How do we earn the most curation rewards? Why do some Steem authors get upvotes so fast? The answer is using automatic upvoters especially on popular authors that guarantee huge curation rewards.
Autovoters like the one I just started using at https://steemvoter.com/ ensure that I get my vote in right away on the authors I am following which maximizes curation rewards because we are using a square root curve on a linear rewards system. Those that vote early get more rewards while those voting late earn much less. Before hard fork 19, this was less of an issue because of the exponential rewards and linear curation rewards where upvoting a post with a lot of upvotes already would give the maximum curation payout which is how we got a ton of high value posts for a few authors while most earned close to zero. Now, upvoting early works the best with an autovoter which seems to be motivating a lot of us to start using this strategy.
What Do We Do with Automatic Votes and Curation?
My hope in talking about the power and limitations of automatic upvoting is that we find a way forward together that is most helpful to each of us. While I refused on principle to use an auto upvoter for my first months on Steem, seeing the earnings and being on the receiving end of so many automatic votes changed my mind.
Using an automatic upvoter such as https://streemian.com/profile/fanbase allows upvoters to earn WAY more curation rewards than doing it manually! Streemian even has an option to follow all upvotes by another account which leads to huge waves of votes automatically like those on @curie upvotes. How much?
Autovotes Earn 2x to 6x More!
The examples here and the data below show the power of using an automatic upvoter that votes early and selecting authors with the highest probability of a high payout to maximize earnings. I first discovered this in my @curie tutorial at https://steemit.com/curation/@jerrybanfield/earn-steem-for-finding-an-undervalued-steemit-post-and-submitting-to-curie-1500598670-0433114. In this tutorial, I discovered that @curie was earning 6 times as much in curation as me using all auto upvotes versus my manual curation. The data here explains exactly how that is possible using two examples to begin followed by a table with author comparisons.
First, the example curation rewards payout in Steem Power below shows one upvoter that just changed to an automated strategy from manual voting previously. Note that this is on two different posts with almost the same voting power with the second post earning more Steem Power despite having less in total rewards and an equal vote on both. Voting early automatically guarantees at least double curation rewards most of the time if the total from the post is $20+ and the automatic upvote comes in at 45 minutes or less.
- 0.048 SP earned for voting MANUALLY LATE on https://steemit.com/upvotable/@jerrybanfield/there-must-be-some-kinda-way-outta-here-in-upvotable-26 late on a post earning about $160 in rewards.
- 0.087 SP earned for voting EARLY AUTOMATICALLY on https://steemit.com/steem/@jerrybanfield/facebook-bitcoin-steem on a post earning about $100 SBD in rewards.
In this second example, we see the return on a high value post voted late manually by one upvoter when compared to an early automatic upvote by another upvoter. The data is estimated in the second case because I adjusted the reward for differences in Steem Power of the two voters.
- 0.017 SP earned for voting MANUALLY LATE on https://steemit.com/witness/@jerrybanfield/meet-steem-s-top-10-witnesses
- 0.113 SP (ESTIMATED EARNINGS) for voting on the same post as above within 30 minutes of release with an auto voter.
Voting early maximizes curation rewards earned from upvotes as we can see for ourselves when we test out Streemian or @steemvoter. Those of us like me now using automatic upvotes earn on average 2 to 6 times as much in curation rewards when compared to the majority voting manually. I made the switch after 3 months of refusing to use auto voters and then seeing this data changed my mind. As long as automatic upvotes are allowed, then it only makes sense to use them to earn the most!
The Benefits and Limitations
I receive huge motivation to do more posts of the highest quality because of knowing how many users have added me to automatic upvoters. Knowing this also helps me to schedule about the same number and quality of posts each day because when setting an autovoter the number of posts the author makes per day is an important calculation. Automatic voting is a huge benefit for authors to earn a consistent reward for effort instead of results because with more helpful posts comes more results.
The huge problem with this strategy is that it is very difficult for most of us as authors to get on an autovoter because of the data I show below. If this is not a big enough limitation, voting automatically also allows authors to post complete crap and earn a lot of money for it as some have argued I did by earning $300+ posting a picture in my boxers. When an author devoting all day to write posts on Steemit that then earns $1 or $2 checks the trending feed to find authors posting the same thing earning $100 to $500, it provides good motivation to either quit or figure out how it is possible.
Another limitation with auto upvotes is that we may actually earn less from our readers and lower the amount of views we get. Part of the motivation to read a post is to decide whether to upvote it or not. When we already upvoted, why bother checking that author's blog? How often will we remove the vote from our bot to do a higher vote when the author does an amazing post?
Perhaps the worst part about auto voting is that authors may actually be earning a lot less for high quality posts versus manual voting. Before the percentage of upvotes on my posts shifted to so many being automatic, I used to get a lot more high value votes and actually earned more than with so many automatic votes. While I am very grateful that so many authors set me on automatic votes, the total payout often is much less for me versus manual curation because of the autovoter percentage versus manual.
For example, one author was kind enough to add me to a 10% automatic upvote on all my posts. That same author previously was voting about 20% of my posts up 100% meaning that overall assuming the same voting ratio, the difference is 50% less in total earnings. With my earnings being enough, this is fine for me but how does this impact authors barely making enough to consider Steem a hobby? Before setting up automatic upvoting, I often would vote posts by authors I enjoy following up by 100% manually giving as much as $38 at one point and as little as $2 recently after loaning my voting power out temporarily with https://www.minnowbooster.net/market which will be finished in the next few weeks! When I am putting that same author on an auto voter at 10% or 20%, that author often ends earning about half of what they were receiving before as I can see with my voting power consistently being higher than with manual voting.
Finally, the #1 benefit and downside to using an auto upvoter is not wasting voting power or having to even check Steem to keep earning curation rewards. What I love about using @steemvoter is that now I can go on vacation for two weeks if I want to and I will still keep earning more curation rewards than I was by actively curating every day manually. While it is nice to maximize my earnings, this is so powerful compared to what I was doing before that I would argue it is significantly lowering the value of manual curation and even reducing the amount of posts we are reading on Steem.
When we combine all these ideas together, the curation rewards get crazy for some authors!
Auto Upvoting Top Authors Early Pays ... Really Well
If auto upvotes were spread all over Steem evenly, there might be no point in talking about this. What actually happens is a lot of the voting power is aimed at posts from top authors because voting early on posts with the highest likelihood of getting the highest earnings equals the most curation rewards. See for yourself using the data I collected from one upvoter cleaning up on curation rewards with auto upvotes on popular authors with established followings frequently in the trending page and on what I call upcoming authors with less overall average upvotes. Note that the upvoter used in the examples below has much more more voting power than the upvoter used in the examples above. The data below shows curation rewards per vote in Steem Power.
In summary, upvoting posts from popular authors early with an autovoter consistently brings upvoters 3 to 5 times more than upvoting authors not consistently earning $100 a post. The maximum rewards come from upvoting popular authors that have a high percentage of manual votes especially from whales which is why recently my posts have been ideal for earning curation rewards with an autovoter.
When competition from automatic voters gets too high on an author relative to the manual upvotes coming later, the rewards tend to drop a bit which is why the earnings are so good upvoting me today. I have been hesitant to make this post after preparing for it for months because just mentioning this may ruin what is currently is a perfect situation for curators voting my posts up automatically. It is worth the risk to me because we need to look at how this is impacting our whole community.
What Do We Do?
Currently our curation rewards system is heavily biased in favor of upvoting popular authors early that have the best chance of getting later manual votes while authors not on autovoter radars struggle to earn anything. Naturally downvoters can try and get the auto upvotes removed by threatening users or downvoting posts on an individual author to try to ruin the curation rewards. With users setting an auto upvoter and forgetting it, this strategy becomes a big waste of time because these upvoters do not even notice all of this happening.
For those of us actively watching our votes and rewards, it is easy for us to adapt our votes to wherever the highest curation rewards are coming from as competition goes up on some authors too much to make a good reward while new authors emerge with few auto upvotes. In the worst case for a downvoter trying to fight the existing system, an author could actually end up receiving increasing support from upvoters rallying against a downvoter resulting in the author earning even more upvotes after a downvoting war than before.
I am not sure what the ideal solution is which has motivated me to just bring this up and trust the discussion to help us see if this is how we think our curation rewards system should work or if it needs changes. As a witness, a meaningful part of my service is to contribute to the discussion about how Steem is working and to help us consider if this is how we really want it or whether we should make changes in a future hard fork. While I love the equality rewards system compared to pre hard fork 19 system, I think being aware of the bias towards automatic upvoters now is worth considering as we prepare for new updates in hard fork 20.
Thank you very much for reading this post which was written specifically to respond to hundreds of reader comments asking for insights on how posts get 500 votes often within an hour of release and how to maximize curation rewards!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Shared on
PS: Witness votes are the most important votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together? Thank you to the 853 accounts voting for me as a witness, the 197.3M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!
OR
Hopefully, future developments here will increase the correlation between the value people find in a post and the rewards they grant it. Whilst the current system is superior to the pre-existing one, it's obviously far from perfect.
The whole purpose of a blog and social media platform is to enable fruitful engagement. And we should collectively work to ensure that is what happens if we want steemit to grow and the value of STEEM to follow.
@fredrikaa exactly we have made huge improvements over the previous system and hopefully we can continue to work together to improve on what we have now!
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I follow your account ? please guide me. I am from Aceh.
Hello @bukharisulaiman . I love helping people find their way around on steemit and to have a more positive experience on the platform. Please instead ask for some specific topic you would like some guidance on, rather than this wague comment.
Also, by first recommendation to you would be not to spam the exact same copy-pasted comment on every comment here... It will only do you harm as people will not take you seriously and you also risk being flagged, which would hurt your reputation and eventually your earnings if they flag a post you've made.
Otherwise, happy steeming ;)
@fredrikaa I check your posts all the time. Lots to learn!
Thank you for reply to his comments @fredrikaa, sorry I just used steemit, please do not spam. I want high steam power to help my community. I am happy in steemit.
@bukharisulaiman From Aceh-Indonesia
Hi @fredrikaa can u guide me also? im new here. thanks.
Follback me
Agree @fredikaa, we need a better system to get more quality post upvoted. The system now is not bad, but luckily this is still BETA.
I hope we will see many improvements in the upcoming forks.
You hit it right on the money (pun intended) @fredrikaa as much as I do like automation it kind of takes the social out of social networks. I can understand people wanting to make a passive income and reward the authors they like. I would also remind people to be cautious of any third party applications that require any of your private keys.
Thnks
"Using an automatic upvoter such as https://streemian.com/profile/fanbase allows upvoters to earn WAY more curation rewards than doing it manually!"
I'm definitely concerned at what this means for Steemit. I have been working on a number of articles to try to make curation rewarding, but it seems that the economic incentives to almost completely automate curation are only getting stronger. I'm starting to feel a little disadvantaged now by choosing manual voting and waiting to read posts, etc.
"The huge problem with this strategy is that it is very difficult for most of us as authors to get on an autovoter because of the data I show below. If this is not a big enough limitation, voting automatically also allows authors to post complete crap and earn a lot of money for it as some have argued I did by earning $300+ posting a picture in my boxers."
Very succinct summary of the 2 key issues. I applaud your use of yourself as an example here. That particular post of yours even spawned a post of my own, "Steemit, Like Life, Is A Popularity Contest". The faux outrage over the idea that life has often not been about purely merit alone was brief but widespread.
"When an author devoting all day to write posts on Steemit that then earns $1 or $2 checks the trending feed to find authors posting the same thing earning $100 to $500, it provides good motivation to either quit or figure out how it is possible."
I wonder how many users choose to buckle down and work hard at the platform, potentially treating it like a full-time job, and how many simply become jaded, complain, and give up. If I had to guess knowing what I do of human nature, and how hard Steemit success can be, I bet it's less than 10% that go on to buckle-down and try to achieve that level of quality that compels valuable followers with large stakes to auto-vote you.
"How often will we remove the vote from our bot to do a higher vote when the author does an amazing post?"
Very rarely, I imagine. It pains me every time I remove a vote I made too low, as you lose both the voting power AND the curation reward.
I'm going to break this off into a second reply (to this same comment, see direct child comment), lest it become an even larger wall of text.
Edit: Upvoting this comment since I am late to the party. Want to get it near the relevant/active discussion.
"Before the percentage of upvotes on my posts shifted to so many being automatic, I used to get a lot more high value votes and actually earned more than with so many automatic votes"
This is very interesting. I assume you accounted for the drop in the price feed for Steemit that calculates your rewards?
It makes sense if people are treating their votes almost like an investment tool now. You see, what they are doing since HF-19, is diversifying.
With only 10x 100% strength votes, that only allows them 10 investments per day. You seem to be noting an effect where some users are making those 20x 50% votes per day, for example, so they can spread a wider net - not unlike the 40 votes per day pre-HF19.
"With my earnings being enough, this is fine for me but how does this impact authors barely making enough to consider Steem a hobby?"
Acutely, I would imagine. I have a couple of auto-voters who are generously supporting my posts, however as you noted, this may very well be reducing the likelihood of my posts reaching much higher payouts. Personally, if I saw a 50% reduction in rewards, it would be very difficult to justify the additional time and energy I put into Steemit given my numerous day-job responsibilities as well.
On the other hand, the generous (I assume) auto-votes from a few of my regular followers such as TeamSteem quite literally keep me going and motivate me to post at times I would be too tired otherwise.
This isn't even a double edged sword, it's a multi-edged sword.
"#1 benefit and downside to using an auto upvoter is not wasting voting power or having to even check Steem to keep earning curation rewards."
On a personal level, I certainly agree. On a holistic, platform level I would think this is a bad precedent and we want to get away from automated interaction as much as possible. Do we want to reward users who are not actually engaging on the platform?
" I would argue it is significantly lowering the value of manual curation and even reducing the amount of posts we are reading on Steem."
I would say this is absolutely true. You have highlighted a situation where the far easier "job" pays far more. This is a huge economic and game theory imbalance which will substantially color the motivation of all users in the network.
Breaking off this wall of text again into another self-reply.
"a lot of the voting power is aimed at posts from top authors"
There's that economic and game-theory imbalance we were just talking about.
"upvoting posts from popular authors early with an autovoter consistently brings upvoters 3 to 5 times more than upvoting authors not consistently earning $100 a post"
Thank you for including the data tables, it's extremely helpful and I realize one of the more laborious and underappreciated additions to a post.
The simplest solution here would be some sort of curve where curation rewards are substantially reduced for popular authors. "Popular" could be defined a number of ways - payouts, followers, reputation.
However, one thing we can all agree on is that these users do not need curation to get their posts seen. Therefore, the curation reward which is supposed to encourage unearthing and promoting high-quality posts is failing, not on a technical, but on a fundamental level.
The curation formula must be changed, lest Steem become (more of) a bot vote-trading playground. I have actually written a series of curation articles proposing various changes to curation, everything from vote-refunding for highly effective curation to changes in the reward curve.
"When competition from automatic voters gets too high on an author relative to the manual upvotes coming later, the rewards tend to drop a bit "
This makes sense. The auto-voters are probably all getting in at what they deem the optimal moment. My guess is that this is slightly before 30 minutes, in an endless game of "wanting to trigger just before all the other auto-voters trigger, while balancing the 30 min curation curve".
What this means for us manual voters is two things:
When we see your post during normal, human browsing (ie, later that evening or in a day or two), your rewards are already very high. In many cases I look at a post and think "I'd have voted for this if it was making far less, but it now has rewards sufficient to match its quality."
Users hunting for curation rewards will pass over articles that have already been mostly upvoted, which for human browsers, is probably most of the articles they see. This is because they expect to make fewer curation rewards. In some cases, they would even be better off voting on 0-reward comments of the author for curation value than the original post itself.
Breaking off this wall of text again into another self-reply.
Exactly especially when it comes to Google search which is truly equal opportunity and one of the best possible traffic sources for the long term!
Good question I may not have considered this!
We might need to slightly correct the data (hypothetically, not saying we should go back and do it) for this effect. As you know, there has been a steady trend down from about $2 over the last 3 months.
@lexiconical your comments here are enough to be an entire post as a reply! tip!
I felt this post was well-deserving of some thoughtful, line by line replies. They really do get to be a bit long though!
Thanks so much for your generosity.
Hi @lexiconical! @jerrybanfield is sending you 10.0 SBD tip and @tipU upvote
:)
@tipU - send tips by writing tip! in the comment, get share of the profit :)This is really discouraging and explains some of the strange voting I see. I'm manually curating and seeking the max reward in about 50% of my votes. The other 50% are for my friends or comments I get on my posts. I've recently been spending a lot of effort trying to "beat the bots" in my search for good posts to upvote.
What bothers me most about this idea of turning your votes over to bots is the bad posts getting upvoted only because the author is getting the reward of the bots. No one looks or reads or interacts - just gives a 5% or 10% votes without looking. This is to the detriment of everyone at steemit. Instead of having posts we are proud of at the top - what do we get?
I'm still trying and enjoying my time here, but there are sure are curve balls!
Sharon I wrote this post with you specifically in mind based on the comment you made before that I replied to. Making this post was uncomfortable for me also because I know a lot of curators using bots would rather we not talk about this and continue to clean up on the earnings. I grew so frustrated with manual curation I even recently switched to bot voting myself because sometimes we need to let something get really bad before we recognize a need to change. This is why I am choosing to use https://steemvoter.com and will show everyone how I use it because as long as this is possible, it should be an option. If the bot voting gets so terrible we can hardly stand it, maybe we will be motivated to ask for greater bot limitations.
Hopefully this post will help with the ongoing discussion already taking place about voting bots and generate some ideas from the discussion about what might work better. I would like to see what Steem looked like with no bot activity and this may be difficult to achieve with how it is structured. Some auto upvoters have bots that make small votes on thousands of posts every day which also act as incredible self promotion for the user and provide incentives for posting about certain topics. This post is the tip of the iceberg with how deep the bot voting is here!
Thank you Jerry! You have no idea how appreciative I am of your efforts. This place has more twists and turns than anywhere I have ever posted.
I have a post I'm working on about how I curate and the results I'm getting which are very good lately. I am getting better money and better friends through my tactics and I still believe in them. But I did not understand that using bots makes this a "set it and forget it" place for some people. This blows my gullible mind.
I looked at some rewards of people who use bots just now.
I also looked at posts with people justifying the idea and also many people talking about having their power blown out and giving up on the idea for other reasons.
The whole topic makes my head spin and now I will be researching it like crazy. I would love to have a list of topics that bots like to vote for. I have wondered how to attract bots to my posts. Now - do I want them? I guess that answer is yes, if financial reward is the goal.
On other hand, you writing a post for me is a huge fangirl thrill today!!!! Seriously- when I started slowly going through your udemy videos last year; trying to upload a course, I could never have imagined it would come to this.
My badly needed course is not finished yet btw. Something called steemit interrupted me and that is directly your fault! I'm still very happy to be here swimming, but the learning curve is not letting up!
Sharon I appreciate your reply here and your perspective which is helpful for us all to keep in mind!
Good question and topic for a post!
I can't wait to read it! I've been looking at the voting bots for a couple of days now and this is very daunting to understand. I know I am not alone.
Totally agree on this. If the goal of steemit to promote good content and encourage interaction I really don't see how autovoters fit in with that.
So many posts now have more votes than views. Autovoters at work obviously. But that means less and less people are actually reading the posts.
How is that promoting good content and interaction??
The daily stats eg from @arcange are showing comments on a downward slide, despite continuing rising numbers of accounts.
I guess that is a symptom of autovoting as well 😞
I saw that too and also on @penguinpablo's reports the comments are tanking and the number of posts is trending down. Does this mean more people are automating and walking away?
Yes a mixture of more and more autovoting which is probably why comments are dropping.
And high drop off rate from the big bulk of people that joined in May/June/July.
Oh - that makes sense. Now I love my commenters even more!
Hey @fitinfun, you are totally right ofcourse. I think the idea is, that in the long run Steem Power will be used to get people's attention and not so much Curation Rewards. As popularity increases, so will the competition for content. At a given point in the future, it will be smarter to manually cast a qualitative vote - while that may not be your optimal financial choice. Just like companies are paying for advertising now, they will do it here on Steemit in the future. They will not pay for a channel that consists of automated popularity, they will for actual humans.
Interesting to think of this as an advertising platform. I'm doing that with most of my posts - referring people to my other work and products I push. My analytics show action and some of my affiliate sales are up. The traffic here is pretty good for me when I get it.
I think Advertising / Opinionating is indeed the whole point of this blockchain. Just as we have seen on 'old' but similar platforms such as Youtube, Facebook or Pinterest. Popularity attracts investors who then dominate the platform until the peoples leave for a fresh start, where quality still dominates. Like Steemit at this point :P
Very interesting thoughts. I'm am still on fb only for my groups. I am in a lot of them in niches. These places are still very good for interaction and information and sales. I open a few at a time and interact.
But out on my feed? No I don't go there ever. i have to really filter and self-censor in all my social media but for the most part I have good interactions on them.
Sencillamente , eso hace de steemit una mierda, no se premia a los buenos, así sólo se persiguen beneficios, las cosas hay que trabajarlas. Que decepción
thank you for sharing, I have been looking at what makes best sense
Why would I want to auto vote the stuff that everyone is already voting for without checking the quality of content at all? Oh yeah, that's right - money. I thought we were trying to reward good content here. Silly me, what was I thinking. It's all about the money, so lets just pile on and vote for curation rewards with bots and not even have to read the posts! Good times!
I did not imagine it made such a huge difference
Thank you Luis for letting me know that this was useful!
I follow your account ? please guide me. I am from Aceh.
I read an article a while back that was comparing the trend with likes on social media with a modern form of applause, as kind of primitive way to show popularity, even if its quite meaningless in itself, compared with a true engagement in the speech, or really taking action or learning from the speech.
It quite hit home with me as i always had this feeling that this form of interaction through like is very simplistic, and often replace more though full answer and interaction, or deeper take on the though or information being expressed.
Even with dictator or propaganda show, it always turn extreme with people being forced to applause with applause sign lighting up, as some kind of faked measure of popularity or approval, instead of genuine and deeper reaction.
This form of bot like & upvote remind me a bit if this problematic, and how it sort of neutralize expression of critical thinking and meaningful interaction through dialog to improve understanding of a topic, to turn into a contest of auto validation with primitive expression of approval through crowd applause, and then going back home like if nothing happened.
@jerrybanfield You always shed light on things I don't understand here in Steemit. Thank You for pointing this out. I hope you can create a system for manual voting for good quality contents because it is really a struggle. By the way, I voted you as a witness. Thank you for your efforts.
Auto upvotes means that an upvote will be given from my account without me reading the content of the author which doesn't sound good to me. This wasn't the purpose of creating such community. Setting auto upvotes will discourage new people here and their quality content will not earn them good rewards.
Yes I would very much prefer a system of all manual upvoting also which was my inspiration in writing this post! Auto upvoters work so well that currently manual curation is being limited in value both in the rewards and the ability to have the author receive greater readership from upvotes. If every post by some authors is upvoted $100 or more automatically, the threshold becomes very high for new authors to get noticed! Even with only about 200 people having more Steem Power than me, my vote full strength at $8 is not nearly enough to make a difference in the face of automatic curation. The despair often comes before the breakthrough!
I used auto upvote in the past. I choose good authors and always read their posts later when I had time. I live in the western Canada and there is no other way to vote around 30 th minute. I get good rewards, support favorite authors and enjoyed posts. I just want to point out that is not so black and white. It's complex system. On a long run, it will level out. Cream always come on top. And guys with bigger SP will always get more rewards. That's the design of the steemit.
And that's the right way to give upvotes to someone, after reading their content, not just blindly and assuming that content would be good of bla bla author!
It's just one of the ways to give an upvote. It's not against the rules. That was my point. Can you tell me what is good content or good author?
I guess I misread your comment earlier, I thought just the opposite thing but that wasn't the case.
Well bro, if you are using auto upvoting, that's okay and perfectly fine. To me, it's not what we should do and I gave my point of view here. There is no reason to fight what is right and what is wrong, everyone's approach is different, so adopt one you are satisfied with.
Stay blessed!
I agree with you and I don't use auto voting at the moment. You misread twice already ( read the first sentence in my first comment). So, who's the one not reading the content here? Cheers.
Didn't misread the second time, you looked like a person who was in favor of auto upvoting, so that's why I said "that's okay and perfectly fine"
Have a good day!
I'm with you! This whole post gives me a sick feeling in my stomach.
Yup, though everyone here is free to share their opinion and we should respect their opinions, however, its up to us whether to agree or disagree and I strongly disagree with this auto upvoting thing.
I feel like I did not really understand the issue until reading this post. Now I don't know what to think.
You don't have an opinion if you use a bot for your votes :(
i agreed with you, steemit should tight discipline, reward should goes only original reader. There should be a bots, who check auto upvote without reading content, and should discourage. Such activity should be plagiarism of reader.
I do not think so ... you can give the manual upvote without reading also...
I read the post ... and I have no doubt that I read the posts of Jerry even if I put an auto upvote
and not only read the post but also read the comments...and it can not be denied that the comments of many evidences that they did not read anything even if they give the manual upvote
to those who decide to give my auto upvote will be to the people that I follow habitually as I do with jerrybanfield
Ever heard of platform called Patreon? You can pledge to support content creator for every video they make and it's automatic. I haven't ever seen people complain about it.
The truth is our time is limited. I can't be reading 10's of lengthy articles a day or even more if I try to find "valuable content". I rather try to maximize my SP income, support authors I know are of value to the community and use small votes when I actually have time to spent here to support newcomers.
Curating is only a job to select few here.
I am the guy that few days ago didn't manage to vote you as a witness. It worked now, sorry for being late after a storm in my town had no electricity for about 24hours.
Keep up the good work!
@ady-was-here thank you very much for making me your first witness vote at https://steemit.com/~witnesses !
Olori Wuraola spotted at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York Read more: https://gossip.naij.com/1126754-olori-wuraola-spotted-72nd-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york.html
WOW I just a got a brain freeze. Thanks for that info Jerry and by the way I witness voted you.
@cryptoforce thank you very much for taking your time not only to vote for me as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses but also to make all 30 of your witness votes! You are in the top 1% of all witness voters on Steem in terms of participation!
Your welcome and keep your videos coming Jerry! My first crypto interest actually came from them and now I am hooked!
Olori Wuraola spotted at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York Read more: https://gossip.naij.com/1126754-olori-wuraola-spotted-72nd-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york.html
Jerry your post is misleading. There is no mention of the reverse auction mechanism that in fact penalize early voters by forfeiting a portion of the curation rewards in favor of the authors.
For clarity when I say early voters I mean voting within the first 30 minutes of a post being published.
For anyone interested here is an old article that explains the reverse auction mechanism.
If people follow your advise in this post they will be making less curation rewards and authors who are not established will be left hungry for attention.
This doesn't mean that I am against voting bots...I use steemvoter myself but I reserve part of my voting power (little as it may be) on authors who are just starting out.
In my view spreading the wealth gives me a much larger ROI in the long run.
Olori Wuraola spotted at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York Read more: https://gossip.naij.com/1126754-olori-wuraola-spotted-72nd-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york.html
Wicked curation post @jerrybanfield. I use Steemvoter and Streemian but I find if im not careful, I find my voting power goes down really low. Easy enough fix yeah, but sometimes I like to come on and also do some manual voting and that leaves me with limited power/votes I can do.
I do believe tho that this isnt enough to not auto vote. So many votes get wasted by not using them and that just comes down to a loss of potential gains.
Cheers mate
@diggerdugg I face the same challenge and appreciate you sharing your experience with us!
Olori Wuraola spotted at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York Read more: https://gossip.naij.com/1126754-olori-wuraola-spotted-72nd-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york.html
Very inspiring and very interesting post @jerrybanfield thank you so much for sharing this! Excited for are call tomorrow!
Sincerely,
@joeparys
I follow your account ? please guide me. I am from Aceh.
What do you need help with sir?
which I definitely need Steem Power father, I just use steemit. what is the trick so that many SBD.?
I only auto upvote people that I actually read their blogs. In Jerry's case I watch his crypto youtube vids, sometimes i don't even read his blogs because i already know what he is going to write from watching his video.
So find someone who you like that have big amount of cash to upvote with and not some random whale that you don't know what they are about.
I don't expect Jerry to upvote my comments but because I like his content, I don't mind.
@foovler thank you very much for watching my videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/jerrybanfield and upvoting this post 100% and voting for me as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses ! I am very grateful for your support and explaining how you use your auto upvote! I am doing the same with mine of voting people automatically that I like reading their blogs anyway!
Jerry, I think you just received a witness vote from me. This is a fantastic post for me. I have been trying to figure out the best method to use, either manual or automatic . . I have almost 6,000sp and sometimes I am not able to use the platform on a given day . . and I would like to ensure that I am giving rewards and doing my part. I am going to look into steemvoter and streemian and look forward to additional posts by you on the subject.
I don't think this is right. This is gaming the system. It destroys the point of Steemit entirely to auto vote things. It's not sustaining and it does nothing for the good of Steemit because if their content sucks, you shouldn't up vote it. Why go through the trouble of creating a network where good content is rewarded and move to an auto system that just targets curating rewards and to collect up votes. How many times do people just circle jerk up votes just to get money and Not bother reading the content? I'm getting my content squashed because I'm getting beat out by guys with followers auto up voting is a bit absurd. I've thought out using those services to grow my account. But I really don't want to because it just seems wrong on many accounts. Someone tell me I'm not crazy for thinking that way.
You're absolutely right! Auto upvoting does game the system even to the point where manually upvoting a post earlier than 30 minutes earns lower rewards because of the "bot penalty" applied which deters users knowing about this from voting amazing posts up early while often the very best posts either go unnoticed or get upvoted first by a bot network which then takes the majority of the earnings on curation while those discovering the post for the first time get little. I had the same debate and in order to promote change I am taking the "let's make it so bad we have to change it" approach because this seems to be what many of us respond to in our lives. Perhaps this post will contribute to helping us find ways to minimize bot upvoting in future updates without having to let it get much worse!
making it so bad that it must be change is the wrong attitude. Human beings will do everything to optimize. bot voting is optimization at its best. Optimization does not care about intent, or whats wrong or right. So you have to first think about how you want the best version to behave. It would be such that people's vote needs to be genuinely based on the content. The only way to do that would be to require that people scroll down the entire thing before they are allowed to vote. People will try to optimize this routine as well by creating code that does this automatically. But at least it slows down the time allowing real readers to get a chance to get in line. but then that detracts from the users of feeling freedom to vote however they wish, so perhaps you allow people to vote from the homepage, but that vote is worth less.
You're not crazy. I have a similar philosophy. I hope I can earn my place on Steemit using hard work and enjoy making my posts and interactions in a manual way. I agree with Jerrys response that things will probably get worse before they get better. I fear that if this is not fixed all the humans will leave Steemit and it will be a collection of circle jerking Bots. Elon Musk will have a great laugh.
Very informative, and congratulations to No29 in witness list. Your are coming closer in top ten.
With best wishes @jerrybanfield
Malik thank you very much for voting for me as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses and your congratulations on making number 29!
My pleasure :)
I started using steemvoter and did not like it. May be, I am not using it properly. Thanks anyway for the detailed article.
Yasir the key with https://steemvoter.com seems to be to pay 3 SBD a month for premium to eliminate the extra upvotes!
I see. That's what I did not do.
@jerrybanfield is the STEEMIT University! Want to learn about steemit and how to get the most of it, he has made videos counting thousands of hours. Also he is bringing more than a thousand new people to the community organically via Google. @gold84
Thank you @gold84 for noticing! I just upvoted your newest post!
@jerrybanfield , its a pleasure for me to have your attention, I imagine you very busy on the STEEMIT community. You made me to believe on it, and I will work with all my efforts to help STEEMIT grow. Hope to be in contact with you. Thanks for upvoting my newest post. @gold84
What would happen if auto bots were abolished and everyone had to do their work manually?
Lee I would love to see what that looked like because currently bot activity on Steem is probably about 50% of the total in terms of upvotes! All social media networks struggle with bots and usually make improvements going forward. Botting on Facebook was crazy profitable for selling fake Facebook likes for years and making mass posts while today bots are getting regulated much better on Facebook. That said, probably 50% of the posts on Facebook are made by bots sharing posts created elsewhere.
I like the idea of official "Steemit Bots" doing work for the good of the community like checking posts for plagiarism, links to nefarious web sites etc. But I don't see how we can build communities of strangers sharing content with each other when it is much easier and more profitable to let a bot do all of the work while we go off and expend our time and efforts somewhere else. I have already cut down the amount of time that I'm spending reading and curating because it just seems so hopeless, why not just delegate my SP and let a bot do it for me while I find something more worthwhile to work on?
P.S. except for being able to keep up with close friends and family I pretty much hate Facebook and have been looking for a good alternative for years. I was hoping that this was it!
Excellent information on Facebook. Though I was previously aware, others should take note.
I did this auto stuff for a day or two when i began, but realized my amount of STEEM was too low to really curate, but also that I wanted to support up-n-coming minnows and redfish. We need to support the new and growing and not just autovote the most popular. I think there have been a lot of good posts about how to cure/transform the curation. peace
Thank you for sharing your experience here @clumsysilverdad and voting for me as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses ! I just upvoted your recent post and added you to my auto voter because I like what you are posting and appreciate your consistent comments here!
I am registering on steemvoter and it puts me the following: ""Please wait and do not close this. We are preparing your account and will send you a pin that will need to be entered in this form""
takes a long time to send the pin? send it to the mail?
we have to put some time to give the vote? in which case, how many minutes is it recommended?
@matuca thank you for asking about this because I went through the same thing! The pin is sent via email. I will have a tutorial out soon showing how to use https://steemvoter.com!
thanks jerry...I will be attentive to that post
congratulations on your position as a witness.
I went to vote for another (@cervantes) and I saw that you did not appear below with the other voted ... and I realized that it was so because you were 29º
congratulations again
they still did not send the pin
This clears up a bunch of confusion I had on this topic. Thanks!
You're welcome Calvin!
Very interesting analysis you've done here, and I'm glad Steemvoter is working out for you so far. For me, I like using Steemvoter to split my efforts between manual and auto-curation. I like to manually curate, but I'm very busy and usually only have time to read a couple posts per day, if that. Steemvoter helps fill the gaps so I can still support authors I enjoy even when I don't have time to read their posts. And there are so many high quality posts that go flying by in my feed, this way I can still give them the reward they deserve.
You mentioned that if an author knows he's on an auto-voting list, he can become complacent and start churning out crap. To that I'd say that everyone using auto-voters has a responsibility to maintain their voting lists carefully. Every now and then I'll check the authors on my list, and if they are voting too frequently or I don't like their latest posts, I'll remove them to make way for new people.
My voting list is a dynamic, living breathing entity and like any real animal has to be given tender loving care so it can grow and prosper. Learning the best way to do that is half science, and half art, and all a lot of fun!
Wow @jerrybanfield great timing, I was just finishing the testing of my own upvote bot when you uploaded this post. Now, I can fine tune my bot.
Nice @sqamemal!
hmm this could be a very hot topic. Bots can be both positive and negative when it comes to steem. Some of the most recognizable bots like @cheetah and @randowhale serve their purpose but are limited and sometimes dont work well. When using bots a site like steemit loses the human connection that it what makes steemit truly unique to begin with. Gotta tread lightly in this arena
Exactly Jason and I appreciate your feedback here about the ups and downs of bots on Steem!
Good stuff. Jerry any chance you are introduced in doing an interview? Would help spread some light on what you are able about to a group I am involved in and would also be a fun interview, nothing too serious
Amazing tips, I had no idea about curation rewards and how they worked!
Thank you @jerrybanfield for the information.
I already applied another strategy delegating some of my SP that you mentioned in another post earlier.
So let's try autovoters this time. 👍
Love your post very useful and great info ;)
Voting after 30 mins of post publish gives most rewards!
I feel the auto upvote option should be out of the equation. For projects like @curie the auto upvote option does help the author who is getting the upvote but we can't find make steemit a game rather than just making it a community to exchange value to each other.
It's quite frustrating to see that almost all trending authors have less views than the number of upvotes they get. Like this post had 313 views at the moment but have 648 upvotes more than double the amount of views.
To be clear, I am not against you @jerrybanfield rather I am a big fan of your work and it's your Youtube video that brought me to Steemit. But for the sake of better system you can do something about it. I love your enthusiasm about steemit and your work towards it's improvement including the project Steemj.
Keep doing the good work bro. Upvoted you for the witness too:)
I believe that this is thorough and helpful to all to understand the direction things are going, but I also see it as an advertisement to lead people to set your posts on peoples' autovoting setup to highly boost your rewards. I wish people were inspired to do it manually since you're supposed to actually READ the content you're voting on right?
Isn't that something that's highly stressed as well? Autovoting destroys the spirit of curation and part of Steemmit's mission. Now it's just about finding profit.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do I suppose. Thanks for the valuable info either way.
Hey @jerrybanfield, nice post!
For those Noobies interested in earning a boost on their Curation Rewards, check out this post and follow to join the next:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitromney/noobie-curation-fund
I can confirm this is legit. The initiative just started though
Thanks @flamegirl!
I hope you consider adding this Floridian to your SteemVoter, Jerry! 😄 I added you to mine a while back 💯♨️❤️
I have my reservations about this whole system of remuneration. I guess all this will change over time into a quality-adjusted remuneration publications.
I really appreciate you taking the time to break all this down. I learned tons. I too have been against auto voting and bots but this made it all make sense. Sadly it seems that this part of the "game" may indeed lead to a community where less posts are actually read and engaged with which leaves us with essentially a platform based on simply following the top authors and trying to blindly upvote their content first. This leaves very little incentive for a "top author" with low integrity per se to continue putting out quality content as Steem really starts to blow up. If you know you have the auto voters waiting for your every post, why try so hard?
Wonderful news for you
Congratulations @jerrybanfield, this post is the forth most rewarded post (based on pending payouts) in the last 12 hours written by a Superhero or Legend account holder (accounts hold greater than 100 Mega Vests). The total number of posts by Superhero and Legend account holders during this period was 26 and the total pending payments to posts in these categories was $1333.13. To see the full list of highest paid posts across all accounts categories, click here.
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Personally I think Fanbase is a perfectly good idea. If I trust someone and want to give them more influence, I'd like to automatically upvote their posts to make them more visible.
For instance, if there is a cause I want to support, a great way to do it is make sure their posts are all upvoted as soon as possible!
I think auto-upvoting should be effectively banned and the upvote button removed from the feed.
Just upvoting popular authors automatically renders the whole concept null and handicaps smaller writers. I get that it can function like a Patreon for the writer but that is not the purpose of upvoting. Maybe Steemit needs something like that but I think upvotes should be for content a person thinks is good, so it should be slightly difficult to upvote something, not sutomatic.
Wow.....After reading this blog post and many of the comments, this confirms what I had thought was happening because I've seen many posts with quality information get hardly anything for their efforts and wondered myself, "why should I waste my time if this current system doesn't even reward a post this good?"
Now the question is, where does the motivation to continue using a broken system come from? I'm new to Steemit and now believe the best avenue to take is to seek out the best content relative to my interests and network with others doing the same.
Automation becomes a problem when it takes the socializing out of a social network. - Me
Useful information but I don't like it. It's against the whole idea.
Hi, Nice to meet you jerrybanfield, very good info about HF19, i like it, don't forget to visit my
profile @preciousboy. I'm new here. I have followed you. I hope you will also follow me, Upvote & Resteem my Post.
Best of Luck!
WoW @nx4440
how to add new account?
I've been kinda wondering about using these auto upvote tools. Thanks for the great info.
STEEM ON!!
great content! thanks for sharing
Very interesting post, take note.