Yes, they CAN use their slider to make more votes, but as they deplete their vote power, they make less on the votes they want to earn money on.
Look at it from a numbers point of view:
If a whale has 40 votes at full power per day and uses 5 to self-upvote the 5 posts they made that day, they still have 35 votes left to self-upvote their own comments and other content. They may use another 10 for their own comments. That leaves 25 full-power votes that they can then use to upvote content from others.
Now lets do that again with only 10 votes per day:
5 for their own posts, 5 for their own comments.... OH OHHHH.... ran out of votes! Sorry everyone else.
Now does it make sense?
That makes complete sense. I guess I need to stop thinking of people as though they are fair.
They say nothing is fair about love and war, but when it comes to money, things can get ugly real fast.
Don't get me wrong; there are many kind and generous people here on this platform. It takes but a few to ruin it for everyone though. What is that saying? A few rotten apples can spoil the whole bunch.
That saying fits perfectly here! I guess I was just hoping whales, with how much they have invested in this platform, will all want it to succeed, so they'd go for a long-term vision, instead of the short-sightedness you described previously.
I'm glad there are plenty of kind people here too, otherwise I wouldn't have lasted this long :-)
Are you still a minnow with over 3,500 Steem? I guess I have a heck of a long way to go because I just got past 2 digits a few days ago and am now earning just pennies per day. I was hoping that reaching 1,000 Steem would make a huge difference in earnings, but if you are struggling with over 3X that much, I'm starting to feel very discouraged.
I saw someone with roughly the same rank as me earn 25 Steem on a scientific article, so I wrote a scientific article to raise my income but it earned only 3 cents so far. I guess it really only matters who your friends are and not what you write about. Rather a sad commentary about the platform if that's the case. I used to be all excited and was telling everyone to join. Now I feel bad for anyone who took my advice and becomes totally frustrated. This platform is becoming no different than any other crypto-currency, where you simply invest fiat currency and take your profits when it goes up in value. There seems to be no point wasting your time posting articles for pennies on your hours unless you simply enjoy posting without having very many readers. I have 160 followers and something like 5 views on my science article. How depressing is that?
Perhaps I should simply invest a few dollars in Etherium and ride the wave on that rather than waste my time at the keyboard? I'll wait and see what HF20 brings. Apparently it is coming soon.
I could join one of the circle-jerk groups, where they use bots to boost their earnings, but that just goes against my morality and I don't believe it is good in the long run for the platform. As it currently stands, you either join those who would do what it takes to boost earnings or walk away. Hopefully they change this soon if they want to see mass adoption of the platform.
You paint a sad picture, but it is pretty valid for the current state of the platform. Sadly, I don't think these particular things will change much, because it basically works the same way the world works. Small break throughs do happen sometimes though, with a nice upvote on one of your posts, but it's becoming increasingly rare, due to the massive amount of posts being shared. I'm afraid that will continue, so it will be more and more about who you know.
I still hope more filtering options will come, especially amongst the people I follow, because I already miss a lot of their posts aswell. I want to support good authors, but it's hard to find them in the big list of crap that is the New section. Comments on good articles, in my opinion, are the best way to find new people to follow and to follow you. It's all about networking here aswell I guess...
The amount my votes go for is still declining, but that goes for everyone, because the Steem value is low at the moment (just like most cryptos). If it rises again, all of our votes will be worth more and things might look a bit brighter again. Only for the payout amounts though, it won't change much about the inner workings here.
A couple of search filters you may find useful:
https://steemit.com/curation/@edje/extremely-easy-and-efficient-tool-to-curate-and-follow-your-favourite-authors-tags-and-posts-a-qreview
https://steemit.com/bounty/@papa-pepper/the-steemian-username-tag-search-engine-500-sbd-bounty-paid
Ooh that seems very useful, thank you so much :D