Minnows and Planktons: Are you utilizing your comment voting efficiently?
Comment voting; some vote, some don’t.
If you do, then make sure it’s efficient and it's not a dust vote. That is what this article is about in a nutshell.
Author rewards on Steemit are king. We all want recognition, and seeing these popup is just a good feeling.
Any comment less than $0.03 in value will turn to dust and the author reward will not be paid out.
If you are a Plankton/Red Fish or a Minnow then what you read here will make your votes count more and not be wasted.
With the low price of STEEM it’s hard to make an impact when voting as someone with low SP, as is the majority of Steemians and especially so when it comes to voting on comments.
I would currently personally advise non-Dolphins and lesser Minnows (less than 3000 usable SP) to NOT vote on comments as they are likely to be wasted or will take too much of your voting power to be efficient.
Let me give you an example, and please don’t take this personally anyone as the names mentioned in the screenshots mean well, but could use their VP in better ways.
The rewards highlighted in YELLOW are too low for the author reward threshold and will not be paid out.
As you can see there are three quite close together that were given with good intentions but are wasted.
But what about Dustsweeper?
@dustsweeper is still up and running, but only votes up TWO dust votes per day. The rest of them will go POOF. Maybe @danielsaori or @davemccoy can comment on why this limitation is in place.
If every dust vote was captured by @dustsweeper then you wouldn’t be reading this now.
What can I do about it?
As a low SP Steemian its hard work keeping up your VP. You seem to be dishing out lots of 100% votes and it quickly goes down.
I would personally advise against voting on comments and utilize your VP on posts. Your vote will not be wasted on a post as the author reward is a CUMALATIVE total of all the votes placed.
If you really feel like you want to vote up comments, then I have a strategy for you. Look at the image below and sorry @bozz for using you as an example. I know you mean well!
The vote by @bozz (marked in red) will be a dust vote unless @dustsweeper picks it up. What @bozz could have done is append his vote to the one above (marked in blue) and then it would have been a valid author reward.
@bozz has recently powered up and is a firm believer in the STEEM Eco-System. I sincerely don’t mean any disrespect pal, you were just a good example that I found.
It's just pennies, do we really care?
It is just that, but for some reason because it's STEEM we want to get the most out of it. We are dedicating time and effort to write content so we feel we need to gain something back in return.
@steevc mentioned to me just yesterday something that really puts this into perspective.
'It's funny that we get excited about a couple of quid'.
This is not even that, it's just pennies, and you could walk around the streets scouring the ground for 30 minutes and collect a few if you like!
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.
Well said, @slobberchops. A lot of people seem to still be unaware of the fact that the <$0.03 votes are voided, so it's great that you are raising awareness.
I wasn't aware of this at all and probably waste a lot of my votes as I tend to vote on comments. A very useful article!
I enjoy Steemit but haven't yet committed the time to truly understand all of its quirks; I just keep chipping away having fun. I probably joined at a time when it was a little easier to get going and @steevc gave me a good helping hand - he's a bit of a star really. I like @shanibeer 's comment "take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves." I quite enjoy just chipping away and have built up a little SP in the process but not a lot. I continue to Power Up so as long as Steemit is around my SP will continue to increase.
It's good that you learned something, I'm trying to get useful stuff out there besides 'boring prog-rock' content, as the @eyeofchops tells everyone!
Dust formula is changing on HF20 tho.
It is, and it will be interesting to see what changes take place when it does.
Well it has already been announced, but it definetely renders @dustsweeper useless as a service.
The dust vote threshold will change in hf20, but the dust payout, minimum payout, will not change.
So hf20 will only make it marginally more expensive to operate Dustsweeper, I think something like 0.5% more expensive with the current amount of SP.
@dustsweeper's purpose is not letting upvotes turn into dust. This is not possible in HF20. Any upvotes above the dust threshold will grant rewards, while every upvote below this threshold will hold no value! This is regardless of who has already / is still going to upvote that comment / post.
Total post/comment value isn't what counts anymore, but the upvote value in itself.
The dust vote threshold, the one for individual votes, will change. It will be like everyone is voting with around 1.2SP less.
But there is also a minimum payout value, and as far as I know, that will not change. It will stay at $0.02.
I hope you don’t know something I don’t, otherwise I would have to kill Dusty... 😉
My understanding is this minimum payout value has been replaced with the 1.2SP rule. Please check it out.
It is two different things, dust votes and dust/minimum payouts. Please see my earlier reply to Ropaga as well.
On the other hand, "take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves." Whatever value someone is voting, they want that value to count (that's the point, after all)! This is a good strategy, thank you for explaining it. Thanks also to your lovely assistant @bozz 😊
I feel a little sorry for @bozz, he was my test subject in both screenshots and I have sent him a DM on discord. He's a good bloke though, and I'll give him a nice vote for his 'assistance'.
I did anxiously search to see if I was in there 😂
I've been thinking about just not upvoting comments myself. Like you said, it really drains my VP and on posts with 10+ comments, it's just impossible to give everyone a $0.03 upvote.
Was thinking about just giving the upvotes on the latest articles of people who commented.
The low price of STEEM has made this especially hard to be worth doing if you dont have masses of SP. I remember not so long ago, voting at weight of 15% and dishing out $0.05 votes.
It felt good to do that, to reward people in such a way, but now I'm looking at 12% for a $0.03.
When, and I say WHEN, not IF.. the price of STEEM goes up, it will all get a little better for all of us.
Well, we're back at around $0.90 again, moving towards the $1.00 mark again. Might not take too long before we're back where we were before :)
I actually didn't know that less than 3 cents was wasted. I always upvote comments and I only can give 1 cent with my 100% :(
I will reduce it's use, but also sometimes still like to vote, simply as a way to show my appreciation for a valued comment. Thanks for that, I always upvote you and steve on comments, so please understand when I don't :) But of course will always for the post themselves!!!!
Yeah, it's really draining the voting power to upvote everyone who comments on a blog post. It gets a lot better for people with 10k+ SP though, since they can vote on pretty low % and still not get dusted.
That's a nice idea to prevent dusting from the upvotes!
I was just thinking it might be better to give them a heads up that you are going to upvote some of their posts I'm the future to show appreciation vs upvoting comments. My fear is there will be less incentive to leave comments if people stop upvoting them.
No worries, to be honest this is something I have been struggling with for some time now. Knowing that the vote will probably never get paid vs wanting to show my commenters some appreciation and build relationships. I think there is something to be said for letting someone know you value their comment enough to upvote it. Whether it gets paid or not. I like the idea of adding to the larger comment though to increase value. Since I got my slider it has been easier to manage my VP so I am not too worried about that. This is a great post and timely as well as I am probably not the only one going back and forth on this.
Honestly @bozz, just save your VP, you don't need to vote up my comments. I have known you long enough for you to be considered a friend now, there's really no need or anyone else for that matter.
Use the 'alternative' method if you really want too.
You raise great points in your article.....
Ready for the but ?
Upvoting comments should first and foremost be an appreciation of the the commenter and them taking the time to firstly read wat u writ and secondly, writing a thoughtful retort.
The money is nice, but the appreciation will always have more value, however big the upvote!
The 0,03$ limit does not exist anymore, now it is more difficult to calculate. I wonder how will @dustsweeper adapt to this change.
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-velocity-hardfork-hardfork-20
However it is still recommended to vote on posts than comments.
Hi, the dust vote change coming with HF20 is about small individual votes. Currently if you try to make a tiny vote, the blockchain will throw an error. This limit will be removed, instead all votes will be reduced with a flat rate. It will be like you are voting with 1.2SP less.
The minimum payout value, the dust we talk about when talking about Dustsweeper, will not change.
Interesting! I'm sure I knew about this, but it definitely is something that's slipped my mind.. I do love upvoting the comments I get/see, and happy to do them at 80%-100% because I usually don't get to use my VP much nowadays anyway, due to lack of time curating. I guess if I'm not keen on giving someone a 80%-100% upvote on their comment, then I'm better off going to their page and upvoting their post instead. Thanks @slobberchops and nice to see how much you've dived into Steemit :)
Good to hear you got something out of this, and yes I'm a little different that the guy who wasn't sure on whether to turn up at Brum last March. I will hopefully see you at SF3.
It might be only pennies now, but it could be worth a lot more in the future. Ethereum used to be "only pennies" - imagine if we were being paid the same value in Ether in the first couple of years of its existence...
Anyway, your post gives a helpful and interesting insight. As I powered up relatively recently, I don't really know how to make my upvotes worth 0.03 STEEM - I haven't worked out a way to deduct what percentage upvote gives what amount (though I realise you're recommending that someone of my SP level should probably not be wasting their VP on comment upvotes, so that's something I should certainly think about.)
If you are using Chrome, get the SteemPlus add on. You will wonder how you lived without it once you start using it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/steemplus/mjbkjgcplmaneajhcbegoffkedeankaj?hl=en
OK... I might try that on my tablet.