Why I think self voting is okay.
Since I first got on Steemit I've been debating self voting, and honestly, I've never had a problem with it.
When you're a minnow, your only vote might be yourself.
So go ahead and look in the mirror, and give yourself a shiny gold star, because you're awesome!
If you work hard on your content, you deserve to be rewarded for it. Fuck this bullshit people are saying about entitlement. It sucks to work hours on something, and then get nothing. So you click that little box to automatically upvote yourself, and you upvote yourself. Yeah! Good job.
Yeah, you click the little box, below the post...it's built into the interface to automatically upvote yourself, and it stays checked, forever, if you check it once. I actually planned on unchecking it like over a fucking week ago, and I kept fucking forgetting to!
Think about that for a second.
It's built into the Steemit interface to upvote yourself.
Yet these people are going around and verbally abusing people, and flagging them, for just upvoting themselves.
I've flagged a lot of people, for legitimate reasons. Primarily spam, but also overrated content. If I think you should have tried harder for the amount of rewards you received, I will give you a flag. Occasionally I will give a 1% flag, just as a message to work harder.
Image used under Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. (source)
Now, of course, there are entitled people. If you're receiving a fuckton for shit content, chances are likely you feel entitled to what you think you're going to receive.
I started writing a story the other day, and I got curried on part 1, and then Steem price skyrocketed, and it's now around $300. Did I work fucking hard for that? Fuck yeah. And every part of the story after. After one of them, I felt like crying tears of blood. While writing certain parts, I actually got so into the story that I did make myself cry at least twice. Every one of those stories in that series took me hours. Are the ones that followed worth more than the face value on them? Probably. But maybe SBD will shoot up to $1000, and I'll be a millionaire.
Am I entitled to that money though? Honestly, no. I fucking cried. I worked until I could barely keep my eyes open multiple times. I fucking stayed up til 4am more than once. I pulled an all nighter because of the adrenaline rush after posting one of the stories and getting feedback and stuff, and then the next day, on no sleep, I cranked out another story. And you know what? I don't feel fucking entitled to that payout. But if you flagged me, I would fucking cry, and I would feel fucking horrible, because I really did work my fucking ass off.
But, eventually comes a point where you vote is worth more, and if you post enough, you can upvote more people with that vote. I've come to that point where I've decided FOR MYSELF that I will stop upvoting my own posts. It's gonna be hard, but I'm gonna do it. When you work your ass off, you want to be rewarded for it.
You also want people to tell you that you did a good job, and show that they fucking care.
But you can upvote at least one more post per day by someone else with that vote.
But that's the voter's decision, not your's. You can't declare who someone votes for.
Do I wish all the people voting for the shit in trending would stop doing it? Honestly, some of it, hell yeah. Some of it I like. A lot of it's over rewarded. But that's supposed to be controlled by flagging.
People do need to be responsible for their own votes, but it's not your job to abuse them into voting the way you want.
Curation is hard as fuck, especially once you get a huge vote. You gotta split that vote among a ton of people! When you're a minnow, you get 10 votes a day. When you're a whale, you can split that among 100 people, and still be giving them big rewards. But to find and read 100 good posts is fucking hard work.
Of course, delegation and curation can help with that.
To me, it has nothing to do with self-voting, it has to do with voting for shit.
Is what you voted for shit? No? Then bang on! But it would be nice if you spread the love. But that's totally your choice.
It's also kinda bullshit when people talk about entitlement in this regard, because you are actually entitled to use your vote how you wish. They are not entitled to your vote. But they are entitled to their own vote, including a flag.
So, no, you aren't entitled to the rewards from a post, and people can downvote, but you are entitled to be able to use your vote.
Note: I finally did fucking remember to untick upvote, which is good, because this is my third post of the day, including one that took over 8 hours.
See, here's the thing about the self upvote.
Unless you are in the top 10% of SP holders on Steemit, your self upvote is going to be less valuable than pretty much anything else that you could be doing. At least if you are engaged in posting "a reasonable amount," and I think that we can agree that a reasonable amount is less than eight posts per day, which is where the system itself begins to limit the rewards that you can get. That feels more than generous enough to me, at least for mid length content.
The only thing that a self vote unless you are a gigantic whale impacts is whether or not some other people can get just a little bit more reward for curating you than otherwise. At the level of SP that people like you and I, and the vast, vast array of users on the platform possess, that is a really small amount of value. And the major impact is if you take the first vote before anyone else can get to it.
If you self vote after that first hour, just to be safe – you won't affect anyone else's rewards on your post. There is even less argument from anyone who is being reasonable and arguing from a position of rationality that you would be incurring harm or impacting someone else unnecessarily. You will gain a very slight difference in potential rewards by passing up on that first vote on something you posted, and the amount is truly minuscule, by and large.
As a result, I literally cannot come up with a good reason not to upvote your own content – but only after the first hour. I like to think of that very, very slight loss in income that I pass up on by not taking the first curational vote as a very tiny advertising cost. Some of the big players who like to play very tight margins like to get that optimum vote in. If I don't take it, they're more likely to and that their vote is a lot larger and more valuable than my own at that point.
Right now, I've settled on a sort of rhythm on a roughly every other day schedule. If I look and see how much voting power I have after voting up the content that I have found that interests me for the day, and I have more than 75% left, I will go to my blog posts or my comments and start dropping 100% votes until I get down to roughly 75% VP, at which point I stop because it will take most of a day to regenerate that VP back up to reasonable levels. On top of that, I have made my usual upvote on content that I like 20%, because frankly I think that 10 votes a day is ridiculously low, I want to reward more people and spread the value that I can bring to 50 posts and comments a day, and that adjustment allows me to do just that. And most days I have enough percentage left to drop the rest on myself.
From where I sit that seems like the maximum amount of value that I can bring to content on the blockchain and to myself.
Now, whether I believe that down votes are an effective means of policing the blockchain and whether it's reasonable to make the decision that someone "doesn't deserve what other people have decided to give them" is a debate of a different color, and I believe I can make a persuasive argument that it is almost always more valuable to the community as a whole to take that VP that you would have otherwise burnt on downloading someone and spend it on upvoting content that you really do want to support, which instead of removing overall value ends up increasing overall value, rewarding people that you like, and making exactly the same change to the reward pool distribution that you would have otherwise – and possibly more if the value of your down vote was larger than the potential earnings of your target.
But that's an efficiency argument and it's for another day.
If we accept that "code is law," as other people have suggested, then given that self voting is possible – it must be acceptable. If it's acceptable, then we can do it. If there are rational, fiscal trade-offs for doing so, let's talk about those in the context of how much they're actually worth.
Which is just a very wordy and long-winded way to say: I am in agreement with you for the most part, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Did you just lex me?
Am I a verb now? Because that would be awesome.
I only know two other people who have become verbs. Mav, who was incredibly famous many, many years ago on FurryMUCK for consistently putting private, highly sexual chat accidentally in public broadcast, and my buddy Eric, who has been verb for his constant efforts to climb up any sort of object or geographic feature in every game that we've ever played together.
So if I'm now a verb, I'm really excited about this. It means I've made a difference in the world.
Yes, I did lex you. Absolutely.
I've thought about this before. It would be cooler if the self vote actually only became active after a specified length of time. That way, the auto-vote actually rewards the curators. Also why upvote bots should all have time settings.
From what I understand though, in the next hard fork, it's gonna change, where you don't get curation at all for your own post. It goes back into the pool. So in effect, you're giving a bit of extra curation to all of them for upvoting you.
I wouldn't say it's the only thing it effects though. It means you have less voting power for one, as I said.
But for those that actually do work hard, it's an act of desperation.
It is, but I've still decided to try to vote for more, even if it kills me, and curate more, and actually try to lower my vote on some, so I can spread my vote out more to others.
Literally just said that before reading this part. :P
I am in agreement with you as well.
You also make a persuasive argument for being more careful with my flagging, as should others. And puts the flag armies in a whole new light...
But, those rewards are also simply redistributed. Problem is that honestly, so many are doing a shitty job curating.
So, you're right, better to just try to curate some good content, because just returning it to the reward pool doesn't mean it's going to someone undervalued.
ok, if you decided to stop upvoting yourself, I need to do it for you :) Thanks for your upvote, it really made a difference. I decided to stop using bots for promotion, it turned out that it become really hard to be noticed without this boost. I put lots of time into creating each post. I start from scratch and build object, then photograph it and finaly I can post about it. It sometimes takes few weeks to create single post :) I am happy you noticed it!
Yeah, few times do people see the effort people put in. A stupid post the other day on making a bagle sandwich that I made took almost an hour to make the sandwich, then a few hours to go through the pictures, and write the post. I pretty much treated it like a photo shoot. Because many of us are trying our best.
You made an excellent point, self-voting for promoting our post is built in the posting app and doing so is fine. Just self-voting without upvoting others are the users entitled for a flag.
Well yeah, it's kinda a responsibility put on the users, to curate content. If you don't have the time, you can follow a curation trail.
I don't think they should be verbally abused for it though. Just flagged until they understand that you disagree with their voting habits. XD
thing i dont understand is how relevant is effort and time spent on writing a post when its about rewards.
personally, i will always give upvote to raw content, straight outta head, with typos and unfinished thoughts.
perfectly tailed, illustrated and written articles i can find everywhere. they all lack authenticity, as they are made for views, clicks, upvotes, likes and traffic. and its obvious.
its kind of material we can find on all mainstream media news sites.
what most of the authors of steemit lacks, especially trending authors, is their own personal opinion about the subject they are working on. I mean, its impossible to spend hours on something and not having opinion. that makes it article written for clicks. And market is full of these.
Wow, that makes me feel better about how I write things! I usually can't stare so much on the monitor else my eyes hurt so I don't really proofread my posts that much... I worry that this might be the reason why people do not like or follow my posts but you have given me a different light and I will certainly do my best effort to every post as long as my ability can handle it. :)
i dont think thats the reason. theres not much people who are upvoting interesting or original posts. they do, but inside their jerking circles.
most of them struggle to make an article which will look decent enough for automated rewards they receive anyway.
I certainly understand. I'm a minnow and I currently have no one who actually like my posts... I would definitely cry if they flag me for upvoting my post. But when I told them I do that, people call me an ass for doing so and by that... I stopped upvoting my recent posts because I don't want to be flagged if ever they see what I did. :(
Minnows can only do a drop in the bucket unfortunately...but I think finding an extra post that's deserving of that small reward is good, even if it's not a huge reward.
I am under the impression that the automatic self upvote from when you post only effects curation of that self upvote, and not for anyone else that votes on your post afterwords.
The upvote is made at the time of post, and so that vote is elligible for zero curation. Then other people that vote will still get their normal curation cut. I haven't gone digging through any code to verify this, but it seems to be the general consensus.
I think the majority of the uproar isn't about curation rewards though, so much as people not voting for others.
Someone who posts once per day and upvotes it has 10% self voting. That's a little high. They post more, it's even higher. But they might still be regularly taking time out to curate.
The worst offenders are the ones that upvote their own comments. That is definitely taking away from curation. Hopefully it's only a small percentage. Some actually rent delegation just for this. I guess to each their own.
Thanks for that quote, though it's still a little ambiguous.
Seems like this would be a self solving problem, these solely-self voters would never grow their network and increase their non-self incoming votes. If they're already a high rep, maybe they feel they've earned it?
I don't have regular time to curate, if I'm lucky, I have time to read some of the stuff in my feed and upvote that before I have to run off and do some other task.
There's an attitude that the platform allows it, so it must be okay. Well, physics allows me to punch my neighbor in the face, but I don't think it's a good idea. And, if these individuals truly feel their comment was worth a certain basic value, I guess that's actually in-line with the platform.
Personally, I'd self upvote more, but I keep forgetting to go back and do it. Plus, I generally run my VP too low to be able to waste the points on myself.
I think the real problem is based on a series of false premises in the system.
Some examples:
That having more SP means you've put more into the community.
That if you have a ton of SP, that you'd even want to curate.
That just because you have SP, you should be the one to determine what is and isn't good content.
As many always point out, yourself included, many just don't have the time.
Bots and similar projects have also proven to be highly effective generators of SP and SDB.
Also, some people heavily into crypt seem to like some really shitty crypto posts.
I'm so new that I hadn't even considered this as to when I post something. I'm glad I had read this or I might have been flagged without even understanding why. I figured I'd vote for me if no one else does. 😎 Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I'm still trying to do some research on the way this all works before posting. Soon though.
For a minnow, someone probably won't waste their flag on you, but they'll certainly talk about flagging people for self voting, and how detestable it is, and blah blah blah. Basically just shaming them into voting the way they want them to.
Very well stated , I just pointed out the exact opposite a while ago, that I do not think we should have selfvoting. I will now proceed to adopt your argument as my own.
Thank you.
Many of us get mad at the whales "abusing" the system in our viewpoint.
No matter what your viewpoint though, I think you shouldn't become abusive over it, because they are just doing what they see as the most profitable.
If we wanna encourage more better curation, we have to modify the current system a bit.