I was listening to the new song by James Blunt, Someone Singing Along and I felt touched by it.
It is very sad when we look in the world today and throughout history and find it filled with hatred, wars, separation, divisions, anger, vanity, hierarchy, sexism, racism, terrorism, feminism and now we have STEEMisim
How sad is that?
How sad it is for a platform that was created with a beautiful vision to combat social and government SCHISMs finds itself changing exactly to what it was supposed to fight?
My dear steemian friends,
I know how most of you feel. I understand you and I will never blame you. I know you are doing the best for yourself and the best way you think it should be.
I am like you too. I want to grow and become successful on steemit. I want to make money and become famous. I want to be appreciated and liked. I want to be upvoted by many because that shows how awesome I am. I want to make lots of friends that will follow me loyally wherever I am. I want to become a whale tomorrow. No, not tomorrow. I want it today. I want it this instant. I want more and more and more and more.
We all want these things. Its human nature.... But
But you know...
If I keep thinking this way. Only focusing on myself, how to make money and raise my reputation. If I only focus on making friends with the big guys or voting them to get more rewards. I may be able to succeed a bit and get somewhere, but I will do that on the expense of posts made by many other steemians that are dreaming of equal chances.
These posts that have no fault other than being made by unknown steemians. They may contain amazing art pieces, beautiful poetry, sad stories or motivating journeys. They may change your day or open your heart only if you had the chance to read them.
But alas, if things stay as they are, these posts may never hear any recognition nor get the chance to penetrate the eyes of visitors to reach their hearts.
Today, I was reading a post by 
In summary,
1- The upvoter will earn higher curation rewards when they program the bot to vote as early as the post is out. The earlier your bot votes the more rewards you get.
Mind you, if you vote within the first 30 min, you will lose some of your curation rewards to the author
Of course, in this case, many people will want to upvote steemians with higher payouts to maximize their curation rewards. This will lead to the second advantage for the upvotee:
2- The upvotee will gain rapid number of votes and large amount of SBD within the 1st hour of their posts making their post appear on hot and trending channel for a longer time and covering up anyone else who didn't have similar advantages.
However, there are several caveats (
The caveats of using bot upvoting service being:
1- The voters may end up upvoting less than good materials (i.e a post with a picture of Jerry in his boxers). By the way, this fact has been stated by
2- The voters may end up not reading the materials or engaging in helpful discussions.
and the worst disadvantages are
3- Giving too much advantages to people who are already at advantage, which tips the balance of expected equal opportunity to a maximum of unequal opportunity.
4- Increasing the gap of hierarchy (Schism in payouts, reputation, income, etc) between steemians.
5- Steemians at the bottom of this hierarchy end up either getting exhausted and depressed trying to get themselves off the ground, give up completely on trying and leave steemit or post lots of junk to maximize their visibility and payouts
Think: if one junk post will get them 0.01 SBD then 10 junk posts will get 0.1 SBD.
6- Both the extra number of junk posts and the posts with very high number of upvoters will create a stronger shadow over other quality posts from talented steemians and make them eternally invisible.
** As an example lets take
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating against 
Back to the example. In this post
~734 votes (posted for 12hrs at the time of writing my post), around 20 of them came from big names
~624 views that mean 110 voters didn't even try to check the post contents
~131 comments which jerry answered about 20 of them and upvoted them with decreasing SP power starting by (20%) ending with (4%). Of course, it is impossible for a human to engage the 100+ comments let alone vote all of them the same.
~From the 734 voters, I am not sure how many jerry has voted. Could be 100? 200? I don't know. But I know for sure he didn't vote the 734 voters that voted for him. It is simply impossible, especially that jerry posts more than once per day. (all is simple math really)
Now I ask all those little people that voted for
Are you growing fast with those rewards?
Are you really benefiting from your upvotes?
Are you upvoting because you want to or because you have other motives?
Whatever it is, I am not saying you shouldn't upvote
What I am trying to say is that: you are putting yourself and others at disadvantage by these votes. We all have a certain number of votes/day (about 10 upvotes if you want to keep you SP% high enough). Give some of it to big guys but give some to smaller people like yourselves. Help each other to grow together so you can benefit together.
Big guys are big already. They have their group of friends, they know each other and know who they want to vote for, they don't even need the small votes (each one of them can vote himself/herself to a fortune)
How many whales or dolphins are going to vote for small fries? if they do, we wouldn't have such problems, would we?
But you small guys need each other. you need to make real friends and vote each other to death until you become whales.
Lately, I joined an initiative called make-a-whale. I like to call it the " MAW guild" (a name inspired by 
But I know we can do even better than that. If we all (guild members) voted each other one by one (the day we receive the MAW bot vote for example), we will grow even faster together. We will have support from each other so we don't have to worry about rewards and can focus on making better posts. We can work together to extend our help to even more people outside the MAW guild.
This way we will all end up as winners
Are these silly ideals I am talking about? Maybe. But they are not impossible to do.
Its harder to break small sticks when they are put together, but very easy to break them one by one.
Now here is the song. Enjoy it :D
Dr. The leaping koala 🙂