Playing With Autovoting - Give Me Feedback Please! - Updated
I am voting for a LOT more people these days. They are getting MUCH smaller votes from me. Here, in my opinion, is the good, the bad and the ugly of the situation but I am curious what followers and and new readers might have to say on the topic.
We had a big upheaval in our routine the past couple weeks, leaving me with much less time to be on steemit. It happened right as I set up my first autovoting, joining the curation trails for thealliance and then qurator, then making my own fanbase. If I had not set those up, people would have gotten no votes at all from me on many days. However, since it was new to me, I had to ride the learning curve - still on that.
I am trying to keep my vote power up high enough that it has some value, but setting the percentages on the autovoter is tricky - I can't know how many people will post on any given day. So I vote until it hits auto-pause, then I turn up that baseline until I recharge and adjust my percentages again... And as those trails grow, I am sure I will have to keep tweaking it.
I like that I am supporting many, many steemians. I like that I was getting SOME votes in even when I could not sit down and properly curate but I am less than wild about voting for things I don't read. I am relying on the screening process of these groups and the good will of the members. I sort of justify it by knowing it is a small vote.
So this is where I'd like input, especially from the people I vote for. Do you think it is a better use of my vote to support as many people as possible, even with small votes with the backup of voting for pre-screened people even when I can't sit and read posts? Or are these trails just making my vote meaningless, not really helping anyone now? Do the people on the trails even notice my vote? If you are on one of my autovotes and read this, any comment about what trail you are on would be appreciated.
Thanks for checking out my post and for any feedback! Let me close with a pretty picture, because, who does not love a pretty picture? No, I am asking, I want feedback here... Who does not love a pretty picture? 😁
Image is my own / Fuji FinePix S8300
UPDATE:
Based on the feedback, I made some changes today. Here is what I am doing, and why. If anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong, I would love to hear from you. Today I unjoined thealliance curation trail. There are about 10 people in the alliance who actually interact with me, they went on my personal fanbase trail. I was upvoting 189 people and it kept my power too drained to do much manual upvoting. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be getting upvoted by only 43 people, and if they had their vote power drop (pretty much everyone does) then the autovotes do not happen. While I was getting much higher numbers of votes, I have been making less and less money per post. I realize steem is down and morale is down and all, but still... I have had two of the "big upvotes" from thealliance bot, each worth about 2 SBD, so being in the alliance gets me an occasional good upvote but the curation trail was just burning my vote power with no discernible ROI. I added the ten or so folks who actually interact with me, and dumped the trail. Maybe some day it will be worth joining, but today is not the day, it seems to me.
I am on two other trails, qurator may be on the chopping block next. When I joined, they required an upvote on "the daily qurator" post, and you had to vote with enough power to ensure it was worth a penny at payout. Then they changed it to you have to vote for EVERYTHING they post... with no self-limit on how many times they will post. At least I gained real followers with the alliance, I have not seen anyone from qurator start interacting with me. On the other hand, the qurator votes themselves at least show up on my graph of incoming voters, so that vote gives me hope of getting back my 4 Steem investment over time. There are some who were already interacting when I joined, but I don't see any return on that investment either. Their bot is supposed to be a big, fat vote, so I am trying to hang on and see if I ever get one of those, but here is the thing... I can do math.
My husband and I can stop voting for anyone or anything but each other and our account balances would grow faster than using the curation trails... not that we are going to do that, but that is the reality against which I am evaluating these services.
I follow openmic and that I do with a "charity" mindset, more like "patron of the arts" one and I don't care if I get zero return.
The other app I tried is steemfollower. It has garnered me a few votes, mostly worth less than one cent and no followers so far. It is often out of service and requires daily upvoting which makes it a bit of a grind. Every day is sometimes not possible, so I will probably drop out of that, too. I also have trouble finding stuff to upvote, they do not screen for quality and I have to sift through soft porn and stuff that I just don't want bothered with.
There ya' go... If you are someone who HAS been engaged with me and you do not start seeing upvotes from me tomorrow (recharging power today) SPEAK UP. Tomorrow I will post about how to get on my autovoter and how I am handling that end for now. Nothing is in stone, I am just trying to find something that works. Suggestions welcome.
Here is the toy I found that is putting everything into perspective for me:
http://steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=qurator&days=7
If you OWN the bot, you can make crazy money. Other people say they make money using them, but I seem to be doing it wrong, I just lose vote power and gain very low value votes.
Here is another graph:
http://steemreports.com/incoming-votes-info/?account=fishyculture&days=7
That big hunk of pie labelled @papa-pepper was from one upvote. I am not sure exactly what his vote value was, but the whole post is only at $1.46 with 42 upvotes, so it is not like he dropped a 100% on me to become my biggest supporter last week...
No upvotes from you for the past twelve days, so evidently I didn't make the cut. ;-)
As for voting bots, I'm just starting to experiment with them as well, but my voting power is usually crap, so it's a moot point. And I really prefer to vote on content I've actually read.
But from my perspective, an upvote is an upvote. Even with all but no voting power, if I come across something that really moves me, I'll upvote it, even knowing it won't bring them a dime. The show of appreciation is worth as much in many ways.
I do wish that the voting power wasn't depleted so fast, as there is a lot of great content on Steemit if you look, but then I also have evenings when it's hard to upvote ten posts on Steemfollower, because there are just so many junk posts.
And yes, I love you red, white and blue picture, as the kind of thing that floats my boat as well.
OMG thank you for speaking up, you totally made the cut...wait, let me check! OK, I just blew it. I have added you now, and tip! for speaking up. I know I missed others too, I have to go back through that list today. Thanks for the input too, I am cooking up a plan, we shall see how it works.
LOL, I figured it was an oversight, but hey, It's okay either way. We've all got only so many hours in the day.
As for your plan, I'd appreciate a heads up when the time is right, as I'm still in my infancy regarding figuring out all the various bots and how they can be used most effectively.
I started to reply to you, then I just added it to the post. It became a short novel... The Cliff notes would be, I am becoming adept in how not to use bots near as I can tell.
Jeez, you sound like me. Half of my comments are at least as long as my posts. ;-)
Very cool. I'm getting the hang of a few of them, but there are SO many more that I've yet to check out at all, so I've got a long way to go.
Ugh. Have I mentioned how much I despise autocorrect?
"Stink in my infancy." I can't even hazard a guess as to what that was supposed to mean. ;-/
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Thank you! Unexpected, but much appreciated.
@fishyculture my Rusty Art Post was upvoted by you Wednesday. I had 15 votes totaling .47 cents. 6 of those cents were my own vote.
My three most recent post do not show a vote from you.
Before my rusty art post, there is a vote from you on my Tree Tuesday post. It had 17 votes for .52 cents.
That's it for this past week. I made nine post and only two post had upvotes from you. I appreciate any votes of any amount. Thank you so much for your encouragement and support.
I love your Red, white and blue pretty picture!
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Thank you! tip! for the awesome detailed feedback - I can go back and see what was going on. It is NOT a good thing if I am watering my vote down and still running the VP so low no one even gets a watered down vote!
Thank you!
I reckon as many small votes as possible to spread the love. I'm in the happy position of having enough time to curate manually so I'm not on any trails. I am on your auto vote list though for which I thank you kindly.
Thanks for the feedback! I decided to give the trails a try, tried joining a couple of prescreened upvote groups. When Steem was up, I actually had enough vote power to feel like I could do more good for newbies by doing so. I am not sure I was correct, I am watching it all play out and trying to tweak things here and there... I don't know the "right" answer, I just try different things and see what happens!
I think any vote no matter how small will give motivation especially to the new steemit newbies like myself.
THANK YOU. That is sort of how I still feel, any little vote is encouraging. But I can't read the minds of my followers! Recharging my vote, that tiny one will help your rep score, and have a tip! for the input!
Thanks,
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I'm in favour of making one's vote count. You are giving more crypto overall if you don't deplete yourself below, say, 85%. Anything less and you're spreading it thinner and thinner, and giving more and more of it back to the reward pool. Less is more.
I want to encourage quality. If I'm encouraging quantity, that's not going to benefit Steemit in the long term.
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The balance I HOPED to strike - still not there - is to be able to autovote a large number of people for a small amount, saving enough vote power to upvote comments more generously.
I have not even considered the pay for vote stuff, I joined curation trails where the members are prescreened for at least some minimal quality level. Not really sure it is effective, the people replying are not the people I am autovoting on these curation trails. They either don't notice I am upvoting or are not reading this post, but I am definitely getting some direction from the feedback. Thanks for the reply. tip!
I just wrote about this type of voting on Wednesday, getting very upset about it. But then I'm not in it for the money. These peanuts I'm raking in don't even feed the budgerigar. I get how you want to stay in the loop and make a difference. You have to start small if you want to save the human race, but know that here, ultimately, you are playing into a corrupt system that still runs on money and not love. Then again giving can be loving.... only I would hate to see us drop coins into tincans out of habit like the Spanish do (instead of improving the benefit system).
Hope you make the right decision. Listen to your heart and you will know how to identify with which team.
That red-white-and blue photo reminds us that small and humble can also stand marked and proud.
Thanks for the feedback. I want you to know I started off in 100% agreement with you. It is only recently that I began to see some value in the autovotes, and that is what I am doing is actually using the service and evaluating the effect on my account, and on my followers. I want to encourage as many as I can, but is the tiny bit of autovote that you can count on more encouraging than the occasional bigger vote with comment and knowing I actually read the post?
From an esoteric point of view, clairvoyantly seen, if you like, the answer has to be no, for it only feeds into an hardening and enflaming system. But this may beside everybody's point here. As long as it feels good to you you are doing the right thing foy YOU.
I am not interested in the value of the upvote. What I am interested in is: are people actually reading my posts? Are they getting value out of the post? Do they find it enjoyable and interesting? A bot vote can't tell me these things.
Thank you. I agree. This post was demonstrative. Most of the people who replied are ones I already interact with regularly - or ones who I did not have on my auto-upvote. The people getting the auto-upvotes from me never even noticed the post - or my upvote, probably.
I think I would use an auto-voting service if I don't have time to be on Steemit. But as it is, I ran out of voting power all the time. And I rather vote on posts that I have read - or at least that they are submissions to the freewrite...
Yeah, I am giving tiny votes to not run out of vote power, and I am not trying to run anything like the freewrite!
I manual upvote , as I do you! (and than)..but last two days I have people auto upvote me and it is NOT working? am I alone? what is your take?
Everything has been a little buggy the last couple days, I have seen people I thought ought to be upvoted who were not, but part of that was my vote power was lower than I realized. I just added you to my list, so there is another autovote that you may or may not get... lol! I am getting the hang of it, I think it will be fairly consistent.
thank you.!! and your support appreciated!
Yes i think its better to help people by upvoting them
But lots of people with small votes or a few people with larger votes?
It may compensate for the fuelling I speak of above if you pick your favorites and give them what YOU think they deserve. This may not be what you like best but what convenes best with YOUR philosophy. Are you going to support those who really need the money (think of the starving Venezuelans and join something like #onnovocks's project or save up for a wheelchair for #gyn's child with Moebius Syndrome in the Phillipines ). Or are you going to support creative initiatives? Homesteaders and environmentalists who may save the planet yet? African agricultural cooperatives? The mentally ill (depression etc) who find a new lease of life here? Or just bright sparks who cheer up your day? All and any are valid! As long as they are real people (and not here to exploit us).
Choose wholeheartedly, I say (100% votes). If you do it any other way, you will make yourself a judge of quality content, which is not fair for those who do their best with their limited capacity (say, with a language barrier or a limited amount of education or resources/material). Why would one photo without text deserve to earn less? (Hours of time and loads of investment in equipment may have gone into it, and they still haven't had their breakthrough, or they wouldn't be here). My reason for voting manually is NOT to be automatic, which may mean I may miss you in my feed, but that makes for a wise lesson: if it makes me feel bad, it tells me you deserve my attention and so that's what I should be giving you. Otherwise I might be buying off my guilt, or want to appear politically correct. Which ALSO has its place, but here it soon runs aways with itself... and things end up impersonal and cold.
If you want to keep it humane and not become robotic, in any case you have to reevaluate your list regularly as people develop or change course, and you have to chose PEOPLE you love. Unless, of course, you are playing the market, then you have to be a lot smarter.... (which is not so smart in my books, in the long run).
How about you check out my blog and see what I am doing before you make assumptions? I have been supporting Abbijulie best I can. You don't even know her or her story, do you? I volunteer for YouAreHOPE. Know anything about them?
You have 158 followers. I have 1200. When I had half this many followers, I did things they way you do. When you get as many as I have, you will start to realize some people deserve upvoted, even for a picture with no text. My roommate spent the last 2 weeks tending a dying friend, could hardly post at all. If she is having the kind of day where throwing a photo up is all she can muster, she probably needs my support MORE on those days.
I is not as black and white as you seem to think.
Thanks for the input, you can keep that judgmental tone.
I said exactly what you are saying. No assumptions were made. I credit the single photo understanding the circumstances just like you do. So what's the anger for?
The "You" I use is generic. Maybe you thought I was talking about your situation. I don't know your situation.
Yep, that was it. It felt very accusatory. Thanks for clarifying. Panties unknotted.