I seem to have had more votes (and thus, higher payouts) when I voted up my own posts.
If you have a decent amount of SP, voting on your own post can also give it some extra exposure, people tend to read posts that have some payout as they see other people must have valued it, so they go and take a look too.
I think people are more inclined to look at a post that has $20 than one that has $0.01
I fully agree. That could be it right there, but I was surprised to see so many more votes on posts I did last week. It's also possible many other factors (variability in the quality of my writing, this being a holiday week in the US, etc, etc) had more to do with it than anything else.
@chitty you took the words out of my mouth :P
I also tend to look at posts that generated more "dollars"
I've noticed this as well. Some of the newbies with no power, come out in the "new" section with 0 or 0.01 while I can come out a bit higher. Which gives me more exposure.
I feel this is somewhat justified because I have put more work into the platform than some of those newbies. So It's kinda nice that I can make myself "stick" out a bit. Maybe we could even have a limit of self votes per day, that Isn't included into our 10 or whatever it is. That we can give to ourselves at our own discretion, Whether it's a Blog post or comment.
A limit sounds fair. Or perhaps a self-vote could deplete voting power faster than voting for somebody else?
That would probably work! And it would encourage people to vote less for themselves. Or it could have the opposite effect. People would still destroy their power on themselves. But that would also leave less power for them to use on themselves. LOL.
Hahah! Yeah, it could go both ways, good point.
I don't look at the number, I look at the headline, the preview image and the preview blurb. If I was only loving a post for its rewards, why would I ever leave the trending page?
If your policy was universally applied, no new users would be able to get a word in edgewise.