Today was a great day for upvoting in the wantwiserupvote tag. As you can see from the picture, there were twelve new articles posted with the tag, all by small minnows. Yes, I do check. I only had to hunt down three more small minnows today. My hope is to eventually have more than fifteen articles to choose from each day that I vote. This will allow me to get those upvotes in quickly on a busy day. Once that happens, though, I think I might need to allocate some votes just for the introduceyourself tag, because it is fun welcoming the new Steemit users. Maybe down the road I'll allocate five upvotes a day for that.
The rest of my upvotes continue to follow my usual pattern. Ten upvotes for my own content (the upvote for this post not yet marked), and fifteen upvotes for content by other people I happen to like (regardless of author minnow, dolphin or whale status).
This morning I checked my rank on SteemWhales and found it to be 3504.
Then I checked it again a few hours later and found it to be 3499. I hadn't really done anything to change it. I am learning that the Steem Whale ranking fluctuates a fair amount.
Then I bought 54 Steem and powered it up and my rank climbed to 3393. I show all these pictures to illustrate my commitment to becoming a bona fide Steemit Whale a little bit at a time. At this time my purchases are small, but I will be making those purchases at a minimum of once a month. Each little Steem purchase brings me closer to that day when I will upvote someone's post and watch it rise by one or more cents... and beyond.
And I write a lot. Even if I only post one blog entry a day, I'm also posting comments, some of which are a bit strategic to get some valuable upvotes. The commitment to upvoting my own content ten times is as much about making sure I post ten pieces of content so that I can upvote it.
In the course of interacting with the Steemit news I learned a little bit more about how voting strength works. Each user who has more than 400 or so SP has the option of voting with a slider, and that sets the percentage of the maximum strength one vote can have.
However, there is another voting strength percentage at work. Each user gets 200 votes to use over a period of five days. That means 40 votes a day. When you use up forty votes--your voting power depletes by 20%. If there were some way to cast 40 votes all at once (such as with a bot), you would see your voting power as shown on Steemd drop from 100% to 80%. Then if you waited exactly 24 hours, it would climb back up to 100%. Of course, in reality, as your casting votes, you're doing it throughout the day, so your strength is both depleting and recovering at the same time.
But anyway, the more accurate way to look at it is that you get 200 votes every five days. If you were to cast them all in one instant, your voting power would drop from 100% to zero, and then it would recover by 20% each day until it reached 100% again five days later.
If you're the sort who votes a lot, casting on average more than 40 per day, you have to be concerned with holding yourself back, or using your slider, so that you aren't constantly depleting your voting strength and cutting into the value of your upvote. But if you are like me, and struggle to get forty upvotes in each and every day, then you have a problem with wasted voting power. If you don't vote, you lose the opportunity. If you step away from Steemit for a few days and your voting power sits at 100% the whole time, it's not being added to, but it will be depleted just as quickly when you come back and start voting.
One way to mitigate this is to remember that Steemit views it as 200 votes per five days. Let's say I want to take Saturday and Sunday off every week. If I only vote 40 votes Monday through Friday, I essentially will lose the ability to cast 80 votes by not casting them over the weekend. However, if I tripled the number of votes I cast on Friday, or doubled my votes on both Thursday and Friday, then I would be effectively using up my voting power for the weekend. Sure, on Thursday and Friday, my voting strength would drop well below 80 percent, but by sitting out Saturday and Sunday, that strength will fully recover by Monday morning.
Practically speaking, this doesn't work for me. When I hit 40 votes for the day, I'm done with it. I don't have the time, nor mental resources to add any more than maybe one or two extra votes. So as it stands now any days I choose to take off, I'm going to lose the voting power for those days.
I did learn that one change that has been proposed for the next hard fork is the ability to vote at double or triple strength ahead of time. So let's say this Friday I know I will not be on Steemit on Saturday or Sunday. So I then set my slider to 300% to triple the value of each upvote. I then would be able to with forty votes, still use up my voting power for the entire weekend, and not lose any of it by not actually voting until Monday morning. I could also choose to do all my voting for the next five days on one day by quintupling my voting power. I'm thinking the slider would go from 0 all the way to 500%.
Since the votes are set out over five days, I could at most take four consecutive days of Steemit curation vacation. Unless I choose to go on some major wilderness adventure that's doable. Most of the time I'm on vacation I wouldn't have a problem checking Steemit every few days.
I hope that proposal does make it to the next hard fork. It would sure be fun to not lose my voting opportunity when I choose to take some time off. And wouldn't it be fun to be that minnow on Friday who receives a triple strength upvote just because wiser wants to take the weekend off?
As I write this my ranking is 3402 (I told you it moves around), my voting strength is at 90.07 %, and my reputation score is a 55.2 and climbing.
