[witness update] @blueorgy: hard name to forget... easy name to vote for!
A lot has been happening here in SteemLand recently so lets just get into it.
Block Size & Bandwidth
As per recommendation of @raodscape, while in a recent discussion, I have modified my maximum_block_size to 98304 although my vote does not have much of a say I think it is important to keep everything in check. This comes after the majority of witnesses (Top 20) came to the consensus to increase the block size to help with the current bandwidth problems, I go into this more in my last witness post. However this did not seem to solve the problem... so it's defiantly a hot topic for us witnesses. With growth in the platform already underway this is an issue we must solve.
Self UpVoting at a Higher Cost?
I wanted to start a discussion on the use of self UpVoting (we all do it... including me) but should it come at a higher cost? In order to make Curation more appealing, over what I've come to conclusion about, the obvious profitable potential of pure Self UpVoting I think there should be a extra cost to your Voting Power. Now this cost would not be so drastic that you would never UpVote again but nearly a way to sway votes onto others comments and posts. Lets say for example an extra 5% over a regular vote or maybe even 10%, essentially spreading the reward pool out and possibly creating more interaction and voting. So far this is just a thought and it really would need to be discussed much further in detail and debated. Since I haven't had the chance to really get into a discussion about it due to other pressing matters I thought I'd bring it up here. Whats your thoughts? Maybe you have another solution to mass Self UpVoting, I would love to hear it.
Voting In General
My recent experiment into voting varied on scales from: very often, at a very low percentage; to very few votes, with the maximum percentage, and both have had much different impacts. The most recent with some controversy because of the commenting part of the experiment, which I do feel now came off as very much SPAM. I am truly sorry for whom ever felt this way, it was not my intention. However this did help me dive deeper into the current discussion on bandwidth and how its being drained quite quickly from Auto Voting Bots. I'll get to that in a second. With data still to crunch the differences between mass UpVoting and specific UpVoting are still to be determined but insight from these experiments and others may lead to some interesting discoveries.
Here's something to look at: total_reward_fund_steem at 0.000 STEEM I'm still not sure of what effect this may have on the platform, however I do plan to find out... unless someone may want to elaborate here within the comments?
Bots
There have been a lot of discussions recently on the use of BOTS, well frankly, there has always been a fair amount of chatter on the subject. Now I believe more the never some of the BOTS may be doing quite a bit of harm via the Bandwidth Issue and reward pool. Recent evidence of mass posting/commenting alongside self UpVotes and BOT following has led to some serious use of Bandwidth and the lowering of the Reward Pool. This has been making a lot of smaller accounts UpVotes produce almost nothing or dust even. Not to mention the amount of SPAM hitting the blockchain and filling up the platform, which is never good. I'm trying not to just ramble on forever, so I'll just leave this open to discussion.
One more thought on the subject is the welcome BOTS. Just a a small suggestion if this is truly for the community and just a way to inform and help out the new users why not Decline Payout on the comments and up the vote % via the post commented on? Don't know how? Not an excuse anymore... Here's the code:
steem.comment_options(reply["operations"][0][1]["author"]+"/"+reply["operations"][0][1]["permlink"],{"max_accepted_payout": "0.000 SBD"},"YOURBOTNAME")
print("Declined Payout!")
Brings me to...
Declining Payout
How ever hard it my be to give up on potential earnings (It's Hard) I feel as though some posts and or comments should really utilize this more. I have seen a few other witnesses always Decline Payout on their witness-updates so I will be doing that as well from now on. I will also be using python with The Code Above to reply to comments here and decline payout for those as well! By no means am I going to start declining everything and don't recommend you doing this either, but c'mon, why not once in a while!?
So how can you show your love without rewarding me? Thats easy...
Vote @blueorgy for Witness!
You know the drill! For those who have already voted for me , thank you, I hope I will keep your trust and maintain that vote. For all of you who haven't voted for me... please consider it! I have a ways to go to even get into the top 50, so every vote counts! So head over to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and scroll past all those excellent amazingly talented other witnesses and get to the bottom where you can fill in my name. Remember you have 30 votes to give so use them wisely!
Don't usually add an image to these posts however... Loving classic black and white lately. Old Russian Stand By T.V Broadcast.
There is actually a lot more to talk about but I'll keep to this for now, I'll keep it short ;)
Great work putting the issues out there @blueorgy. Right now my mind is and has been feeling on certain steem-ings.It usually means I'm about to write another post.Here's where I stand on it. Steemit has too many Indians and not enough chiefs. It's beginning to look like Carnage all around. When we as Steemians ( big or small) can't agree on what is right and what isn't, when Witness is against Witness, there is something wrong. Hell, you just said you upvote yourself, yet there is a bot called @smackdownkitty that flags self voters. Steemit will go nowhere if this continues.
Well I'm defiantly not against any other witnesses, I'll start with that. I also try to counter my own self upvotes with an equal or higher vote / resteem for someone else and my self upvotes are not at the level 😉 Yet. I would decline payout on the comment but I'm on my phone now
Nah,papa, you're doing a great job (as far as this noob can tell). I may be a noob on here, but I know how the copper is worked. lol. Keep being the person you are. I know you're doing your best for everyone on here.
'Decline payout' is a mystery to many of us newbies. What does it actually do? How beneficial? Does it give a boost to the post? You see, these are the things that we need to know - and are not explained in the FAQs. If you ask here, under question, or newbie, or something similar, what you get are a lot of robotic upvotes, and no answers. You have to go to a FaceBook group and ask there. THAT is a major problem. But THAT is what I has happened to me.
Agreed! Help us understand wth is happening with these technical details. I see the upvote amount strike through, but does that mean I waste my upvote or what?
Decline Payout is simple: The post rewards remain part of the rewards pool, which gets distributed to all of the other active posts. When UpVoting a Declined Payout post like this one means that you have used your Voting Power to help gain visibility to the post but have not rewarded it nor will you receive curation rewards. You have essentially giving that to the rest of the pool therefor helping everyone else out just a little bit.
With the BOTS, there are what they are BOTS, and when replied to could have notifications set up so that a person could actually respond but most of those are juts created solely for profit. Otherwise maybe some would decline payout themselves ;)
Thanks for the answer. Just one clarification needed. Does using decline payout increase visibility of the post over the visibility that one has accepting payout? Or does it change nothing at all as far as visibility goes? There should be some benefit to using it, other than not taking from the rewards pool, or people won't use it.
I always assume the Decline Payout was collected from the rewards pool like any other payment, but instead of sent to the author it was just sent to @null, essentially burning the amount and thus making the supply less (increasing the price of demand).
I may be wrong on that part.
Nice post !! I up vote myself of course . What I have noticed is that the more I vote, comment,reply the more I was making then I stared listening to others. Turning into another sort of game play for lots of people . It's starting to look that way on some accounts . Level up as fast as you can . I'm a firm believer in helping each other thats a community . Dog eat Dot is just dumb. You have been up voted and resteemed .
I don't and I feel like I'm losing out.
Well I don't think its frowned upon to UpVote your main blog posts, dependent on your SP of course, and at our levels I could see no harm in it. Mainly what I meant by that. Also you are losing out in some rewards on what is obviously good content with time and energy put into it. I feel this content is fine for initial boost in visibility. Your a good example of someone with one of the "Good" Bots ;)