to grow in this platform. 
I have also read several guide articles by different authors in this platform but I haven't heard anyone mention about this voting bot until today by you. 
From my experience so far in steemit,  the whales are the one really enjoying based on their reputation and followers.
As newbies, you have to begin with comments and good comments at that in order to draw their attention. Even if as a newbie and one make good post, without the help of these well established people on the platform resteeeming post, the post might not really gain enough audience that will upvoted or comment.  
This is really a disadvantage,  as it might discourage the person, the boils down to the fact that patience is needed. 
I have seen a whale who just posted a picture  and wrote  unreasonable thing on it,  to my surprise in less than thirty minutes he had already made about 50dollars.
Quality content draws the attention of people to read a post but if this voting bot is used by people who don't have the creativity, then steemitbis likely to loose it's integrity as the platform that rewards creativity,  innovation and intuition. 
Steemit encourages unique ideas and frowns at plagiarism or indolency.
I really loved steemit when I joined it because if how the system operates, and I have been enjoying it so far.  
I am totally not In Support of the voting bot as it will no longer encourage creativity rather like you said above, give the lazy ones the leverage to post articles that are not meaningful.
When you have in mind that your article will only be rewarded based on the quality,  one will always tried hard to make it unique but if otherwise, they will just capitalize on their voting bot for success. 
In a nutshell,  I am not in support of the voting bot except it's use in the promotion of quality content.

Well if I have to add to the post, I think yes, voting bot is cool only when aimed at visibility.  So I think it should be the work of those incharge of bots to maintain quality before allowing the use of bots

I happen to disagree. If all the good content stops using voting bots then they would be left with a dilemma. Keep supporting garbage or find a better business model. Now I understand that never going happen. 


Steemit should not have to be about spending money just to keep up. Votes are free to earn here. Why people want to spend the money for more is just crazy. It is like walking up to my bank handing them $5 and them saying congratulations sir here is $6.5 back.  Expect that’s nothing to be happy about at all. That is called inflation. 

I think voting bots will make people lazy. If at end of the day they know they will make $50 profit on something if they spent 10 hours on it or $45 profit if they only spent 2 hours. Naturally only spending 2 hours for that kind of reward is far more amazing than 10 hours. That saved time could be filled with writing more blogs to buy more upvotes...

It is disappointing the kind of upvotes these people can buy are so huge it takes a large stakeholder to piledrive them into the ground when they are using plagiarised content, spam, or just low effort stuff that only took moments. These things leave the reward pool open to those that could not give two cents about the platform and just want to pillage and murder the reword pool and laugh at how easy it is to game the system.

I go with @nairadaddy, that voting bot has its good and bad side, but for me it has more bad than good. Newbies don't have much SBD to make their quality post trending, so they continue writing and not getting much reward for their hardwork while people who don't produce good quality post but have much SBD get rewarded. I know we use money to get money, but that shouldn't be the case for steemit platform, where people should get rewarded for quality and not SBD availabilty. 

Of course Voting bot makes good quality writers lazy, because they know once they bot, they get trending and get rewarded.

Imagine a steemit platform without Voting bot. cool right!!! Only quality posts and Influential steemians  get trending. 

@ogochukwu thanks for changing my perception, that Voting bots are for Visibility and not profitability.

Hey @ogochukwu, as I have come to realize, everything has its advantages and disadvantages as well. Voting bots are good if used well. Expectations must also be managed. It can be seen as advertizing  for visibility instead of profit making.

Seriously, its better to select specific posts to boost expecting the best. If you boost all posts, you may spend all your SBD. Lolx.

Also boost within the first 30mins for maximum exposure and appearance on the hot page.

Voting bots are good and bad. We all have the freedom of choice to use it for whatever we choose.

Cheers bro!

Its been quite a while. Hope you are good!

I wouldnt be a fan of them in general and would rather have none on operation but since they do exist and are highly used i find myself using them to give my posts a boost at the start and more visibility.
I think that posts sitting on 0c really struggle to attract attention where as posts with ten dollars makes people more curious as to why so they look. I do post and try to add good content so for me its about attracting people to it but there are plenty out there just using the bots for profit.
Its not as much an issue now as i have regular followers and commenters so i never see 0c anymore but that took a while.

I'm somewhat new here and still don't understand how voting bots work. I hope I get to learn with time.

There seems to be much focus on the people using the bots, rather than the people running them. They are the ones making money of its use, so they are in the end the ones responsible for the utter lack of quality checks. They make enough from their huge milk-cow bots, so why can't they at least put in some minimal amount of work into assuring some minimum level of quality ?  Maybe the best thing to do with our excess voting power would to only use vote bots of bot owners known to moderate, and possibly to actually downvote random "unmoderated" vote-bot upvoted content , in order to prompt those bot owners to start doing some bare minimum moderation for their bots as well. 

Look at it like spam mail and open relays. A vote bot without any moderation is like an open relay to spam. Given the marginal ROI for users, it only takes marginal downvotes to make the ROI negative for users of unmoderated bots. 

So rather than "rewarding" the bot owners for being lazy by using their unmoderated services, use the money to rent SP and downvote random  unmoderated vote bot upvoted content with it, if you want to help the platform. Oh, and to upvote content upvoted by "moderated" upvote bots.  If we can help making the ROI on moderated bot usage slightly positive while making the ROI on unmoderated, open relay spam type bots slightly negative, our SBD would truly make a difference.

thanks for sharing this wonderful information @ogochukwu.
In my opinion, voting bot is good, nothing on earth does not have good and bad side.with reference to your question, i think, it will make good writers lazy, because what ever you post, you can get good credit for it.As good steemians, we need to go out of our way to be creative and get captivating information.