RE: The Daily Bragging-Post about how many people I vote for!
I have mixed feelings about your voting strategy.
First the parts I like:
It shows generosity of spirit, and as you point out above it means a lot more to them than it costs you. It's great that you look for newbies and throw them a bone to incentivize their growth.
It shows you care about the community and the growth of the Steemit platform too. If we only vote for those in our echo chamber not only does that not foster our own growth it also limits the adoption of the platform.
A vote from an established user is a personal gesture that helps newbies feel they matter, that they're recognized and a part of this great community.
Please note I have great respect for you and think about what you say, and reflect on the impact you're having on Steemit, which IMO is very positive. However, I offer my opinion here for consideration for the future character of the platform. I don't want it to evolve into a place known for shallow people that are only interested in popularity, money or their selfish interests and disregard the bigger picture of what Steemit is all about.
That takes care to encourage only the desired behaviors and withhold incentives for undesired ones. It also requires being responsible to use voting power wisely and not indiscriminately, as well using the stick rather than the carrot (downvote) when a user, app or guild causes harm to the community or acts in opposition to the success of the platform.
I was a Steemvoter user and learned firsthand the problems associated with vote automation. I changed my posting key and no longer use that service. I have yet to add my posting key to AutoSteem, and I may not. I am happy for now using it as a different way to browse Steemit, not for vote automation.
Any delegation of your voting power, be it through a guild, voting service like Steemvoter, AutoSteem or even a bot entails risks. Have you @fyrstikken considered the risks involved with your bot? Are you confident the bot will always vote for users that will help the platform? I'm not saying "bot voting is always bad", I can see a bot programmed to vote for brand new users once as a way to acknowledge them and provide a warm welcome as a good bot, I see no harm in that.
Now for the contrary:
Your labeling "Picking favorites" as selfish maybe "so last year" but so what? That label carries the message being discriminatory is not good. Granted your focus was on big whales who are trusting others to encourage a narrower set of users than just voting for newbies but I see that as helping to raise the standards of the information and overall reputation of the quality of the content here and that is good for everyone.
How is voting for others if you want them to vote for you not selfish? I would hope that people vote for others not for what they can "get in return", but for how the content they're voting for provides them and the community value.
Your article is focused on growing the number of users but not the quality of users. A balanced perspective is missing here. Both aspects are important for the long term success of Steemit. Diversity of users is also good, but that requires everybody doing their part to encourage their own preferred set of users. If each of us do that diversity and quality within such community subdivisions will grow organically. I hope the user interface will reach a level of maturity soon to help in this regard, so that newbies can "find their tribe" within the steemit world where they feel at home and unhindered to contribute to the culture of that group.
My bot runs on my own computer by me, it is not run on a and others that voluntarily will vote for everyone will of course upvote (with a very small percentage) every post that is made, but counter-mechanisms like @cheetah will of course have more power to downvote plagiarism and re-distribute our vote in those cases.
Steemit.com has too few active users at the moment, There are 123,000 accounts on my upvote-list and only 505 Posts were made during the past 24h period. Picking favourites and ignoring everyone else has not worked in our favour which is to grow this platform so that there are more content-creators. If you look here, you can see how few votes people throw: https://steemdb.com/labs/rshares - @curie is not even on the list, @ned is #2 with 43 votes and @blocktrades is #1 with 29 votes... etc... Those numbers should grow to 3-4 digits imho but at a smaller %
Q1. Do you want people to vote for you?
Q2. Do you vote for other people?
I am sure everyone want people to vote for their posts - in fact, it is a fact - you all want your posts to get votes, so let me just answer YES for you on question number 1.
On Question number 2, Do you vote for other people, well - according to: https://steemdb.com/@full-steem-ahead/curation you vote for 1 post every once in a while, so I will answer your question and say: NO, you do not vote for other people.
So what is more selfish? Voting for people or not voting for people? - https://steemdb.com/@full-steem-ahead/authoring 74 people voted for your last post and made you $10 bucks, I would say you have some serious voting to do to break even :)
Yes, I am focused on growing the number of users, the quantity of curation creators. A Balanced perspective exists in the fact that others are focused on quality when they see it, or downvote plagiarism/spam/etc.
Remember - that when you upvote everyone with a small percentage, you still have most of your voting-power to upvote things you really read and really like.
You can call it a symbolic vote if you like, it is still a vote and we win more people to create more stuff.
Thanks for answering for me, I couldn't have misrepresented myself nearly as well as you did LOL.
I'll admit I'm selective, that's my main point here. I'll also admit that since I stopped using SteemVoter my voting has dropped off dramatically. I need to get back in the habit of voting manually. For example, I failed to vote for your article, but I have corrected that mistake, not that you'll benefit from it. That's probably why I didn't vote for it when I read it.
Your comment here also reflects the apparently limited history of steemdb, so when you make a blanket statement that "NO, you do not vote for other people." you are working with inaccurate data and thus your assessment is incorrect.
Another thing I will need to get back in the habit of is the use of the voting strength slider and overall voting power I have as I vote each time. It would be so much more intuitive if the slider always represented how much strength you had at the time you cast a vote, rather than requiring users to figure that out for every vote they cast. Lets see, how much power do I have right now? Did I vote my usual users and leave myself enough for new users I like? When did I vote last? All that complexity is unnecessary and is also a hindrance for newbies to figure out.
Anyway, thx for the reply.