Steemvote 0.2: Your Vote Works for You

Some weeks back, I released version 0.1 of steemvote, an auto-voter. Since then, I've made numerous improvements and version 0.2 is ready!

Art by @klye

This version keeps track of your remaining voting power automatically, and adjusts its behavior depending on your preferences. The goal is to make it as efficient as possible when it comes to using the voting power that you're allocated.

So, for example, you choose to auto-upvote your friends while you have at least 99.5% voting power. But when your voting power goes below that, you restrict your voting to only the authors you think will be profitable. You need voting power to make a profit, so you also choose to stop all voting if you have less than 90% voting power.

Ration Your Voting Power

The way this works is by specifying a "maximum voting power" and a list of "backup authors". When your voting power is greater than the maximum, steemvote will vote more aggressively by voting for your chosen backup authors in addition to the authors you normally vote for.

You can also set a "minimum voting power". If your current voting power is less than that, steemvote won't vote for anything. This way, steemvote will ration the voting power that you grant it. When your voting power goes back up, steemvote will start voting again.

The great thing about this system is that you can use Steem regularly, and steemvote will use any voting power that you don't. Your vote works for you.

Why Use Steemvote?

Many of us enjoy browsing Steemit, so what good is automation? What could it add to the experience?

To answer this question, let me share an experience that I often encounter: I'm browsing through Steemit, and I see an interesting post from 6 hours ago. It's very popular and has hundreds of votes. Next to the payout amount, I see that blue upvote icon. Steemvote voted for me when my vote had more effect (shortly after the post was made).

Depending on where you live, you might wake up to find that not only did authors you like make popular posts, you also helped make their posts popular while you slept!

For me, steemvote enhances the experience. I look through Steemit without playing resource management with my voting power. Sometimes I get a little surprise in the form of curation rewards. It's a fun addition to the experience, and it makes me think less about unused voting power going to waste.

Setup

As long as you have Python 3, you can setup steemvoter by running sudo ./setup.py install. Run steemvoter from a directory with a steemvote-config.json file, or supply it with steemvoter -c /path/to/steemvote-config.json.

Changelog

Here is the changelog for version 0.2, which you can also find on Github:

• Voting power is tracked. The config key "min_voting_power" is used to specify
  the minimum remaining voting power that your account must have for
  steemvoter to vote (Default: 90%). Current voting power is updated via RPC every 20 seconds.
• A new config key, "backup_authors", is used to specify authors that
  should be voted for when steemvoter is not using enough voting power.
• A new config key, "max_voting_power", is used to specify the remaining voting power
  above which steemvoter will vote for backup authors.
• A new config key, "vote_interval", is used to specify the timespan that
  steemvoter will wait between collecting and voting on eligible comments (Default: 10 seconds).
• The config key "vote_delay" is now "min_post_age". The effect is the same.
  Configurations that still use "vote_delay" are backwards-compatible.
• Configuration info is output when steemvoter starts up.
• In the "authors" and "backup_authors" config lists, a string representing an author name can be used instead of an object. In this case, the default values will be used for optional attributes.