So I do think HF19 has been mostly a very positive thing. I've been noticing a trend and I know people like @schattenjaeger have noticed it as well as he wrote about it here.
I kind of noticed this off and on since the HF19 but I didn't really CLICK and say "wait a minute" until I'd had a very lengthy discussion with a pro-communist steemit community member on my decidedly anti-communist post. The typical capitalism and how it is all about consolidating wealth was trotted out several times as well as numerous other points we discussed. It was lengthy and there were numerous back and forth comments. Then I realized I saw the first comment of his up voted to like $3, and then the next comment a little less, and so forth. In the end I realized ALL of his comments had been up voted and the descending quantity seemed to be due to perhaps voting percentage declining due to use. I checked as I wondered which spectator was devoting so much of their voting power to up voting all of these comments. It turns out it was the anti-capitalist guy himself who had just been stressing the woes of capitalism and consolidating wealth. The word hypocrite went through my mind, and I did point out how he was actually doing the same type of activities he was saying were wrong. The conversation ended there. Now with the speed his votes were declining I am fairly certain my dialog was not the only place he was doing this.
That was my observation and I hadn't really decided to write anything about it as I was still thinking about it. I went on to read @schattenjaeger's post and I was also very interested @lukestokes's response. You see I know both of these guys tend to put quite a lot of thought into what they say.
I tend to be with @lukestokes that people should be able to use their power how they see fit, and it is up to the community to discourage such activities. That can even be seen as potentially using your flag to counter these self-comment voters as they are essentially intentionally draining the reward pool exclusively for themselves with little interest in fostering community growth. This a hard thing for me to do myself as I am very anti-flag except for use as a counter to spam, abuse, and plagiarism. Other people add the concept of if they believe the rewards are too high. I don't agree with that one as that leads to justification for those powerful enough to remove all rewards from topics and people they do not like or disagree with. It has happened before, and it still happens from time to time now. I've also seen powerful people down vote stuff to protect the reward pool, only to turn around and up vote their own comments before, which takes from the reward pool. Thus, I do not see reward pool as a valid reason for a flag.
Now what some of these self voting people here are doing is essentially spamming posts and writing next to nothing, or the same thing over and over again and up voting their own comments. This could constitute spam. There may be justification for ME to flag those. I am not telling any of the rest of you how to use your down votes and up votes. That is up to you. I am however, attempting to persuade you. That I will freely admit.
This is not necessarily why value of posts are declining. That is more likely due to the amount of new users and the currently decreasing value of steem on the market. There are ups and downs and this is normal. Ride them out. I believe @ats-david in @schattenjaeger's post explained it quite well and I'm going to include a screenshot of that comment here:
What he is stating there could have some huge ramifications on all of us. I do know that prior to HF19 people would keep their voting percentages relatively high, and not go voting crazy and be fine with going into the sub-50% range on their voting power.
With this current self-voting that doesn't seem to be the case. People seem content to vote their own stuff continually and drain their percentage. They are also draining the pool for their own benefit. Why? Because, they can.
Now I do see the value of being able to up vote your own comment for higher visibility, but I don't actually seeing that being very important for some time. The notification about replies helps with that.
I would advocate and EXPERIMENT where we temporarily removed the ability for people to up vote their own comments for awhile. See what happens. As with any code changes there are ways around this. All they really need to do is have a second, or third account and delegate power to it and have that up vote their comments instead. This is why most anti-flag, anti-down vote, and in this case anti-up vote own comments ultimately cannot solve the problem. There are generally work arounds to any software "solution" and sometimes they introduce new problems. So I do not expect it to stop this problem, but it does have the potential to slow it I believe.
Part of this problem comes from posts like Jerry Banfield's recent post We Double Our Steem Power Upvoting Ourselves Every 181 Days!.
First for most of us doubling our steem power in 181 days is NOT impressive. Most users don't have a lot of steem power. You can more than double your steem power just by using the platform regularly voting on people you like (other than yourself) and commenting, and posting. You should be able to increase your steem power by many magnitudes.
There is an exception to this. This is where that observation by Jerry becomes really concerning. If you already have a lot of steem power then doubling your steem power can take longer. So if the very powerful begin self voting themselves that would have some dire reward pool draining consequences.
For the rest of you. Doubling your steem power in 181 days by self voting is not impressive. You can likely do that far faster just by voting on people, commenting, and posting. For example: Let's say you have 100 steem power and you read his post. That means in 181 days you could have 200 steem power. On the flip side you could just post, comment, vote and you likely would double your power the NEXT DAY if you had a very successful post, or if not then at least within a week or two. It does depend on your activity, and how you interact with people. Yet doubling steem power is far easier for most people just by using the platform than it is by self voting all of your own stuff.
In addition, I fully expect some people will start combating this and that there will be some people that start flagging comments that are self voted. I really expect this will happen. It won't happen from me unless it is spam, plagiarism, or abuse. Abuse for me is not system abuse it is when a person is abusive to another person in an overtly obvious way. Example: Someone obviously trolling someone and not simply disagreeing.
Our little experiment here called steemit is quite beautiful. We are exploring a never before seen world. With this new world come new problems. New problems also require us to consider new solutions and not simply reach for things from the past. It is a challenge. This means it is not easy. We will have bumpy spots in our journey, but I do believe we can get through them as a community.
I almost always upvote my own comments. And I spend FAR more promoting steemit then I take out of the system. For instance, I just spent many thousands of dollars flying some people in to the recent Athens Steemit Meetup for the edification of everyone present.
You will soon see massive new initiatives by the Greek steemit community.
Example: https://steemit.com/contest/@onceuponatime/from-zero-to-hero-usd25-000-in-crypto-prizes
I am realizing that it would be irresponsible of you to do otherwise given the weighting scheme on Steemit. However, I also note that this fiduciary responsibility directly contradicts your ability to curate content, insofar as curation you undertake can be seen as decreasing your own responsibility to tend to your affairs.
I don't want to hijack this post, but would like your consideration of my thoughts I am posting on my page. I'd appreciate any comment you feel might help me to better consider the issues I present.
Wow, i which i could have at least one weekly post with that payout on your comment! lol
Btw you have done some give away posts and stuff, so you are ok with upvoting your self as i think you already proved not to be selfish...
Excellent food for thought.
Never thought about it this way.
I appreciate you doing all my thinking for me, @dwinblood. It really saves so much of my energy for more indolent pursuits.
-edit-
I don't like seeing my comment all the way down here. I'm going to upvote myself to the higher places.... :-)
Upvoted you to help keep it at the top because this post-HF19 Steemit needs a better sense of humor.
can you please explain me what is this HF 19 means on steemit
It means Hard Fork, which is a change in the Steem software(code) -> number 19
Dork. If you had a habit of up voting you own comments I'd be concerned, but I know you don't and you just did it to be cunning and comical. :)
I'm not sure how to approach this issue at the moment. It's still early a lot to think about. Most ideas I come up with are not difficult to circumvent.
I've solved this moral dilemma by upvoting your comment. We can rest easy now. Disaster is averted.
Honestly though, those people who are doing it exclusively, I find quite distasteful. They often don't upvote the post they are commenting on. It is alien to my way of thinking.
Yes. Exactly. It is very disturbing. I am thinking it may be worth resurrecting the two rewards pool idea. One for comments, one for posts. If comments for example were 20% of the total reward pool (maybe less even) and posts were 80% then at least there would be a stop gap/firewall to stop this illness from doing more than 20% damage.
I didn't say it would stop that. It would limit it though so it couldn't spill over to stealing and draining the rest of the pool for posts.
I think it's steem's mistake to make upvoting yourself even possible. So hard to resist sometimes, when it's so easy to do..
If they didn't allow it that is easy to get around. Just create another account and up vote your comments and posts from the other account.
Most things that seem like a solution are not actually as easy as we might think.
I don't see many simple solutions to these issues. Thus, why we discuss them brainstorm and hopefully us as a community will solve the problem. I don't think it will be easy though.
I confess that I played around with this a few days ago. I was giddy because I had as much as $16 per upvote of power, to myself or others. I lost myself for a couple of days and now I feel I've lost of bit of my honor and am working to get that back. I tried to rationalize that I'm accepting it all as 100% SP and not cashing out anyway so it may even be better than me upvoting someone who is cashing out weekly 100% of what they can. The truth is that it's not for me to say what others do with their rewards, but honor and respect need to be valued in this community for it to thrive. There probably is not a good way to mitigate self voting. As you mentioned someone could always just make duplicate accounts or delegate their own Steem Power to a friend who would upvote everything they did. In the end there will always be leaches but the goal is to discourage that. I do think it's acceptable to upvote people you think will be very good for the community long term even if the single 1 paragraph comment isn't worth $5 in real word terms. The goal is to promote and encourage valuable users as much as possible.
This is a really candid comment, thank you for it. I feel similarly. I would be really up for disabling self voting. The stated purpose of the network is to let the best stuff (as collectively decided by voting) to bubble up and be rewarded. Self voting does not work towards that, I think it's clear.
I think the question is, what's the lesser of the two evils? Self voting as it stands today or people creating multiple accounts and cluttering all of that to achieve the same goal? Cliques are also an issue. Let's say there's 3 people each with $10 per upvote. Person A can always upvote B and C. B can always upvote A and C, and C can always upvote A and B. They keep doing it because the others do. It doesn't have to be a meeting in a dark room for this to occur. These sorts of things happen naturally in the eco system because if you notice someone just upvoted the crap out of your post, you're fairly likely to return the favor (if they deserve it hopefully). The thing I hold dear is that I want each account I see to be an actual person.. just 1 person for 1 account. I don't want to have to wonder how many other accounts everyone has. That makes the whole project lose credibility in my eyes more than self upvoting. What do you think?
I don't think we need to decide which is the lesser, we should just deal with them as we can. Self voting can be entirely removed by disabling it on a blockchain level.
In the meantime as we campaign for this, we are making a bot to "tap people on the shoulder" about this issue with small flag for self votes on comments only (announcement here and here). For normal posts, we decided it wouldn't be fair to do that since it's the default steemit.com interface behavior, so I opened a change ticket for that, hopefully it's accepted.
As for multiple accounts, they can be useful, for bots or organizations, etc. I do not agree with 1 person 1 account. But for self voting, I don't know it's probably a serious issue. I think that because you have to split your stake between multiple accounts to do that it will never be as effective as using just one account, so not as bad as self voting. But to really solve it I don't know.
I do think that just because it is now known the first one should still be solved, we needn't choose between them.
Very good points and honestly I think I agree after reading your reply. I also just realized how awesome bots can be as you could literally as a community member make a bot that did that, right? Replied to self voters on comments? I wonder what the back lash would be lol. For instance, some people upvote themselves on comments just enough to be at the top of the list. Not 100%. Maybe just $0.10 worth.
For sure. We are not going to have the bot comment because you do you open the bot up to flagging itself. Just a little pinch of a flag instead to get the point across.
The point is that if vests are split between accounts they are necessarily small by virtue of being split.
It is impossible in a decentralized system to limit account creation, except as it is currently limited by time, and/or funding requirements on Steemit.
At least I can think of no mechanism that might do so. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, however, and suspect brighter eyes than mine carefully looking at the issue might well find better ways.
That's fresh thinking on the matter, and exactly what I meant when I said someone else besides me might have ideas I couldn't come up with. I am aware that, in principle, the economic constraints on Steemit that cause new accounts to need to be delegated Steem in order to make posting possible, are mechanisms that might potentiate such limits as you discuss.
I'm not sure of details, but that may be the right way to handle spam and plagiarism. At least it's an avenue that has potential.
My question is...based on the way that curation rewards work, if you upvote your comments that were upvoted by other users right before the deadline to upvote, does it give them better curation rewards? Someone wrote a detailed post about the timing of votes and how it affects curation payouts earlier this week...wish I had the link to it...and it inferred that's the way it worked as far as upvoting your posts. At least then you'd be more a team player about upvoting comments, plus you could convert the voting power almost immediately into steem power when it paid out 12 hours later.
I really think moderation is key here, and that allocating your upvotes to other users wisely can be more lucrative than up-voting your own comments.
The white paper states Steemit has deliberately made the rewards for earliest votes highest, in order to reward those that discover content and curate it first more, to encourage curation work.
I fail to see that accounts randomly accessing Steemit per schedules that have nothing to do with when posts are made could possibly be advantaged by this. However, self votes, and coordinated cliques, certainly can.
Draw your own conclusions as to the true motivations behind this mechanism.
Edit: speelingh. Hookt ahn fonix rilly werkt fer mee!
I'm amazed I hadn't thought of that (upvoting someone's post right before a deadline for payout) and then receiving the rewards more quickly. I can't answer your question but I'm curious about that now too. Anyone who's been on Steemit for a few months or more has seen that it's much healthier than it was before (I don't just mean the price being higher). There are some "problems" that will never be solved because they're just impossible lol. I agree that I'll earn more by posting good content and contributing to discussions like this one than I would just upvoting myself all day. Plus, why would I want to shoot the project in the foot if I am an investor?
It's funny... I noticed the same thing from a communist here while in a discussion. I got 9 upvotes on one of my responses to them and and still had less value than their one vote got them. So I looked to see who was upvoting them and it was their self. I ended up doing it also on a couple of mine, justifying it saying to myself well this persons gonna do it while having this convo so I might as well too. Then I went and upvoted else where and realized I was using too much voting power on myself and couldn't upvote others the way I wanted to. I won't be doing that again.
Yep, when I first joined steemit back in July I watched some videos telling how to use steemit and Craig Grant I remember was recommending people up vote their own comments. At the time it made sense until I watched. I quickly came to the same conclusion you did. I don't up vote my own comments.
I have been really upset when people comment and upvote themselves (it's a positive comment on what I blogged
Yes, and this is a relatively new problem. I believe it is because now that HF19 was instituted even low power people votes actually do something. We do need to do something about it, we simply need to be smart about what we do and not make haste decisions.
LOL, it happen to me too... But also happens that the newbie minnow just comment some unrelated stuff and upvote himself with 0,02$ and never upvote my post, wtf?... I sometimes feel the need of flag him, but nah, i wont be loosing me energy there...
I wrote a more detailed post on my thoughts, if interested.
Self-Voting: Scammy Behavior, Rational ROI, or Something Else?
Hahah... and now I'm tempted to vote up my comment so others actually see it. ;-)
Nah... don't up vote your own. If you need more visibility ask me if it is my post. I typically vote 1% on comments. I can bump it some for visibility.
I was mostly joking, but thanks. :)
Great post and great discussion you have going here. I'm tempted to commie bash some more, but I'll just leave it be.
Hahaha... I just found it ironic that the guy that was talking about the evils of Capitalism and how it consolidated wealth was self-upvoting all of his comments at as high a level as he could. Well, not really ironic. I think that is considered hypocrisy.
I know. I've seen it quite often. It's almost a stench I can smell with all my senses other than my nose. It's like a desperation mixed with judgement and fear. Those who are the most upset about the evils of money and capital are often, sadly, the most obsessed with both. They can't live freely with an open hand, willing to take risk, save, give, earn, and thrive.
I can't give you the $31 visibility of the @onceuponatime post above though
Well, I didn't fully agree with Jerry's double in 181 theory since HF19. If I remember correctly, he argues that high SP accounts have more incentive to do so now (since HF19) because there is big profits to be made.
In my eyes HF19 just reduced this opportunity for the high SP account by giving it fairly to everyone!
Thanks for the post!
HF19 did reduce the advantage large holders of SP had, because prior to the fork that SP weighted votes exponentially, and the fork reduced that weighting to a linear model: one SP, one vote.
However, at the same time the fork reduced the labor required to fully drain VP by 400%, making it far easier to extract maximum financial gain from the rewards pool. @aggroed estimated that HF19 improved the situation by reducing the concentration of rewards in the author rewards pool to 93% of author rewards going to a handful of accounts (high SP holders) from 99%.
It may, however, not be quite so improved as that, due to the reduction in labor (and therefore time) necessary to fully drain VP.
Edit: I wanted to add that this also reduces the number of votes minnows cast by 400% as well, dramatically reducing the rewards minnows deliver via curation. This also dramatically concentrates the rewards pool in the accounts of high SP holders.
Great perspective. There should be another type of flagging here which flags a content for being abusive, plagiarism or illegal. Right now the flagging system takes away rewards which I feel gives too much of power to the whales. If some big whale does not agree wit you he can just flag you and your rewards goes to 0 even if 100 minnows find your post helpful. Also flagging can cause retaliation which can make this place toxic. I think self upvoting cannot be stopped, there are too many ways to get around it. I feel there is no use fixing it since it can't be fixed.
Never say can't.
For example we were proposing two reward pools awhile back. If we did one for comments and one for posts then these comment thieves might be able to drain that pool, without impacting the posting pool. Now if the comment pool was say 20% and the posting pool was 80% (just made these numbers up, don't set them in stone) then it would act as a stop gap and at least only 20% of the actual total reward potential across both pools would be compromised.
But still they would be able to just post and upvote their own posts. Or make alt accounts and upvote their posts?
Sure but up voting their own posts is not the problem. The new problem is people posting any number of comments... often total spam and up voting their comment 100%. Sometimes not even bothering to up vote the post they commented on.
They can do this rapidly and have all of their rewards and the reward pool focused exclusively on themselves.
If there were two pools then the most they could take from would be the comment pool. It wouldn't effect the posts as well. Right now they are all in the same pool so it is draining that for everyone and even the posts themselves.
Oh ok that makes sense
Great post. Its hard to figure out how to make your own posts worth anything when people will just read and then not upvote and if they simply disagree flag it as happened to me with a few comments. But ai definitely agree that being acrive and producing quality content is the best way to increase SP. That is proven no matter before or after HF19. Thanks for the info and effort.
Definitely an important issue that needs to be dealt with sooner or later, preferably sooner. I don't think flagging is necessary - people are doing what they are allowed to do. But I do think some limits need to be put in place from the dev side of things pretty soon.
Resteeming this to 9100+ followers.
Yeah I don't have a solution or idea yet that I haven't already also thought of ways to circumvent. It's a new issue and I suspect there will be a lot of intense thought focused on this one.
Hey dwin. Appreciate the article - and your pro liberty stance.
I ran foul of commenting on Schattenjaeger recently, as some ardent communist downvoted me AND one of my followers, an innocent bystander, merely for criticising downvoting because of political disagreement. I think this is the real problem - not the self upvote.
Let's not be bullied by these people who do want to stifle free speech -- when it does not fit their narrative.
You have found the biggest blemish in the steemit platform.
The down vote, and how people use it. I was very anti-flag for the first half of my journey here on steemit. The problem is that most solutions open other doors. Without the flag there is no way to counter when someone is caught colluding and voting their own stuff and creating like a perpetual reward pool draining monster that just grows and grows.
You see there is not centralized group of people that get to police things. That is on us.
So a lot of solutions in the past don't work here. We need to do some seriously out of the box thinking as we are in knew never before explored territory.
I am familiar with the woes of the down vote. I don't have a workable solution for that though some people at various times have proposed ideas I'd be willing to participate in as an experiment.
We need to be willing to try new things, and if they don't work take a step back.
Steemit has problems. Even with the problems it is a wonderous place. We simply need to try to as a community come up with NEW solutions to these totally NEW situations. Otherwise, yes there will be many things we've come to know and loathe. Namely war.
Agree - thanks for your thoughts.
Happy to participate in any reasonable and honest experiment and out of the box approach.
Has everyone forgotten that minnows can't reduce their vote weight?
https://steemit.com/steem/@l0k1/the-rewards-calculation-curve-was-not-the-only-thing-prejudicial-against-small-and-new-accounts-on-steem
Though I think that slider should just be available by default.
I also, and I have posted it on the Condenser github (steemit.com interface):
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1544
Excellent... I get asked a lot by my family members who have only recently joined about when they will get a slider.
I think the slider unlocks at 500 steem power right? The people I am seeing doing this that are draining the rewards are high enough to definitely have unlocked the slider.
It's about 480: https://steemit.com/steem-help/@sykochica/what-s-this-slider-bar-and-vote-power-percentage-what-s-the-difference
So newbie accounts are wasting, by no mistake of their own, their SP.
Worse than that, if you are careful you can get 100% growth of accounts just through self voting:
https://steemit.com/hf20/@jerrybanfield/we-double-our-steem-power-upvoting-ourselves-every-181-days
Yeah I referenced that Jerry Banfield article in my post. Though doubling steem power in 181 days is actually slower than if people just engage and post, and comment, etc. By 181 days my account had increased by close to 1000x.
So 2x is not that impressive. 2x if you are already very powerful is impressive though.
Not if you have a grip of SP. Gaining a bunch of minnow votes is not even remotely comparable to the self vote of a whale. Whales will NEVER double their account value relying on minnow votes.
Yep, they are actually the ONLY ONES that strategy would work on. Yet is also would likely devalue steem a lot so they might actually lose money, and all of us with them.
I really don't want that to happen. It has happened. Last July, I am told, many Steemers abandoned the platform, and the price of Steem plummeted from a high of around $4 to a quarter of that (I wasn't here so don't recall personally the event, or the figures, and am just repeating what I recall folks that were here then saying).
As Steemit grows and turnover is greatly reduced, investors in Steem achieve capital gains, and this is an appropriate mechanism for such gains.
It also demonstrates my point that abusing self-voting is not just something little accounts seem to be doing.
The minnows are in a quandry because of their inability to conserve their voting power. Self vote and earn, or vote for others and earn nearly nothing.
Toss in discoverability... due to the sheer volume of posts dumped all in the same pool it is hard for small accounts to get noticed. Getting harder every day. They can't get communities working soon enough.
You know, back in September last year, @ned was talking to me about early concepts with this feature. It's time it was done.
chainBB can be used now to create communities, but idk how many people are using it
Not with the slider, but my VP is below 4% presently as I just upvoted stuff I thought worthy, and, until I read the white paper yesterday, tried diligently to remain free of strategies other than upvoting what I thought worthy.
Given the mechanism that prevents VP from being recharged if it is used regularly, I have penalized my VP, and deprived those I upvote of the power my vote should carry.
This is also a problem that my proposed solution to eliminate weighting VP by personal wealth would solve, as there is no need to drain VP in that implementation, with other mechanisms in place (using reputation) to prevent sybil attacks.
In fact you have that backwards. Single voice single vote is precisely how the stakeholders in most democratic nations are being steadily destroyed. If your vote at the polling booth was multiplied by your tax bill (and made accountable to you), there is no way the government could take services from those who pay more taxes to give them to those who do not.
As for preventing sybil attacks, there is numerous algorithms that can be applied to the task of recognising these malicious players. Textual fingerprinting, IP addresses, social network relationships, financial transactions between individuals.
Single voice single vote leads to a situation where the most skilled politicians can manipulate the results to get the support of the most entitled pricks in society to the detriment of the rest of us.
Me, my fellow activist witnesses, and many other people, now including some newly minted accounts run by more celebrities coming to the platform, are all working hard to find the effective solutions. We have been working on this for a long time, and I can trace back my first foray into designing functional distributed systems to 2013 when I discovered bitcoin, via the black markets.
The decay of voting power is essential to stop spammers. Single voice single vote, plus no vote decay, would overwhelm the blockchain with meaningless votes, overcomplicate the rewards calculation algorithm, and it would be absolute hell.
Myself and @personz are in the midst of developing a bot that will name-and-shame self voters on the platform, and now that I am aware of more of the issues affecting minnows, who, as I see it, are given a choice with the current interface between earning immediately on self votes, or voting up others, with little impact, to build their reputation. Furthermore, as my friend felixxx, a fellow witness, has informed me, that adding the vote slider for minnow accounts will also require the witnesses to vote for a 128kb block size, because at present the blockchain would disallow more than really a very small number of transactions (post, vote, coment, transfer, powerup, delegate) for these small accounts. The increased block size will allow this to function.
If all of these measures are put into place, the user experience of new users will drastically improve, and this will foster mass adoption and see the price head to the moon, and steem become a common payment method for a lot more online, and eventually, offline transactions. Offline in the sense of point of sale in a bricks and mortar shop.
I have spent hours composing a cogent reply, but it is pages long, and I feel it would be innappropriate to post it here. I don't want to plaster @dwinblood's post with a wall of text.
I am going to edit it and post it on my page, so as to respect this post.
I do ask you, personally, to take the time to review my comments, and to respond in kind, in order that our common interest in Steemit, fairness, and the good it can do for all it's users, can be furthered.
Thanks for your substantive reply here. Please do me the courtesy of carefully and particularly answering my post at your earliest convenience.
I'll think about it :p
I wish you would. Only the grinding power of criticism can sharpen my point. You have insight into Steemit that I value.
Thought provoking to say the least. I tend to post and engage while never really giving any thought to the politics. This has inspired me to get more active in bettering the community and being involved in these types of dialogue.
It is a totally never before seen idea. This means we also have new problems. We need to come up with solutions to new problems while keeping this a place we know and love, and keeping it decentralized. It is tricky, but worth it.
sir, you've touched the very roots of problem
VOTE OTHERS! That's how I feel about this whole function. Thanks for sharing! Cheers! FOLLOWED. UPVOTED.
#follow4follow
as much as I like the community, the steem I bought is also an investmant for me and one of the largest in my whole portfolio.
I bought in as a dolphin, so I started with no followers but some voting power.
Of course I want my investmant to grow and protect espically here with a calculated inflation. I also think this is more then fair, since I took the risk in powering everything up so I am in it for the good and bad.
While I still upvote a lot of others peoples content and comments under my own posts as a thank you and to keep readers engaged. I also upvote my own comments, as in some I put a lot thoughts and see them almost as an own post but also for tactical reasons in big posts like this, to see my comment at the top.
I saw posts with just 1 sentence and 5 comments from the author were he just upvoted all of them also and to be fair it is his right to do with his voting power what he wants to do but for me this is somone I will propaply not engage with.
To totally not be able to upvote myself would be a huge turn off, for me and I think also for a lot of other people with smaller followings. Also it would create more "behind closed doors circles" were votes get exchanged, which would not help steemit because it would make it less accessable imo.
I am still quite new and learning more about steemit everyday and so far my experience here has been very positive and I think regardless how the system would be changed there will be people trying to exploit it.
Your investment will grow also if the value of steem increases. It will not likely increase if it has negative perceptions associated with it. Food for thought.
I up vote my own posts. I don't up vote my comments. I do up vote A LOT of comments though. Just not my own.
My idea of investment in growth is to grow followers so I naturally grow more from their interest, while working hard to grow the community and keep steemit and other steem blockchain projects a positive place. Thus, I earn more from my work from my followers while hopefully also helping to increase the value of steem itself, so that becomes a force multiplier on any investment I already have. It is pretty neat that there are a lot of different ways to grow investments here.
Self voting of comments could potentially lose followers, or not get people that otherwise would have followed. If that is not part of your investment model then that is completely acceptable. If it is then it is perhaps worth reconsidering.
I also am I hope pretty reasonable. I almost never flag people. I very much dislike the flag. Yet, there are many people that will use it. I foresee self voting of comments (perhaps not for a few cents amount to bump it in a coversation) leading to some people wielding the flag. I wish they wouldn't, but I do believe it is going to happen.
That is partially why I wrote this post. I was seeking a way to address the issue and to at least get people thinking before war breaks out. War is never good for our investment here.
"Self voting of comments could potentially lose followers, or not get people that otherwise would have followed. If that is not part of your investment model then that is completely acceptable. If it is then it is perhaps worth reconsidering."
I actually have not considerd that...
I am not sure yet how much time I want to invest into steemit yet and were my journey will go, for now it is a mix between a hobby and investmant.
Also we are talking about self voting on comments in general not under own posts right?
Yeah it is just the comments that we are seeing the blatant exploitation at the moment.
I note that capital markets exist because capital gains exist. Expecting self votes to be necessary to gains is metaphorically comparable to a stock investor in a broom company expecting to receive the change that is swept up with brooms the company sells.
It is neither necessary, nor does it promote the appreciation in the underlying company. In fact it directly impedes it.
The white paper states "In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."
While they state weighting VP (vote power) by SP held by the account is intended to prevent sybil attacks, in fact such weighting merely replaces number of accounts with number of SP. Since it is less expensive and far faster to deploy lots of SP than it is to deploy many accounts with separate votes, the present system makes sybil attacks far easier and less expensive.
Self votes, and coordinated cliques, are sybil attacks.
I join voice with you, say no to self votes, ban it permanently. This is harming the community
I disagree there. Try it. See what happens. Make an informed decision from there.
Anyone upvote his own post for monetary benefits only, otherwise there is no reason to self upvote, this is wrong use of our own power IMO. Which i learned today by reading so many problems, self voting is playing a part in those....
Just tell me why else one will upvote own post? One is sharing because one like that, it already understood.
As i said earlier i agree with you to try it as an experiment.
Later is said ban it permanently, because IMO i am sure it will be the result of experiment.
Good writeup, but one thing I see you did not cover here was up-voting yourself being a default setting, at least for me. I personally would like to have the ability to turn off that option. My settings tab does not give me the ability to set that option on or off, too often I miss the check box just before making a post. If there is a place to change that option somehow, then please do this community a favor and write a post that directs us to that place so we can turn that option off. I do not do it on purpose, I just do not see it before posting! So before you start up a crusade to down-vote people just because they have up-voted themselves, it is a witch-hunt in itself. These people might have missed the check box, and posted without unchecking it. For pete's sake people! You're turning this community into a petty bickering, nitpicking platform like Facebook or you-tube!
You DO have the option and FREE WILL to NOT post a comment, NOT up-vote a post, that will limit his/her posts exposure no matter if he/she up-voted themselves or not! Posts are only paied on the first 7 days from what I understand. And think about this, would you upvote someone that has a history of flagging for whatever reason?
We're not concerned with you up voting your posts. Most everyone views that is fine. You did the work you should be able to up vote it.
The problem is in comments. People are exploiting the system and upvoting all of their comments they make on other posts by large amounts. Often more than the post they are commenting on. They then sometimes will not even up vote to post they were commenting on.
You're not going to get flagged for voting on your own BLOG POST. It is the comments where the shady things are occurring now.
Then my sincere apologies for my last comment post, I was getting the understanding that it was about the blog posts getting self up-voted as well as comments. My apologies for my misunderstanding and thank you for clarifying.
No, I don't personally know anyone on steemit that has problems with you up voting your own blog posts.
We actually didn't care about comments either when it was just a few cents for visibility.
Lately though we're seeing people up voting all of their own comments for large amounts. This is not a good thing.
The pro-communist guy I was debating with started with like around a $3 up vote of his comment and we did enough back and forths to where he was down to around $1.50 or so for a comment... but I bet he up voted easily $20 - $30 for himself in his short comments in that back and forth exchange.
Now apparently there are people with a lot more power than him doing the same thing.
The pool of rewards is shared among ALL of us. So if they use this tactic they essentially are syphoning rewards to themselves and impacting EVERYONE on the platform.
I don't up vote my own comments. I do up vote a lot of comments though. :) I just do a small amount for each. I like to encourage discussion. Up voting my own comments does not encourage discussion. :)
Then in that context I have to agree, I do not believe I have ever up-voted my own comments, I will go through confirm that statement. But yeah the commenters I believe should not have the option available to up-vote their own comment.
Or at the very least we could experiment with disabling that and see what happens. It is not the only option, but it is one.
I agree.
This is an impressive piece you have written and basically you point out the problem there is with upvoting in understandable language. I've not done it once nor will I upvote anything I comment ever. It's not right. You as the original poster are the one giving value to my comment. And of course other readers who might agree with me. Or just find my comment funny. We should stay true to those basics and of course downvote everyone who upvotes his own spamcomments.
Cheers and steem on!
I'd upvote this comment, but I cannot, because the algorithm that recharges my VP renders my vote less and less worthwhile the more votes I cast. I only learned of this yesterday after reading the white paper, when I note my VP was around 4%.
Sorry bro!
come back later when you are at 100% :D J/K
=D About 4 more days
Upvoting your own post is one thing...I can get behind that, you put some effort into arranging the piece, might as well get a little something for it...upvoting your own comments smacks of narcissism...and I'm pretty sure if you're that stuck on yourself, there's a mirror somewhere close by...go visit that, rather than award yourself with a "Participation Trophy" for replying to comments left on your thread...just my thoughts on the subject...that is all...carry on!
Nice thoughts and analysis.
Interesting, I actually unchecked the personal up vote box so that I can come in after 30 minutes and boost anyone else who already voted on my content. Is that a good thing to do or am I taking curation rewards away from my viewers? I have been under the impression that I am helping them. But I could be wrong.
I don't actually know how that would impact your own post. I've never tried it. The people on steemspeak discord might have some good ideas there. A lot of good minds there. I need to visit them more often too, I've just been busy and distracted.
Thanks a lot u will look them up!
https://discordapp.com/invite/sqxV63P
I read that HF19 was supposed to help the community not just the individual. Heard it was an equality fork or something. Minnows leave in droves after making 2 cents per post each day. Maybe disable the self-voting option? I find it personally disturbing to see a comment worth 50 times more than my post that took me six hours to put together. Some would rather vote for their own comments than vote on the work. They do it all day long all over the place. I am not sure it is greed as much as it is based on being able to do it. If the option were disabled, people with voting power might vote on minnows again rather than their own lazy comments. Just thinking out loud.
HF19 did help the community. Before HF19 my 17,000 steem power vote was worth less than $1 at 100%.
Back then it was n^2. This means 1 steem power was worth steem power.
2 Steem power was worth 2x2=4 steem power.
3 Steem power was worth 3x3=9 steem power
10 Steem power was worth 10x10=100 steem power
Now imagine there were some big players with 1.5 million steem power. Do you realize how big a number 1.5 million x 1.5 million is?
That is what their vote was weighted in terms of divying up the reward pool. As such those with a lot of steem power controlled most of the reward pool.
It would take quite some time of gaining steem power before your vote was even worth $0.01
HF19 changed the curve to n.
So 1 steem power is 1, 2 is 2, 3 is 3, 10 is 10, and 1.5 million is 1.5 million.
Suddenly people with less steem power were able to have effect and distribute the reward pool. This is a good thing.
The problem is now that they've been given that ability many of them have chosen to do it by exploiting the system and simply commenting and up voting all of their comments 100% regardless of whether the comment was very good, or was something they just keep copy and pasting.
All changes on a system like this can introduce new problems. Many of them you cannot see until you've tried it. This is one of those. We as a community simply need to brainstorm and think about it and come up with some solutions.
I agree. Disable the self voting. I wonder what would happen?
And thank you for the explanation of how HF19 is helping. I understand it better now. :-)
Having said that, I have voted on my reply comments and the posters comment to move it to the top, if possible. But the devs could just add a "pin to top" option instead.
That's a great idea. @dragosroua or @personz might be able to do something with it.
Wow that was a really interesting story
I'm looking forward to some analysis of what has happened since HF19. I know it affected my own voting behavior for a few days. I don't vote for my own comments, except once since HF19 to raise a comment's visibility. I think we should have to spend to raise the visibility of our own comments, just like we have the post promotion button. The multiple-account issue has been with Steemit always, for posts or comments. And the coordinated voting campaigns, too.
It will be interesting to see how far down the reward pool sinks. It's like the reverse issue of HF18, where it took over a month for the pool to fill up. The time after HF18 seemed to knit people together because it was about just getting through the month. This HF seems more difficult because there's no improvement in sight, just a continual decline of the pool to who knows where -- even as our own votes are worth more. It's more of a hoarding mentality than a sharing mentality.
I'm just going back to flinging upvotes out all over the place - there is so much good content that should be rewarded. My voting power will go way down, but it will still be higher than it was before HF19.
Yep pretty much any tech solution that suggests limiting what an account can do to their own account is easily circumvented just my having more than one account.
It's hard to code-block human ingenuity! ; )
Yep. Yet it is surprising how often people suggest things as a solution that all it requires is another account. Thus, why I said it might slow down the problem, but wouldn't eliminate it.
I ultimately think going with a 2nd reward pool just for comments might be the way to go. Then these activities won't hurt posts so bad, but the comment pool might end up being pretty worthless and cutthroat.
One thing I like about Steemit is the willingness of most folks to experiment. With such a complicated system, involving people with different motives and ways of engaging with each other, it's hard to predict what any change will actually produce. Quick testing and adjustment is a difficult thing to pull off with so many parts, but I've been impressed with what Steemit's been able to do. I hope they do some sort of adjustment, but active comments are key to keeping people on the site -- and to initiating enough transactions to help demonstrate the blockchain capabilities.
Yeah comments should definitely stay. Yet people abusing the comments by posting a lot of them and self-upvoting them all is draining the entire pool and will be impacting the payouts for posts as well. It seems like segregating them would keep either from being able to adversely effect the others.
I like comments a lot. I up vote a lot of comments. I keep my % at around 1% at the moment so I can up vote a lot of them, but I still do. I like to encourage discussion.
I've been able to keep my % at 15% for comments, with very little impact on my voting power -- and I fling those comment upvotes around like there is no tomorrow.
How about restricting users from upvoting themselves or any other user that has delegated Steem Power to them?
That is not a bad idea. It could be circumvented by adding a third account, but it makes it a little trickier.
If it is possible to delegate SP to a third account then just follow the SP delegation chain and restrict upvoting any of the accounts in that chain.
This way the user will only be limited to upvoting friends and cronies and not necessarily their own accounts.
That might work. Yet, it can be done without delegation as delegation didn't always exist. People would power down... send their steem to a different account and then power up that account. They could also do that via an external exchange. So what you stated would likely work for actual delegation but it can still be circumvented using the old method.
Then software "solutions" are merely meant to frustrate rather than completely solve anything.
Well it isn't that they are "meant" to frustrate. It is that people can find a way around most of them. Yet, the end result is that they would technically just be a "frustration" for those serious about exploiting the system. Those not serious and doing it simply because it is easy to do might stop doing it. "Might" being the operative word. Just a guess/speculation.
Theoretically, blockchains can be hacked but the effort required to do so is not worth the attempt at hacking the blockchains.
What needs to be found is a simple solution to create such significant frustration that it is not worth exploiting the system.
I understand I am suggesting a simple solution of a similar leap to that of the blockchain without giving any specifics. This is similar to suggesting there is a simple solution to mind control.
This is a well thought out and presented argument. Exactly what I have come to expect from you!
I have just read the white paper (finally gave up trying to get answers from others), and "Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders." is the reason for the downvote stated in the paper.
A problem with that premise is pandering. People who are focused on attaining wealth don't want to mitigate unfair systems of building wealth, they want to use them. This tendency is completely ignored in the white paper.
Given the dramatic concentration of rewards in a tiny handful of accounts that has been the standard on Steemit (since well before I got here last month) it is highly unlikely that developers haven't been aware of the issue.
Since the 4x reduction in labor necessary to drain VP implemented in HF19 increases the efficiency of concentrating wealth by self votes, I cannot surmise that there is intention to solve the problem. The developers are not imbeciles who couldn't have understood the consequences of that change.
I but note these facts, note also I am new hereabouts, and have often been wrong. I deliberately am not accusing anyone of abusing the system, or malicious intent. However, these facts seem pretty plainly to suggest certain conclusions about how Steemit is designed, and how it is being attacked.
A reason that wealth weighting was implemented is stated in the white paper to be resistance to sybil attacks. Since decentralization precludes being able to prevent multiple account creation, the possibility of sybil attacks is very real.
However, the present situation IS a sybil attack - only SP is the vector, as concentrated in single votes (or few), rather than multiple accounts possessing power. Since creating a single account (or few accounts) with attack force power requires only funds, and creating a massive number of accounts requires both funds and massive amounts of time, the present circumstance is vastly more favorable for the ongoing sybil attack(s) than that I propose.
Edit: unfortunately I have so drained my VP that I am unable to upvote your post. Please have a look if you suspect I am not being forthright. After reading the white paper, I have finally and reluctantly had to acknowledge that simply voting for content I find worthy is strongly discouraged by the draining mechanism for VP. I have to let it recover before my vote has any power. =/
No worries on the vote I am having to watch that myself. You are in the unfortunate predicament that the slider has not unlocked for you yet. It comes available somewhere around 480 steem power I was told by @l0k1 in his comments to this post. He is also working on trying to get that slider unlocked by default. It will help you maintain your steem power better.
So much of successful Steeming - and living - is doing things from a genuine, authentic, helpful space. As for upvoting your own comments it seems a little spammy. I'd not report it because I'm too busy creating content and networking by commenting on other folk's posts. Good topic, helpful read here for fellow users. Thanks much.
I agree, I think we should experiment with removing upvoting our own comments, fair enough upvoting our own work I think we all deserve to be allowed to add some value to our own posts ourselves but comments no, because that is purely being used to game the system and ruining steemit as a whole because no one except the odd few are actually curating anymore
Be strong stay focused
I am not a fan of the upvoting own comments however the other day, I did do it. It was in a logo competition and I went through and upvoted all of the actual entries so they were towards the top. I just thought it would be easier for @officialfuzzy to view.
Having said that, I didn't upvote with full power. I think there are massive drains on the pools where people are upvoting their own content for hundreds each time and designating very little towards the other content on the platform.
I have not thought enough about it overall but it does seem somewhat underhanded and I wouldn't mind seeing an end to it for awhile to see how it effects the pool.
At one point they did consider making a post pool, and a comment pool and keeping them separate. That was shot down by community discussion. It would however, have created a firewall for exactly this type of situation.
The problem with the big guys doing it is that the small must also to get anything.
I haven't noticed the big guys doing it myself as I haven't seen those posts. It doesn't surprise me to hear they are. Yes, this is a big problem. The ship is taking on water.
What happens if there is no self upvoting at all? Posts included.
No clue. It hasn't been tried as far as I know. Though that is very easy to get around. Just delegate power to another account and up vote yourself with that.
So I don't think that is a solution either.
Yeah, I know.
There is plenty of that already I'd say. I just don't think a flag war is productive. It would be nicer if the 'don't be a dick' rule would self govern.
Rewards pool has drained 40%. Maybe more since HF19. That's why posts have been declining in value after they peak.
How much of that is due to this self voting massive amounts of their own comments that we are seeing?
I think I see 4x as many vests going into comments as before. So by old standards 5-6% is shady comment upvotes
Yeah. I up vote most comments 1% as I want to encourage commenting. So as of HF19 that is about $0.07 - $0.09 per comment where as before that would have been $0.
Yet, these self voters who appear to be doing their own comments at 100% and rapidly is a problem I think.
I do think we may need to revisit the separate reward pools idea.
What's that. Comments gets its own pool?
Yeah for awhile they were talking about comments being a separate pool. I am pulling these numbers out of the air but say comments were 20% of the total rewards, and posts 80%. If this comment draining activity is done at least it would stop at 20% of the total reward pool.
They were actually planning on implementing this at one point and Dan Larmier brought it up, but eventually it was shot down by the community.
I'm thinking it might not stop the current problem, but it would at least limit the overall damage it can do.
I already flagged some who just spammed for followers.
But flagging because of self-voting...
As I said in another place: Self-voting is okay if you would have voted if someone else had written it.
But it is not only comments. Look at
https://steemit.com/@sandrino
He just embeds a youtube videoand upvotes himself for 20$.
That is surely misuse, but who can afford to downvote for 20$?
Yeah this is a relatively new issue, well it has always been there but due to the HF19 and most people's votes actually being worth something now it is far more visible.
I am only thinking about this and I don't quite have any good solutions that I can't also think of ways to circumvent.
As with the other recent HF's, it takes a few weeks for equilibrium to be found. I do hope we find it quickly so that we can focus more on content and less on 'strategies.'
Do you know that myself and @l0k1 are considering doing exactly that? His explanation here, my note on it here
💯% !!! 😎
I am glad to note the evolution in your thinking. Thanks for your honest consideration on this issue!
😆
If you want to help me to better understand these issues, I'd very much appreciate your thoughts. I didn't mention you to drag you in, but you were mentioned, and you oughta be invited to respond to my post.
Will do
Another thing is this....
I noticed a user commenting on one of my posts the other day. He automatically up-voted himself as did 6 other users, simultaneously. Now, I watched this go down in a few seconds. So, these other 6 users could not have been real people, but bots.
Bots on Steemit will ruin what we have going here. There has to be a policy to stop this kind of thing fast, as people are taking advantage of the payout system, and will exploit it in any way in which they can...
The comments section I am quickly leaning back to an old idea that was shot down by the community of having two reward pools. One for posts, and one of a smaller amount for comments. Then there would be a sort of firewall so that yes the comment pool could be drained, but it would not kill the posting pool in the process.
This is not really a solution but a stop gap. Yet, I'm thinking revisiting that idea might be worth doing.
How? I can't think of a way. Turing tests wn't work, and any centralizing solution is worse than bots.
How about making bots worthless for that purpose by delinking VP from SP? It's the only way I can think of, and also fixes the gamut of financial manipulations at the same time.
I'll admit that I do upvote my own comments from time to time. Before even viewing this, I often ask myself if I'm doing the right thing. Since I'm fairly new, I'm just testing the boundaries. I think in the future, I'll refrain fron doing so.
Thank you for bringing this to light. A well deserved upvote and resteem is headed your way.
Cheers!
This is a very new thing. We are all still learning together.
I don't have enough experience to say which way is best.
But I did want to say I always appreciate your thoughtful, balanced, considered posts. Posts like this are what make Steemit great!
I am in it for the long haul. I think steemit and the steem blockchain have a potential to change the world. If we can just solve some of these problems. Yet they truly are new problems, and that requires a lot of out of the box thinking.
Even with these problems it is still beautiful.
Wow i really liked and appreciated this post. I am guilty of up-voting my own content a few days after i post, i never do it right away. But i thought that was something you were supposed to do?
I have been posting on steemit for about 2 months now and have commented and up-voted many others posts. But i don't seem to be getting views. I feel on an open platform like this where (in my mind) hundreds if not thousands of people can see your post within the minute you post it. Maybe i'm wrong about that and they get lost in a sea of constant posting.
I wish there was a better way to Vet friendships, activity, & people on here. I want to build some solid content creator relationships on this platform. I'm not saying my content is perfect or even always aimed at the majority. I just wish i could reach more people without having to pay SBD to "promote" my post. I do use tags but maybe i should use better ones?
I have used SBD 3 times with my Earned SBD and legitimately saw no difference in viewers or likes. I felt like it was wasted. Maybe someone reading this could guide me in the right direction on how promoting actually works as well.
Try linking up with people on http://steemspeak.com
It is a hosted chat server, with a voice channel, where people are able to develop and nurture collaborative ideas.
I second this. If it was not such a huge distraction for me I'd be there a lot more. It's too easy to get sucked in and lose the day. :) Though I will return from time to time... great place, especially if you REALLY want to learn about steemit, steem, and even other crypto currencies.
Right now this is a big part of the problem. It is a problem known as dicoverability. They are planning on implementing communities sometime soon and when they do that I suspect that will help.
Promoting posts doesn't seem to do much. It was created initially as a way to burn SBD when a few times it was dropping below $1 USD and it is supposed to pegged to the dollar. When you promote you are essentially destroying the currency which reduces the amount in supply and in theory should help increase the price. This is why promotion was created.
I haven't noticed it being truly effective in actually promoting things. I promote most of my posts by a small amount based around one of my favorite numbers, I mainly do it knowing it won't do anything but I am burning a little SBD.
Wow thanks i did not know that, ill keep this in mind. I do wonder how this platform is going to evolve in 2018. I know there is a roadmap ... but it seems since the lead developer left that were stuck in some sort of Beta Limbo ... do you find that to be the case as well?
No... Dan Larimer hadn't actually been doing most of the development for awhile. There is a team of them doing work on this. The community is also very involved since it is open source.
the essence of socialist intellectualism
I have upvoted myself on posts in which I wanted my comment to be the first read on the post
Yeah, I used to do this. I stopped awhile back. My personal choice.
I get the feeling that not many people are actually reading the full comment sections anyway /smh
Some do... my wife who is suddenly starting to understand steemit and might get engaged told me that she thinks her OCD is a problem here. :) She says she reads ALL the comments and feels that she must even on posts she didn't like. LOL It might keep her pretty busy.
LOL
see if you can direct that attention to the things she is INTERESTED in
Skimming is such an important reading/comphrension skill
She reads and comprehends quite well, her OCD just makes her very much a completionist.
it's harder to retain that info when you're pulling in lots of data from divergent and unrelated sources
I'm not OCD, but my brain is fried from trying to clean up my reference database
I know its a small comfort from such a newbie as myself, but I will never engage in self-voting. I find it ethically dubious. I'd rather up-vote things that make sense to me, that I feel contribute to how I'd like Steemit to be.
Thanks for the post, I'm trying to wrap my head around various concepts used by this platform and every bit helps.
It's a new world. You've landed on the beach. Let's go see what is out there.
wait wait wait. so is it better to remove your own vote from you post? is that why my voting power is so low?
No. You can vote on your own post. It is a good idea.
It is people voting on their own COMMENTS not the post, that is the problem.
Ohhh, gotcha. Thank you.
regardless of what I post, I can't seem to get much more than a few pennies, and I'm posting quality content. occasionally I've seen some good ones, but it's rare.
Heheh.... when I started I posted many things that received $0. This was at a time when there were some posts making $36,000. (July of last year).
Though I'd keep posting and occasionally something I wrote would be popular and I'd get some sudden love. Over time this improved.
I write about a lot of different things. Basically whatever I am interested in or thinking about at the moment.
Some of my best posts are ones I thought would make nothing and I wasn't even sure why I bothered posting them.
There were others I busted my ass on and thought were great and they got $0.
So all I can say is hang in there... it will grow.
thank you. I appreciate the response. I'll keep at it. But then I get concerned with "reposts." Can I share my art more than once?
The thing with a post, even art. The words you put talking about your art are important too. Your post becomes a journey into your mind. So I don't see why you can't reuse your art. Preferably you'd want to be saying new things in your words to accompany that art. Reposting the same thing over and over again you can probably do. I doubt you'd get many followers or votes. However, if each post you do has something different and interesting in it then that is how you get people. It is like fishing. You are using different bait. You also need to realize that sometimes you don't catch any fish.
Great post @dwinblood! Answered some questions I had myself so thank you!
This is a fantastic post and although I am guilty of the up vote my own comments it has from the beginning for me just felt wrong, call it my cultural upbringing or my bonsai cultural it really smacks of Narcissism/ self back patting. These are just my thoughts on it...Do I need better people to follow here at steemit to get away from folks upvoting themselves to go back in line to my upbringing ways or learn to hold my nose and adapt to this new world ways?
Ultimately you choose the path that is right for you here. If it doesn't feel right to you then don't do it. I will not force anyone to use their account a certain way if I can at all avoid it. I believe good ideas don't require force.
Instead I try to explain to them what their actions are doing, and hopefully some of them will change.
You also can choose who you follow. If you encounter someone that you think is acting poorly for the betterment of steem and the community then try talking to them. If that doesn't work then not following them is a good step, and if they are a witness remove your witness vote from them. Really removing their support mechanism is something we can do.
How do you remove support from a witness?
If you haven't voted on a witness you don't have any to remove...
Here is a post I wrote about witnesses 4 months ago:
https://steemit.com/witnesses/@dwinblood/voter-responsibility-know-your-witnesses
Very informative... I hope big guns learn from it too
Maybe. Perhaps some seeds they'll think about over time. I wouldn't expect any instant changes from big guns.
Interesting article @dwinblood is there any way to find out how many surplus rewards there are and how long it will be before the rewards distributed are limited to the new Steem generated by the platform (9.5% per year, right?)
I have not kept up with this. I am sure there is a way to do this. I know you can join steemspeak discord channel and I believe type /rewards or something like that and a bot there will tell you what the current reward pool is at. I also believe the people there likely could easily answer this question. I would jump on and ask them now for you but I am in the middle of some work for my actual WORK. :)