RE: Steemers won't waste their votes on comments … voting power is money, voting on comments doesn’t make money.
I think the primary problem is a learned behavior problem, not an incentive problem.
The founding document on curation reward, The update
You can look around to find a lot more advice on voting, but the advice, from an economic standpoint, is complete Bullshit. Maybe for Whales and Dolphins things change, but, if you don't have well over 1k SP, the advice is economic nonsense. Here's why.
The advice is to vote for things in the new section 15-30 minutes old that you think will make it to the front page, don't vote too often, 40 votes/day target. I did the math a while back, to compare a bunch of numbers here would take way too long, so you'll just have to trust my generalities, or do the math yourself, the formulas are in the first link in my comment.
I have 15.836 SP right now, that's .0611MVests. I'm decent at picking articles that will make it to the front page, according to the rules I've read about. The most I've ever received from a curation reward is .007 SP, if you take Steem dollars as dollars (and they're close enough) that makes .007*2.3 = $.016.
Better than nothing, but, let's put this into context. My daily average reward (total) is more like .004, or almost $.01.
Little more context: That's voting for 4-5 articles reading probably 20, and investing around an hour and a half of my time. That's a pretty horrible hourly wage, like .005$/hr.
If you believe in the idea behind Steemit and like doing this, that's fine. If you are trying to maximize the value of your time, you should comment, write articles, or better yet, get a temp job.
The links you provide don’t work for me.
Your target should be 20 votes a day (40 cut in half your voting power on each vote)
If you don’t have a lot of free time and not a lot of funds in SP, you shouldn’t spend the your time trying to make money by voting. I agree with you. In the other hand the system offers you a way to increse your funds in SP and then be able to win more by voting. You can write good content. Th emore quality and popular your content the more money you’ll make and the more mopney you’ll get out of voting. You can also buy SP if you beleive strongly in the future of Steem but be careful, investment are risky, never invest what you can’t afford to lose.
I think the structure of the platefrom is really well done. It has benefits for people with time and no money, people with money and no time and people with both or neither.
The only imbalance I see is there is no a lot of incentive to comment, at least much less than vote or write a post.
sorry, I'll just put the links in cut and paste form https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/latest-curation-reward-solution https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/
My point was that it's not about incentives, it's about learned behavior, because maximizing your curation rewards is very close to maximizing nothing.
You should vote for comments because you have more interaction, more connection and more social engagement. It's actually way more inline with your incentives because positive interactions are way better for you than just voting for a piece where your only interest is to get curation rewards.
The above is also a really good reason to comment!
Imagine, during the next months you post a coupe of very successfull post and you earn around 10K $. Would you keep thinking that maximising your voting power is not important ?
You could make 100-150$ / month by voting smartly. Maybe it's not a lot but then your plan would be to keep doing that to grow even more your SP funds. Well, you would be then very careful with every vote you give and you would stop voting on comments because you only have 20 votes with full power / day.
That's what I meant with the imbalance ;p
Ok, but I didn't just buy a thousands of Steem and power up.