Auto-votes on Whales
Today I'm going to discuss an observation I think many veteran Hive users are already aware of which is why so many people chose to auto-votes whales. I get why people do it, I did the same thing as a strategy to be discovered but I don't think it's a good one anymore... I've changed my mind.
I know a lot of people might use auto-voting as a strategy to be discovered, but I'm here to tell you the odds of getting the favor returned is little to none. Instead, just post content that people can learn something from if you want to be discovered and eventually you might catch one of these whales' attention.
I've recently removed most of my auto-votes, especially on whales because I'd rather conserve my HP to reward more authors who are adding valuable content. I mean, even the most popular whales abuse their auto-votes and I hate to see it. I won't mention any names but one popular account made a 1 minute video and got about $35 in up-votes and to me, that's kind of abusing your followers and I don't want to be part of that. It really discourages people who make good content that are not discovered to see it as well, unless I'm the only one.
Collecting auto-votes in my opinion oftentimes leads to abuse of them. While I appreciate the auto-votes I receive, I have disciplined myself to practice what I preach; however, what I'd like to see more is more people following users and manually reviewing their friends' feeds and combining up-votes with their comments. This actually leads to people returning the favor and considering doing the same, which leads to genuine engagement.
I'm not going to lie though, some of my close Hive friends I'll keep my auto-votes on because quite frankly I like them, but to use auto-votes to gain attention doesn't work, at least in my opinion.
Do You Have Auto-Votes on Whales?
If you have auto-votes set on whale accounts, have you ever received a single up-vote by the user? If so, was it after you commented on their post or was it by chance?
My guess is that it was after you engaged with the user and in my opinion that's a far better strategy to garnish the attention you would seek through the use of auto-voting without wasting your HP.
I'd like any reader of this post to take a 2nd look at their auto-votes and see how they actually perform on whale accounts and it's probably the reason why your curation ratio is low between 6-10%.
I'm not saying I have the best curation performance because I use a lot of my voting HP to reward my friends / people I follow, but from my experience auto-votes on whales isn't that rewarding and you have about a 0.01% chance of getting the favor returned... i.e. receiving an auto-vote trail on your content from the whale in target.
Controversial Opinion
I know this is a controversial opinion but I like to be direct and share my honest observations.
I know some of these whales do put out really good content but far too often do I see the same account later posting a 1 minute video because they know they have a daily quota they can take advantage of in terms of knowing the auto-votes they typically receive.
I like to be a man of the people, for the minnows / dolphins hoping to earn the attention they seek.
If more people followed this type of rule then you'd be contributing to that so I would at the very least consider reviewing your auto-vote trail and removing the whales who aren't auto-voting you or regularly up-voting your post.
That is all!
Thanks for stopping by friends!
Sources
Photo Editing - https://logomakr.com/
I do very little auto-voting. I follow what my @tenkminnows account votes on, but that is all small accounts. Otherwise it is all manual as I want control of where my votes go. I appreciate that some whales do a lot for the platform and community. They can expect $30+ in votes on anything they post, most of it automated. I may add a small vote in some cases, but I prefer to get votes to posts that are not making as much as they should. I can find art, comics and music posts that took considerable work to produce, but make cents. That is the sort of content that will attract a wider audience and it needs to be encouraged. Yet another post about Hive itself is of little interest to the masses.
We definitely need a better spread of voting so I applaud your stance.
Thanks! I vote some whale posts too I like but don't have any auto-votes set on them. Yea agreed Hive posts are of little interest to the masses but they're important for new Hivers to see because it's hard to search for them.
Some people will do well regardless of what I do. I seek out those who struggle to make much with good content.
I don't use any auto-voting service mainly because I can't afford to. LOL
Like yourself, I would like to automate voting for a few individuals and maybe the odd community as a whole but that would be out of sheer laziness rather than any deliberate plan to enhance rewards for myself. IMV it's really hard work and eats up a lot of valuable time to trawl through my friends, followers, communities to see "Who's posted since I last looked?" so an auto-voting capability, I can see, would be beneficial. The question is: "What value is that vote to the recipient other than financial?" What I mean is, I could, for example, stick yourself on an auto-vote and never look at your work or account again. Now is that:
Supporting you?
Is that taking an interest in your work?
Is that even some loose form of friendship?
imgae source
I am grateful for the auto-votes I do receive don't get me wrong. Personally I stick to some rules that I've developed when posting. Like most of my posts have at least 500 words if they're not full of pictures, I love to blog about my son!
I definitely prefer readers and engagement over anything though, auto-vote or not. Because of reward timing most of my friends posts do kind of well, so I set auto-votes on them so I can support them and get better curation.
My way of engaging with friends, even if I already upvoted from an autovote is the same for anyone I follow. I just troll through my friends posts from hive.blog and usually do much less on curation and that's why my curation performance isn't as good as some. I'll sacrifice 5% though to support the people I follow, it's worth it imo.
I also have plenty of time on my hands with COVID and all!
There are 19 active whale accounts out of 32 according to arcange's stats post. To be honest I don't know if I vote on any of them or not, but then again I don't use auto votes yet, (not big enough account but growing).
There is a lot of talk about supporting smaller accounts, it seems to me many people fail to even review their auto votes as I have seen plagiarized content get a lot of support from auto voters. Whales are not the only shit posters, they are people also and may not have a lot of time, but still want to keep their feet in the Hive Block Chain.
A couple issue I see with that, voting for a person just to get a vote back is not helping or supporting the smaller accounts it is supporting your own account, ie: I voted for you I expect a vote in return.
I believe there are at least two reasons to vote:
The two are not mutually exclusive. A person looking to support people/content can do so with a portion of their vote power, and also they can use a portion of their vote power on curation.
To exclude a group of people for any reason is simply wrong in my own personal opinion. People need to decide if they want to be an excluder or includer. We have seen throughout society what happens when a group is excluded.
As always on the vote front, at the end of the day it is the person choice, it is their vote, it is theirs to do with as they will, and I am not advocating one use or method over any other.
I'm not saying I vote and expect anything, it just kind of happens, statistically speaking.
I follow both those reasons you mentioned, but I also know many Hive users that are new look for strategies to be discovered. Upvoting and commenting is one of them.
I'm also not saying to exclude anyone, I vote whales good posts that I like following similar rules you've outlined all the time.
The post here is really just food for thought. I appreciate the comment my friend!
Yeah anytime voting is bought up there is controversy. I myself am not that big of a fan of auto voting, I do however understand the need for it. My max vote value is still less than $0.100 so I do not need to worry about appearing overly generous on my votes, The bigger I grow though I am going to have to consider that, which manual voting at this stage in my growth will certainly aid. I just hope when I get to the Auto Vote stage I can remember to check my votes on a regular basis.
Actually, what I found is the more HP you have the more manual voting returns unforeseeable dividends later. I'm also a fan of up-voting comments, I think people appreciate that and it incentives more engagement later on. Now if you know your going to be lazy, which I get burned out too, then I'll just follow a good trail.
I don't think I will ever follow or sign on to a vote trail. I have seen to many of those that vote on plagiarized and extremely low value content, (one blurry picture and no words).
Manual voting for curation rewards can return a lot especially if it is on content that catches on fire, (kind of goes hive viral).
Comment voting is something I also try to do on occasion, but I need my vote to be close to $0.020 at 25% vote power to do it. I do make exceptions sometimes because I have signed on with dustsweeper to pick up my slightly short votes, but I don't like doing it to often.
!ENGAGE 25
ENGAGEtokens.Yeah, while i am starting with the blockchain platform i got surprised that people get so much attention with a too many or few more big upvote which helps to earn by their post. But a valuable good content won't get such kind of attention.
Up voting manually is better andnits its strong the community deepth while auto voting failed those judgement. But auto vote both benefit them with rapid way, and somehow everyone managed to grab it. Anyway it always aware me about the think tank of this community.
Yea if you're new, I'd recommend engaging on discord and twitter using the same name as your hive profile. It's true that you can make a solid post as a new user and get little to no return. Also, it helps to have a little bit of HP too.
Thanks for your suggestions.
I suspect that people auto-vote whales because they are hoping for higher curation rewards. It is about maximizing curation rewards.
IMHO, such auto-votes completely undermine the value of the curation system.
If that's the case then people should seriously look at how those up-votes do because most of the time you have to constantly check and change the timing of them. It's a lot of work. On whale accounts, votes typically do less than 100% curation performance.
Better curation rewards are from up-voting low reward posts that are quality because if they get the up-votes they deserve the performance is well above 100%.
The auto-votes are generally from upvoting services. So the first question is: How many upvoting services exist?
These upvoting services tend to sell curation trails. The bots cast the auto-votes in a sequence. My guess is that the position in the sequence is either dependent on political clout or the amount one pays for the service.
The competition in the auto-vote arena would be a matter of bots controlling a large number of upvotes competing with other bots with a large number of upvotes.
BTW: My voting strategy is to look at posts that are at least six minutes old. I avoid reading posts from authors that get a dozen upvotes at the five minute mark because they are most likely using an autovote service.
In reality, when everyone auto upvoting the same author at same time,curation APR cannot be predicted (it can be hit or miss).
The people who are buying autovotes are looking for passive income. People looking for passive income tend to be lazy.
The upvote services upvote in sequences. One's position in the sequence is dependent on what people pay. The upvotes from a large service will be relatively predictable.
I also removed most of my auto upvotes and I personally read the content that is in auto upvote by me. I often add and delete authors on it and change the voting percent on them.
If used judiciously ,it is nice tool but "blind" autovotes are disheartening for Hive user base.
Yea it's a nice tool but it would suggest most people auto-vote whales because they falsely assume curation rewards are higher and/or they're hoping to be recognized
Yup, The reality is quite opposite to the user assumptions.
I autovote people I work with or otherwise enjoy most of their content.
Even then, the autovote is meant to keep my VP at a certain level that gives flexibility for some manual voting as recreation.
You're on my auto-vote trail friend, but partly because you also put out some banging content on the req! ;)
I've noticed and I appreciate that.
I try to put out okay stuff anyways.
I totally agree with you @cryptoknight12, I go for the post content and I like upvoting bloggers who try hard and do not get many votes.
Agree with everything here, but, manual curation, commenting and voting is time consuming effort. Yes, I more or less use manual voting but this depends on my time I have here. Also for preparing good post with photos needs some time. So as I mention I agree with sayings here but I'm still in dilema because you can't manually curate everything, only your feed.
This is why I'm pretty selective with who I follow and try to follow Hive users who've engaged with me, like yourself... so you'll get a follow from me friend! :)
Thank you very much, engagement will be mutual :) 👏😎
genuine engagement matters!!!
that is it!
is there a rich list for hive?
https://hivebuzz.me/ranking
I would think so considering the number on your profile shows what rank you are in HP. Not exactly sure where that is though
Personally I'd love to see the hive.vote implement a way to refuse upvotes from fanbases etc if they choose. That would pretty much remove a large portion of autovotes as some whales would probably utilize such feature.
Also my auto votes are primarily set up to follow curation trails on a number of game accounts like @cyrptobrewmaster @vimm and such to support them and content related to them. I don't generally set autovotes to any given person as I can't guarentee their content would always be something worth voting.
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