Well I see a few realistic options for realizing some return on my voting power...Also I've invested in the power, and now I should be able to use it...
It is a commonly held misconception that simply holding VP entitles you to a claim on a directly correlated share of the reward pool. This is simply untrue. Holding hive power only entitles you to inflation. Rewards are an entirely different beast, because of all the game theory surrounding them due to being a commons. Self-upvoting comments has been considered abuse by many, including myself, for as long as I've been on the platform(Steem, etc.). I hope you will stop on your own, but that will not stop me from disagreeing with your use of the reward pool, and expressing that disagreement with my downvote. You seem entirely reasonable, so please don't take it personally.
If you want to earn a respectable return on top of your share of the inflation, @ocdb and @curangel can provide you that along with directing the reward pool to actual blog posts.
I agree.
This is where I disagree. I think it's more valuable for me to create intelligent comments on topics I care about. And when I do this to also upvote those who interact with my comments as well as upvote my own comments. See my thoughts above, but it seems that far too few rewards go towards comments.
Since you and a few others have reached out, I will cease self-upvoting as a trial. My worry is that I will have less incentive to interact on Hive. Therefore, I'll also stop upvoting comments from users who engage intelligently with my comments. And a human brain will be removed from curation and replaced with more automated voting, with niche and peripheral content being completely overlooked by the reward pool.
I upvote users who comment on my posts but do not upvote my own save two exceptions:
While that is an intriguing argument, is it enough for me to apply a different standard than I do to everyone else who has a clear intent is to milk the reward pool for their 'just deserts'? You've stated your intent is different, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Bear in mind that post HF 22, you have to leap past a rather large penalty for comment upvotes to be worth anything at all. While I am personally willing to take this hit in order to reward the comments of others, taking it to reward myself just seems wasteful.
We have a similar amount of hive power on the aggregate, so we are relatable in at least one way. Ask yourself this: At our level, should we seek to create value here or extract it? I believe that I stand to gain so much more long term by rewarding visible content, rather than I do some comment hidden under a post. That being said, I want to reward others for interacting with me, so I definitely see the value in incentivizing the comments of others.
You stand to gain so much more by looking at the bigger picture and somehow tapping into curation, while at the same time keeping this passion you have for interacting. Nobody can get you past your baser instincts of needing an instant reward for interacting with people but yourself. To me it seems like such a waste.
In any case, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and I am glad you are willing to try something different. I hope you can recognize the difficulty in applying different standards, attributing intent, and creating exceptions for something that is generally frowned upon.
Can you explain? I searched a bit but couldn't find a good description of how HF 22 affected comment rewards.
Is this because I benefit when Hive as a system becomes more valuable? I.e. the whitepaper argument that whales will do what's in the best long-term interest of the network rather than their own short-term self-interest?
Or because comment upvotes don't produce good curation rewards?
Or because self-upvotes on comments will be erased with downvotes?
When I look at the posts I'm supporting through curation trails, they tend to be content I don't care about. In fact, most of the posts I auto-upvote through trails offer little original content or provide something that's already available in a better format elsewhere on the internet. However, the comments and posts I manually upvote provide content that I personally care about and that are of high quality.
So I guess my bigger question is are we pushing users too much towards curation trails?