When I first started in Steemit I upvoted and resteemed all the posts the posts that I came into contact with. At that point, even with the meager SP that I had, I didn't worry about bandwidth issues and just kept upvoting and resteeming like there was no tomorrow. Bandwidth issues started happening after the December and January mad rush of new users.

I remember commenting on a post that I liked reading and was upvoting every content that I liked. This was on top of the 15-20 posts that I was required to upvote and so you imagine how low my voting power gets.

I remember that the author replied to me and patiently explained why having low SP and upvoting on a good post while my Voting power was low was doing a disservice to both the poster and to myself.
At this point, I did not know about https://steemd.com/@username yet and was coached on Voting Power and diminishing power of your upvote.

I did not know that each upvote used up 2% of my voting power because without the slider I was voting at 100% each time. I was also educated that your VP returned 20% every 24 hours and so the best thing I can do is space my votes to give it time to replenish so instead of 10 votes I could potentially vote up to 11 times a day.

So knowing that I was more careful of what I would upvote on and got promptly "kicked" out well I left but it depends on who is telling the story. Anyway, that is unimportant.

So keeping your voting power at 75-80% a day is valuable in making sure that you reward the person as well as getting curation rewards for yourself. Doesn't matter if you 15 SP or 20 thousand SP. I know the urge is strong to go past that especially if there is good content and I have gone past 60% at times now but most of the time I try to balance it.

This is what newbies don't realize that is important. They get to 20% or lower and the value of the vote is so tiny already. Some would argue that its the thought that counts. Well, it is a nice gesture but without value do you think it sits well with the author? Is that the behavior that we want to encourage?

What we want is to reward authors of good posts with an upvote with value so that the time and effort the person did is rewarded.

Upvoting Comments

So what has that got to do with upvoting comments? Well, we needed to lay down the foundation first. As this is something that is expected to be known by all Steemians but is hardly the case. Took me awhile to learn about it.

If you notice the comments in my posts I reply to almost all comments and if I have enough VP which I normally do because I leave about 2-4% allocated for comments alone. It is natural to upvote comments in your post to increase engagement with those that commented.

I have found that when you take the time and effort to reply and upvote comments there is a higher chance that they will return even if your upvote value is only 0.01 cent. That is still of value.

The next level here is upvoting comments of other people in other people's post. So am I crazy to even suggest such a thing? Don't we want that it is our comment that gets more visibility? Madness you say!

Depends on whether you have a scarcity mindset or one of abundance. The mere fact that our Voting powers replenish 20% a day should be an indication that we do not need to skimp on upvoting content but doesn't it run contrary to what I just said about maintaining it above 75%? I don't see it that way because we are maximizing our SP to better reward people.

So if we are in another person's post and we upvote it we are rewarding that person who took the time to read and provide a good comment as either to add to the discussion, strengthen or provide a different view of the topic. We are encouraging engagement.

Now if in the event that somebody else upvotes that comment you get curation rewards from that so it is a win-win.

You may say that it's easy for me to say that because of the SP that I have. Most of my SP is just delegation from very nice people that see value in me spreading that vote but if you don't have a slider yet you can use busy.org and use the settings in order to enable a slider. You can see it in the image below.

Mind you if you have 50 SP or lower it is not going to be very effective though. This is the main reason why the slider is by default available when you reach 500 SP but at around 200 SP you can make use of it already as it shows there value if you adjust your voting weight at that SP level.

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So, in conclusion, upvoting in comments in both your posts and other people posts helps encourage people to leave comments that add value to a post.

We are encouraging behavior that engagement is something important in this platform. I find that the carrot always works better than the stick. Rewards make people feel good and threats are short termed.

So go out there and if you have the voting power engage and reward those comments.

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