My etiquette rules for delegations, witness voting and power-downs
I will not repeat the full introduction from my previous post, My etiquette rules for authoring at Steem, but keep it short: As with Internet and particularly Usenet where there existed pretty strict netiquette rules all until September 1993, I believe Steem also needs some etiquette rules. I'm holding a bit of steem power - and with a bit of power comes (at least) a bit of responsibility, hence I'm trying to set my own guidelines that I will try to adhere by.
Ballot box, photo by Olve Utne, sourced from Wikimedia Commons
If those rules makes sense to you, I believe you also should follow them - and if they don't make sense to you, I would encourage to use the comments field. I will give upvotes to opposing points of view. Of course, there are the arguments "it's my steem power, I do what I want with it", and of course for some people it will always be most important to maximize the personal short-term profits. We can only hope that good behaviour leads to more carma which again will lead to more upvotes from others as well as increased value of the whole ecosystem, including the token.
In this post I will cover power downs, delegations and witness votes.
Power downs
Personally I don't want to power down. I think I've done it once or twice to pick up some of the profits after the Steem value growing - but it just doesn't feel right. It may be I will have to do it at some point in the future. Anyway, here is my rule on power downs:
- If the options are to delegate power to bidbots or to power down, then "power down" is the correct choice.
Witness vote
Everyone should care a little bit on the Steem governance. The list of active witnesses are unfortunately quite static today - there are people running witnesses that have left the community long ago, not all the witnesses truly care about the future of Steem. There are two problems, one is that most of those who have casted their witness vote don't bother to revisit their voting, the other is that there is too many that don't bother to vote for witnesses at all.
Ideally one should do some research on each and every witness candidate, are they active or not, do they care about the future of Steem, what kind of opinions do they have on the blockchain rules? Do they have significant values at stake?
I don't really have the time nor interest to do all that much research and have that many opinions on the Steem governance, hence I've chosen to delegate my witness votes. Every now and then I'm redoing my delegation - I try to pay a little bit of attention to some of the steem meta discussions, if I find someone who seems to be smart, who seems to care about the future of Steem, and who has distributed the witness votes, I will consider to redelegate my witness vote. Here are my witness etiquette rules:
- Don't let the witness votes rot away: Anyone holding steem power of any significance (like, more than 200) ought to do a minimum of due diligence and either cast all the witness votes or delegate it to someone else.
- Don't let the witness votes go stale: Anyone that has voted for witnesses or delegated the vote ought to reconsider the votes every now and then. Are all the witnesses voted for still active members of the community?
Steem Power Delegations
I didn't want to delegate my steem power - though, there simply isn't enough time in my life to be a top-notch curator, sometimes I simply have no time for Steem for several days in a row. When I'm able to yield significant rewards, I feel a significant responsibility for putting some care and tender into my voting. That includes doing real curation of new content, avoiding too much "circle jerk"-voting (I vote you, you vote me). It includes giving less than 100% upvote to something that isn't of good enough quality to hit the trending page, as well as avoiding to vote 100% on comments (then I'm the only one deciding the order of comments on platforms where the comments by default is sorted by votes). I don't have much time to consider my voting habits, and I don't have much time for "real" curation. Hence, delegating it to someone that could care a whole lot better than me certainly is a valid option.
I could probably delegate it to someone who would be willing to pay for it - it would be in my best interest, but I don't like that idea much. After all, when I bought some Steem long ago, one of the motivations was to support the network, and I don't believe delegating it to the highest bidder would be much supportative. Hence I've decided to delegate a significant amount of my voting power to @steemstem and a little bit to @steemitworldmap as I believe those are good projects and since I believe those accounts are doing a better work on curation than what I can do.
So, the rules are:
If you're unable to do a good curation job, then delegate all or some of your steem power to someone that can do a better curation job than you.
Delegate to the best curators, not to the highest bidder
I personally don't want to power down as long as i can utilize it. Below point is quite important to me.
Very helpful and learning topic you have raised here. Resteemed your post. So that my small followers can be benifitted from this post
Holy shit.......... I thought this was going long and monotonous. This is good man - short, clean and simple. I like it.
Okay, lets get down to it. I know you asked to maybe share a different opinion then yours but I actually want to ask a small question.
Powering down and delegation seem to me like two opposite sides of the spectrum. Can you elaborate upon your reasoning? I ask because usually the choice is between sweet or no sweet, sweet or medium sweet, etc. This feels like choosing between sweet and sour.
Please know that I ask this to develop my own understanding. By hearing your reasoning I would be able to better understand the system. I also am open to the possibility that my analogy is incomplete or misplaced in context.
The bidbots gives a steady return on invested capital with the least amount of effort.
One may achieve the same by powering down, converting the steem to other assets which can then be invested into other projects.
I didn't think it from this perspective. Thanks for clearing it man :-)
It also make me think if it be would be possible for this model to work. Person 'A' and Person 'B' are two steemians. 'A' has little time on his hands and decides find a steemian who can use some delegated SP in a better manner. So 'A' finds that is 'B' a deserving candidate and delegates him some SP with a contract that both of them will share the curation rewards.
I know this is nothing new but I am just floating an alternative option. Obviously I also recognize and respect that your rules are your own to decide.
That's legit, and it's within my rules. A considers B to be a good curator, hence the first rule is obeyed - and even though A will get some returns from B, he's not just uncritically delegating to the highest bidder, hence the second rule is also observed :-)
I think you should probably add the option to join a curation trail of your trust, e. g. steemstem or curie. You can do that spontaneously when you're a few days off, and in contrast to delegating, it is revertable in seconds and it will also give you a few curation rewards.
How to do that? Through autovote-bots?
i'm doing it through steemauto.com. basically, it runs a bot that gives a vote to everything that gets voted by a certain account (in my case steemstem), and it allows you to scale the vp (e.g. to vote with 20% of the power that steemstem uses)
Power downs: if one is more of a curator than content creator then powering down would not be the best idea, in my opinion, but on the side of constant content creators powering down is a way of cashing out the max out of rewards.
Witnesses: I have only 5 votes I guess, but I can recommend at any time @dragosroua as a witness that cares for the platform.
Regarding your idea of delegating SP I see it as perfect. I wouldn't choose bid bots either, but I wouldn't like seeing it rusting for days.
I guess you and I think a lot a like. I like the delegate to bid bots versus powering down solution. If those were the only two options, I wouldn't see much sense in sticking around or participating.
I think your thoughts on witness votes are dead on. We do need to be informed about what decisions and what activities the witnesses are involved with and how those are impacting us. And when things change, we need to take a hard look and determine if the vote should be given to someone else.
I know there are plenty of people with less SP than me that are already delegating to someone or some project. I've not reached the level of SP yet where I feel like that's the best use of my SP, or what might be left over. I'm not even sure I'm in favor of delegation yet, though I see it as better than many other practices on STEEM.