STEEM Voter Update (Voting Realizations)
Overtime you kind of see people's voting patterns and everyone approaches things slightly differently so it is interesting to say the least. If anything the STEEM blockchain is a grand experiment of behaviors in a decentralized governance model.
Overtime a lot of our followings have increased but in a lot of ways I don't feel like I'm any further ahead than I was when I had 300 followers on here. And when I look at it you would think by having almost 4000 followers that I would get a lot of automatic upvotes but I basically only get about 15 autovotes not including my own bot trail.
Then you have to ask yourself if my content is garbage? Obviously everyone isn't going to be interested in all of it but in my opinion some of the stuff I blog about isn't really blogged about by anyone else on here. Some of my crypto videos have been real rock solid especially my one on EOS. People generally liked my best memes. So I really can't say for sure why so many people don't set up Steem Voter when it is free to upvote people automatically.
Like I will see people sitting with STEEM power in their accounts not voting for anyone......etc when they could at least earn a little bit of curation rewards. I don't know if it is because they don't know about it or if they just don't want to do it or they think it will take money away from them. I'm not really sure.
It is just hard for me to believe that after all this time that only 15 of my followers figured out how to use the autovoter. I have seen other people come back and it was like almost all their autovotes were gone. @daxon was a good example of that. He was gone for awhile and when he came back he didn't hardly have any automatic support. He was still on my autovoter.
My autovotes are pop'n off non-stop. 120 people on autovotes.
I have monitored my voting and the rate that everyone is posting and basically if I just post myself a couple of times / day and just upvote people's posts my voting power recovers slowly. I upvote a ton of comments and a lot of them I upvote with a decent percentage which I like to do but that is what really drains my power.
To be honest I don't want to really rant about the situation on here but I almost feel like we have to accept it for what it is. Even if you are pumping hard on here it might always feel like you are on a hamster wheel and always having to say "Remember ME!!!" "Remember ME!!!" to people. I think that is the biggest part I don't get. There are some of the OGs on here that I'm still upvoting but I rarely get upvotes from them. Of course they have their own little clusters here on Steemit but it is weird how you can fall out of mind pretty quick.
Ultimate Realization
Some things have to play out overtime for me to really determine what would happen with this platform and how different people could approach it. The distribution was messed up from day 1 and that will likely always be an issue on here. That being said I don't think the platform will "die." Even with no real updates it is light years ahead of anything else. It could just keep going for 3 years or more with no real updates because people will still post and stack coins and the witnesses will keep going. Even if this whole place becomes 500 people circle jerking each other there will still be money to be made if a person is in the right position with a decent amount of power.
Also another thing I want to mention is that the math on buying more STEEM power and what that will equate to never seems to make sense. Suddenly it makes sense when the price goes way up. If a person is able to just keep rolling gains into it it suddenly makes sense when the price spikes. That is the way most people are always going to feel unless they ended up with a massive amount of power back in 2016.
Everyone is in a different situation on here but I would say if a person is a content creator that has made a decent amount of money on YouTube it would make sense to just power up a bunch of STEEM to hedge their risk with YouTube. Obviously for a person to do that they have to gain a certain level of conviction on this platform. Always my question with it is if I shouldn't have diversified as much and just powered up more into this platform. Some of it has served me well though because situations like the Calisto situation since I had a little bit of Ethereum Classic already I will be getting that and I was in before the surge so we will see with that. Also with different forks for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin.....etc I'm able to gain those extra coins by having positions in other projects. So it is hard to say for sure. I'm not sure whey I'm typing all this. Probably 2 people will read it.
Ultimately I'm bullish on STEEM and will keep gaining more power
Why do you guys think that the followings don't seem to correlate with the amount of upvotes?
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Unless there will be a huge incentive created to spread your votes around as much as possible, things will never change here. You can still make a decent amount of money, if you invested in STEEM below 1$, but if you didn't, it is really 20 times harder than it is for people like me...
That is actually an interesting idea if somehow the curation reward payouts somehow were setup to reward people who voted on a lot of different content creators. Or that there were additional airdrops for people who have very large engagement which factored in reputation, voting, commenting....etc. It would be tough to make it work exactly and might be best to just do it and not announce it. I personally don't think this will be done because when things were really bad on here nothing of that sort was done.
Ultimately I'm going to keep building power and keep going but if thinks soften up some more in the crypto markets it could get pretty painful for a little bit.
Good post, I normally use SteemVoter, I actually put my people I vote for on pause as my Steem Power was down pretty low and wanted to start running a contest so wanted it to build back up a bit.
Something I'm getting more interested in doing is delegating Steem power to various things.
There really seems to be no rhyme or reason to who or what content gets upvoted. I mean a lot of people making garbage ass content make $50 per post and I see people making really amazing content getting $1.
There's a lot of bot accounts posting garbage and not even posting in the correct format ie it looks almost like something reposted from IFTTT that accidentally breaks the link and leaves for example half of it above their meme and half below the meme. I wanna downvote stuff like that but when I see they have a (76) its like okay I downvote them and have little to no affect and then they wreck me.
Number of followers doesn't really seem to correlate to upvotes or earnings on posts much of the time.
In regards to what you were discussing in the post as far as strategy maybe I'm going about it wrong. I drain my Voting Power oftentimes giving a lot of 100% upvotes and a lot of 20% and 30% plus upvotes where as I see many other people spreading their voting around a lot more with like 1% to 5%.
In terms of the type of content people wanna see, that's somethign I'm really confused by. I personally tend to do all types of content ie what I ate for breakfast in one post, a meme in another, a commentary on Steemit in the next and then reposting my Youtube vids. I sometimes wonder if I would be better off sticking to one thing and keeping a narrower focus.
Steemit is a very wierd platform. I enjoy it but no other social media site is like it. I feel like Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc is all a very specific type of content surrounding various niches. Steemit is the only platform I've been a part of with such a community aspect ie the contests and so much talk about the platform itself, not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing just how it is. I guess you could say Reddit is somewhat similar in the sense there's a lot of talk about Reddit.
I think this platform is still kind of trying to find itself and what it is. I'd like to see the gamesmanship kind of come to an end, I like it here but sometimes I feel like it's all just a big game or all just a big circle jerk for lack of a better word. Read the comments under any post and well over 50% are bots or people who didnt even read the post, maybe 40% are people who read as little as possible while still being able to sort of formlate a thought and comment that relates to the post and maybe 10% are actually thoughtful comments engaging with the creator.
I have kind of an anlogy of what Steemit feels like to me sometimes. You ever see your Youtube comments that get caught in spam where someone comments on like every single video of yours either dropping a link or telling people to checkout their channel. It's kind of funny when real people do that, its one thing if its a bot but its another if someone is actually relaly wasting their time on something that's going to give such little return ie 90% will get caught by spam filters and the other 10% will likely be deleted by creators of the video. Those people are trying to grow whatever their thing is or make money with their links. I sometimes feel like Steemit is the same thing, people fruitlessly going from post to post dropping their comment trying to benefit themselves.
After this long rambling post I'll say I regularly go through periods of loving Steemit and then thinking it's kinda fucking dumb or getting frusrated. Needless to say I'm probably feeling the latter at this moment lol
Hahhaha, I get the frustration for sure and sometimes I write these post to vent myself or just to touch base on where I'm at mentally with what is going on with the platform and that is part of the reason why a lot of people feel like they can't put me on an upvoter. I'm not a "safe" bet for them. Like I might talk about picking up chicks one post, say the market is going lower the next post, say STEEM is awesome the next post, and then talk about space travel the next post. To me it is kind of ridiculous that just paraphrasing coindesk / cointelegraph articles became the "safe" bet. But all in all the STEEM blockchain has been an amazing thing for me and a huge time drain in others. In some respects I look at how much time I have spent here and would say it wasn't worth it because if you calculated the hours spent and saw the hourly rate I could have done better just working a job in a lot of cases. On the other hand I would like to say that I'm on the cusp of something big.
I think for guys like us we know how the system works at this point and it probably makes the most sense for us to try to step up our STEEM power and cluster up even more. If we can't front run the the next wave we could sort of get lost in the mix to be honest with you. I know there are going to be some big points of frustration if the price sags and I have purchased at higher prices then it sags to but I'm looking to get in a better position on here. For the next week or so I'm probably going to have to do low hanging fruit posts and not spend a huge amount of time on here because I have other stuff going.
By the way. Did you get to try to surf on Lake Michigan?
Unfortunately I still havn't made it out there. During the week I need to be in my office to get packages out so my only free time is weekends. One day I headed out to NW Indiana near Gary but waves weren't big enough to do anything. I should have hopped in the water in my wetsuit to at least get a feel for it, I hear from even good swimmers that swimming in a wetsuit, especially a heavy duty 8mm one is a totally different experience and its very wierd so I should have gotten my feet wet but was like hell if I'm going into the water at 10 degrees outside and I'm not even gonna get to surf so wound up heading to 3 floyds brewery and having some beers instead lol.
Were getting kind of into the time of the season when you can still have some rough weather but its not below 15 degrees so I'm gonna have to try to make it out before summers here because in the summer waves are pretty few and far between, however I have seen a couple guys surfing in Brigman on wavy days during the summer.
I'm actually heading down to Mexico tomorrow so will probably do some blog posts about it.
Sweet! How fun in Mexico!
Thanks
I have been talking about this a lot lately! Everyone keeps pushing this idea that we have to rely on the community for votes, but the reality is that if you aren't getting a major payout from a whale or a delegated app like DTube, you aren't really making anything. I have watched two users on here in particular that have 2k and 3k followers respectively, and they rely seemingly on 1-2 upvotes for their 80-100 dollar daily payout. On days when that whale hasn't upvoted them yet, their posts sit at about $3. If that whale ever left them, they would be screwed, and I think a lot of people are in this position! I am too. I only get heavy upvotes because of DTube and a very kind, dolphin I guess? I realize that it's only a matter of time before YouTubers come in and start sucking all of the DTube delegation dry, and that dolphin probably won't support me forever, so I have been trying to get a real following, but there are two problems with this:
1.) Even if you have an awesome following that really love you, most people's upvotes, especially in the beginning are only worth a few cents. You would have to have tens of thousands of followers to get anywhere.
2.) A lot of the followers you do have are most likely inactive. A lot of people start on here excited, and following different people, and then get discouraged and leave.It's hard to tell how many of your followers are inactive unless you go through them all manually. This isn't just a problem with Steemit though. It's the same on Facebook. I think of the George Takei page I follow, and while he has a following of like 15 million, he only gets a few thousand likes and just a few hundred comments on each post. You'd probably see a similar phenomenon on YouTube. What makes YouTube more ideal however, is the only thing someone needs to do is watch your video for you to make money. They don't have to decide whether to use their SP to upvote you. They don't have to leave you a comment to make your post any more visible.
I love Steemit so much, and I am busting ass to try to claw my way into a stable position so I can help others. Right now I feel as though I am on a floating door in the waters of the Titanic crash, and I can hardly help anyone from my current position. I need to move up to a boat. The move up to a boat here though is nearly impossible now unless you put your own money into the system. I am, like you, failing to see how my investment into Steem will compound and grow, frankly because I imagine for Steem to stabilize, it will tether itself to the value of USD 1:1. I could be wrong there, but as I see it there are only two choices: Steem is always crazy volatile and no one can really use it because it's all over the place, but we as Steemians can still make money on its peaks, or Steem stabilizes and drops back down to being worth a buck, and we never make any "investment" on it. The "investment" talk is coming from people who think Steem has the capacity to be the next LTC or BTC but I don't think that's possible. The system is set up too differently, and it's too easy to get new Steem.
Well that's my rambling for the day. I would set up autovote, but my SP is so small, it wouldn't make a huge difference in anyone's posts! I haven't been on here as long as you, but I do understand where you are coming from!
That is a great analogy "on a floating door in the waters of the Titanic crash." I think one of the toughest things mentally is the timing and when to power and when not to. It will differ for everyone depending on their financial situation. It isn't a good feeling when the price starts to sink and your time investment erodes. That is pretty much with any crypto though but this one more so depending on how much time was spend creating content. Early on a person is going to have to put in a big effort to gain more attention. I have been on here for over a year and a half and there are people looking out for me to some extent but I guess what I'm really trying to work toward is earning $300 / day everyday even on down days. That is going to take a longtime to get to that point but ultimately I think it will happen and at that point I will be expanded out upvoting like 500 people's content. That will be cool for sure.
I think you are right about the DTube upvotes. It has been great for sure but ever since I first joined the platform there have been people who have joined who are going to "save" the platform or who garner huge amounts of upvotes and ultimately either left the platform or slowed down on really posting that much.
I think the new popular YouTubers like @furiouspete123 and @hodgetwins are great addition but we run the risk of them being in the same situation where it will be short lived. Then when the next popular people join they get the attention and it ends up sort of being a revolving door in a lot of ways. I was actually planning on doing a post about this issue. I think those two additions will ultimately be positive additions ultimately but only time will tell.
This may freak you out but when I first got on there was a girl from Colorado who had no following who did a "makeup tutorial" and for some reasons all the whales piled in and upvoted her post like crazy. Her first 5 posts made $53,161 and ultimately she didn't stay on the platform.
https://steemit.com/beauty/@guerrint/the-first-steemit-makeup-turtorial-bringing-youtubers-to-steemit
There were some other examples of that sort of thing but that was the most ridiculous situation. Ultimately it hurt the platform more than anything because it made the whole thing look like an unfair casino. LOL
The thing that has always gotten me though is that the people who have stuck on the platform and broke their back for it oftentimes weren't able to obtain a fraction of that type of money even when prices have blown past what they were in mid 2016.
I don't mean to complain because I am bullish on STEEM for sure and want to keep building here but the struggle is real for sure.
I think it's really interesting to see what happens when new big names come on here be it @grantcardone @furiouspete @hodgetwins.
I like all those guys and honestly those are all guys I followed on Youtube prior to seeing them on here. That said is their content really worth hundreds of Dollars per post? Are there posts really worth 300x some of the other great content on here?
@kenanqhd has really been killing it lately, lots of great content, lots of media in the posts, well thought out, interesting posts. I especially liked his post about what it's like living in a small town in China, that one actually earned pretty well over $100, however this post of his only earned like $3...
https://steemit.com/life/@kenanqhd/canadian-celebrates-chinese-new-year-with-chinese-family-awesome-feast-with-handmade-dumplings
Is that post above really only worth $3 and the hodgetwins post a sorta kinda meme with no words that was screenshotted from their phone and they didn't bother cropping out the top and that's worth $18? I probably could have found a better example of a pretty basic post making like $400 but I didn't feel like searching for an example.
https://steemit.com/scam/@hodgetwins/bitconnect-did-what-motherfucker
I think there's a lot of truth to what you said is that new big Youtubers are going to come on here, everone is gonna know they are going to do well and is going to try to get into their good graces like people do with whales, it builds up their accounts hugely, and then the next flavor of the day from Youtube comes on and they are the big earner.
I'll be curious to see how this plays out but I can definately see larger Youtubers comming here, making thousands for a few weeks until the next big Youtuber or celebrity comes on and do the same. I'll be curious to see if the numbers are sustainable and if people stick around for the long haul
Jesus @ that girls payout. Made over $50k and cashed most of it out. Unbelievable.
Thanks @rulesforrebels for the shoutout. Appreciate it man. Things seem to be getting better as I have been testing out bid bots and the highest paid posts of mine were always upvoted by curie's team.
I don't think payouts will ever be "fair" in terms of content. This already is the case on YouTube. There are many videos that deserve more views and money than some shitty videos made by a well known YouTuber. Success on any platform has to take into account many factors like networking, social status, timing, etc. That is the case in business as well.
What Steem has to be careful of is greedy YouTubers that are here just for the money. Some YouTubers have joined that I am a fan of, but I get a strong feeling that they are just trying to get as much money as possible. They even posted their crypto portfolio on one of their posts and it was all pumpcoins like ripple and tron. Just because they are popular YouTubers, it doesn't mean they should get free handouts. Being desperate to attract big YouTubers over here will allow some of them to exploit their platform for nothing but monetary gain and ruin the reputation of Steem again.
Yeah the cashout was pretty insane and there were other examples of that where people for some reason were heavily rewarded but then didn't really stick around. Then some of the people who stuck never really got solid consistent payouts....etc.
Lets just go to youtube and facebook, we can make a cool $1.56 monthly lol
What you said is so true. I see people who get like 70 upvotes and earn $3 and then someone else gets 8 and makes $77.
It was way worse before HF19. Dude there was one post I made in the fall of 2016 that got over 100 upvotes and made $1.50. That is when I called it quits for awhile. The platform looked like it might die actually at that point. It was very sad. After HF19 voting behavior changed a lot. When people's votes weren't worth anything people would vote. Then suddenly even when people's votes were only worth $0.10 they stopped voting as much. It was very strange.
I'm ready for the say when my vote will be $10+. That will feel good when I'm able to control larger amounts of the reward pool. Not to harp on it again but the distribution was so skewed that then catching up and being a tangible piece of the reward pool is going to be extremely tough. Kind of off subject but if I was smart I guess I would just be like @exyle and just talk 100% positive about the platform and never say anything bad. I have him on autovoter because he does seem like a good guy and wants the platform to grow but I can't keep my mouth shut even when it could make me a lot more money.
I don't vote on anything until I read it, watch it, or understand it, which is character trait I think more people need to adopt here on Steemit... or maybe they have and that's why you don't see many people doing it.
I liked your comment. I just finished writing my own and I made the comment there's way too much gamesmanship on Steemit.
I feel like 50% of the comments on any given post are bots or peopel who didn't read the post. 40% are people who skimmed the bare minimum to be able to comment related to the post and maybe 10% are actually thoughtful comments where someone is actually engaging with the creator.
Yep, now you're getting it Rebel... and I for one will never up-vote anything I haven't fully vetted, nor will I ever give to, or participate in any bot action whatsoever.
The struggle and the hustle is real. I understand why people get in that mode for sure.
Yeah it's hard to blame people because sometimes it feels like hey its not good for the platform as a whole but it's how to get ahead and everyone else is doing it. I've been seeing more efforts to kinda try to clamp down on that like these honey pot posts that supposedly will make it clear you shouldn't upvote or comment and if you do you somehow get dinged. I've yet to see one though.
Part of the issue is that 95% of the people on here are content creators and that takes too much time to be able to do all of that and then watch and read everyone's content. There just isn't enough hours in the day.
You make a great point. I think @reseller is doing something kinda cool right now which is doing a Steemit show. There's a Youtuber, forget his name but he has a Youtube Channel/Podcast and the point of his show is to bring attention to smaller channels. I think that's kind of an interesting idea in a flood of a bunch of content creators do kind of a summary or wrapup and highlight others content.
Yeah I saw that @reseller was doing that and it looked pretty good and he was gaining some traction on DTube. @bethwheatcraft is doing a similar thing on there called STEEMBuzz
If you can't read it, don't up-vote it... somebody could be calling your mom a whore in those articles for all you know, or promoting the Petro... or worse... BitConnect!
I was one of those lucky ones who made a decent amount when Steem was at a really low price. I used to get a lot of autovotes, from pretty big accounts. Ned used to upvote my posts on the regular. It all went out the window with HF19 though, it hit me hard bro, my votes fell through the freakin floor right after HF19. It is what it is though, I've been doing my regular hustle, finding ways to grind it out here and use the tools that are available. Keep it up man, you've always got a fan in me!
Yeah it is odd because I know a handful of people who were actually doing way better before HF19. Things got a lot better for me after the fork personally but it is interesting how it effected different people.
Thanks for the support! We will keep pushing and gaining power and eventually have a more tangible amount of power. It is crazy to me that I'm still technically a minnow. :-( Partially was my fault in some ways but that is what I had to do at various points in this platforms history.
I think I came on right around the time of HF19, you mind explaining a bit more about what it was and why it hurt your account?
I guess I'm one of the 2 people that read your post. To be honest, I don't really like the idea of autovoting. I upvote on a daily basis, but I read the posts and usually comment as well.
Distribution is sort of an issue, but delegation helps a lot to even out the playing field. At the same time, I guess you can say that it is one of the perks of being an early investor (having massive amounts of SP).
But you did make a good point about being relevant. I feel like 95% of my followers are just bots or something. Even when I look at really popular Steemians like Sweetssj, the number of followers vs upvoters is quite alarming. She has over 27k followers, yet on each of her posts, she only has about 2000 votes on it.
I think communities will help to bring people closer and stay relevant. Nowdays, everyone is bombarded with content and it is easy for anyone to get looked over.
The bottom line is that there are challenges on this platform and it isn't about making things fair and perfect, you just need to find opportunities in these challenges.
Yep you are one of the 2. Hahhah!
Yeah the ratio of followers to average upvotes / post is pretty crazy for sure. Sometimes we see that on YouTube with the amount of subscribers to the amount of views on videos but usually it doesn't seem as bad as it is on here.
My worry is that the opportunity on here will be more aligned with focusing 100% on profitability and since the distribution was so messed up from the beginning that ultimately it will seem to be a great investment for people who had tons of STEEM from the beginning and then won't be able to retain the masses for sustainable amounts of time.
Ultimately I'm bullish on STEEM and will continue to achieve more power and keep building overtime.
That kind of ratio on YouTube only happens to people that have "fallen off." Here, the ratio is low even though the person is basically the poster child of the site.
If the price of Steem increases, we can expect our SP to go a lot further. Sure, whales will able to give someone $1000, but maybe with our SP we can at least give ourselves $20 per vote which is still pretty darn good.
I think it's important to focus on your own improvement instead of comparing yourself to whales or worrying about what others are doing. It is helping me at least lol
It is true though but I think the frustration can come if a person starts to feel like they would have been better off just working a low paying job and then powering that money up and then started blogging with the power. That is the mind bender and I get to that point several times on here even though I have a handful of power.....etc. But I'm not going to stop. Eventually I will have more power and hopefully relative to what other people have it will be enough to have a more tangible effect and keep growing.
I was recently watching a video which talked about Youtube across various niches. They talked about the amount of followers GaryVee has versus watch time and upvotes and his is actually very low, but in his case it's due to him encouraging people to get out and take action as well as his audience being a bit older and having jobs and working on hustles, where as someone making Youtube videos for teenagers, they get home from school and sit on Youtube from 4pm to 10pm so those Youtubers are going to have a lot more watchtime and upvotes.
That makes sense..... kids get really engaged into some of these YouTube stars for sure. I feel like the making money niche and some of my crypto videos on YouTube had high engagement but of course that was all a waste for now because they still haven't monetized that channel. I basically got too pissed off about it so I can't make videos for that channel for the most part until they monetize me. It was a calculated bet I made to expand my reach and it really burnt a lot of my time up for no real gain. Luckily the stuff did get published here as well and I was able to earn something but wasn't what I intended.
Yeah that new policy really sucks, I would have thought the better way to handle it would have been to grandfather in people who were already previously monetized or at the very least who were in que to be reviewed. It seems wrong to retroactively enforce a policy when that's not what the expectation was previously.
One other twist to this policy which I didn't know until today was it's not like once you hit the 1,000 subs and 4,000 watch hours your gurnateed to get on, you still have to go through a manual review and not only that but they always look at your past 12 months so its not as if you can build up a channel adn then move on to something else. I suppose that is possible but if the channel starts falling off and doesn't maintain the 4,000 watch time and 1,000 subs they will demonetize it. I have one older channel that just runs passively but I'm going to have to go in from time to time and make some vdis just to make sure it stays live.
Yeah it is ridiculous and it is so BS that they don't automatically monetize me after going way past 1000 subs and 4000 watch time. I have told myself I'm not going to do much with the channel until I get monetized but like you said I might even slip out of being qualified some how. It is total BS and they are really dropping the ball.
I see so many channels that are monetized that are complete copyright infringements. like the whole channel is just stuff they pulled off TV.
Yeah it amazes me how some people literally will post tv episodes and stuff and are running ads every 3 minutes and they have no issues and then someone uses a 10 second clip in a video they are making which should be allowed by creative commons and they get a copyrigth strike.
Yeah it makes no sense. I have seen channels that have videos that they have probably made $50,000 to $100,000 off ad revenue from songs and other people's content
Na, thats typical on social media. On facebook, people with 5k friends only get a few dozen likes a post :)
No man, you provide really good Content... imho.
But it is weird how the numbers that are Following a person does not necessarily correlate to more Upvotes when you keep getting a higher number( of new Followers).
Also don't really understand the Auto voting ? What is that all about ?? I know I wouldn't mind implementing that
Thanks @brianphobos for the insight you provide with this Post.
P.S. I do think it is interesting how people seem to write off others who are starting out here or those that have low infleunce with low Steem Power. Don't people realize that circumstances change in life. And that little Minnow may some day decide to start putting his weekly paycheck into Steem, or cashing out a 401K to invest here or getting an inheritance or some other kind of windfall to plow into Steem etc..etc.
That's why it makes sense to have a wide variety of people to encourage and support here, imo
If you see on the screenshot above of all the upvotes and curation rewards basically you can get curation rewards for upvoting. The optimal times to upvote a posts are from 25 - 35 minutes after the post. So a lot of people are running auto upvoters through stuff like www.SteemVoter.com to support the content creators they like when they aren't able to be at the computer and to just upvote automatically.
@brianphobos I am still new to this platform and thus my opinion may or may not register as relevant. I believe I understand the point you are trying to make on the followers vs votes. There seems to be gap between the one who posts and those who read said post. Not always easy to follow all feeds, even if you enjoy material posted by specific persons. I was first attracted to STEEMIT as a venue to post original material to a community eager for new content. Unlike my personal Blog on Blogger, I have yet to find my place here. Thus, it has been months since my last visit. I am trying a new strategy of posting a multi-part series and I will see if that helps get more traction for my original content material. I only upvote material I have actually read and like. Until your post I was ignorant of auto-voting. I liked this article. I will drop by to read more in the future. Cheers.
@satasco I've been on here since mid June of 2017 and something I've come to realize is it's really not about your content. You could be the greatest writer with the most amazing content and it's not going to get you very far unless you have eyes on your content. Now that's true of any platform but the other thing it's not just about having eyes on your content, it's about having the right eyes ie powerful accounts on your content. This platform is more about interaction and being part of the community and contests and knwoing how to use the platform to your advantage moreso than it is about creating content IMHO
Really great point. I've found this to be totally true. You know what they say "it's not what you know it's who you know ".
This is a Social Platform so interacting and getting to know one another is crucial
@rulesforrebels Thanks for that. I am still trying to learn how to make this work. Cheers.
I think one of the things that happens as well is that when there have been a rush of new accounts then some of the older users do tutorial type posts to help new users but eventually that seem repetitive so I know there are new users getting on and the system can be very confusing to them. So oftentimes they might not even understand the flow of the votes and all the intricacies of this system. It takes a lot of research to really understand the pieces. But I would say the same thing goes for YouTube and figuring out how to tag videos the best and try to gain a following there as well.
I used the auto voter for a bit and then stopped. It didn't make any sense since I don't have much SP to get curation rewards. Instead I now go through and actually read content before upvoting. As this year goes on, I think it will be fun as my upvote becomes worth more money. I know a good bit of people leave comments just in hopes of upvotes but there are people who genuinely read your content before voting. Those are the people who I will be upvoting! I think others will follow suit when they start paying attention to the people I upvote.
Even with my Steem Power it doesn't seem like much in the way of curation rewards but it starts compounding overtime and I can see that in a year or so it could become worth a lot more for sure.
My issue is there is so much content that I don't have time to look at it all for all the people I'm trying to support. Plus there are optimal time horizons for when the upvote will produce the maximum amount of curation rewards.
Hi @brianphobos. I thought you might appreciate a reply. I am one of the ones with some auto votes on, I can only afford to do a few because my power gets drained pretty quickly and get left with upvoted worth nothing for thing I come across that I like. My husband on the other hand is pretty against bots and autovoting so he sticks to lovingly curating by hand. That means some days he is busy and doesn't vote at all. I suspect many 'genuine' users (i.e. those that are here for the community and the content) feel like that.
As for the uneven distribution... There are lots of cartels in here, a lot of people milk the bots to the tune of $600 or more per post... While others plod along with cents... Then there is the issue with curation rewards, some just upvoted certain people to milk the huge payouts...
I don't know what the solution will be, but we are all responsible and each person ends up making their mind up.
I personally bought Steemit with BTC profits and use bots to get a few dollars from each post, do a mixture of manual curation and automatic... Not getting very far so I dip in and out as life allows me to, but I can't see my future as a full time steemian, more of a gig on the side. That is my position, don't know if it is of any help to aid your understanding... Good luck!
Thank you for your response. Yeah 1 of the main concerns is certainly people just voting on the "safe" bet with their upvote bots. So if they vote on someone who they know will just post the same stuff all the time that they know will get a big payout then they could get the best curation reward. So suddenly the payouts can end up having nothing to do with "good content." That is subjective though obviously.
I'm not a very "safe" content creator to vote on because one minute I'm doing a meme, the next minute I'm playing basketball, then I'm talking about crypto currencies.....etc People don't like it if I say that some crypto currency is going lower...etc.
I do a lot of manual curation as well. I think the situation will get easier for me when my vote becomes worth a more tangible amount. Like if my vote was worth $10 then I could spread it out even more.
You bring up an interesting point. I typically set my autovotes for people who support me or people who I have some relationship with on here, however I can see someone just picking someone like @jerrybanfield because they know their posts will always earn alot