In this post I am explaining how I changed my follow and voting behaviour and how it changed my experience with Steem drastically. They key for that was to limit my follow-list, use Steemauto for automated upvoting for better curation rewards and SteemWorld to monitor the process on a daily basis.
Sweep Your Follow-List
One of the biggest mistakes I have done when I was new on Steemit was to follow way too many people. This will quickly ruin your experience when browsing through your personal feed. If that looks like another trending page to you then you should clearly take the broom and spring clean your follow-list.
The strategy I follow is to only follow and upvote people where I think they are valuable for my personal growth. This is incredibly important to me as we are becoming what we surround ourselves with. To me, growth can either mean that I can learn something relevant from that person. Or it can mean that I feel a connection to that person that makes me want to follow its progress.
After I did that twice I ended up with now 150 people who I follow. I think this is a very healthy number and has still plenty of room to grow before becoming chaotic again and I can still easily browse through their daily posts without braking into sweat. Before that it felt impossible for me to keep an eye on all these people. But with the reduced list I really feel that I am pretty up-to-date with all of those I am following.
Automate Your Upvotes With Steemauto
As these people are now my main focus I have started to put a third of them on my Steemauto Fanbase. With this free and open-source tool you can fully automate your upvotes. This saves a lot of time and can increase your curation rewards drastically because if you upvote early and before others then your share will be higher. If you upvote before 30 minutes post time you will actually get less for each minute closer to zero. So by timing your upvotes with Steemauto you can get in your upvotes at just the right time.
Usually the magic number for the upvote time is 30 minutes because from that moment curators get the full curation reward. However, the curation share each curator receives depends heavily on how early the upvote came as well as how many Steem accounts have upvoted before and after that. This sometimes leads to bringing in the auto-vote even earlier than 30 minutes (i.e. 29, 28, etc) to catch other auto-voters.
If you are new to this keep in mind that you have voting power that drops 2% with each full upvote and regenerates the same amount in 2.4 hours). That means you should consider to limit the upvote weight you set on Steemauto as well as reducing the daily limit. I have the majority of people on just one daily upvote and something between 5%-25% upvote weight.
On the other hand some people create great content but only post occasionally. And then there are people that create extraordinary content on a daily basis. I have those individuals on 100% upvotes and sometimes even up to twice a day. Even with over 50 people on my Fanbase list I am still able to keep a daily equilibrium of my voting power.
Monitoring Accounts
While Steemauto is managing my upvotes I am still observing closely what is going on every day. To get full access to the Steem blockchain activities of my account I use SteemWorld. You can quickly see who, when and how you upvoted as well as track your voting power. I find this incredibly helpful as it gives me insight to micromanage my activitives and optimize my curation reward hunt. It also allows me to tweak my Steemsauto when I think it drains too much of my voting power.
Besides watching my own account I also use it heavily to track what others are up to. This allows me to tweak my upvotes even more and make sure to make the most out of my beautiful Steem Power. I have been able to increase my curation rewards about 100% with this behaviour. At the same time I am supporting those people that truely enrich my life and bring the change to the world I want to see.
My Steem experience has changed drastically with this combination of limited follow-list and automated support for some of these authors. For the first time I feel like I am keeping the upper hand over all the relevant content. And I am having a good feeling about sharing all the love in form of Steem which I create for others while earning curation rewards. Steem is fun again.
Do you still read those people you are up voting on?
I’m still doing manuel voting, sure I have some favorites I rather vote on more often. But I still want to read posts from people who I don’t know and which are new to the platform. Unfortunately i don’t have all that time to read either.
I still don’t care about squeezing out as much of this platform as possible, but frankly speaking.. maybe I will do this too. At the end of the day we are all just Egoist, fair enough!
Yes, I try to read the posts from all people I autovote. Of course, that is not always possible. And that's why I love this system so much because I can game it like a browser game. Although I don't think this is egoistic at all. I support a whole lot of people and never miss any of their posts. It is like Patreon but better because I don't have to pay for it with my money. If I would like to squeeze as much as possible I would just delegate my Steem Power to a voting bot.
Your posts are very interesting especially for me who is still a beginner and I have to learn more do you want to be a
teacher to me.
be continuous sir.
Thanks for sharing these awesome tools for us to use to improve our journey here on steemit.
I really love your tips because I'm always looking how I can improve and keep on growing here on this platform
Really sturdy advice! 'Taking your steemit experience to the next level' i am thinking this would drastically change my steemit experience. And, being a plankton, it would be an efficient way to grow my account. I have also been meaning to tidy up my follow list. I too followed everyone at first. Thanks for sharing 😊🤹♂️
howdy there @flauwy and thanks for another educational and informative post which can help so many of us and thanks for being a great role model!
I follow everyone I see who makes a good comment everywhere I see them. I have been doing this since I got here one year ago. Now I follow 4200 and 5000 follow me.
I do this because this is my policy on all social media since I've been pushing my natural weight loss methods for the last 8 years or so. If we are talking about people in the US, 40% of them are obese and therefore in my target audience - I want all the fat people I can find to hear my message and on platform I post to. If I do not follow them, they will not follow me.
Unlike other platforms I use, I have never looked at my steemit feed in the entire year. As you say - it's useless. I find posts to read when I need to by using steemnow, which I keep open 24/7. I have it set how I like it and and might visit 10 posts a day for any reason. This is how I just found your post because your title interested me.
I also use an auto-upvoter - steemdunk. I can only have 20 people on it that is enough for me. I check it every couple of days and visit some of the posts I upvoted. Someone warned me not to use the one you are using for some reason months ago so I did not go on it. If steemdunk ever fails me, I might try, but so far so good. I do not think my vote will ever be big enough to need to slice it really small.
I could not stand the pressure when trying to keep up with my 20 friends manually. I have a few people not on the upvoter that I do vote frequently, but other than that, I can vote for a lot of comments and a few posts at random. It is just amazing the idiotic skills you have to develop to work here, but I keep trying anyway.
The more interesting point to me is that after a year of vigorous following activity, I have only found 4200 steemers to follow. Supposedly 60K are active here so to speak. Maybe 55K of them never make comments.
Thank you for this... I am going to sweep right now.
“One of the biggest mistakes I have done when I was new on Steemit was to follow way too many people.”
Don’t worry dude, I think we all did this in the beginning (:
This is exactly the way I have been operating my Steem experience. Great minds think alike I suppose ;)
-Ken
Wise words as always. I have to say, I made the same mistake. I'm following too many people, It was nice I read it in your post since I have you as an" steemit mentor".
Always sharing info, leading us to made our best effort here. Thanks!.
Following this rule from the day one here keep it short but simple and easy :)
Damn fine post!! This has been on my mind!! *Grabs broom for some serious sweeping.... * Resteeming to help others grasp this and to remind myself to stay on it!! Much gratitude for your post.
Hi @flauwy I've got an offer you might be an interested in as a writer in the cryptos space. Please email me on [email protected]
Great tips! In addition to setting up auto votes the thing that has improved my steemit experience the most is this tool I've been building. It's a personalized feed that learns from your upvotes. (It led me to this post in fact)
Really useful post @flauwy and I also watched your youtube video about using contests and challenges and wondered if you could advise me? I want to set up a contest and my reason for it is simply because I think it will be hilarious and fun (had the concept in mind for a while now!), but not sure it's worth the time and effort if nobody will see it...any tips? :-)
I was doing manual curation so I had really no life than reading / upvoting content. And I was almost always late so : no curation rewards... And I had so much stress when I had to go to sleep and my VP was around 95% ...
Then many people complained that I was voting for always the same people and not for enough people... (But you know right, how hard it is to vote for many many many people)
Now, I am dealing daily with steem auto and steemworld and I feel so much free and better :D
And I can read all the post I want when " I have time " :)
Thank for sharing your experience with us !You may believe it or not @flauwy, after a year on steem I changed the exact same pattern of voting as you.
Have you heard of a tool where I can set a upvote rule for new votes e.g. for new posts on the entire chain like every post after 15 minutes with less than 5 likes? Thanks for the post will definitely adapt your strategy!