Some believe that all Self-Voting is bad while others don’t have any problem with it. I’ve seen calls to have Self-Voting banned but the truth of it is that if someone wants to Self-Vote then they can easily get around a ban by creating a sock puppet account and voting from it instead. So I personally think it’s better to try and understand why people Self-Vote and try to find out where consensus says the line is drawn between what is Legitimate and what is Abuse. Welcome to the first of my posts exploring the Grey Areas of STEEM.
Before I start, this is a bit of a work in progress. If I’ve missed anything or you disagree with what I’m saying then feel free to post a comment and throw in your 2 cents worth (literally or figuratively - I don’t mind). My objective here is to try and understand these Grey Areas a bit better myself so that I can figure out where the consensus might be on what is generally considered to be acceptable behaviour. So here they are – The reasons for Self-Voting :-
1. Post Promotion
There is a small checkbox on Steemit.com where there is an option to “Upvote Post” when you submit some new content. This is generally considered to be an easy shortcut to Self-Voting your own post while submitting it and many use it for the purpose of giving their new content a bit of a boost so that it can get on its way to the Trending page. A lot of people have started using bid bots and even the seemingly defunct “Promoted” feature to try and boost the exposure of their own content in a similar way and this practise of paying to promote your content seems to be widespread on the platform. In this instance a user is spending some of their own Voting Power rather than paying someone else to promote their post.
2. Comment Curation
Once a user has posted some new content, many comments from other Steemians might start coming in. Some of those comments could be comprehensive, invaluable and/or insightful, while others might just be vague, brief and/or spammy. It is very common for dedicated Steemians to try and answer questions or provide additional content for people who have engaged with their posts by commenting. Comment Curation is the process of upvoting comments so that they are “bumped” and will appear higher on the page. It is done so that new readers can read beyond the original post and find more valuable content as they read through the top comments. Some Steemians will also comment on others posts and Self-Vote their comments so that they are boosted above the poor quality posts (often bot spam) and thus become more visible.
3. Rewarding Undervalued Contributions
There is a generally held view that we are here on STEEM to reward good content and we should be upvoting content that we think is undervalued and downvoting content that we think might be overvalued from a rewards (earnings) perspective. What this means is that if some people are posting or commenting and they believe they have added more value to the platform or the discussion than the rewards currently show, then they should Self-Vote to ensure that their valuable contribution is appropriately rewarded.
4. Maximising Rewards
This is the process of Self-Voting for the purpose of maximising ones own rewards and ensuring the best possible ROI (Return on Investment) for the STEEM POWER that has been vested by a user. It can even be possible to lease STEEM POWER delegations from others and then 100% Self-Vote to cover the lease expense and then guarantee a profit on top of it.
So I’ll be right up front and admit that I Self-Vote myself on occasion for the purpose of #2 and at the start of my journey I Self-Voted for the purpose of #1 but I don’t bother with Self-Voting for Post Promotion any more (partly because my vote is too weak). I have also recently gone to war with a user and downvoted them for Self-Voting for the purpose of #4. So for me what I consider Legitimate is #1 and #2 and what I consider Abuse is #4 which puts my Grey Area somewhere around #3. But I am genuinely interested to hear others views on this. Maybe I am in the minority here. Maybe some would consider me to be a Self-Voting Abuser, or maybe some would consider me to be an Aggressor or an Oppressor for initiating a war against a poor innocent minnow who was just trying to get a Return on their Investment. It's a Grey Area right?
Where would you draw the line on Self-Voting?
Images and Credits
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