I've decided to stop upvoting myself because it's not worth it
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I don't really have any problems with self-upvoting. That being said, I've realized that, as a minnow, from a financial point of view, by upvoting myself I'm actually wasting voting power and loosing potential higher rewards if I were to upvote others.
My current 100% upvote is worth 3 cents. I could give that to myself with an upvote or I could give that upvote to someone else's post and earn much more from curation rewards. Of course, that means that I will have to dedicate more focus and time to actively curate content.
My only exception to this will be my bi-monthly Steem World Journal posts.
You can think of upvoting a post like buying stocks of a promising new and upcoming company on the stock market. Applied to Steemit, that promising new company is a good quality well written post or comment, the stock that you bought is your upvote and the stock market is Steemit itself. Find that excellent content, upvote it, wait for 7 days and earn the curation reward.
Another metaphor for this could be mining for gold. :) I mentioned @fulltimegeek's quote before and I'll mention it again because I think it's suitable to this situation:
Once people realize that it's harder to mine for truth than bitcoins, they'll come flocking to STEEM.
the point of steemit is to have enough steem power to make your upvotes worth something
people who have 5000 steem power can give themselves $1 per upvote. upvoting 10x a day will usually give you 100% voting power again within 18 hours.
you can literally give yourself $10 a day, $300 a month, for doing absolutely nothing
this is why people upvote themselves
there are people on here who are currently on the hot page who can give themselves $30 in upvotes, PER upvote. thats $9000 per month, if they ONLY upvote themselves 10x a day
its a money making machine
Even in these two scenarios that you're describing, those people could earn even more than that by using more of their time for curating content. Of course, in the end in comes down to how much time you're willing to invest. Time literally is money. :)
"those people could earn even more than that by using more of their time for curating content."
Where is the data that shows this?
Steemit is like investing in an ultra-risky start-up. Since HF-19 and the reward pool draining, I think we're down to ~30-40% APR from 100% self voting. I haven't recalculated this since HF-19, when it was well over 157%.
I think these may be acceptable rates of return for such a risky investment, and I'm not sure there is anything wrong with these numbers.
That's one of the reasons why, from a financial pov, curating has become more useful.
It seems to me that you'll make less curating, though? Strictly speaking, I'm interested in the math so the incentives are in line.
Thanks for the perspective. I'm fairly new so I'm still figuring out how this all works.
Don't mention it @treebuilder. I'm still learning myself. :)
interesting point you bring here... I will have to think more about that, there is so much for me to learn using this platform. keep bring the good thoughts across @anonimnotoriu
"I could give that upvote to someone else's post and earn much more from curation rewards."
I've been looking for the data to support this, as I've mostly seen the opposite. Do you have it?
One important thing to take into consideration is that curating is a very subjective activity. Each of us is a unique individual with a mix of beliefs, opinions, points of view, ideas and life experiences. While someone might consider a post as being quality content, another might view that content as completely useless or non-sense. And that translates directly into how much each person will earn from curation.
It's more useful to give a practical example rather than a theoretical explanation based on how I understand Steemit to be currently modeled. I might be wrong, but I don't think anyone has made yet an analysis comparing a self-upvoting vs. curating scenario. I intend to create a report at the end of next month based on my personal experience.
I look forward to it.
I guess effective curation (ie where you vote something early that becomes huge) is a little less subjective. It's the skill of determining what the community will like.