Votes and Steem Circlejerkmunities

One of the rules that you'll hear people tell you and others over and over again in regards to the Steem blockchain is to not ask for upvotes. Don't beg for upvotes. And yet as soon as someone creates a community or group, one of the first things that they say is a requirement is to upvote the posts of the community.

Excuse me, what?

Just because you start a community does not give you the right to ask the members for upvotes, even if you are asking on behalf of others.

One of the things that began to irk me about @qurator was them requiring you to upvote their posts. Of course, they did this in a tier system, so it kind of wasn't technically required, but if you didn't upvote multiple posts per week of their's, then the upvote that you received from their bot was very small. Of course, it's better than nothing. You can easily join and just get the tier 0 upvote, and it's a pretty good investment.

I didn't apply to @qurator because it was a good investment though. I applied because it was the closest thing that I could find to paid curation. I thought that if I joined, and I posted really good content, I could possibly get in The Daily Qurator. I read The Daily Qurator as often as I could, and upvoted it, depending on the content in it. Often there was maybe 1 or 2 good posts in it, but nothing astonishing. It started to feel more and more like they weren't trying to find good content by the members, but rather simply featuring new users, perhaps even randomly.

Why support a community that is a farce? Anyone can run a community that just upvotes a central account that runs a bot. It didn't feel like they were really doing anything good for Steem. Were their standards even high enough? Or were the standards just that they not post absolute crap?

Then, slowly, it started to fall apart. They had relied on paid delegations that began to expire, and in an attempt to keep those delegations, they started to require more and more of their users.

First, it was that you upvote 5 or 7+ of their posts at 1 cent, or 100% if your vote wasn't quite 1 cent, for tier 1 or 2 respectively. This was checked on Sunday. That didn't really sit well with me, because it's basically taking 1 vote per day that could be going to good content, and putting it on their shitty newsletter, which occasionally featured some real crap. It was also encouraged to auto-vote, due to being calculated on Sunday, rather than on payout or something like that. I prefer to vote manually.

Then they moved all the tier 0 to another account, so they would have more VP for their "supporters".

Then they tried to get rid of the whole upvote system in favor of paying for tiers. You used to be able to pay for tiers, but they had gotten rid of it to try to get more delegations. Guess it didn't work out. People threw a huge hissy fit, and they walked it back a little, but by that time, it was simply too much for me. Death of 1000 cuts.

They moved tier 1 and 2 off to another bot, and to even get into these tiers you have to pay monthly or upvote their account 7+ times with a certain number of cents on your upvote.

I could do this. My upvote is worth more than 5 cents, and I already had been delegating to them, but I removed it after they had tried to change things. It was simply too much for me.

I can give my upvote to good content, or people that make good comments on my posts. Why vote on their compilations of shitty posts by new users? Ironically I have continued to follow them and will upvote their posts when they has a few good posts, but I haven't, because they haven't been good.

I also belonged to another group, @steemitbloggers. A friend had invited me, but I got a bad taste in my mouth from the first second I was there. You had to put their logo on all of your posts, and use their tag, and upvote and comment on one user's post per day. Of course, there were benefits. You could post your own posts in their discord, and you could get support by a bot, and eventually featured in a newsletter that they started running.

I'm not really good at keeping up with daily tasks though. I did do surprisingly well for a long time though. I upvoted almost every day on someone's post, and often upvoted more than once per day, so I think I stayed ahead for a long time. Then one day my browser crashed, and I lost the tab for the community. Without the tab open, I forgot to upvote for a week or more. Then I remembered...and I didn't feel like it. I didn't want to go through their posts to find one to upvote. Often I would find some good posts, but also occasionally I would have to go through a few shit ones, occasionally even members that had no clue about what copyright was, or how to cite images. I grew tired of it and annoyed.

It was alright for a while though, since I had a big pool of posts to choose from when I had high VP, so I wouldn't hit the dreaded 100%.

My upvote is my own to spend.

You can't simply require users to vote on your shit or your community's shit. That is only a tiny step up from those assholes that spam comment on posts asking for upvotes or follows. You simply created a community so that the upvote begging is more distributed.

There are many ways that you can run a community...but I'm not sure I have seen one that is run properly yet here on Steem. So far they all just seem like big circle jerks where eventually you get hit in the eye.

_{Image copyright Terry Johnston, October 21, 2006, CC BY 2.0 (source)}