A long time ago, when I was a software engineer in an AI lab, we did some work with Fuzzy Logic. It sums up my approach to almost all knowledge. Nothing is totally black or while, but its some shade of grey and that shade may change due to context.
Self voting is fuzzy to me. In my opinion, people stating out with low SP should always up vote their own posts and occasionally their comments.
People like me in the middle should up vote their posts if they are doing about 1 or 2 posts a day. Seems to me that if they are doing a ton of posts every day, then up voting them all might be seen as an attempt to take as much reward as possible, which may be good for them and less good for the community. I'm not against the occasional comment up vote at this level either.
Whales who post occasionally should up vote themselves, maybe at less than full power. Up voting their own comments might not be the best idea.
But its very fuzzy! Different people are going to have different ideas. How do you define hot? What does it mean to be tall? When is self up voting bad? All fuzzy!
While I agree minnows should largely upvote their own comments/posts, I wanted to make everyone aware it doesn't really do much. It takes 112 to 119 days of upvoting your own comments 10 times a day just to double what you have(assuming no one else upvotes you). Upvoting yourself when you have the 75ish steempower they give you doesn't really do anything because it goes away after a certain point. You might get 30 days I think it is before it goes away, or until you earn a certain amount.
The only real way to get ahead here is making quality posts frequently, or commenting good comments a lot, or having a following to bring with you, or buying into the system(I did purchase about 195ish Steem).
Upvoting yourself without first buying more Steem is an exercise in futility, because you will be making less than 20 cents per day when you do your 10 upvotes. A person could make way more by putting some thoughtfulness into their comment or by making their ow blog post.
Usually when someone upvotes a blog post I make, I upvote them back then and there or a day or so later. I go back and look at who upvoted me and click their name and upvote if they had a good blog post. I think that is how Steem should be used for the most part. But just my opinion from a newbie! :)
Although I had noticed this trend of upvoting of own posts and did not think much of it, I just happened to see this conversation. @truthforce, I am in agreement with the points you have raised above.
meep
Wow I agree! My brother just started here recently. His vote is worth only 0.02 and I actually told him he should upvote himself, And his comments. That way he can build himself a bit as fast as possible. It's kind of a difficult decision on whether or not you should, When you are much smaller than everyone else. It doesn't bother me personally when I see smaller people upvote themselves, but not everyone will agree on that. because at what point do we stop?
In my case he would better upvote my articles instead his comments, because I upvote commenting newbies, as long as they upvote my articles as well (even if that has more of a symbolic value). If everybody keeps upvoting himself (or close members of his 'club' whatever they write) the motivation of writing time consuming high quality articles decreases. In my opinion that can't be the sense of this platform.
In my case, I do a lot of commenting but very little upvoting. Why? Because I upvoted a lot when I first got here (12 days ago) and now I'm recovering my steem power from that mistake. But even so - I have now been advised to only upvote 10 or so times per day to keep the steem power. So are my comments a waste of time?
I think they are worthwhile for the engagement and knowledge I get - plus they pay substantially more than my posts. I'm not sure if this is a long term strategy. Later, when I get the slider bar I will figure out how to upvote more often, but for now I think I am stuck at 10 a day.
It isn't a mistake to upvote others, you actually get curation reward and in addition many people should upvote you, too, then. If sometimes voting power decreases, so what? It will recover soon: you lose just nothing.
I upvote you now (30 %), so that you see how nice it feels to get upvoted ... :-)
Edit: you can also upvote comments with a very low percentage, so that voting power decreases very slowly only.
Edit 2: If you can only vote with 100 % it is indeed reasonable to upvote about ten times a day. But even then I would suggest not to upvote your own comments only.
(In my opinion it's a big disadvantage of HF 19 that newbies can only upvote 10 times per day in average anymore.)
Well, I was down at 40% a week ago and now I'm trying for the 80's so it seems to take a long time. I drained the power right away when I first got here.
I upvote about 5-6 times a day right now. I am not upvoting myself ever on posts or comments or replies.
Thank you for the upvote! I do really appreciate that. I followed you and will be sure to use one of my weak votes for you as soon as I can. It's midnight in Bangkok and I am done voting for today :(
The slider would help for sure and I will use it as soon as I get it so I can spread the love better. I wish it would come when you join and that someone would explain the reason to use it, but at least I understand now. Thank you so much for helping me.
Dang! I just saw the amount of your upvote. Holy cow! Thank you again :)
I like this perspective also and yes have and do up vote myself but with that being said the majority of my up voting power goes to content that I want to see more of. I see nothing wrong with the up voting of one's own self especially in the beginning of their steem journey. Thank you Mr. Stokes for starting a great discussion.
I'll try it, thanks everyone for the insights!
Great perspective. I like it.