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RE: My Personal Stance on Voting Bots - One Month Without Paid Upvotes Challenge
You mean to earn from the curation rewards? You can kind of guess when to upvote a post to get most out of the curation rewards.
Not just curation rewards. My question is how best to reward quality posts on Steemit by using upvotes. I'd like the highest quality posts to get the highest rewards. To keep things simple and in the spirit of the Steemit whitepaper, lets say that I want to maximize the reward for posts (and comments) that I personally feel are high quality. Others may disagree with my assessment of quality, but I am only trying to maximize my upvotes. I'm also considering the reward as being both the increase in reputation and the payout to the author. I would also like to be rewarded on the quality of my posts, which I have some say in by upvoting. I've read a lot about how all of this works, but there are so many variables, that it is still not clear to me that I am voting to achieve my goals.
As a new user should I upvote my posts? Will someone get upset if I do? Should I wait 30 minutes for mine? for others? But what if someone starts voting before 30 minutes? And what if the author upvotes first? Oh and then there is my voting power that I have to watch. Should I vote a post older than 7 days? (I'm not expecting you to answer these, my main point is actually next.)
So its clear that this system of voting power and payouts was/is based on game-theoretic principles. However, it is not clear how and when and on what I should vote to maximize quality. I think that is a fundamental problem, especially for new users. In most other social network systems the rule is simple: if you like a post or want to support it, then upvote it and share it. Adding limited auto-refreshed voting power makes sense to avoid people who just keep voting, as well as Sybil attacks. But adding the rest of the Steemit economic rules (for which I know there are good reasons) suddenly complicates the upvote decision, bringing with it a rather high cognitive cost per vote.
Interesting question actually and I did some research into that. So, it appears that it's indeed better to wait, if you want to maximize other people's curation rewards.
Source: https://steemit.com/curation/@yabapmatt/why-you-should-wait-to-upvote-your-own-posts
I also think that there's nothing wrong with upvoting your own posts, though it won't make that much difference when you're a new user.
In response to your last paragraph, I think most of those additional economic rules stem from the equality update (hard fork 19), which made drastic changes to the way post rewards were distributed. IMO it makes the whole process of voting too complicated, as you mentioned. I'm also not sure if it does have the desired effect of rewarding quality.
In hindsight, the section in the Steem Whitepaper called "No Micropayments, No Tips" seems to be wrong, or at best extremely naive. The paper rules out micropayments because the cost to the payer increases cognitive costs, thus increasing barriers to participation. It goes on to claim that steem upvotes don't suffer from this, because the cost is not paid by the voter, but by the system. This is supposed to decrease cognitive cost to zero, because the vote doesn't cost the voter anything. However, if we want users to vote for quality, there must be some cognitive costs! In addition, even though the vote is paid via new tokens, since everyone knows a vote is worth a certain amount and a user can vote themselves (or sell/loan those votes to others) a vote in steem does cost the user. There is a fixed allotment of new tokens, so in any given time period voting is a zero sum game. So Steem votes ARE micropayments with significantly higher cognitive costs than the traditional micropayments that steem votes were trying to avoid!