Showing Support...

When you vote on something, you're showing your support. When I was new, I mostly thought of voting in terms of curation. You find awesome things, if you can, and upvote them, to reward the author for creating that content. Of course, you can also reward friends and bloggers in general just for being here for so long and contributing regularly to the blockchain. I hadn't really even thought about that when I first got here. The idea that you vote on something just because they're your friend is kinda dirty to a degree. After all, are they really worthy? But here they are, on the platform, making friends, and contributing to your enjoyment of the platform.

I personally vote in different percentages. Sadly my vote isn't too large. I've even been doing a power down for a while, and putting some of that steem into a trading account, and used some of it to buy upvotes from OCDB. For a long time I did not support buying upvotes...but then after so long of blogging and still for the most part getting shit for upvotes...I got over it. But, despite only having a 2 cent upvote, I still choose percentages. For many comments I upvote only at 30%, which means that without using @dustsweeper, or getting another upvote, their upvote may be lost. That sucks. For posts I often upvote at 70%, or even 80% or 90%. A 100% upvote from me is quite uncommon. I even avoid 100% upvotes for myself.

My particular upvote, in regards to posts, often mirrors the grading system. I give 70% upvotes for friends posts that I read, unless it's astounding or amazing. It's my C. It's normal. I'm not sure calling it average is accurate. If it's an above average post though that really stands out to me, I give it an 80% or 90% even. 90% is for posts that are really astounding. I also occasionally do some percentage in the middle. Sometimes just because I'm upvoting from Steemit, where the slider sucks and is hard to get on the right number.

I moved to a 30% upvote on most comments because they aren't posts. I've decided that perhaps they shouldn't get the same kind of reward. Sadly, my upvote is still so small. I would prefer if my 30% upvote were closer to 5 cents at least. Comments really deserve more than just a penny for your thoughts. So do posts.

We can't vote on everything though. That's why I do percentages. Percentages give me more upvotes. Sometimes it's hard to find enough things to upvote, but I'd still like to upvote more people. So, every upvote at 70% or 80% means I can upvote a few more people every once in a while.

But why I started talking about this was not my percentages that I choose to upvote things, but that support that an upvote signifies.

We see a post, it could be a drawing or a blog post or a story or whatever, and we read it, and we enjoy it...or maybe we don't even, but we appreciate the person putting the effort into that post, so we upvote it. We're all encouraging those people to continue, to go on, to keep posting.

But sometimes we need to think about what we're encouraging.

Every day trending sucks. There are maybe a few good posts occasionally on trending, especially when talking about under specific tags.

Of course, this doesn't really even apply to us minnows...or maybe bait fish? Whatever the fuck we are, it doesn't apply to us really. Our upvotes are a few cents. We're encouraging people a little bit...but not that much. Dolphins encourage people a lot more, monetarily. As our upvotes grow and grow, the monetary reward grows.

So here we are, on a platform that encourages all sorts of people to post shit that a ton of us REALLY would rather they didn't encourage.

And there are even a ton of projects that have started self-voting what can be classified as spam comments on thousands of members. And if someone does choose to flag them, they lash out at that person. Isn't flagging supposed to be used for spam? If someone views a comment on a post as spam, and sees the upvote on it as more than they deserve for an automated comment, aren't they allowed to flag it by the rules set up for flagging?

I don't know...I kinda sorta went off on a tangent and don't remember why I started talking about this...whatever...keep moving. Don't drown.

_{Fish Tank @ Honolulu Aquarium by Daniel Ramirez 25 May 2010 CC BY 2.0 (source via wikimedia source)}