I am reflecting on my experiences on this website to date and in this post I am going to tell you how I feel about the voting apparatus of this site.

2017-12-30 18:42:24

current_witness
jesta
total_pow
514,415
num_pow_witnesses
172

Data from https://steemd.com there are a half a million users of steemit.com.

Paid vote services dominate the reward pool.

The vast majority of users continue to use voting services, When I first started to use steem I refused to use these out of service to the philosophy of the reward pool.

This resulted in me leaving the site for over a year out of boredom. I returned with a new take on my original approach.

My goal is to use this platform to help me become a successful artist and help others do the same with my stake in the rewards pool and adhering to the philosophy of making value from nothing with a likeminded community working together. I have started to use these vote services to bring value to my posts even if I know they don't deserve it, and thus I am complicit in the ongoing devaluation of the content on this platform. If I manage to make a sale using the account @art4sbd to sell my artwork I will have the time to make steem a better place for artists.

The site is young and relatively unpopulated

Many users limit their use of the site to vote based curation in order to see and promote the unique content of steemit that people are willing to post for rewards. Ultimately it is these accounts that are (the majority of) steemit and will lead to its growth through word of mouth and individual promotion.

Like any competitive economic system the value of the reward will determine the level of competition. The difference in the vote buying content producer who is merely using the site to multiply their currency through #moneypost 's and my account's content is very dramatic. While the Whale has much power here, we have seen that the minnows en masse provide the sustenance of the use of the site as an instrument of entertainment and learning and not just a way to make easy money. I am trying to gain as much vote power as possible to support this concept.

This site used to be more fun before prices became ridiculous

The first few months of the site there was a torrent of ideas and comments on every post with many users engaging on the platform, most of this interaction was eventually taken of the blockchain to discord chatrooms, twitter, facebook, and other mainstream media services. The few users that seem to have dedicated their internet use to this blockchain have done very well since my return. Things are looking up again and the amount of users who don't use the platorm exclusively to dump #moneypost content is growing, and sbd is dropping back in the direction of affordability.

Vote percentage

The original idea of expressing yourself here to gain the reward of community feedback can me expressed even further through altering vote percentage. Many users especially the paid vote service accounts use a different percentage of their vote determined by the amount of sbd they are paid to do so.

I feel the need to learn as much as possible about the percentage ratios distributed by the whale accounts and learn why they vote the way they do, I feel that doing this will grow the site exponentially.