An Open Letter to my Followers
Like many people I followed Jeff Berwick @thedollarvigilante to Steemit. I had no notion of making large amounts like him. That’s just not how I have used social networking thus far. My hope is to support the principles of freedom, and being incentivized to participate doesn’t hurt.
While, I have made more money than I ever did on Facebook, Twitter, and all of my other social networking efforts combined, I'm not going to be quitting my job anytime soon. Of course that's okay.
After a few days of experience and study I think I may have stumbled out of the gate. I’ve been expanding the people I follow in a quid pro quo fashion. They followed me, I followed them, without regard to what they post. In a few cases I responded to people that promised to follow me if I followed them. I did that and up voted many of their posts. While I managed to get several upvotes I was getting zero or near zero payouts.
It turns out that after 20 upvotes your influence becomes extremely diluted. Which explains why I can make a few cents with 5 upvotes and zero with 7. Additionally, I'm just not helping anybody by upvoting willie nillie. So in the interest of making my upvotes valuable to those posters I appreciate, I need to limit myself.
So here is the full disclosure:
- I will NOT be following my new followers in a quid pro quo fashion. Please do not follow me to be followed.
- I will be limiting my daily upvotes to maximize the value of them. You should get paid more for my upvote.
- I will NOT be upvoting for follows.
- I will consider following people that BOTH upvote me and produce content that appeals to me. If you want to be followed by me upvote a post of mine, and I will review your blogs for the consideration of following and or upvoting your posts.
- I will follow those I chose to.
- I will upvote only quality posts, first for those I follow.
Today, I will be reviewing and pruning my follow list to focus on people that produce quality posts that I want to read. So you may be unfollowed.
If you are only following me because I followed you feel free to unfollow if that is your desire. Hopefully, I’m producing content you want to read, and you will continue. As you wish.
I will be reviewing my feed regularly, first for upvoting and curating. Then I will review the public blogs.
Okay, I think that will straighten out the problems I see with my previous behaviors. Please comment on other things I can do to streamline my interaction with steemit, tweek the benefits for those I upvote, and perhaps increase the profit for me down the road.
Thank you for reading, especially if you made it all the way down here.
Those are good upvoting rules and principles.
A recent hard fork also instituted the 30 minute rule for curating. If you upvote right after a post is created, your curator rewards go to the author. The portion of curator award going to the author decreases over time. After 30 minutes 100% of any curator reward goes to the curator. I found the following article to be helpful for understanding curating, Mind Your Votes! An investigation and guide to maximizing your Curation Rewards.
Steem on,
Mike
Was just considering doing a little cleanup of the list of people I also follow... it is a good idea to narrow down the list to make the Feed of posts more useful. Some cleanup from time to time is needed.
Otherwise you wont be able to review your feed efficiently, and if it has a lot of junk in it you wont want to read it. So it is a way of conserving your energy, and focus on appealing content creators.
@neopatriarch
You speaking like a professional.
I have over 100 followers. 1% only really doing the UPVOTES , the rest are lazy bum.
I still UPVOTES them and supported them.
Hopefully, they will realise that I am making more than them, as I physical gaining more by upvoting them.
@bullionstackers
I found today that many of the people I had followed were inactive on steemit. Perhaps that accounts for some of the lack of activity of your followers. Additionally, they all have a soft limit of 20 votes per a day that they might be using to up vote other posters. Besides most of these probably have real jobs and cannot give it attention everyday. So I think its a little unfair to label your own followers as lazy bums.
Maybe they doesn't know how to use the Feed.
The Feed are your followers blogs.
Could be. Some of the menus are not very intuitive. Perhaps someone needs to blog about just those sorts of issues. I figured that out myself, but there were a couple of days before I even noticed the option. Suddenly there was a real reason to follow people.
Still learning about the best use of our votes. Seems I may have been over voting, which doesn't surprise me. I like what you had to say here, seems a very logical way to approach it.
Thanks naquoya
I also joined with the Jeff Berwick post. Quite a learning experience!!!