Where are your votes going?
View this post on Hive: Where are your votes going?
Steem is no longer decentralised and may steal your funds. Use Hive instead.
View this post on Hive: Where are your votes going?
Steem is no longer decentralised and may steal your funds. Use Hive instead.
I've found @fulltimegeeks approach very novel and effective in voting for people who he would like to support and encourage to remain on the steem blockchain.
As for how I allocate my votes. It's all done manually. I thinks that's half the fun of the steem blockchain. To be able to upvote someone and for that vote to have some monetary value.
My general guiding principles are as follows:
Will be interesting to read what approaches others take
@kabir88
What happened to your rep?
IIRC the Haejin flagging wars happened to him.
I also don't vote up posts with too much self-voting. I've stopped self-voting again for now. I'll support those who need it and are doing good work. I know @fulltimegeek also does a good amount of flagging where it is justified.
I use steemauto.com for all of the accounts I have control over currently. It is a nice tool and functions well most of the time best of all it is free. Although you can donate to the cause.
It only uses posting key to log in with steemconnect but to authorise it you have to use your active key one time.
I only use the claim rewards tool and the fanbase part of it. It a list where you create the accounts to vote on how many per day and what percentage of vote you use per account.
Its pretty easy to set up.
The only thing I would prefer it had was a option to upvote comments. I have a few great friends on here that only comment. I always have to manually upvote them. I hate it when I miss voting for them. As well It would be nice to have a flag option to automatically flag people too.
@lovenfreedom is working on some code to make our own system. When she gets it done and tweaked we will allow others to use it.
First time I have heard of this project, I will check it out!
From an idealistic point im with you 100% - But the way the current system is setup makes it to where this is basically the thing to do.
If whales self vote, people cry foul, they get upset, they think that plutocracy is taking over the system that could have given them freedom and financial fortitude. But, they feel to see that "freedom" means that all people are free, not just a few, and this includes whales to upvote themselves.
Since the system of incentives is currently broken, and people tend to love the populist conversations with cult like intensity. They pitchfork against these whales, call them names, insults and what not. A nuanced conversation is a thing for the weak and feeble.
So what do whales do? What would say.. @sirvotesalot do, if people are "hating" him for self voting, for trying to make money on his investment.
Option a) Shutdowns to the outside world and becomes a straight out spammer pressing the farkit button.
Option b) Delegates to a bot
So you see, delegating to a bot is nothing more and nothing less than self voting, but it removed the stigma just a little bit. Enough, so that people pitchfork against the ones who are buying the promotion services, and thus the delegators to the services can be shielded from the social pressures.
Now, does this make it right? Does this make it wrong? The answer is somewhat subjective, but I think if we had a diverse system for investment, it would balance out the scales a bit more.
I just think it's short-sighted to just exploit the platform at this stage. If it does grow then we all benefit, but those who abused it earlier may well get judged on what they did. Maybe they don't care. Steemit is too small to even register as worth using to the big players of social media. I'd like to see that change, but we are getting off the right path to making that happen.
It is, but its less obvious as you say. My recent delegation to @helpie that gives me a bigger vote could be a seen as a way of self-voting but this is deemed acceptable? On the other hand, @helpie votes people with 'good content' for nothing if they are accepted into the 'group'.
Where do we draw the line? If I also delegate to @qurator and @silvergoldbotty simply to gain daily self-votes am I then exploiting the system?
As the system operates today its not designed, or let's use the word "conducive" to make any type of manual curation profitable or sustainable. So, i will say the controversial thing...
If given the choice to support a good article writer, the new shakespear or a good human being... i will chose the latter without hesitation.
Helpie to me is an effort for good people who care to pool their resources together and shift the distribution a little bit so it does not syphon to the top with much velocity.
Now, this phenomena to me is due to many factors, but the one that helpie is fighting back on, the battlefront, you could say, is the inability to cooperate meaningfully.
So, what we are doing in helpie is supporting you... via your content, but the distinction is key.
That conversation is completely aside, and should not be conflated with whales self voting.
My position on that matter is this... everyone is free to do what they want with their stake, the right response to shit content is flags.
What happens if those flags lead to reprisals?
Nearly all my voting is automated and I absolutely love steemauto as a way to do it since it allows to save up a huge amount of time. I nearly exclusively upvote people form the health / vegan / running / fitness communities on steemit who do good things for the platform (voting distribution). I honestly don't care so much about actual content as long as it is halfway decent.
I see awareness around voting as a big issue on Steemit, smaller accounts tend to think their upvote does not matter while bigger accounts often vote based on what they get in return or sell their upvotes.
I don't really like the direction Steem is going with the SMT's and believe the communities feature would be far more deneficial for the platform right now.
A lot of us have people we trust to put out good content, so automation may play a part. It is a lot of work to curate, but I enjoy reading posts. I've delegated to others to use my voting power more effectively. They can spread the votes wider. I don't mind losing curation rewards.
I really hope communities can give things a boost.
Hey, @steevc.
I still manually curate everything. I read posts, and if I can find something to say, I do that. I have yet to try any automated service, though I have been thinking about it more lately. The thing is, I like reading and commenting, so the upvote is just part of the process, if the post causes me to read and comment.
From what I can gather about the account you site above, it is authentic, but as you say, an exorbitant value gets attached to his posts which generally are motivational or inspirational, which some people have a problem with, too.
I don't mind the motivational/inspirational. That's fine. However, very few posts, in my opinion, are worth anywhere near $500-$800 or more. But then, since he bots his posts up quite a bit, how much of that has he already spent? It's the false sense of earnings I don't like, and the blame isn't necessarily with him or the vote sellers, but with the system. A simple amount on the post showing the bot votes, or a net amount, or even the word, promoted, would be great.
Looking at his account, he's been here less than I have, but already has a significantly higher rep and is a smaller dolphin. I don't know if he's invested or no, but it's not at all farfetched to say he's managed that through vote bots alone. I just know, on it's own, that's a lot of growth in something like seven months time.
His rep is mostly from those bought votes, so it means nothing really. Okay, so he gets lots of comments through being on Trending. Maybe that's what he wants. I don't think there's a massive profit when you buy votes unless you get lots more from voting trails or elsewhere. I just wonder if some people have allowed their votes to be used and don't realise they are just encouraging behaviour that is not so good for Steemit. I really don't care about the content of his posts, but I agree it's not worth that much. I want to see a good share of the rewards going to others who choose to not buy their votes.
I don't know if it's worth checking into whether or not he's bought STEEM and powered up, but he does have over 7,000 SP, so it's coming from somewhere, and I'm not aware of anyone who has amassed that amount of SP since January, so something's going on. I've seen reps going pretty high in short periods of time thanks to bidbots. SP, not so much, but maybe the other folks I've stumbled upon weren't powering up their earnings.
At any rate, as long as the illusion exists, people are going to do it. And if they actually are making some healthy earnings, they're not going to quit. However he gets those upvotes and comments, they really look impressive to the untrained eye. Annoying to the rest.
Just looked more closely. He's been powering down, too, so there's a couple of thousand STEEM sitting there. Wallet history doesn't go back far enough for much of anything else, other than the bot transactions and his earnings.
If a few people withhold their vote or flag him then he loses his profit even if he still gets more rep. This platform gives us freedom to do what we want, but the community can still police it. Many are dealing with some of the smaller abuse, but they are scared to tackle the big fish.
Sometimes I wonder if we are targeting the right people. Let's say vote sellers are the drug dealers and the buyers are drug users. Why are we choosing to target the buyers that we think "goes a bit over board" Instead of aiming for the sellers?
There should be a certain responsible as a seller and I think we haven't found a way to make that happen. But sometimes this "fighting" seems endless because we don't aim at the source.
I'm not saying buying votes should be removed, I even use it myself (within certain standards) But instead of teaching the people that buys it through sanctions I would find it much easier to teach the small handful of sellers.
Just my humble opinion.
Interesting thoughts. That would be cool if you could self automate your votes. I think a lot of people are turned on to Steemit by the thought of sustained rewards in the form of curation, but since your vote is tied to your name, you still want to make sure you are voting on good content. At the very least content you are interested in. I look forward to hearing if you make any progress with the Pi-voter!
You need a lot of sp to really earn from curation. I don't worry about how much I make from it
:) easy to say when you are a dolphin. Seriously though, if this were my full time job I would be on the street. I am lucky that I have a decent job and I am able to use Steemit mainly as a creative outlet and a way to meet new people. I understand what you are saying.
I am always taking my time to read and reply on what I am interested. Never used any of the options, not because of control, but because I like to be surprised and find gems out there.
I vote manually because if not... what its the point?
I've not looked into any of this automated stuff. I split my time between new posts and my feed to look to good content and vote accordingly. I'm here to read interesting stuff and reward accordingly - if only a teeny weeny little vote.
Just support whatever you think is good and keep commenting. We're building something amazing here, and it can be fun too :)