WHY I COULDN'T UPVOTE, COMMENT AND POST FOR 3 DAYS!
For the past 3 days I was not able to upvote, post or comment: More than 70 hours have passed since my last blogpost and more than 60 hours have passed since my last comment. Steemit had forbidden me to speak and all I could do was read.
The cause of this trouble: No remaining bandwidth!
I would like to apologise to all my followers and others who commented on my articles who were expecting a reply; there are a lot of comments which I cannot answer because my account did not have enough bandwidth. I am making this announcement for everyone to be aware that I am experiencing these issues and I will be trying to fix them. For people who have never heard of these bandwidth problems on Steemit, please read the article as you will find useful information that is important to know.
- Here is a short explanation of the problem:
The bandwidth limit is mostly occuring with new Steemit-users who have little Steem Power. These people, myself included, apparently break the guidelines of Steemit and our accounts can get temporarily limited! In other words when your account is limited you can't do anything: no posting, no voting, no commenting.
In case you didn't know you can view my remaining bandwidth and voting power on this page: https://steemd.com/@maxdigi
You can also view your own voting power and remaining bandwidth by replacing my username in the link and put yours instead.
6 ways to fix the bandwidth issues
Luckily there are a few ways to avoid this message and reduce your bandwidth usage, but I wish I had known them sooner:
1. Don't vote too much
Voting uses Steem Power and also takes away bandwidth from your account. This means we should all keep in mind to only upvote qualitative content, content worth your upvote and worth your bandwidth.
It's even more important to know that unvoting, so taking away your vote of a post is not a good idea; this will take away the curation reward you might get for that vote and you will have used twice as much bandwidth. Unvoting also uses bandwidth from your account, so if you did upvote a post and you would like to remove it, keep this in mind!
2. Don't follow everyone
Now this is something I wish I had known a lot sooner... As I tried to expand my network and found new people who wanted to follow me, I also followed a lot of them back in order to gain their respect and to show them my support. This seems to be draining a lot of my remaining bandwidth, now it also appears that having a lot of followers with low Steem Power will use up a big piece of your bandwidth as well.
Now I learned the hard way that I have been making mistakes, this problem in particular seems very hard to fix: I could try stop following some people, but unfollowing will also reduce my bandwidth and doing this would probably silence me for a few more days.
3. Don't comment to comment
Another thing I used to do was reacting to everyone on all my articles, to me this felt normal and was a way of being polite to my readers. I also regularly went to the introduceyourself-section to welcome new members and refer them to my blog.
Steemit does not approve this behavior: We should only bring value to the platform. This bandwidth-issue in some way also supports my previous article in which I stated everyone should remember to keep the posting quality high and that quantity doesn't matter, quality must always take precedence over quantity. Read my previous article here
4. Don't resteem too much articles
Resteeming also takes away some of your remaining bandwidth!
5. Don't edit your posts or comments (if it's not necessary)
It's normal that bloggers sometimes make mistakes in posts or comments, not everyone is a perfect native English-speaker, but it is important to keep in mind that editing posts or comments will also use bandwidth. This is why you should always read your posts and comments a few times before posting so that you don't have to edit them!
6. Powering-up
As you read in the beginning of my post, the bandwidth limit only happens to accounts with low Steem-Power. So a solution can be to power up your Steemit account. You can do this by buying STEEM and converting it to SP or by buying SP directly from blocktrades.
Important note: You will not be able to upgrade your Steem-power by converting STEEM when your bandwidth limit is reached: You will have to wait for your bandwidth to come back before you are able to power up, converting STEEM also uses bandwidth...
What will I do in the future to avoid this issue?
Basically to fix these bandwidth issues I will have to drastically reduce my interaction with the community, which I really don't want, but it seems I'm forced to do at least some of these things:
- I will not be able to react on every comment anymore
- I will not be able to upvote all the content I like
- I will not be able to resteem all the content I like
- Slowly I will have to reduce my following (meaning the people I am following)
Next to these 4 bulletpoints and last but definitely not least:
I will focus on Powering-Up my Steemit-account!
Today I have already bought Steem Power worth 0.25 LTC in order to publish this article. If I did not power up who knows for how long I would not be able to express myself. Hopefully I can invest more in the future and increasy my total bandwidth!
As you might have noticed there is a little icon next to the title of this article; this icon means I have chosen to Power-Up my Steemit-account with all the rewards for this particular post. My next posts will all be like this with the main purpose of being able to interact with you more!
Smash that upvote please to help me increase my Steem Power!
Your opinion
As always I want your opinion on the article but also specifically on this question:
Isn't Steemit basically supporting inequality by limitting the bandwidth usage of low accounts?
My explanation:
Don't get me wrong, I love Steemit, I love the cryptocurrency, I love the community. But today I was basically forced to spend money in order to run my blog the way I want and react to my followers... Doesn't this bandwidth rule only benefit the Whales? I don't see them complaining; they can post and comment all day long and build a network way faster than others. Seems a little unfair to me.
If you have any other suggestions on how to solve the bandwidth issue, please let me know!
I want to thank you all for your understanding! I am very happy with the growth of my blog and I hope we can continue this trend.
Thank you for reading.
Feel free to upvote, comment, resteem and/or follow my blog @maxdigi if you liked this post! I greatly appreciate your support.
Cheers,
MAXIDIGI
Quick reply to this you only have 5%!! I've been having this issue for days. The bandwidth comes in in waves. You could be at 50% one minute and -150% the other. (that's literately what I was at). I just keep looking at it. I just take it as a sign to actually work. lol Thanks for the details.
You can probably get on around midnight EST but if you are active too much at night good luck getting on in the daytime. I've been blogging about my issues. It's a slow process to get your bandwidth back. I miss upvoting like crazy. lol
I’m new. This is a very interesting issue. Thanks for sharing! I found it very informative.
Look at it now! Wouldn't it be great if it were like that all day.
https://steemd.com/@maxdigi
I’ve been locked out by this bandwidth issues up to half a day!! Luckily not 3 days! I am putting all my Steem and SD into Steem Power for the foreseeable future.
Don't follow too much people, I think this is what causes the extreme bandwidth problem for my blog, but I'm not really sure though. Would love to hear more opinions from people with the same issues.
Now it gets frustrating not knowing which comments I should answer and which I should not answer!
I love you all! Steemit is making me a bad person lol
I suspect that it's the act of initiating the follow that affects the bandwidth, not the continued following of a person. Presumably, when you press follow, that's recorded in the blockchain, and when you press unfollow, it's the same.
Thanks for the remark, I think you are right.
You got a 1.74% upvote from @nado.bot courtesy of @maxdigi!
Send at least 0.1 SBD to participate in bid and get upvote of 0%-100% with full voting power.
Sneaky Ninja Attack! You have been defended with a 0.76% vote... I was summoned by @maxdigi! I have done their bidding and now I will vanish...Whoosh
Interesting. I never noticed this even when I was new to Steemit. I assumed the bandwith was how much media you could upload in a given time frame, such as high res images. I didn't realise it was every aspect of Steemit that affected your bandwith.
You got a 1.18% upvote from @upmewhale courtesy of @maxdigi!
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This is a well written post! I too have had to deal with the bandwidth limit a lot lately and I really wish I knew about it before I got the warning. Mine would also go up and then back to the negative without me even doing a single thing on Steemit.
Literally this issue is haunting me !! That’s is the reason I’m waking up early in the morning :) . My parents are getting shocked with my early wake up habits ;)
Huh so that is where you had vanished to cause didn`t see you post anything new for a bit in the feed. Glad you are back this issue I have not encountered yet myself could it be I just got lucky?? Since joining I have been doing well pretty much everything you listed in this post :o I am glad you made it clear that all these actions can affect the limit. I too try and reply to every comment and I do upvote often aswell. Ah does posting to dtube also affect this? because I mainly go there and upload stuff.
I have no idea if your activity on dtube also affects this but I don't think so. As long as you don't follow too much people you should be fine with your current bandwidth but I'm sure you will run into the same problems if your blog grows and you don't invest in Steempower. I'm hoping this terror will leave you alone. It's very annoying. :-) Thanks for your comment!
Ah okay so right now just avoid following too many people ah is a bit tough to resist that cause there are so many amazing folks here that I`d love to give some support to but if it is a risk to my bandwidth I will hold back for now till I start heh leveling up on this platform. I have a feeling tho maybe my dtube posting does not affect this either so I suppose my being mostly active there saved me big time from this issue. Hm I am not helping myself much tho by replying to nearly everything ah is so hard to just leave comments sitting ya know? And no problem and glad to see you back here! Hope you can work your way around this issue and continue posting great stuff!
resteeming this, I ran into the same issue and I could not find a good article as to why it was happening and what contributed to it and what I could do.
They really should state that its expected you purchase SP (50-100 bucks worth) in order to actually use your new account when you are signing up, if you are coming to the platform expecting a free space to express yourself and engage, you're not getting that.
It would take a FTP (free to play) account probably half a year of frustrating posts to make enough SP to get actually rolling. Very deceptive, they should be blatant like EA and the Battlefront launch .... we all hated it but at least we knew how bad they planned to screw us
Yes I agree with you on this. Thanks for the resteem!
Investing around 50 bucks definitely helps but I still run out of bandwidth regularly! At least now I can make some upvotes and comments, not a lot though. I don't know why Steemit chooses not to inform the members of these limits, they will have their reasons I guess...
I'm planning on powering-up more in the future. :-)
Great article, it is very very useful for newcomers and me too.
Fortunately I have enough 'remaining bandwidth' now and will check from time to time.
Thanks!
That´s interesting. Ii never ran into this problem and I´m only reading about it recently. I haven´t used Steemit different than you and I encourage people to resteem much more, because this helps authors even more than "just" upvoting. Maybe it´s because I am powering up as much as I can and plan to do so also in the future.
Ive had the same issues. It’s only getting worse. I think more witnesses should talk about fixing the bandwidth issue
You are right, its very unfair and it makes it very hard for new users to get very deeply engaged with the steemit platform... what bothers me is that I only can use steemit a lot at night and not much in the morning cause the bandwidth lowers severely...
And you mentioned a few things I did not know. But thats why I usually limit my steemit activity to 3-4 New Members welcome daily, 4-5 Feed Commenting/Upvoting, post 1 of my own blog articles a day and reply to 3-5 comments. Thats it daily for me. :)
I'm running into the same issue. I suppose it's a good thing on one hand because it makes me think about what I'm posting and writing, but on the other hand...it kind of sucks.
I feel you! Powering-up your account definitely helps though, I'm experiencing less issues since I bought more Steem Power.