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Of late, I have been hearing a lot about the lack of votes even on old steemers' posts. So I went around the town to see where have all those voters gone. I was shocked with what I found.

You know what? Voters are there, votes too are there but the soul which used to lend its power to those votes has been sold or leased out!

Are There Anymore FREE Votes in Steem Ecosystem?

Just to give you an idea:

• On an average, only a third of the vested SP is actively voting (considering 100% voting power utilization). This means 67% of total 190 million SP is lying idle. And out of about 37% influence, a miniscule percentage is being used for manual curation.

• About 12-15% of total SP is with the commercial bots listed on StemBotTracker

• About 5-7% SP is with platform specific bots like utopian-io, dlive, dtube, busy.pay etc.

• There are several Community bots by communities like Minnow Support Project, Qurator, Alliance, SSG, country specific or ethnic communities, etc. These bots hold a large share of vested Steem Power too.

• There are some individual accounts who have been delegated or have leased some high SP but they vote only to a small group or community of their own interest irrespective of the content quality.

• There are many individual users who take huge SP on lease off-market or from delegation-lease market and sell their votes for profit.

• Many Steemers are active on vote exchange platforms like Steem Follower & Steem Engine.

• Many curators are using auto-voting softwares like Steem Voter, Steem Auto, Steem Dunk etc. to automate their voting to their chosen authors or tags.

• Many curators use their voting power to follow trails like curie or similar curation initiatives or to front-run big bots like booster, utopian-io etc.

• Some of the precious voting power is lost in high profile flag wars. If that help to realign the reward pool, you know who will benefit the most? Yes, the ones who are pocketing the major share of reward pool.

• If after using all this, one is left with any surplus voting power, it is often sold at vote-selling platforms like SmartSteem or MinnowBooster.

I’ve given you the above figures to just to give you an idea. To get the exact figures and analyse the scenario, someone like @paulag can help out. But broadly, this is what my understanding and observation is.

So Who Is Voting Me?

Generally speaking, majority of your votes will be mostly from newbies, planktons & redfishes who won’t get any sizeable profit in selling their votes or the people who don’t have any significant SP in their accounts yet.

Of course, there are some who are either unaware about the profitability of delegating their voting rights or they do not bother about profit too much. Besides that, you do will get an occasional vote from some big whale or orca who is passionate about manual curation.

Most of the bigger fishes voting you are either a witness or with some interest in community development (future witness) or with some personal interest in your mission or life. Otherwise, if you get a bigger vote, consider yourself as extremely fortunate.

Why Will Anybody Vote You?

If everyone gets a better return from selling their votes or delegating his / her SP to monetize it passively than doing a manual curation, why would any wise investor will do manual curation? So yes, please don’t expect big whale vote out of nowhere. Those times are passé.

It seems the onus of community development is on witnesses as they would directly benefit with the increase in witness voting. So you can expect a witness vote but with a very low vote weight as they have to support a large fanbase.

Will Manual Curation Die A Slow Death?

In the current scenario, it looks very much like that. So either there is some economic benefit in curating compared to leasing out delegations for profit, there is very less interest in curation. Therefore, either curation reward needs to be increased or a better option will be to make the dormant SP holders participate in voting actively. And I think with time, we will see more participation of all SP holders in voting through the use of automated bots and softwares or through delegation of SP.

Imagine a scenario when 100% of vested power is effectively utilizing its allocated 20% voting power daily. What will happen? There will be a steep fall in the reward per SP. This will drop the rate of return per Steem to less than the rate of inflation of Steem (taking into the account that authors & curators get only 75% of the total annual Steem token inflation). However this is a hypothetical scenario but we will tend to move towards it before we find some equilibrium when manual curation will be given importance again.

So How Can I Earn Votes Now?

Well, all is not lost and there are still very good chances to earn votes. But you cannot expect votes by just creating quality content. You need to network a lot …it’s a social network anyway! You need to align with some community or communities and get active there. Being in a community, you will receive support from that community and its community bot. If you can create strong bonds in your relationship with your networking ability, you have an edge.

The other easier route is to invest some capital in the Steem ecosystem and power up your account. Now earn through delegating your SP to bots or to vote selling market. You can also use your liquid tokens to buy votes from bots.

Don’t Use Steemit.com

No one may have offered you such a weird looking advice. But let me be honest to tell you that there is no incentive in using Steemit.com. Use some alternative platforms which incentivize its users for using its platform. Earn a hefty vote from the platform-specific bots for using new Steem apps which have great features too. Why use Steemit.com? Steemit.com should only be used to create a free account and get some initial delegated SP. After that, relinquish this platform in favour of the ones that give you a good incentive for using those.

Disclaimer

Let me disclose that I’ve written this post when I got several disappointing messages from new as well as old Steemers in the past month complaining about the unavailability of even reasonably sized votes which were easier in the past.

I’d also add that I’m not the one complaining for it. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening around here. In fact, it was only this week that my account received a first qualified 100% whale vote out of nowhere. And that too from a person who spreads his votes widely in the community, making his vote weight very thin. But yet, he chose to vote me with 100% VW. So yes, all hope is not lost. Keep posting and Steem on. If this can happen to my account, it can be your account too.

Cheers!