The Premise

My upvoting philosophy is to use my upvotes to promote and reward quality content. This will make the good content more visible and gives incentive for skilled creators to keep up their good work. I believe that this will increase the overall quality of the platform, attracting more people. This is, admittedly, a long-term strategy.

How much Steem am I giving up in the short-term to facilitate this long-term strategy? I am going to conduct a 1-week experiment to attempt to determine how much curation rewards I am missing out on. I plan on doing this by auto-upvoting the posts of the highest payout users. This should, in theory, give me the greatest curation reward for my upvote.

I hope that this experiment will show that the increased results are not significant. If my curation rewards only increase by about 0.1 SP a week then the long-term benefits to the platform clearly out-weight the extra 5 or 6 STEEM ($15-$20) per year. I want to show that you can support quality content without giving up much. I just hope that my results match my expectations!

The Experiment

I will auto-upvote of each of these users soon after they make a post: haejin, adsactly, stimp1024, slowwalker. Remember, this experiment ignores post quality and will only run for a week. These users' post rewards consistently hit $300 and $400. I am going to upvote each of their posts with 25% voting power. Collectively, these users pen around 20 posts per day, so I should be using all my 5 daily upvotes at that rate.

In order to upvote these posts early I will be using the AutoSteem automated upvote tool.

Last week I received 0.107 SP in curation rewards. Let's see what happens if I only vote on the top reward posts! After the experiment, I will be promptly returning to promoting quality posts. The experiment begins now!

I will not be upvoting my own posts as to maximize the results of this experiment. Because of this, I will need your help to spread the word! Please upvote and resteem!