I received a question from someone and chose to answer it in a post for more people to benefit from the answer. @irawandedy said (in part):
"... I see in this month, the value of votes that have been given decreased very significantly, about what causes the friend? Many friends ask me this question and I can not answer it myself. thank you"
There isn't only one reason, but several. Some of these reasons can recur at anytime, and some are a result of HardFork changes to the Steem blockchain code.
There are 3 main reasons I can think of:
- The falling price of STEEM.
- HardFork 19 changes.
2a. HardFork 19 gave more power to SP holders which motivated self-voting.
2b. HardFork 19 changed how the vote power works. - Pay-to-play.
1. The falling price of STEEM
The falling price of STEEM makes your posts worth less USD/SBD. It's that simple. The payouts are always based on the value of the STEEM token.
When STEEM rises, your post value rises.
When STEEM falls, your post value falls.
This can happen because:
a) Bitcoin price falls which means the other tokens lose USD value as well.
b) More people are selling STEEM than buying which makes the price of STEEM fall.
Your post payout will fall, and your vote with have less value to allocate.
2. HardFork 19 changes.
2a. HF19 gave more power to SP holders which motivated self-voting
HF17 gave more power to SP holders. This means they could upvote themselves and get more money. And that's what they did.
Instead of using their power to vote for others like they did before, more and more users started to vote for their own comments.
Some people made new accounts to manipulate the reward pool and siphon rewards to their comments and posts, cross-account upvoting their comments and posts to increase their rewards/money in those various accounts. Collusion between people is always a factor on Steemit, but his new HF change made people collude more to get more money by upvoting themselves and each other.
Rather than use their vote power to reward others, they are concerned with rewarding themselves more.
With more people voting for themselves, your post payout will fall, and your vote with have less value to allocate. Even for those who vote for themselves, their vote value will go down.
Also note, that if more people join Steemit, and more people are voting, then more people influence how the reward pool gets allocated, and that also means your vote value will drop. This isn't the main reason for vote values falling though in the past month, but it may slightly contribute to that drop. The main reasons are the 3-4 I'm talking about.
2b. HardFork 19 changed how the vote power works
HardFork 19 changed how the vote power works, giving people less 100% votes that they were used to, which made them vote for less people.
The changes made the former 100% vote as powerful as the new 25% vote, making the new 100% vote a 400% vote before the hardfork. If someone changes their votes to 25%, it's the same as 100% before, and they can keep voting as they did.
All users with less than 500SP don't have the vote power bar to change their votes to 25%. So they don't keep voting as they did. Even users over 500SP with the bar chose to stop voting for as many people. Why? Maybe they wanted to upvote themselves more, which is reason #3.
When more votes are made on different posts, the reward payout on your own posts will go down.
More people are voting with 100% (400% in the former system) on their own comments, and this means more rewards are going to those comments, and less to the other comments and posts. All of the self-voting means everyone else gets less on their posts and comments voted on by other people, and their own votes on posts and comments goes down.
3. Pay-to-play
Many people are motivated to get money for their posts any ways they can, even paying someone to vote for them. They want to upvote themselves by paying someone to vote for them. The other person isn't voting for them because of the content, but because they are being paid to. It's a self-voting tool for the most part.
This has meshed with #3, where people are not upvoting their own comments to get more rewards, and they pay other to vote for their comments.
So instead of people voting on things they value from others, now some are paying for votes so they can pay themselves essentially. Less votes are going to other people, and more self-voting is happening through pay-to-play. It's not someone voting for themselves directly, but they are buying votes for themselves, so it's still self-voting.
All those pay-to-play votes for one's self, one's own posts/comments (self-vote), act like other self-votes, in that they apply more total votes in the system and that reduces the influence of your vote, making the value of your vote go down.
I hope these answers provided the information to understand why the value of your vote is going down.
If you have a question you would like me to do a post about, please feel free to ask :)
Good information here, enjoyed reading , thanks.
The story post is very thought out but I have one question in regard to this comment:
Wouldn't this only make the price of Steem fall if people were asking less for Steem than the current market price? I see bots all the time on small volume trading sites that manipulate the price of coins to make it look like the market is pumping to get the volume to increase and then dump their coins at a price point that gives them a decent price.
So if the majority of people asked for a price higher than the market wouldn't this actually help the price of Steem trend upward?
Again, thanks for the post.
Good point !
Go look at any coin, and zoom in to find a time where there is a sharp red descent. That is when people are selling below the selling price, and taking the buyer prices. I didn't mean whenever someone sells STEEM it will make the price fall and affect payouts. It takes an actual large amount of volume, like the red descent on charts. That shifts the price measurably. If people are willing to pay the asker price, or more, that sends the price higher yes.
You just explained what I wrote in my response. I just wanted clarification on what you meant with that quote. The way it was written made it seem if someone sells steem, in general, that the price goes down. Thanks for clarifying what you meant.
It's just referring to simple supply and demand.
If everyone is selling, then there is more supply than demand so the price will fall. If everyone is buying, then there is more demand than supply so the price will rise.
At the moment because the price is falling so hard and people are panicking, we're seeing more people dump their Steem on the market and just increasing the supply with nobody there wanting to buy it until it bottoms.
Yeah, I'm one of them people waiting for it to bottom.
A great post @krnel, I just found a satisfactory answer. Thank you for your help, i can not repay your kindness right now. May be a time or only a god able to reciprocate :)
Thanks for reading and providing a question that others were asking as well ;)
Wow. Your analysis is very insightful, thank you! I am a minnow and new to Steem. I actually didn't know we shouldn't vote for ourselves. Now I know. I will never do it again. I'm learning lol. I am going to re steem your post and upvote. Thanks again =)
Yeah the principle is good to apply all around. But the major issue is when it's on everything. If you make 1,2,3 posts a day, then it doesn't affect it as much. So it's up to you if you want to not upvote your own posts. I would say just don't be someone who upvotes all their comments or uses pay-to-play to buy yourself a vote. Thanks for the feedback.
Its the fork.. I used to have one or two whales come by and upvote my posts of course aiding in others to upvote. I was just starting to get every post hitting double digits, now its far and few between with better posts and more followers. Not the greatest vibe since then...
Yup, my votes cut in half almost, probably like 40-45%, after the HF. Not much we can do about that, even if the HF is reversed, I wonder if those upvotes would come back :P
Thank you for this post it explains everything I wanted to know for the most part but I want to know what do I need to do you give people more money? I don't like just giving two to eight cents, thank you for your time
That's based on Steem Power in your wallet. You can make posts with "100%" to get all SP. Or you can buy more STEEM. I would say just make more posts and feedback on other posts with comments, make relevant comments and link to relevant posts that may have made.
Thank you so much for the information and answering me much appreciated krnel🕊
Great analysis @krnel. I am new to steemit and was wondering why the value of vote keeps changing... Your post explains it. However, another question that I didn't really research on yet... Sometimes my vote gives 1 cent and there are times when it had been more than $5. I am not controlling how much to give, but what defines this?
In the time you opened the post, and read it, someone else voted, or more than one person voted, and all their SP gets added to the updated $ you see when you cast your vote. It only updates when you load a page of upvote to change the $ value.
My point of view: The number of accounts are rising, but the issue of steem is the same. This means that when you vote the quantity of steem that you are sending is weighted with all users... then you send less money. We have to add the drop of steem price.
New users with hardly any SP voting does have some effect as well, thanks, but the issue wasn't present prior to the HF when new users were joining anyways. Maybe now it's amplified more though despite the low SP because of the HF changes, thanks for the feedback.
Makes so much sense @krnel. Thank you for spelling it out. I'm gonna share this with some friends who were wondering the same thing.
Sweet, glad it's been beneficial to many, I figured it would help to provide some partial answers at least ;)
Yes, and I really hope your "Only Upvote Others Athon" takes off!
I wonder... how to make that "take off"? Hehe...
I don't know, except for just to keep talking about it. I do KNOW one thing, it will catch on, and it will become the norm eventually <3
In a year?
:P
I suppose once there is enough social pressure and...
LOLOLOLOL
Nice write-up but honestly speaking point 2 & 3 are very bad.
There are 3 main reasons I can think of:
The falling price of STEEM.
HardFork 19 changes.
2a. HardFork 19 gave more power to SP holders which motivated self-voting.
2b. HardFork 19 changed how the vote power works.
Pay-to-play.
There should be a measure to correct that or what did you think.
We can all change our behavior. That's the best, freedom-applying solution. But people don't want to do what's best, they don't want to control themselves, so then other people step in to control their out of control behavior that is not desired. Steemit has no "laws" other than peer pressure of the community and the code as a default basic "law". So remove selvoting from the code, and that deals with some part of the issue.
Since you've mentioned STEEM price falling, I noticed it fell more than SBD price? Why is that? Also, what about curation trails/stremian/steemvoter? Do those affect the drop, too? I regulated voting for a time as well and reserved my votes for people on my feed but after reading a post about voting power stabilizing (sorry I forgot the term used) at 25%, I'm now trying to go as far back as I can to upvote people on my feed that I may have not seen after scheduling my steemit stays to a bare minimum to curb my upvoting.
SBD is pegged to stay at $1USD, and this also hurts the price of STEEM at times to leverage the SBD to stay there.
Well anything that increases people voting -- like automated voting whereas they normally wouldn't have voted -- will make all other votes drop in influence.
Do you check your vote power? No the vote bar, but on a site like steemdb.com or steemstats?
Ah, those concepts make sense now. Thanks! And I've only recently learned of those sites (including steemnow which is what I use). But by the time, I was around 60%. I tried regulating the voting to fit the 20% refill but I just kept dropping and dropping until eventually, I was at 29% one day. So I took to scheduling times on Steemit so I can give the upvotes to contents I like reading. But after reading @timcliff's post about it regulating at 25%, I'm trying to unearth from my feed what I would've otherwise read if I had gone online more. (So if I missed some of your awesome posts, it's because of me staying off of Steemit a lot)
Thanks for sharing this valuable information, i was wondering what was going on as well but now i am aware. Upvoted Resteemed and followed!!!:)
Glad to help, thank for the support ;)
Good and to the point!
hehe, thanks ;)
So that begs the question, was Steemit better before HF19?
Many people think so. I think overall with all changes in behavior, things have gotten worse. With the HF alone and people still doing things the same way, then it might have been better than before, but not now.
Thanks for the insight.
You only mention it in a sidenote, but when i see the graph in this post below, i would say the bigger number of people on the platform should have a great influence on the voting power.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptoriddler/more-than-250-000-steemit-accounts-mehr-als-250-000-steemit-accounts
So i guess it is time to gather more people as followers... which will be done by better content. So I would say, in general this is going in the right direction.
The strategy I am testing right now is, not just upvote yourself, but upvote any interaction.
So anybody i reply to, any post i read, that is not complete nonsens, and anyone replying to my stuff.
Since it is just pennies now, i am not really paying myself, but i am trying to make myself valuable to the platform.
What you guys think about that?
Does that make any sense?
This information really helps me understand about Steemit. Thanks @krnel.
Regards,
@dsatria
Glad to help ;)
a fairly succinct summary of the current situation. thanks for your many fine points and showing some of the drawbacks of the format
You're welcome ;)
You have truly broken down the problem as it is
Keep it up
Very helpful article
Thank you, I've been wondering why that's been happening the last few days,and now i know.
I think you answered the question perfectly,explaining all the possibilities that influence price change.As you said it will only discourage self voting and benefit the whole community in a more fairer way.
As always an interesting read.... keep it up
Thanks ;)
nice information
I hope it can be stable @krnel
Changes are needed. Since people don't want to self-control their behavior, the code will probably need to be the change.
Hm, what about the Reward Pool getting smaller? I think I've seen information about it somewhere, I would be happy to get some clarification here :D
You mean the STEEM supply or the SBD supply each day?
Thank you at least someone took the time to provide the information. This helped me. I made a post last night to figure out why this is and never got a answer. Love the format of this blog. Thanks for giving back to the community.
hardfork 19 changed how the vote power works
You should put quotes around that, since it's exactly what the post says, and adds nothing to the conversation that is new or even anecdotal.
What happened then the upvote had 100% power now it's just only 0.5/1% what's happened
Nothing of that sort happened. Until you have around 500SBD or so, not sure of current amount at market rates but whatever equals 1M vests, you always vote at 100%. After you have 1M vests, you can adjust vote power via a slider that will appear when voting.
What about the initiatives (not sure if directly affiliated with Steemit) like Steem voter or message boards where people openly trade votes? Doesn't that effect the way votes get distributed?
I also need a favor from you to look at this article that I talked about NUMBER ONE change we need on Steemit to keep it relevant in the long run. Your feedback is highly appreciated!
Yes using voting services to autovote does affect voting. If those people weren't autovoting, less people would be voting I guess hehe. steemvoter uses one vote each day from all the people who use it's service, awarding itself a large reward with the votes of others.
Nice information..
nice for sharing information
I read that the minimum for a comment payout is $0.02
Is this accurate? I thought it would be measured in steem, but I can't find that.
No, the minimum for payout is $0.00 ;) Maybe I didn't understand you hehe
There were many times when my comments were going to pay out $0.01...
and, I waited, and saw nothing.
So, I looked into it, and found something that said the minimum to get any payout for a comment was $0.02
Curation has a 0.001 steem minimum payout. Below that you get nothing.
Its the reason most plankton get nothing for curation.
Ah yes, sorry, good point. When I first compared the digits in STEEM vs. Bitcoin or others, I noticed that limitation of only 3 digits past the decimal, to the thousandths. I saw that as limiting to the potential to become a more valued currency that could be split into further denominations like other cryptos have. If that were corrected (i.e. enlarged) then posts with low SP votes could earn smaller fractions despite not getting much support.
Great post and great thoughts. I think all of your points play a part in the falling value. Plus all the problems Eth had recently.
So as I understand self voting is a bad thing ?
If you understand what it does, then you should recognize it's not beneficial to the long-term success of Steemit, or yourself. That makes it bad indeed. Before the "Equality" changes of smaller SP having more influence, less people could affect/abuse the system with self votes, so they didn't do it much. Now it became more rewarding so more people do it. They got more power overall with HF19 changes, and they got more voting power, so they could give themselves 4x the self rewards along with the "equality" changes overall.
Indeed a great answer, I have one question though. The $ amount we see on our blog or comment, is it Steem or US dollar?
USD based on value of STEEM in markets.
There are many factors behind it, how can we explain all things in just one post. The algorithm is quite complex here.
I wonder if the self voting would be disabled would it be better for everyone at the time and how this would affect the whole system?
Yes it would make a change for the better overall.
Good talk with good info @ krnel
Invitation to all.
Read the blog and the comments.
From @xpilar Followed, upvoted and resteemed.
And do the same to you so that this information comes to everyone.
Regards @xpilar
Great piece, it's really informative, thanks for sharing
I really like to find people with interesting posts, with information that I find beneficial to me or to my followers who are on my feed. Your posts are very well thought out and are very informative and also from having been on here for awhile, have had a better chance of understanding this platform.
I find your posts very interesting and will continue to read more of your other posts. This being one of the first ones that I have come across that drew my attention.
Followup clarification please:
🔼 If my vote power is 100% and I vote on a post and my uovote gives them $0.05.
If I then go and vote 10 more times on other peoples posts, Will that original $0.05 upvote get dilluted and go down to $0.03 or $0.04?
And....if I vote 'too many' times on 'too many' posts (lets say, 50 in one day)....would that lower that original $0.05 vote that I made when I was at 100%?
Would all 50 votes be worth (in$SBD) NOTHING ???
Thanks so much for the clarification!!!!!
✌ Peace!!
Yes it get;s diluted a bit as your power bar drains. I'm not sure if the first vote goes down after the others, I think they stay as they are based on the vote power you had when you voted 100%. So if you later vote 100% but only have 60% power, then that vote is less but not the first one. I think... hehe.
Ok, cool!
Thanks for the answer!
Still trying to figure it all out here!
Peace ✌