Enough with the *indirect payments*

Today, I found myself upvoted another steem related application's announcement post. I hate this - there are other ways to monetize web services instead of exhausting users' voting power.

How they do that?

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We just give that access.

Users generally think that they just log in via SteemConnect but what is going on under the hood is, we set their accounts as posting authorities.

A good analogy from @good-karma:

You can share any of the permissions with other accounts on Steem.
Just like, you can rent out room in your house or have more than one passcode to access safe/vault or joint ownership of property/house...

Posting authorities let these apps:

• Upvote on your behalf
• Post and comment on your behalf

Your funds are safe, they can't interfere w/ your funds. However, upvotes are also creates a direct value on the network.

The "Free" Model

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^Source

Facebook is free. They make money by selling users' private data, though. So for this case, actually, users are the product - not the facebook.

The same thing happens in the steem ecosystem lately. 3rd party apps using users' voting power to boost their posts and call it free. Most of the times users are not aware they're voting for them or not. (If they don't watch their account's movements closely.)

I don't want to trust any 3rd party authority to use my personal voting power. That's a personal thing and should stay personal. If the services are valuable enough, I am ok to pay it as a subscription fee.

How to revoke the posting authorities

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I have revoked a lot of apps' access today. It's surprising that I set that many accounts as my account's posting auth.

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First of all, you can check the current authorities on your account via steemd.com. All authorities are listed on the left sidebar:

To revoke their access, just go to below URL and paste the authority account to the last fragment.

https://v2.steemconnect.com/revoke/@steemiz.app

And you're done. No thanks needed.