"My Upvote's Run Out of Gas" - Observations of the Hard Fork & Maximizing Our Affectability (A Red Fish's Point of View).
Let's face it.
Most all our votes would have more impact if invested in quality content that is doing well rather than on our own posts that get little attention and an average of $0.03 on payout.
With the new configurations implemented with the HF, in my mind we (as a community) need to stick together in supporting one another on our levels. And I believe an important part of this is being confident other Red Fish/Minnows will support us with their votes if we are doing the same.
Like it to the game of Clash of Clans, where the most successful clans are the ones who's members support each other by donating troops to other players for defence. And where the smaller, less advanced members would donate their troops among each other while the bigger, more advanced members would donate among themselves as well (often donating to the little guys too, because they know that supporting the little one's makes for a stronger base clan and a more rapid advancement in the game as a whole).
Consider your upvote is a "troop donation", helping your community to strengthen in value and influence.
Consider the image above. These numbers are based on being new and not knowing the rules. So of course I had left the "self vote" box ☑ ticked on all my posts & was upvoting my own comments. Before I knew it, my upvote to another virtually became worthless. And in posting more than 4 times a day I watched the value of my own posts drop like a rock, damaging what precious little value all your good intentioned upvotes did for it.
So I just hope I helped a few of you out there to understand the damage whale chasing, consistent upvoting of self, and excessive posting is doing to our community of Red Fish and Minnows as a whole.
Putting the people and their content before our own urges to earn probably would be far more profitable than 'narcissistically' patting ourselves on the backs constantly all day long.
Thank You for Listening.
Another very informative post. I didn't know!! Thank you.
My pleasure. I prefer to help inform people to the best of my ability rather than keeping them in the dark for the sake of any profit.
Thank you for the candid insight. Steem on!
Big thank you for the
& 
!
So you simply uncheck the vote on your post box and never vote on yourself anymore?
I never upvoted my own comments, but I didn't think voting on your own posts could do much harm since it's also checked as default...
I did uncheck the self voting option, and so long as I do not clear my cookies it remains that way. Yet I still do upvote my things if I see no one else is. I'll break that habit as well soon. It's just my personal choice to start shifting my voting power away from me for the benefit of others (and if that post or comment takes off, all the better for all of us).
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But yes, any upvote (even on self, post or comment) or flag reduces your voting power.
There is a really cool tool found on https://steemnow.com/ that I refreshed after every upvote (and one flag) and easily saw how fast our voting power drops. I encourage you (and any one reading this) to do the same observational experiment to help us all understand better how it's working against us if abused.
Thank you for the