Is it such a bad thing?
I know many steemians who are against the self-voting practice, and I also was against it for a long time. Why is that? You could buy a bunch of Steem Power and start to post just whatever posts, after that all it takes is to upvote yourself and, voila - you are effectively draining the rewards pool without really contributing to the quality content on the platform. You don't even need followers or curators. Even better, you drain the money unnoticed. In fact, there are many "authors" on Steemit who do exactly that, I'm sure you have come across some already. As you can imagine no one benefits from this in the long-term. I would argue that this is one of the main reasons the price action of the Steem token is so depressing compared to many newer altcoins who surpassed our market cap in a matter of just a few months.
There will always be people who will try to abuse a system if there is money to be made, and Steemit makes no exception. With time we will see new waves of more accounts who will try to take away as much as they can from the market capital of Steem.
What we can do about it?
For me, the answer is quite obvious. You upvote yourself! The less money goes out of the platform the better for the price of Steem. By upvoting yourself you get a little chunk of the rewards pool that otherwise would go to the pool drainers. After all, if you don't like your own material, how could you expect others to like it? And you get to hold on to some more Steem.
How to Upvote Yourself
Of course, there has to be some etiquette on how we curate in general. As I mentioned just upvoting yourself can be dangerous. Think of a good strategy on how much of your daily voting power you are willing to allocate. I would recommend a 33/33/33 strategy. That is 33% will go to your favorite authors, 33% to your commenters and 33% for yourself. Normally I don't upvote my comments, only on occasions where I want the comment to go up in the comments section.
At the end of the day, the upvote is a tool we use to curate and we are all responsible how we utilize the tools Steem is offering. Use the upvote in any way you like, as long as it's beneficial to the platform as a whole and the platform will reward you even more.
Steem On!
That was a great explaination, currently not a lot of people are concerned about the self voting strategy and even the big whales.
Every big whale you will see self upvotes their posts and even I saw an interview of a very popular whale where she stated she stopped self upvoting but soon she had to start again because she couldn't go on without it.
I guess self upvoting has it's merits of course but yeah over doing it really will mess things up for others!
Maybe for the big authors whales who are already getting the rewards from the reward pools and they are not selfish and they just want to send their post on hot then trending page as we can see for getting featured in the hot page you need good time & money ratio on your post.
Also their is another thing about how the upvote reward is distributed, a Steemian or the author who upvotes the post secs after the post is posted the voter voting at that time gets a very less curation reward for themselves then people who vote after some time or like after 20 mins which is the best spot and the curation reward is distributed depending on that, curation reward isn't like you can get the biggest pie the earlier you vote now.
I haven't gone through the steemit white paper completely but you can go through there about this topic.
Let's see what the other discussions have to say about it.
Also take a look at my recent funny posts 😂
https://steemit.com/funny/@asteemian/karma
Заслужаваш тука няколко ъпвоута! Thumbs up
I mainly upvote my posts to get more eyes on them than if they had no value assigned. What I've always wanted is for the self-votes to simply send the money to the @null account which would destroy it, effectively helping the price to rise. I'm skeptical it will ever happen though.
Good idea, additionally I always promote my posts to burn some Steem. It helps me reach more potential followers and balance the Steem I acquired from the self-vote.
To be fair, it's not my idea but I read it on Steemit once and it stuck with me ever since. I hadn't thought about the promotion feature, never used it so it slipped out of my mind, will start using it from now on. Thanks for refreshing my mind !
This is an interesting article. Thought provoking. I must admit that you are right. What you say makes perfect sense. This is called self love. If we don't love ourselves how can others love us?
{This is true to some extent in broader prespective but, still upvoting own post seems like an act of self praising !}
True but it's a build in a feature on the platform, you can even upvote on your post before even posting it. If Steem forbid upvoting yourself people would open more accounts just to do that. I think as long as you use your voting power wisely you are not harming the platform.
As a newer member I was never really clear on the positive or negative of self-voting until recently.
I have chosen to not self-vote all the while continuing to UPvote others with good, quality content. I've never been willy-nilly about handing out UPvotes and until last week I never fully understood the strategy. But now that I do, I am more critical thinking about how to delegate it.
I agree, as long as the voting power goes to the right people, the platform will become better over time.
Maybe you could also have a chat with @therneau and see what he has been working on :)
I used to upvote everything, including every comment made. Now I only do posts but I'm not sure why. When I joined the site everyone upvoted their own comments, it wasn't until a little down the line that it became bad Steem etiquette. After being here this long now, I am not so sure I agree and am thinking that comments should just be auto upvoted just like posts.
Hmmm, you make a good point.
I don't upvote my own posts, but I only have a cent of SP so I'm not missing much. But I have always though it a bit greedy to upvote yourself.
At the moment I am resting from upvoting at all. Trained by "likes" on FB, I was upvoting almost everything I see, including all comments. As such my voting power has been low for awhile. It's finally climbing again, tho.
But I digress.
We all learn as we play around on the platform. After all there are no real rules on how to use your voting power, and this is the beauty of it.
I support your opinion! Respect ya!