Upvoting One's Following List

Steemit has a irritating voting scheme. An upvote reduces one's voting power by 2%. To maximize one's rewards, it is best to leave a few hours between each upvote.

To choose posts, I usually load the created page. I look for posts that have just crossed the five minute mark and are well written but have not received many votes yet.

NOTE: Steemit.com uses the round function to display time. So the real five minute mark happen thirty seconds after the display shows five minutes.

The voting bots all know the formula. Since the bots know the exact timing of the posts, the bots are often able to vote exactly on the five minute mark.

It is stupid to have a upvote formula that gives more rewards to bots than to humans, but I digress.

As a human I must sleep at night; so, I drop 4 upvotes just before going to bed.

I live in the Western U.S.. There are often very few new posts when I prepare to go to bed. I sat down at the computer and scrolled through several pages of steemit posts and found few that I wanted to upvote.

I decided to click on my following feed ... and ... bam ... I found four posts to upvote without any thinking.

It felt so great to upvote without thinking.

I admit, I did not pay great attention to my followers when my steem power was low. I found that upvoting my follow list was just an exercise in futility. When I upvoted posts under the two cent threshold, my vote value would be dusted away.

I recently bought my way into dolphinhood and my upvote is worth more than the threshold; so i can upvote any post with confidence that I would receive a reward ... providing that the price of STEEM stays above $0.075.

I can see why large accounts fall into the pattern of upvoting just their followers. It is so much easier than reading the posts.

The whales seem to belong to voting circles which concentrate the author rewards into just a few powerful accounts. This pattern is not good for the platform.

My Following List is a Mess

Unfortunately, my following list is a mess. When I joined STEEM I thought it would be like twitter. On twitter one follows accounts to get followers.

I followed people at random hoping that would lead to upvotes.

It didn't work.

My current strategy is to follow accounts that appear to be writing quality posts but that fail to get upvotes. Yes, there are topics that I like more than others. This influences my votes.

I intend to follow more newbies as newbies need love too.

I will probably follow new accounts until they gain an established readership then move on to the next.

Conclusion

If you develop a decent following list, then upvoting your following is an easy way to get in the votes without spending a lot of time.

The problem is that accounts that just upvote their following end up missing the posts from small accounts who write good posts.

I will probably play the game of using 6 upvotes a day for actually curating and then upvote 4 posts from my following at night.

Creating a following list is an easy way to upvote without thinking and is a legitimate way to approach the platform.

I generated the image of ducklings on night cafe. ai-images are considered to be near public domain. feel free to re-use the images i generated.