I am surprised how many people are using Steemit as an investment. I also put some money into STEEM Power, and want it to go to the moon, yet I am not going to use scripts, and voting schemes, to inflate my wallet.

Why doing it might be a good thing

I understand that just by buying STEEM Power you are increasing the value of STEEM, and strengthening the network, as the more money people stake, the more difficult it is to break. If you are using a good voting bot, that votes for the articles that you like anyway, you are also helping to reward content creators. At the end of this article I am going to post a link to a Steemian that gives a valid explanation of why people should be encouraged to do that, and have more intelligent bots available to it.

Why I don't do it, though

My views are rather unique; I haven't yet found on Steemit anybody who promotes the same ideas, and even if I did find them, then probably my own blog would have not been necessary. I go to my favourite tags, and I select the 'New' section as opposed to 'Trending', because I don't want the selection of the articles to be affected by other people's votes. I do not care about voting exactly 10 times per day, although I would probably receive a greater curator's reward if I did that, but I want to retain full voting power when I want to reward content that I think a robot would not find. On YouTube I actually mostly watch the content that is recommended to me by YouTube robots, but not even half of the recommended videos, and even when I do watch something, I often do not want to reward the authors. I often watch videos of people brutally killing mice, with the intention of reporting them as animal abuse, but I don't want to train robots in thinking that this is the content I really want people to publish, or be paid for.

Why automated voting breaks Steemit

I often notice articles published probably specifically in order to have bots vote for them. Like the article called 'Are people still using Steemit?' with only two characters in content:

??

I replied by joking:

No, I don't think anybody is using it anymore ;) People are just posting dumb articles, like this one, and have bots voting for them ;)

(A bot voted for the article 16 minutes after posting).

Enter ARK

ARK can be held on a hardware wallet, is not time-locked, you only have to cast one vote in a lifetime, and the vote remains valid forever, without decaying, you get paid once a week or once a day, depending on the delegate you choose, and you get extra bonuses (free transactions, or part of the block reward going towards new users) depending on your choice of the delegate. I do not intend to store in STEEM Power more than a couple of hundreds of STEEM, because a key that is not stored in a hardware wallet is not secure. (Full disclosure: At the moment I do not hold any ARK, but I do own some STEEM, and I use mostly bitcoin for payments, as far as cryptocurrency is concerned).

The opposite view

In this blog I often present views that are contrary to mine, to emphasize that they are also valid. I am following @phoneinf who posts valid explanations (in a series of videos) on why tokens should be used to automatically reward content creators, as opposed to just earning interest for holding them. I still try to make sure that for my every vote content creators receive at least a couple of cents. Yet I wouldn't put my life savings into STEEM, as I do not want to keep a large sum of money in a hot wallet. I prefer voting manually, as delegating my votes to robots wouldn't give me an incentive to discover new content. Yet when somebody does publish good content, and I've been following them for months (whether on YouTube, and manually donating bitcoin to them, or on Steemit, and voting for them, also manually), and I think that I will continue to vote for their every post, I wouldn't mind if a robot did it for me.