Voting is one of the key mechanisms in Steemit to distribute rewards. Votes gives the article or comment rewards to the author, as well as rewards to the one who votes.
Voting therefore is an interesting topic and we saw a lot of discussions and debates here on Steemit regarding voting curves, whale-no-votes experiment, new HF with an almost empty reward pool that is (still) filling up, down votes and so on.
Today I like to discus the topic of self voting, ie voting on your own posts and comments.
When I started actively posting on Steemit, I used the interface settings as is, this was with the auto self voting in the Steemit UI unchecked, meaning I didn't upvote my own posts. After a couple of weeks I got some hints and comments from others, telling me to upvote my own posts, so I started doing that; Posts only, not my comments. At that time I didn't really know what algorithms were in place and how rewards were distributed. I only noticed that rewards to both, my posts and comments were very low in value. Obviously because I was a newbie, had hardly any followers, and my posts would be quickly gone in the general channels and therefore more or less invisible for the community at large.
For some reason though, I had (and still have) an uncomfortable feeling in upvoting my own posts and comments; I do not find it very chique.
By now, understanding more of how rewards are distributed, the fact that rewards to posts and comments can be factors higher than rewards to votes, as well as the willingness to ReSteem from time to time while I want to be able to find my own posts easy, I stopped upvoting my posts more than a month ago. Note that I'm a mini minnow with super low super powers :)
In addition, I tend to vote more on comments than on posts. I for sure do not read 40 posts a day, but I do read quite a few comments. I like the interaction, and I like to reward others when they are part of the interaction. I even upvote comments of others that I like, without commenting to such comment.
Not voting for my own posts, gives me:
- Good feeling
- Easy discovery of my own posts in my Blog channel
- Almost no reduction in vote rewards; And hardly a noticeable reduction in overall rewards
- More votes left for posts and comments created by other authors
What is your view on the topic of self voting, what is your own culture you implement here on Steemit and what do you like it to be?
PS: I noticed I did some own post upvoting 2 days ago, when using Steemit UI with my smartphone, apparently the checkbox for auto upvote was checked. A bit unfortunate, but ok, sometimes errors happen.
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