Self Upvoting by the Top 100 Authors on Steem?
How do we choose the right amount of voting power to give to others versus keep for ourselves? What percentage of votes are Steem authors using to vote on our own posts? Where do we find data to help decide what is a reasonable amount of voting power to use on ourselves and what amount is excessive? When does it seem reasonable to vote our own posts up and when does it become excessive?
For example, is a self upvote once daily reasonable? How about 3? 5? 10?
Self Upvoting by Top Authors?
My first month on Steemit I did a lot of self upvoting for $1 per upvote with about 40 upvotes a day. The next month I gave up voting my own posts to see how much it would really cost after my vote got up to almost $40. Today I am trying a mixed approach with upvoting some posts I make while not upvoting others.
What to do going forward?
Is an ideal balance to use the majority of our voting power to give to others while investing 10% to 30% back in our own posts because of the data we are about to see from the top 100 authors and from testing it both ways?
Who are the top authors on Steemit?
We can see the authors earning the highest payouts in the last 30 days at
https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30
We are going to use "Trending 30 days" and collect data on how the top 100 Steemit authors upvote.
How the 100 top Steemit authors upvote?
I used each of the 100 top author usernames to see their individual Steemit Account Outgoing Votes Info that you can find here: http://steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=jerrybanfield Thank you to @steemreports for making these outstanding reports available!
Here are the results for votes from 5 August to 18 August 2017:
What can we conclude?
- With 553,955.201 STEEM and spending 66% of voting power on self, @tamim is the single largest self upvoter on Steem in the last 30 days paying out more rewards back to themselves than any other author earns total with one exception which I will cover in a future post. My 26% self-upvotes with 51,000 Steem Power earn me less than 4% of what @tamim earns with self-upvotes while @tamim's total earnings are almost 50% higher than my total earnings at #3.
- Each of us gives ourselves back a different amount of voting power. The average votes for the top 100 authors is 200 votes and the percentage is 22.49% for self, while the average self votes of the top 10 is 140 votes and the percentage is 44.10% for self.
- 4 out of the top 9 earning authors vote themselves up with 60%+ of voting power while only @kingscrown and @gavvet use 10% or below.
- The difference in amount of Steem Power versus voting power disguises the actual earnings from self upvotes. For example, @kingscrown only did 10% in self upvotes versus my 26% but still managed to earn more than twice as much as I did from self upvotes because @kingscrown has 6 times the voting power I do. Meanwhile, @kingscrown is able to give 7 times as much in rewards out as I can making for an extremely valuable voting partner!
In summary, self upvoting is allowing for massive earnings at the top while getting rid of it only makes for an incentive to create systems to hide self upvoting which makes it even harder to detect. While it seems fair to give back some to ourselves, using 50% or more of our voting power to just give rewards to ourselves and our friends not only pays well but puts us in a position to continue doing it more in the future. Making upvoting circles, alliances to do vote for vote, and doing self upvotes along with votes for friends and family means success is extremely challenging outside of those systems.
I hope in looking at this it is helpful for us to decide where to go from here? Now the question is do I vote this post up or not :) ? If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk
Shared on:
Posting this motivated me to get work voting others up more and myself less!
Still doing some self upvotes for visibility in comments which works very well to get comments noticed as we can see here and to get replies. I am now avoiding upvoting most of my posts unless they get a downvote in which case I reserve the right to vote back up! I think less than 20% self upvotes is ideal!
Wow! I just read another post about self voting today and it seems like most people do it to some extent. I am, however, shocked to see how much some of the top people give back to themselves. Not judging or anything but this post was pretty eye-opening.
I personally will usually only upvote myself a max of once per day. On posts that I earn well on I usually don't usually self vote. But for posts that I do put a good bit of time into creating that don't earn much I will upvote even though my vote at 100% is worth about $0.20.
I feel that since I've put more of my own money into this "economy" than I've earned here (I've now contributed more of my own funds to my SP than I've earned from my blog), I should be able to not feel guilty about self voting. Especially since for every self vote that I do, I give out 10-20 upvotes to other people's posts and people who leave meaningful feedback on my own posts.
This was kind of a relief to me to see that self voting is more the norm / rule than the exception even though some people frown upon it. I Personally feel like as long as we are mostly supporting others and not just constantly self voting then it's perfectly fine to self vote. It's kind of like getting paid a dividend on my investment of my own money into my SP. I was partially inspired to use this method of investing and earning by one of your posts, Jerry.
On a side note, I haven't withdrawn a single cent to an external account or cashed out my rewards here and I don't plan to for a very long time.
John I totally agree: "I feel that since I've put more of my own money into this "economy" than I've earned here (I've now contributed more of my own funds to my SP than I've earned from my blog), I should be able to not feel guilty about self voting. Especially since for every self vote that I do, I give out 10-20 upvotes to other people's posts and people who leave meaningful feedback on my own posts."
I am keeping all my rewards here from now on too after cashing out about 20% of them so far and powering back up the rest! It seems a delicate balance between giving back a reasonable percentage to ones self especially after making a significant investment while not going overboard and just voting it all up for ourselves!
First of all congratulations on a great analytical article and for the consistent quality of your posts. You're a big promoter of this platform and Steemit needs members like you.
You bring up an interesting topic when you mention that you invested in Steemit. Just looking at statistics regarding self voting doesn't tell the whole story. Statistics can be misused and misinterpreted. Did you hear about the man that drowned in a pond that averaged only 1 foot in depth? He didn't know about the 9 foot whole in the middle.
1.)If someone has invested 10's of thousands into Steemit it becomes clearer why they do some self upvoting. Steemit NEEDS investors and investors want a return.
2.) Many members, myself included have given away thousands and in some cases 10's of thousands worth of Steem and SBD in prizes. Should using some upvotes to fund those prizes be demonised?
3.) If someone spends half an hour making a comment on a post should they be allowed to tip themselves a dollar or two for their time? Perhaps their goal of self upvoting a comment is to get it near the top because they've made an important point that they'd like to be seen. Statistics can NEVER reveal those things.
4.) many members have spent 100's of hours mentoring others in Steemit.chat, on Skype etc.. should they be allowed to "pay" themselves a few dollars for what they have done?
These are just some points to keep in mind when examining these stats.
It is true that there are some who abuse the system and if some are using a high percentage or even 100% to upvote their own posts it is cause for concern.
Keep up the great work and thanks again for the great dialogue on this topic!
Point 3 is what I came here to say. I am extremely new to Steemit, with my account under 2 weeks old. I did did research for the 2 weeks waiting to be approved and for the little time I've been on here. Although my upvote isn't worth much, I do self upvote in some comments to get the comment a bit higher so you don't have to be reading every comment to find mine down at the bottom. Just a point to never banning self voting, with giving a full opinion on something I feel I still don't have enough knowledge of and haven't put enough time thinking about to have a strong opinion one way or another.
Upvoted!
Welcome to Steemit! 2 weeks to get approved. Wow, I had no idea that it was that long. Keep learning and enjoying the platform!
@kus-knee you're welcome for the discussion and thank you for joining us in it! What you have shared is very helpful for me to feel after investing over $50,000 in Steem along with devoting my entire business to it for three months now that upvoting my own post a few dollars is reasonable!
Not to mention that you've brought a large number of followers from your other sites, tons of experience as an internet marketer, and a boatload of enthusiasm. Self upvoting in your case is warranted and even expected. Keep it reasonable and I don't think anyone should complain.
We want an enthused @jerrybanfield whose investment pays off!
This sounds totally reasonable Jerry. I'll confess the ability to upvote your own content as you contribute to the community is the biggest reason I traded all of my Litecoin for Steem Power. I know there are other reasons to hold steempower but to be honest I'm not sure what they are.
So you can't discount the fact that having the ability to upvote your own posts is an attractive feature to bring in new investors. You've mentioned this on your Youtube and I totally agree. It could easily attract a multimillionaire to drop just one of his or her millions for this purpose alone. And that would cause the price of STEEM to go way up, which would benefit all.
I like the diversity that Steemit is capable to offer: there are so many ways that you can earn with it and you have the power to choose which ones are the best for yourself...
Thanks for using the http://www.steemreports.com.
Please also visit @steemreports, and vote for the articles to finance the development of these tools!
You're welcome I just added your username to the post and have upvoted all of your recent posts!
Thanks man... much appreciated!
You're welcome I will have more posts coming featuring the data on your website soon!
This is great.
I am settling into the 10% range and feeling comfortable. I used to do more, but I'm liking it now better.
I just made a rad post about voting strategy. "Best Upvote Strategy" if you're curious.
Anyway, as always Mr Banfield. You're a gosh darn legend. Cheers to you my friend and thanks for this top notch baller information.
i followed you and up voted
I, personally, give all my votes to others. My vote weight is only $0.05 including delegated power, but I feel that I benefit most when I give back to the community.
Outstanding! I did that for a month and now I am not sure whether it makes sense to do some self upvotes or none!
I am replying maybe to late and Jerry you dont read this but IS THERE SOMEWHERE DEMOGRAPHIC DATA ABOUT STEEMIT USERS? (age, country, sex etc.)
Good question I do not know of one that has this data because it is not available publicly on the blockchain!
"google_analytics_id":"UA-76480270-1" at least we know, that the steemit admins collect and have such data. Maybe we could add as a hidden/visible content our own google_analytics_id to get some data.
Thank you for mentioning this because I just checked if they had Google analytics the other day and I did not see it! Did they just add this?
you are welcome :) I found it right now in the source code and I did not look after this previously
I think they've been doing it for a long time.
That is very unethical
it is not unethical to get the public google analytics code from the source code you already loaded in your browser and so is not unethical to get demographic data about the visitors of your content. Steemit is like wordpress. Installing your google analytics code is legal. It doesn't matter if its visible or hidden. Anyway, thank you for sharing your point of view. Now you have my point of view too.
https://steemit.com/statistics/@arcange/steemit-statistics-20170721-en there we go, arcange (67)
Witness - Developer of SteemSQL, SteemitBoard, Steem.NET and SteemToolbar
I appreciate not voting for yourself. I think a vote should be something you give to someone else. You are right though that many would just bypass and use vote-for-vote community if we were to ban self-voting. I still think it is best to just not do it, but let's see if I can still resist the temptation when my vote is at $3 and not just $0.03
Me too. My voting power is so small. I usually keen to give them to the community.
This is absolutely epic!
I'm often sad I can't vote more than I do if I want to vote full power.
With the recent in flow of new users though it's been strangely easier to stick to around 11 votes a day.
You've exceeded my expectations.
You've got talent!
This is incredible!
You've got skills to envy.
I believe you've hit on the core of the issue right here:
"While it seems fair to give back some to ourselves, using 50% or more of our voting power to just give rewards to ourselves and our friends not only pays well but puts us in a position to continue doing it more in the future. Making upvoting circles, alliances to do vote for vote, and doing self upvotes along with votes for friends and family means success is extremely challenging outside of those systems."
The fact is, Steemit's game-theory strongly encourages exactly what you are pointing out is happening here. Because of the snowball effect of cumulative "interest", which is essentially the same effect you get by voting yourself, you end up behind everyone who does it if YOU don't do it.
I don't have a good solution, but I think curation needs to be much more rewarding somehow. I also hate the 30 minute anti-bot rule, which I don't think actually disadvantages bots in any way. Be nice to get this done without substantially reducing the rewards pool, too.
Excellent analysis, Jerry. I really liked the "circle graphs/pie charts".
Thank you Jason I feel good about not having a good solution either and making curation a bit more rewarding might help some!
➕💯
@jerrybanfield I am guilty of UP Voting myself. You have taught that the BEST thing to do is still spread the LOVE around. I may Vote for myself but I know that it is better to GIVE than Receive. Live the GOLDEN RULE. Love You Man, STEEM On Brother !!!
Thank you @stokjockey :) That is the question whether it should involve guilt to do a few self upvotes or a lot or any?
What if a person's self-upvoting is 99% or even 100%, will it be considered illegal at Steemit?
There are no rules here, and this is the power of steem. You might even find people that will appreciate that you don't give back any votes, but probability will be hard to convince them to upvote you :))
I'm completely lost on this. Is this about using the 50/50 choice or about upvoting their own comments? I am upvoting myself on posts and then 8-12 posts or comments on other people's posts each day. Some of the people on your list are barely voting at all.
This is super discouraging information to see. I hope this platform will succeed because I love some many things about it, but it might implode from lack of support to those who are trying.
After 8 weeks here - I still do not feel comfortable to invite friends yet. They would shoot me if I told them the level of effort for a small return.
I am here for the Alexa ranking and to get my work seen. My connections are content creators with the same goal. Posts here do not get seen by the search engines unless an individual post makes $10 and gets the "DoFollow" tag. I'm not sure how that will happen under these conditions.
Swimming up the stream...
Exactly! Thank you for saying this.
I'm on a little vacation from posting original content because I've been frustrated at the amount of effort I've put into posts vs. how much I receive in return. It's super frustrating. :((
I have shifted to a lot more commenting and a lot less posting for that very reason. My goal is now 3-4 posts per week and 30-50 comments per day. My comments bring much more reward compared to my posting. Commenting a lot helps:
The sad thing I have found is that in order to get that $10 - most posts have one or more of these things:
So far I have not gone into any chats on Discord or anywhere else. I have been told a few times that if I go in there and "suck up" to certain whales this is a good strategy and they "might" start upvoting my posts. Ergh...
Then I went to one of those whale posts and a good portion of the comments were "Love your post! Please vote on mine" with links provided. The post itself was the Whale whining about how bad steemit is now with spam. I wanted to answer that Spam is rewarded while good content dies but stayed out of it.
What if that Whale went in daily and voted for 10-12 good posts for people with low payouts? Great content is not hard to find at all here. I find much more than I can vote on or comment on in any given day.
Whale assistance would improve the place tremendously, but there is no motivation for a whale to do this unless they want the platform to succeed in the long-term. Since many of them are draining out their investment/earnings right now, I am not sure they care if the place survives or not.
Note the difference in the whales above.
some are are all over the platform and I see many of them daily. You can see they spread their votes to many - I assume based on quality and interest.
some have a small handful who get all their votes. This means they are posting their own post, hitting their 5-7 people with votes, and leaving for the day. How is this voting pattern improving the platform? It's not.
Absolutely. I agree with you. That's currently how things work here and for people like you and me, it's incredibly unfair and annoying.
I could crank out awesome content every single day if I put my mind to it, but why? So I can make $3 or less on something I spent a couple hours thinking up, writing, editing, formatting, and finding images for? -- and that's just for 1 post.
What I find is that leaving comments on the posts of more popular Steemit users (this post, for example) very, very, very rarely prompts a response from the author, but often allows me to run into friendly, helpful people like yourself who I would enjoy following/upvoting.
I can't/don't want to buy SP either. I think your commenting/building relationships strategy is better for people like us and I will likely implement it as well. I haven't commented much outside my social circle lately. Thank you for sharing...
You're welcome, and I am so glad to connect today. I just ran into a post with some comments talking about cross posting on other platforms such as G+. I don't get the whole strategy yet, but I'm on every site known to man (exagg) and I can certainly promote out there.
The commenting works but you need a thick skin. For 30 comments I get about 5-8 replies and average I-2 upvotes on the comments. But like you mention, I get a lot of connections from this - people who would never see me otherwise.
I'm trying to think in the long-term for a platform I barely understand that changes constantly! There is no end to the chances I will take to get my message out.
You get only 1-2 upvotes because, after HF 19, people (i.e., dolphins and whales) have had to use their upvotes more wisely or spread them thin to something like 1% per upvote, which amounts to a few pennies in most cases. Of course you don't get a slider to adjust your voting percentage until you reach 400 SP...
In addition to consistent comments, I think it's important to actively engage the non-spammy comments on our own posts to maximize those relationships. I am starting to get my regular set of commenters/upvoters, which is really cool.
You have a great message and I'm happy that you're persistent about getting it out. DTube will also be a fantastic alternative to YouTube, if you haven't checked it out already. I haven't checked out your other presences online, but will do so...
You can find me by searching "fitinfun" on any search engine. It's all me me me and one of my best achievements. fitinfun was not a word when I started and google wanted to show "fit 'n fun" for the result. Vanity!
This I do not understand:
"people (i.e., dolphins and whales) have had to use their upvotes more wisely or spread them thin to something like 1% per upvote, which amounts to a few pennies in most cases."
I get the theory, but at 1% that means they can vote hundreds of times a day. Why not go to 40-60% and vote 20 times a day? That's what I thought I would do if I ever got to such lofty heights. That way I can make a bit of a difference and actually help people maybe.
I absolutely agree with you on the replying on my posts. I do have some repeating peeps and that's rewarding. And the financial rewards crawl upwards week by week - I've only been here 8 weeks. I just want that Alexa ranking and I guess I will have to work much harder to get it :)
I just got a message from a minnow friend telling me he is spending 8+ hours a day on the commenting and replying and is burnt out with the lack of response. I told him to work harder lol! He's a guy with awesome content and thoughtful comments. Ergh...
I'm holding off a bit on Dtube but will definitely go for it in September :)
You've got serious skills.
"I am here for the Alexa ranking and to get my work seen." This seems to be a great bottom line for many of us unless "Posts here do not get seen by the search engines unless an individual post makes $10"
REALLY? I have not seen that anywhere would you link your source because that would be very helpful information for me to process?
The data shared here is definitely discouraging and I think if we are going to do better we have to walk through the despair of looking at the downsides of how things are working now.
Hi Jerry - here is the post that told me about the "NoFollow" "DoFollow" information
https://steemit.com/seo/@howtostartablog/a-big-hole-in-my-backlink-strategy
The first comment tells you the threshold is maybe $9-$10 based on this steemer checking his own posts. I checked mine at the time (below $10) and others with $10+ and it seemed to be accurate.
Here is another post with the same information and lots of verification in the comments.
https://steemit.com/seo/@cryptoctopus/steemit-seo-today-i-learned-dofollow-links-are-not-about-reputation-at-all
And here is how to check the DoFollow/NoFollow status for each post so you do not have to dig in the comments to find this information:
Thank you so much for looking into this and any ideas you have for us little guys :)
You've got serious potential.
and did your alexa ranking approved since you post your work on steemit?
My Alexa ranking for my little WordPress site is not good and is unlikely to ever climb to the ranks of Steemit. I was hoping to piggyback my existing (huge amount of) content and take advantage of the Alexa here at Steemit. I already use this strategy at you tube and a few other sites.
For example - I can post on my fitinfun blog, but few will see the post.
Then I make a you tube video on the same topic and use that video to drive traffic to my site and vice versa. This strategy helps me get my message out. I hope to use this at steemit, but if my posts do not get the "DoFollow" tag, they are not going to help me since no one can see them.
At You Tube - all the videos are ranking based on various stats and so they all help me regardless of great popularity or not. All my work is "how to" and tutorial. People can find my videos with you tube search no matter how popular they are. Here at steemit, if my post does not get $10, it will not appear in search at all.
This is top-notch!
Just powered up my account with more than 500 of STEEM. From this level adjusting voting power is possible. 😀
Thank you for the report. Saved it to my bookmarks.