Question: What is your thought process when deciding to upvote / resteem?
Source: Pixabay
I've been thinking a lot about the cognitive friction of Steem vs. other monetization models.
I don't have much confidence in the Patreon-type "donations" model. I think the typical mental process of considering donating to a creator goes a bit like this:
- I love this person's work! I want to support them.
- Hmm, but I have bills.
- Besides, I shared their work on Facebook, so I already supported them.
- They probably make plenty of money anyway with their book/course/ads.
I've been trying to wrap my head around the mental process of deciding whether or not to upvote or resteem Steem posts and comments.
How do you think most people decide whether to upvote / resteem?
I can't speak to anyone else's thought process. This is how I think of it.
I want steem to have a higher value, and steemit and the blogging are comparable to mining. (Sort of)
I have voting power that is based on my Steem Power. I have 40ish full weighted votes a day. I want to spread them in ways that makes the platform and hopefully the value of Steem go up.
I look for articles that are interesting and relevant. Or that I think a lot of others might be interested in. I also support those who support me. (Only if I think their stuff is of reasonable quality and or interest.
So, it sounds like a pretty frictionless process for you, correct? In fact, you see it as helping yourself when you upvote someone. The only cost to you is that it takes up one of your 40-ish votes?
How do I know the amount of votes I have on a daily base, and whathappens when I spend more votes? Until now I voted if I came across something interesting.
You can check https://steemstats.com and type in your username, you will see the voting power bar.
Thanks kevinwong.
I am more or less following this pattern too.
For me, resteeming is limited to posts that either totally gave me a "wow!" feeling-- typically created by some of my favorite contributors here, OR posts I feel are important to the community from more of a "public service announcement" angle.
Upvoting? To some degree, I am motivated/guided by my writing and editorial background... I consider the content and evaluate whether it adds value to Steemit overall, as a "content venue." As in... if I were surfing along and saw this collection of content, would I think "cool site, I'll check this out some more?"
I'll upvote at 100% for things I feel are "solid" and "add value," and then scale down to about a 20% upvote for content I see as "passable, but not spam or spun content." I see my task as a "vote caster" similar to being a magazine editor who gets 100s of submissions... the good stuff gets featured, the OK stuff gets put somewhere "in line" and the junk gets ignored.
Sounds like a solid framework for thinking about it. So it doesn't sound like you feel like it "costs" you anything to upvote?
I will give upvotes pretty freely. I will almost always upvote 100%. The exception is comments, which I'll usually give 50%. My philosophy is that it doesn't cost me anything to upvote, and it sure takes a lot of votes to really deplete my voting power, so I might as well reward anyone who is contributing something even moderately worthwhile.
I do some voting on autopilot through Streemian too.
I very rarely resteem. I don't want my followers to get annoyed with me clogging up their feeds with resteemed content.
I upvote articles of many different authors, especially also of new or not so well known members whose content I feel to be undervalued.
Some already "famous" writers automatically receive upvotes from many followers, bots and also members who hope to profit from curating popular stuff early enough (often independently from quality of the single article) so that within a few minutes they may reach a potential payout of 40 dollar or more. A newbie however may write a really long or creative article, but only gets a few cents. I try to balance that a little bit.
Of course I also vote for well known (and paid users) if I like what I see. I also try to support friends and people I like.
But all articles which I upvote have one thing in common: I do open, read and of course must like the content before I upvote them. :)
I only vote manually.
I resteem articles which I think are either of very high quality, useful for myself (in this case resteeming is kind of bookmarking them, too) or just very entertaining/funny to read.
I want to support the work of a person, I consider his post useful, beautiful or interesting. I want to hope that I will also be supported and appreciated. Sometimes I make bookmarks, so as not to lose the topic.
If it's something I find interesting and/or well written I upvote. I resteem articles I find interesting and I think the people who find my articles interesting would agree.
I upvote:
I upvote anything that I took the time to go through, but weight adjusted accordingly, of course. For re-steems, it's either to give more exposure for a certain post, but more likely it's because I want it to be part of my blog roll, quite like a bookmark for myself :)