There are continuous talks about self-voting, rewards pool, visibility, ROI and the best practices around the Steem and Steemit communities. If you have been around for a bit maybe you have heard of this. But more likely you have seen the robot comments on posts declaring that a bot has voted at some or another percentage.
Something like this:
I wanna be visible!
So there are two reasons that I hear for doing this. One is visibility and the other is ROI. Let's tackle visibility first.
I have tried a lot of bot votes, I have never noticed a visibility bonus. When I go to the trending page, I see the same authors and the posts are always over 100 dollars or more, and so my paid upvotes have never seemed to help me with visibility. In fact, as we will discuss, they actually may have been preventing more real upvotes.
Killing Curation
So when I earned some whaleshares, I used them on a recent post to make it more visible! I put a $7.50 upvote right on a new post so that people would see it! (and perhaps be tricked into thinking people liked it?)
Well only of few of my most loyal followers ended up voting for it, here was the final result:
So no net effect, not a single additional view, but guess what? My loyal followers got a vastly reduced curation payout because I invited Official Fuzzy of whaleshares to take all of the curation rewards for my post!
Does this seem fair to them? I don’t think so. It would be much better for my followers had I applied the whaleshares last, not first. Then they would participate in the enhanced curation! This is the same for upgoats, randowhales, minnowboosters etc, unless you want these robots to get the curation rewards instead of your real followers, apply them in the final days before payout.
ROI? What is it that we are building here?
It is very possible that you have heard the phrase ROI, which stand for Return on Investment. I can understand that people want to make money, I can even understand that the incentives are set up a certain way for ROI analysis. But let’s do our ROI analysis after community building.
Why do I say that? Shouldn’t the free market be allowed to run….free? Actually yes, what I am fighting here is what is called myopic behavior or short-sightedness in plain english.
Building community is what we need to do in order to continue to see returns on our investments over the long haul. What is good for the short-term is not, in this case, healthy for the long term.
The incentives are clear - but please - add your ROI robot votes at the end.
Curie and curation efforts
If you are actually trying to get your content showcased by some of the great and wonderful curation services out there, you have heard of
. Know that will not even consider your post if it already has over $1 in payout. Your best bet is patience, not my personal strong suit but something I have had to learn here on steemit.
Now, please leave your carefully constructed comments and criticisms below ;p
Love and Light!