Spread Your Vote – But Don’t Let it Turn to DUST!
Dust Votes are a HOT topic right now and after going on a bit of a rant yesterday about not Conserving Voting Power and instead spreading votes around I realised that I have been a bit of a dick for doing that and not making people aware of the Dust Vote issue. So I apologise for being irresponsible. I’ve been on this platform for about 10 months now and I actually have a technical background so I really should have known better but it’s only very recently I even found out that this Dust Vote thing was a problem. If you don’t know what I am talking about then please keep reading because it is important to be aware of when spreading your vote around.
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Basically, for posts and comments with a very small reward attached to them (under 0.02 SBD apparently) the system classifies them as “Dust” and rounds them down to zero. Now for months I have been trying to engage with people commenting on my own posts and I have been upvoting those comments on my posts not just to encourage engagement, but also to curate those comments so that they show in order of relevance to my post. It turns out that in a number of cases I have been wasting my Voting Power by voting on comments this way as they’ve been getting rounded down to zero.
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It is not so much of an issue for me right now because I have enough STEEM POWER to make sure that votes on comments are at least worth a few cents, but for newer members with small amounts of SP they could very easily be wasting their Voting Power if they are spreading votes around on comments. Please do accept my sincerest apologies if you followed my advice from yesterday. If you have a low SP then the simplest thing you can do to avoid having your Vote turn to Dust is to just not vote on Comments and only vote on Posts. That way even if your vote is small, you can be confident that it’ll stockpile with other votes on the upvoted post and still count when it comes to paying out rewards.
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I want to thank everyone who pointed out my oversight yesterday and give a particular shout-out to @glenalbrethsen who not only pointed this out but he helped link me up with some resources too. This guy is a fountain of knowledge and is fast becoming a bit of a GO TO guy for finding out about what's going on. He might not be an expert but I reckon he’s got his finger on the pulse of STEEM. Check out his blog and if he starts dropping in on your posts with helpful comments like he seems to be doing everywhere these days, you’ll become a better Steemian for engaging with him.
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Hello buggyman. We mice thought your post yesterday was a little simple in mind, just like us. We mice of course take our voting power very seriously and would be horrified if it turned to dust. So we are super happy to see that you came back to apologise. If you like we could down vote your last post - we have plenty of VP and SP, just let us know. 😉
Thanks for the vote and the comment! I don't think you need to worry about dust too much ;)
I stand by my post from yesterday because I still think we should not worry about our VP too much, but I should have been clearer about this issue for the sake of the minnows. If you want to downvote me on my post then I do respect that, though I do hope there was still some value to be found for some. Cheers!
We mice were only joking with you buggyman. We love your stuff! Now we have to go find Cheese. See yah.
https://steemit.com/steemchurch/@rameelkarim/sniff-and-scurry-an-awesome-lesson-learned-for-there-life-s-if-you-can-trust-it-you-can-accomplish-it
Please check out my blog
Yes, Dust votes are a real surprise for most new users. The dust threshold is actually as high at 2.67 cents as I've written about it here.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@apshamilton/newbie-mistakes-to-avoid
Nice post. I've given you a small upvote to make sure you're higher than 2.67 cents :)
Well, I don't know if a full-blown apology was necessary, but it does show you care about what you put out there, so I appreciate the caring. Your original concept is still sound. There's absolutely no need to hold onto votes. Just some of us will need to place them where they can do the most good for everyone.
And we all need to know what that means. That's the main problem. We all don't know what we need to know to function to the degree we could. I think you've helped to spotlight it, though.
Thanks for the shoutout, too. Very kind. :)
Yes, integrity is important to me and I'm man enough to admit when I made a mistake - or in this case at least an oversight. Thanks again for dropping in!
Thanks for writing about dust votes. I am fairly new to Steemit and had no clue about the rounding down. Since I have a low SP, I must have wasted some voting power and others who upvoted me probably also wasted they voting power on me when we might have been more strategic in the way we voted. However, there might still some symbolic value in those dust votes: even if I don't get any material reward on some of my posts or comments, I value the actual upvote as a token of recognition, and I am encouraged when I know someone read and appreciated what I had to say.
You are very welcome. I totally agree on the symbolic value of the Dust Votes. I know for most people a fraction of a cent is not worth much, but for me it's been an acknowledgement that I have at least read the comment even if I haven't replied. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us :)
That makes sense now that you mention it. I hadn't really thought about it until now and have been doing lots of dust voting. Thanks
I'm glad to hear see that I'm helping to get the word out. Like I said I'd been here 10 months with a technical background and I didn't know about this. So many minnows out there are probably getting dusted away and are oblivious.
I still think your previous post is valid though. Moderation is the key here and i think your main point on that post was just to not be a scrooge :)
Peace.
Thanks! You GET me. :)
I stopped doing that a while ago, but wasn't sure why. Maybe it was intuition. There's so much to learn about this platflorm - i dont know whether it's more fun finding it out all at once or more fun finding it out as you go through posts like this and through trial and error. I'm voting for discovery I think - it's more interesting. Dustvotes is a cool term.
It is too much to learn all at once. I think if I tried that my head would explode :)
I think mine already did....
Thanks for clearing up that bit. I think I'll keep voting until I run out of payments and then let it build up. I'm not on constantly so I should be fine that way.
And again learnt something here. So do not upvote this comment! Haha. I upvote replies with 1,5 cent so should be fine.
You did a good job of laying out something I've felt for awhile. I appreciate every up vote but I'd rather people save their VP and use it for purpose. They deserve curation rewards too and a .001 vote is netting them nothing.