To Auto-Vote or not to Auto-Vote in #NewSteem?

in steem •  4 months ago 


A couple of days ago, I was reading a post from Lordbutterfly, where he talks about dealing with the circlejerks on Steem. By that, I think he means downvoting people who just upvote each other's posts.

I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this, I mean, I do agree with downvoting low-effort posts that have significant rewards, but just downvoting because people are upvoting their friends is a bridge too far for me. To me, it seems kinda fair that people who've invested a lot into Steem, get some form of reward for it. It also seems kinda natural that big accounts tend to upvote each other more.

Though, one could argue that since the curation rewards have increased a lot, such behavior isn't necessary anymore. Well, it kinda is actually... If you swap large-value upvotes with other whales, you'll still earn way more on both curation and author rewards, then if you'd only use your stake to upvote good posts from smaller accounts. Sure, it's a little bit unfair because you're not exactly practicing proof-of-brain to the fullest, but large investors are somewhat entitled to somewhat of a return on their investment IMO. Keep in mind that I'm talking about upvoting qualitative posts of your friends, not just upvoting single pictures or comments for +$20.

Spiral of Negativity

I reckon that if we have to keep policing perceived bad behavior, in order to make Steem work, we're going to lose the battle. If you want to encourage good behavior, it should be done on a fundamental level, with the Steem mechanics basically.

When Steemians are constantly policing other Steemians, we're at a serious risk of ending up with a platform where people are afraid to do anything. I'm already second guessing my use of Steem-Auto, even though I've never made any sort of verbal agreement with anyone regarding swapping upvotes or anything like that. For me, it just happened naturally.

I add person X to my Steem-Auto and after a couple of days, I notice they've added me on theirs. No agreement or anything, though you could say that we're now part of a voting circle-jerk.

These days, I just try to stay away from trying to police the blockchain, sure, I do give a single downvote from time to time, but it's not something I want to spend the majority of my time on. I'm technically still a member of Steemflagrewards, a group which rewards downvoting bad content, though I've not been active for months. Some of the content they tackle surely deserves to be downvoted, but there's also a lot of gray-area stuff, here I tend to feel somewhat bad for the person at the other end.

Switch to 100% Manual Voting?

Honestly, I don't really know what to do from here. Maybe it would be best to just remove everything from my Steem-Auto and completely switch to manual curation. I'm curious what everybody else thinks about that, since almost everybody I know here on Steem using some form of auto-voting, except just a couple of individuals.

I'd really like to hear everyone's thoughts on this...

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I think it is only natural that circles are going to pop up. It is an unavoidable part of the system. I start reading your content and I like what I read, you start reading my content and you like what you read. We start upvoting each other. Then you see some other people that follow me that you like and you start voting their stuff and you start voting theirs. Boom the circle just got bigger. I think the real issue is the circles that are upvoting crap content. Like you said, just a single picture with no text, or a screen grab of the current market prices, etc. Imagine what the circles are going to look like when communities are created?

In a perfect world, I think we would all manually curate. That just isn't going to happen though. We are busy people with busy lives. I don't see Auto-voting as inherently bad, just a fact of life. It is pretty rare that I auto-vote someone whose content I don't actually read at some point. That is probably what makes the difference between good auto voting and bad auto voting. Are you trying to maximize rewards and still read the content or just trying to get the most curation rewards possible?

If I would go entirely manual curation I would have my VP at 100% way too often and that is just a waste of good VP. I have some regular voters now which will keep my VP around 92% mostly and the rest I do manually every now and then when there is time..the boss' time kills my time ;)

I think balance is the key here. It is fine upvoting your friends once in a while. But it should be an individuals conscience to not abuse. Being harsh on wrong doing at times provokes rebellion.
Autovotes should be banned though.

Posted using Partiko Android

go organic auto~vote! :)

I completely disagree with the notion that if any two accounts support/vote for each other, it is bad or even a CJ. Lets say me and x started Steemit around the same time 2 or 3 years ago. We never knew each other, but liked each others work. Now for years we vote and comment and joke with each other. I would say till the death that is not a CJ. That is just mutually supporting a friend. Now as the numbers grow, does that change the point? I have not invested money into Steemit. I have earned it the hard way. Never once used a bot. So I can understand those that put in real fiat dollars want to get a tiny something back. It is like a dividend on a stock.

I tend to agree with that, but it seems that some people don't. Actually, more people seem invigorated by the new free downvotes to curbe that sort of behavior.

Sure, those people seem to stick to high value posts for new, but I wonder if they'll also start moving towards the lower payout posts. I don't know if you check out some of Exyle's video's, but in one of his latest ones he talks about how Steem is getting "less fun", because you can't even post short content anymore (a couple of pictures for example).

I'm not a big fan of that, the whole point of a social media website is the ability to share what you want. Sure, spamming plagiarized pictures is obviously wrong, but now people take offense to posting original pictures as well, if they're not accompanied by a long article.

Exactly right. I never understand why some folks feel they need to constantly tell others how to behave. It is a very slippery slope once we start having a witch hunt simply because a post doesn't have the "minimum" number of words or photos. We need more people here using the site so let's not try to drive off those that may not have the time nor the desire to do long form posts.