When you follow someone to auto-upvote them. I think there should be options to filter which posts are auto-voted!
So, yesterday wasn't, the best, of my days, and in a moment of weakness I posted a very short, extreme-low quality post expressing my rage! I made sure to set the reward distribution to "burn," just in case someone upvoted it, because even in my broken state I knew that 3-words posts shouldn't get any upvotes.
To my surprise when I got better and checked my HIVE account's today's morning I found that I got some upvotes from more than one big account. Those accounts who continued to upvote my posts for the past 3 months. I got upvotes from 
I was glad to know that such people trusted me enough to upvote everything I post. That's a huge honor! Especially since I don't interact with them that much. The problem is that I know now I'll get upvoted no matter what I post and that creates a bunch of issues (read next section.)
Why I posted it in the first place? I've done something terrible and I was feeling so bad I wanted my self-loathing to be recorded on the blockchain forever! I know I'll regret it one day but that's how I felt right then.
I thought auto-upvotes are filtered by something. There are many bots that won't upvote anything shorter than 150 characters! I was sure that post of mine will be caught in one of those filters and won't get voted.
Now I feel like I wasted 20 HIVE out of the reward pool, just for my selfish anger! Rewards that could easily have gone to someone who worked 5 hours on a post that got less than 0.5 HIVE in upvotes! (I've been there!) Thinking about this makes me feel worse than I was feeling when I made that post in the first place!
But this post isn't about yesterday's one. It's about Auto-upvotes and why they should be filtered:
So, why ?
Knowing that I'm getting the upvotes no matter what I write, at least for someone like me will have a effect on my posting:
This will put a huge limit on my content: I can't publish posts/articles that objectively deserve less than 20 HIVE (which is approximately, their auto-votes combined.) I can't make a joke post or some low quality rant (like this one,) anymore! At least not on my main account.
It makes me want to post everyday, anything, without a thought about value, just to get that sweet upvote: Luckily I don't do that, but the temptation is there! I try to only post about things I really want to say. This also means that there will be days with no posts from me, even when I have time. In these days, part of me feels I'm losing, the other part thinks it's worth it in the long term.
Knowing that no matter what I post will get upvoted might decrease the quality a bit! I mean who reads this stuff anyway? Right? Still, I don't do that for the same reasons above. Long term~
What filters should there be then?
It's been a while since I took part in one of these auto-vote services. As far as I know there's already the white/blacklist filters for accounts and voting power filters as well.
So I suggest adding filters based on the content of the post being upvoted:
- Number of characters/words! I think it's a must. Many users won't use it, bt for some, it's essential metric when deciding to give the upvote.
- Tags: That's easy, I want to upvote @ arandomstranger187638 but only if they posted about #gaming. Or I want to follow-vote everything @ randomvotingtrail votes as long as it contains #diy in it.
- Content: if the post contains a certain phrase they won't get an upvote from me.
I know all of these are possible because voting bots already upvoted by these filters. I also know that many Hivers will be thrilled to prevent their auto-upvotes from going to what they consider low quality content from authors who generally post high-quality content they love to see.
What do you think?
I'm conflicted about writing this post because I really want to keep getting these auto-votes, but I feel that there's a problem in getting them all the time! Especially if they keep being unfiltered.
Final thing I want to say is that I might be wrong. This article was written in a burst of emotion after watching my mistake of yesterday becoming bigger! I'm not even sure if I'll agree with what I wrote here in a week or a month. I also never checked if the filters are already there or if they're work-in-progress...