One Should Avoid Self Votes ... except when the vote sweeps the dust for the post
SteemIt allows users to upvote their own posts.
Shortly after I joined SteemIt, a pod of whales convinced me that users should upvote their own posts as the self vote would encourage others to follow.
The whales, of course, were just trying to justify their own actions.
Plankton accounts should never vote on their own posts.
At the time, very few of my posts were cracking the elusive $0.02 mark and I was not receiving any rewards.
My upvote value was so small that my pathetic self-votes were all wasted.
There were few tools at the time that would show the upvote value of small accounts. Fortunately this has changed.
After several years of frustration, I am finally a redfish. SteemBlockExplorer shows that my account has 755 STEEM POWER and that my 100% upvote is worth $0.0046 ... with STEEM Price at $0.159.
The price of STEEM is low. Even though I am now a redfish, my 100% upvote is 23% of the minimum value needed to receive a reward.
Weekly Curation Rewards
The Curation Report on your STEEM Wallet shows the last week of curation rewards. The report shows that I received 1.254 SP in rewards last week.
Hooray for me!
That is about twenty cents a week ... almost three pennies a day!
Hooray for me!
I've been placing my upvotes on the 5 minute mark. I've managed to front run several whales.
For this article, I need to look at the minimum reward received as that is the true value of my upvote.
It looks like I receive 0.009 SP curation reward for a 100% upvote. My combined curation and author reward is 0.018 SP.
In most cases, I get only 0.009 SP for a self vote.
In most cases ... a self vote is not worth it.
Sweeping Dust
The cut off for a post is $0.02. With STEEM at just under $0.16, it takes about 13 SP in upvotes for a post to get an award.
My 100% upvote is worth 0.009 * 2 = 0.018 SP.
When I see a post that is at or just under the reward price, I can upvote that post and bring it over the reward price.
Yesterday I receive an upvote on my post that was worth 0.13 SP. This brought the vote total to $0.02.
But the price of STEEM was falling!
To assure that the post would stay over $0.02, I decided to upvote my post. This brought the reported upvote value to 0.16 SP.
NOTE, I was expecting that 0.13 + 2*(0.009) would be 15, but there probably is some rounding involved.
Anyway, I believe that I have enough SP that I can sweep the dust of a post with 0.11 SP rewards.
My current stance is that I will drop self votes when the vote sweeps the dust of the vote.
I Miss Dust Sweeper
There used to be services called @dustsweeper and @dustbunny that would automatically sweep the dust for accounts.
It appears that these accounts have gone silent.
So, that means that mid size accounts who want to support small accounts on Steem should occasionally sweep the dust of plankton accounts to help the accounts grow.
About the Picture
I generated the image above of a dapper dude giving himself a thumbs up on Night Cafe.
In an effort to increase my upvote value I decided to try generating an image a day which for SteemIT which I will publish (along with an original essay) here on SteemIt.
I consider this post on upvoting to be an original article.
I will put the images in this Night Cafe Collection.
Conclusion
Small accounts should avoid upvoting their own posts. It is not worth it.
Once an account has enough SP to sweep dust, then it is good practice to sweep the dust of posts that fall short of the $0.02 minimum payment.
I will put the images I generate for SteemIt Posts in this directory
Quite apart from the fact that self-votes look extremely unappealing ;-))
Many, if not most, of the whales were self-voting in the early days of the platform.
This was especially true when curators received only 25% of the rewards. Apparently the whales felt that self-voting was the only way to receive a decent ROI.
Today curators get 50% of the reward and there are many utilities that analyze voting patterns. There is less justification for the self votes allowing utilities to stigmatize the practice.
Speaking of Looking Good
Personally, I think that sweeping dust looks good. It shows small accounts that you value their upvote. This is why I loved #dustsweeper. It assured that small curators got the reward for my post.
I thought about ending the post by saying that authors should hold enough STEEM in their accounts so that they can assure that their posts crossed the $0.02 mark. I don;t have the cash to buy STEEM; so I said I dream of growing the account through posts.
I checked your blog - looks sad in that respect.... Your topics aren't necessarily mine - the AI stuff tempts me to skip over it rather than read in. It will be the same for many. But not all: so where are their votes? Maybe you could try joining a Community? For a wider audience...?
I probably should admit that I have a HIVE account which I grew to 6K HIVE.
I created several communities prior to the Justin Sun kerfuffle. I also helped create tribes on Steem-Engine and HIVE-Engine.
Steem-Engine went bust.
So, I know for a fact that everything changes when one's account starts giving $0.02+ in SP awards. For example, I would have upvoted your reply on HIVE.
AI Images
I have mixed feelings about AI images. I was really sad to see that there were no #inktober posts on SteemIt in 2023. So, I decided to play a game in which I drew images for HIVE and posted AI images on SteemIt.
Generating an AI image a day was fun. Drawing a picture a day really taxed me. Of course I am not an artist.
About 20 people played the Inktober game on HIVE. Some did AI images. For this reason, I thought the AI images were tasteless.
I was the only account that posted with the tag in 2024. So, it was not tasteless.
Putting AI Images in a Community
I don't think I would want to put the AI images in a SteemIT community. I figure the best place is my blog.
I see that there were communities for AI images, NFTs and even memes on SteemIt. They seem to be dead.
I admit I am doing the images on SteemIt just to see what would happen. The technology has some value as posts need images and AI generates compelling images.
I understand your approach. That's not my style, blogging doesn't need to be ‘decorated’ as far as I'm concerned - unless there are personal shots to go with the content. But anyway: thank you very much for your explanation! I'm sure we won't meet on HIVE ;-))
Your upvote of my comment threw me into an ethical dilemma. The upvote was worth 10 SP ... the post was worth under the $0.02 cut off.
My 100% upvote increased the vote to 0.14 which brought the vote to just over the cut off.
Sweeping dust benefits small accounts. I consider it to be a worthwhile effort.
If I had any spare money, I would buy enough STEEM to sweep dust. (One needs about $500 in SP).
Don't worry about such dilemmas - next week it's forgotten ;-))