Voting with the future of Steemit in mind might be the most profitable voting strategy long-term.

At this point we all know that the voting process on Steemit seems to boil down to a problem in game-theory and group-think. For many great discussions along those lines, follow the work of @dana-edwards. Indeed, assuming the size of the pot is fixed, of course it makes sense to play the game and try to maximize your share of the rewards. This is a simple game, the rewards are algorithmic, and your payouts, successes, and failures are all immediately apparent and quantifiable by simple looking at your wallet history.

It is easy to adjust your strategy while playing this game. You can monitor bot voting patterns, you can study analytics of trending posts, authors, and tags, you can easy build a fleet of voting bots of your own and swarm certain posts, hoping to trick other voters into thinking a certain post is going viral, maximizing your share of the curation rewards.

This is a simple strategy, it can be very profitable (i.e. @wang et al.), and there is a type of instant gratification associated with seeing large amounts of curation rewards in our wallet histories.

If you're not convinced that this can be profitable, just check out @wang's wallet history, and you will see that he earned ~1010 Steem Power over the previous 24 hours through nothing but automated voting. Now I have nothing against @wang. He did not design the rules of the game, he simply took advantage of a set of skills that he has, given a set of rules. However, I am suggesting that another voting strategy could potentially be more profitable long term.

The voting strategy I suggest is simple: vote in such a way as to maximize user adoption and retention of the Steemit platform.

Strategies like @wang's seek to extract the largest fraction of the pot as possible. In that, @wang has been quite successful. However, as could be predicted by game theory, this type of voting strategy has led to the creation of bot-listed authors, who are virtually guaranteed to reap large rewards. It also decreases the chance that other valuable content will be found. Since a certain proportion of dolphins and whales are only voting with their bots, there are less remaining to find and upvote the growing body of high-quality posts.

I'm suggesting that instead we should be voting in such a way that we make new members feel excited and not disheartened. How many $0.00 posts does a brand new member need to spend a significant amount of time working on before they get completely discouraged and move back to a more familiar system? We want new members to feel like this platform is (reasonably) fair, and that they also have as good a chance as anyone to make decent rewards on this platform (assuming they work hard, etc...).

So, I'm proposing three simple guidelines for voting, which might help the platform succeed long term:

1. Do continue to vote for new members and their introduceyourself posts. I recognize that a lot less of these are the large payout posts that they used to be, but the fact is, many people are still using this as a way to test out Steemit. I would hate for someone to put work into their very first post introducing themselves, and come away feeling completely unnoticed. I still try to vote for these when I find them, although most of them don't get huge payouts, because I believe it is important for retention to try to look out for our new members.
2. Do vote for some content that is completely unrelated to Steem, Steemit, cryptos, tech, etc... As you probably know, we are still a reasonably small community with reasonably focused interests. However, one of our main shared interests (expanding the platform and userbase) necessarily requires that we encourage and reward content unrelated to our other main shared interests (blockchains, etc...). So try to do your part and find some new struggling content and give it a boost.
3. Spend some of your votes downvoting spam comments every day. Yes your voting power is finite, but as I'm trying to describe, the rewards from voting are not necessarily limited to the curation rewards you see appearing in your wallet history. The potential rewards from your voting could include a platform that successfully de-incentivizes spam content to the point that the degree of spam becomes less and less. One potential side effect of the new rules about posting limits, could be the increase of spam in the comments section. Let's do our part to fight this. Not to mention some have offered cash incentives to #doyourpart.

Anyway, in the end, I don't know if any of this will matter or not. The truth is, in the end @wang is probably going to be pretty well off as he extracts his piece of the pie. However, I think with a little change in attitude, we can increase the size of the pie for everyone. It's like @dan said recently:

The whales are actively seeking out people to promote up the ranks. We have no incentive to be a majority holder of a small puddle. We would much rather be a minority holder of a giant ocean. All that matters is that we grow from a puddle, to a pond, to a lake, to an ocean. Whales are small in the grand scheme of an ocean of fish.

Don't focus on your personal short-term profits. Focus on benefiting the system, and you will see profits long-term.