Good post, I normally use SteemVoter, I actually put my people I vote for on pause as my Steem Power was down pretty low and wanted to start running a contest so wanted it to build back up a bit.
Something I'm getting more interested in doing is delegating Steem power to various things.
There really seems to be no rhyme or reason to who or what content gets upvoted. I mean a lot of people making garbage ass content make $50 per post and I see people making really amazing content getting $1.
There's a lot of bot accounts posting garbage and not even posting in the correct format ie it looks almost like something reposted from IFTTT that accidentally breaks the link and leaves for example half of it above their meme and half below the meme. I wanna downvote stuff like that but when I see they have a (76) its like okay I downvote them and have little to no affect and then they wreck me.
Number of followers doesn't really seem to correlate to upvotes or earnings on posts much of the time.
In regards to what you were discussing in the post as far as strategy maybe I'm going about it wrong. I drain my Voting Power oftentimes giving a lot of 100% upvotes and a lot of 20% and 30% plus upvotes where as I see many other people spreading their voting around a lot more with like 1% to 5%.
In terms of the type of content people wanna see, that's somethign I'm really confused by. I personally tend to do all types of content ie what I ate for breakfast in one post, a meme in another, a commentary on Steemit in the next and then reposting my Youtube vids. I sometimes wonder if I would be better off sticking to one thing and keeping a narrower focus.
Steemit is a very wierd platform. I enjoy it but no other social media site is like it. I feel like Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc is all a very specific type of content surrounding various niches. Steemit is the only platform I've been a part of with such a community aspect ie the contests and so much talk about the platform itself, not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing just how it is. I guess you could say Reddit is somewhat similar in the sense there's a lot of talk about Reddit.
I think this platform is still kind of trying to find itself and what it is. I'd like to see the gamesmanship kind of come to an end, I like it here but sometimes I feel like it's all just a big game or all just a big circle jerk for lack of a better word. Read the comments under any post and well over 50% are bots or people who didnt even read the post, maybe 40% are people who read as little as possible while still being able to sort of formlate a thought and comment that relates to the post and maybe 10% are actually thoughtful comments engaging with the creator.
I have kind of an anlogy of what Steemit feels like to me sometimes. You ever see your Youtube comments that get caught in spam where someone comments on like every single video of yours either dropping a link or telling people to checkout their channel. It's kind of funny when real people do that, its one thing if its a bot but its another if someone is actually relaly wasting their time on something that's going to give such little return ie 90% will get caught by spam filters and the other 10% will likely be deleted by creators of the video. Those people are trying to grow whatever their thing is or make money with their links. I sometimes feel like Steemit is the same thing, people fruitlessly going from post to post dropping their comment trying to benefit themselves.
After this long rambling post I'll say I regularly go through periods of loving Steemit and then thinking it's kinda fucking dumb or getting frusrated. Needless to say I'm probably feeling the latter at this moment lol
Hahhaha, I get the frustration for sure and sometimes I write these post to vent myself or just to touch base on where I'm at mentally with what is going on with the platform and that is part of the reason why a lot of people feel like they can't put me on an upvoter. I'm not a "safe" bet for them. Like I might talk about picking up chicks one post, say the market is going lower the next post, say STEEM is awesome the next post, and then talk about space travel the next post. To me it is kind of ridiculous that just paraphrasing coindesk / cointelegraph articles became the "safe" bet. But all in all the STEEM blockchain has been an amazing thing for me and a huge time drain in others. In some respects I look at how much time I have spent here and would say it wasn't worth it because if you calculated the hours spent and saw the hourly rate I could have done better just working a job in a lot of cases. On the other hand I would like to say that I'm on the cusp of something big.
I think for guys like us we know how the system works at this point and it probably makes the most sense for us to try to step up our STEEM power and cluster up even more. If we can't front run the the next wave we could sort of get lost in the mix to be honest with you. I know there are going to be some big points of frustration if the price sags and I have purchased at higher prices then it sags to but I'm looking to get in a better position on here. For the next week or so I'm probably going to have to do low hanging fruit posts and not spend a huge amount of time on here because I have other stuff going.
By the way. Did you get to try to surf on Lake Michigan?
Unfortunately I still havn't made it out there. During the week I need to be in my office to get packages out so my only free time is weekends. One day I headed out to NW Indiana near Gary but waves weren't big enough to do anything. I should have hopped in the water in my wetsuit to at least get a feel for it, I hear from even good swimmers that swimming in a wetsuit, especially a heavy duty 8mm one is a totally different experience and its very wierd so I should have gotten my feet wet but was like hell if I'm going into the water at 10 degrees outside and I'm not even gonna get to surf so wound up heading to 3 floyds brewery and having some beers instead lol.
Were getting kind of into the time of the season when you can still have some rough weather but its not below 15 degrees so I'm gonna have to try to make it out before summers here because in the summer waves are pretty few and far between, however I have seen a couple guys surfing in Brigman on wavy days during the summer.
I'm actually heading down to Mexico tomorrow so will probably do some blog posts about it.
Sweet! How fun in Mexico!
Thanks