WHY I COULDN'T UPVOTE, COMMENT AND POST FOR 3 DAYS!

For the past 3 days I was not able to upvote, post or comment: More than 70 hours have passed since my last blogpost and more than 60 hours have passed since my last comment. Steemit had forbidden me to speak and all I could do was read.

The cause of this trouble: No remaining bandwidth!

I would like to apologise to all my followers and others who commented on my articles who were expecting a reply; there are a lot of comments which I cannot answer because my account did not have enough bandwidth. I am making this announcement for everyone to be aware that I am experiencing these issues and I will be trying to fix them. For people who have never heard of these bandwidth problems on Steemit, please read the article as you will find useful information that is important to know.

• Here is a short explanation of the problem:
  The bandwidth limit is mostly occuring with new Steemit-users who have little Steem Power. These people, myself included, apparently break the guidelines of Steemit and our accounts can get temporarily limited! In other words when your account is limited you can't do anything: no posting, no voting, no commenting.

In case you didn't know you can view my remaining bandwidth and voting power on this page: https://steemd.com/@maxdigi

You can also view your own voting power and remaining bandwidth by replacing my username in the link and put yours instead.

6 ways to fix the bandwidth issues

Luckily there are a few ways to avoid this message and reduce your bandwidth usage, but I wish I had known them sooner:

1. Don't vote too much

Voting uses Steem Power and also takes away bandwidth from your account. This means we should all keep in mind to only upvote qualitative content, content worth your upvote and worth your bandwidth.

It's even more important to know that unvoting, so taking away your vote of a post is not a good idea; this will take away the curation reward you might get for that vote and you will have used twice as much bandwidth. Unvoting also uses bandwidth from your account, so if you did upvote a post and you would like to remove it, keep this in mind!

2. Don't follow everyone

Now this is something I wish I had known a lot sooner... As I tried to expand my network and found new people who wanted to follow me, I also followed a lot of them back in order to gain their respect and to show them my support. This seems to be draining a lot of my remaining bandwidth, now it also appears that having a lot of followers with low Steem Power will use up a big piece of your bandwidth as well.

Now I learned the hard way that I have been making mistakes, this problem in particular seems very hard to fix: I could try stop following some people, but unfollowing will also reduce my bandwidth and doing this would probably silence me for a few more days.

3. Don't comment to comment

Another thing I used to do was reacting to everyone on all my articles, to me this felt normal and was a way of being polite to my readers. I also regularly went to the introduceyourself-section to welcome new members and refer them to my blog.

Steemit does not approve this behavior: We should only bring value to the platform. This bandwidth-issue in some way also supports my previous article in which I stated everyone should remember to keep the posting quality high and that quantity doesn't matter, quality must always take precedence over quantity. Read my previous article here

4. Don't resteem too much articles

Resteeming also takes away some of your remaining bandwidth!

5. Don't edit your posts or comments (if it's not necessary)

It's normal that bloggers sometimes make mistakes in posts or comments, not everyone is a perfect native English-speaker, but it is important to keep in mind that editing posts or comments will also use bandwidth. This is why you should always read your posts and comments a few times before posting so that you don't have to edit them!

6. Powering-up

As you read in the beginning of my post, the bandwidth limit only happens to accounts with low Steem-Power. So a solution can be to power up your Steemit account. You can do this by buying STEEM and converting it to SP or by buying SP directly from blocktrades.

Important note: You will not be able to upgrade your Steem-power by converting STEEM when your bandwidth limit is reached: You will have to wait for your bandwidth to come back before you are able to power up, converting STEEM also uses bandwidth...

What will I do in the future to avoid this issue?

Basically to fix these bandwidth issues I will have to drastically reduce my interaction with the community, which I really don't want, but it seems I'm forced to do at least some of these things:

• I will not be able to react on every comment anymore
• I will not be able to upvote all the content I like
• I will not be able to resteem all the content I like
• Slowly I will have to reduce my following (meaning the people I am following)

Next to these 4 bulletpoints and last but definitely not least:
I will focus on Powering-Up my Steemit-account!
Today I have already bought Steem Power worth 0.25 LTC in order to publish this article. If I did not power up who knows for how long I would not be able to express myself. Hopefully I can invest more in the future and increasy my total bandwidth!

As you might have noticed there is a little icon next to the title of this article; this icon means I have chosen to Power-Up my Steemit-account with all the rewards for this particular post. My next posts will all be like this with the main purpose of being able to interact with you more!

Smash that upvote please to help me increase my Steem Power!

Your opinion

As always I want your opinion on the article but also specifically on this question:

Isn't Steemit basically supporting inequality by limitting the bandwidth usage of low accounts?

My explanation:
Don't get me wrong, I love Steemit, I love the cryptocurrency, I love the community. But today I was basically forced to spend money in order to run my blog the way I want and react to my followers... Doesn't this bandwidth rule only benefit the Whales? I don't see them complaining; they can post and comment all day long and build a network way faster than others. Seems a little unfair to me.

If you have any other suggestions on how to solve the bandwidth issue, please let me know!

I want to thank you all for your understanding! I am very happy with the growth of my blog and I hope we can continue this trend.

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Thank you for reading.
Feel free to upvote, comment, resteem and/or follow my blog @maxdigi if you liked this post! I greatly appreciate your support.

Cheers,
MAXIDIGI