3 different voting strategies: Witnesses, Dolphins and Minnows.
Steemit is growing at an incredible pace (500 users per day), this means that is getting harder and harder to find good content and filter through all the spam. Luckily for us the platform has a great feature to fight this problem: Curation.
As some of you already know, Steemit pays you to vote on posts, but you only make money if other people vote too. The intend of this is to filter out spam, plagiarism and crappy content, while featuring good posts on the “hot” or “trending” categories.
A witness responsibility to curation.
In Steemit not all votes count the same; some votes have more weight than others, the more Steem Power a user has the more impact he/she will have when curating content.
There are 19 witnesses who are paid with SP for finding blocks and keeping the network running. Some witnesses are also some of the biggest whales on Steemit, but unlike other whales they have made this wealth by being voted in by steemit`s users, which morally obliges them to give back to all the users. One way to give back is to vote, curate and distribute SP and SBD to deserving users.
I have seen the entire 19 witnesses vote for content and post on comments, some witnesses have auto-voting bots and this is a GOOD thing since it is not humanely possible to be awake and voting 24 hours a day and whales need to vote all the time if poster want to make any meaningful amount of money!
Having said this, next time you vote for a witness make sure that he is an active voter on Steemit.
A dolphins curation strategy
According to one of the most famous writers on steemit, @stellabelle, a dolphin is a user who is not big enough to qualify as a whale but has enough SP to make a difference when voting. I personally consider a dolphin anyone who has between 50m and 200m Vest.
Like a real dolphin, a steemit dolphin needs to be very smart about their votes if they want to make any money. Some dolphins follow whales and try to vote just before them, in my opinion that strategy is not adding any value to steemit curation system; on the contrary it is giving the whales even more curation responsibility.
The best way a dolphin can make some curation SP is by reading the “new” category and voting on good posts that they think will likely become popular, depending on their SP they should vote in the 10-25 min range. By being the firsts to vote they can make a couple of SP per post and also feature good content on the “hot” list so that the whales can come in and give their votes to already “pre-approved” content.
How should minnows curate?
Like it has been stated in the past, curation is not for small users. If you are a minnow and hold less than 1m SP, you should just vote for whomever you enjoy reading. If you want to make some steem you can write valuable content and promote it amongst yours friends on facebook and twitter, if your friends sign up and vote, your post will climb up the “hot” category which will make it more visible for dolphins and whales.
Remember that at this point it only takes one or a couple of very good posts to become a dolphin, so don´t be discouraged if your first post was not found, you will sure have a second and third chance of becoming a dolphin… or maybe even a baby whale one day!
This is sugarcoating. Auto-voting bots are not able to recognize quality content. There is no other way currently to recognize quality content other than have it processed by a human brain. What auto-voting bots are doing is voting on content issued by authors who had a good past performance regardless of the relative merit of their content. And since these bots are first in after the content is released, they undercut everyone else. This is the Steem version of HFT trading. Just look at Wang bot. That witnesses that are paid out of the dilution of everyone else's stake partake to this kind of practice is not something to be proud about, and I don't know what to think of the fact you condone it as "a GOOD thing".
That's inconsistent. How can "dolphin" front run whales (voting before is called front running, not following as you said) if Whales voting isn't predictable. Yeah right, whales voting is damn predictable because they vote on maximum payout posts based on historical performance: @stellabelle, @andrarchy, @heiditravels, @dan, @cryptoctopus, @donkeypong etc. These are the "bluechips". Talk about fair retribution of content. If even witnesses and devs aren't showing the right example, don't come crying when Steemit becomes unusable because most of the revenue is extracted using quantitative posting and voting methods centered around technical features of posts.
Exactly, doesn't seem fair or in the best interest of the community under the current rules. This gives me doubts about the long-term viability of the project, but for now I'm keeping the faith that changes will be made in the future to make things more fair for everyone.
I guess that makes me a platypus!
Copypasta strikes again!
This is such a nice and useful post that I am upvoting it early. Great ideas and you've explained these three strategies very clearly!
Thanks!
What about 1 to 10 Million SP?
I would say those are tunas, they can still make some good money following the dolphin`s strategy. I actually have 1 account with 4m Vest and it has done quite well curating.
If you have 1-10 million you will most likely become a dolphin soon if you keep voting and posting :)
Yea I have 8 mill
Very informative! Your categorisation is excellent but it does show a skew towards the heavyweights. For the purpose of establishing that this platform does not endorse the concept of the rich getting richer, it is time to relook the logic behind the rewards. I believe as a community we can come out with solutions so that we are not only percieved to be fair, we actually are.
The rewards for curation have actually been re-configured to favor small holders and to prevent bot abuse.
However, some investors have bought a lot of steem or invested in mining hardware and they want to see their investment being returned somehow, that return on invest comes on the form of curation and I think is fair to retribute them.
I do believe who have invested should profit but their influence should be (almost) at par when curating. I have no clue how this can be implemented but it was just a thought. Which ever way I just want fairness and in no way am implying it is not at the moment.
Is that in VESTS ? I wish I had 1m SP :)
Great post! Upvoted!
Great points, I was especially impressed with your insights on the witnesses, that's one area I haven't properly dug deeper into.
Another article about my pal @stellabelle ! She is amazing and a great mentor! I am pleased to see her influences far and wide here in the #steemitcommunity
Dolphins ability to echo-locate is similar to savvy readers who are able to zero in and locate the quality posts in the sea of potential. Upvoting is like sending a bubble of light at that quality post!
Are you a Whale?
hehe not even a dolphin, maybe a tuna