I'm not one to shy away from poking the bear. I once made a post on a message board for mom's where I heavily criticised the bad parenting advice being given and threw in some admonition for the anti-vaxers while I was there.
I'm not trying to poke the bear today, but I half expect there to be consequences.
I was looking at the returns that people were getting from using various upvote bots this week and was surprised to see how regularly people lose money on them.
I've used bid bots twice and received a good return on them, but I've avoided a couple of bots when I saw that they were oversubscribed with bidders. I've since learned that the use of bots is somewhat controversial, but I'm not going to go into that here (I recommend taking a look at this post by @stellabelle). I just want to give fair warning to fellow minnows who may not realise what they're getting into.
My Observations
I took these screenshots from the Steem Upvote Bot Tracker yesterday. All of the amounts shown are in USD rather than SBD.
The two above show a profit before the deductions for curation, but this next one looks rather painful - a loss of almost $450 before curation!
A return of -47.71% isn't even the worst that I've seen. There were two occasions on which I saw a very popular bot return -79%.
While writing this post, I had a look at the bot tracker and saw a bot that was 5 minutes away from making a payout that was on course to exceed 150%. With two minutes remaining, that dropped to 53%. In the end, bidders got -0.95% as there were a couple of late additions in the dying seconds.
Another small bot had only 5 bids with two minutes remaining, and a projected return of 74.24%. With one minute remaining, an extra bid was added, bringing the final return down to 47.26%.
Safety First
As you can see, you need to have your wits about you. Even if you watch the bots carefully, it's possible that several people could make transfers in the last few seconds and bring the returns down to negative territory.
Do you feel like gambling? I don't.