I've noticed that there is a fair amount of controversy about self-upvoting. The way some people talk about it, you'd almost think it was evil. Other people say that the ability to upvote your own content is one of the perks of investing in the Steemit platform by powering up your STEEM.
I'm with the second group. I believe that when you tie up your STEEM by powering it up, you help out the currency by essentially taking it off the market. The more STEEM is kept away from the market, the less selling pressure and therefore, the better the price will be for those times when someone does want to sell STEEM.
It makes sense to reward people for performing such a valuable service to the entire STEEM ecosystem. The reward you get is that you get to influence where the monetary rewards go. That means that you can influence some of those rewards right into your wallet.
Steemit is engineered for blog post self-upvoting. Anytime you publish a post, the default option is to upvote it as soon as you publish it. You can choose to not upvote it, but the people who designed Steemit clearly expect that of course, you will upvote your own work. And why wouldn't you?
The controversy seems to focus on upvoting your own comments. Some people flat out won't upvote a comment that has been upvoted by its author. They figure the author already has taken his or her reward.
I believe it's kind of silly to make an issue out of that. If the comment is good and you liked it, then upvote it. Don't worry about who else upvoted it.
But, since I've encountered at least two people who claim they will never upvote a self-upvoted comment, I figure there are probably others out there. So just to be safe, I don't upvote my comments right away. That way, if one of those anti-author-comment-upvote people happens to read one and like it, then they'll upvote it and not be turned off by me tooting my own horn. Then a few days later, I might go back and upvote all my old comments. By then they are old news and no one is going to care, least of all, the people who originally upvoted them.
But I do upvote my work. It's not because I think everything I ever post here is amazing or brilliant. It's that since HF19, every comment goes from zero to 18 cents once I upvote it. It seems silly to me to turn down that money. After all, the reason I fairly regularly buy STEEM and then power it up is so that I can make money off it. Steemit is unique in that there's this intermediate step called posting content before you can realize any kind of return on investment. Of course, there is potential to make more money when others upvote my work, but it's sure nice to know that I have a way to easily earn a Dollar or more a day just by upvoting five or six of my own comments each day.
Another aspect of the comment self-upvoting controversy stems from the perception that those who upvote their own comments are not upvoting other people's content. It's like they're hogging all the rewards for themselves. Right or wrong, it's a real perception, so my advice is to make a point to upvote plenty of other people if you are going to upvote your own comments. Even if people think you're hogging the rewards you can have a clear conscience because you know your own voting habits. I personally follow several curation trails on Streemian and I also have automatic upvoting rules set up in my SteemVoter account, mostly for upvoting minnows. My voting strength hardly ever goes higher than 40 percent because of all the automatic voting I do for other people's work. In other words, no one can credibly claim I don't vote for other people. In addition, by delaying the self upvoting of many of my comments, hopefully that mitigates the perception that I upvote myself too much.
It's also important to remember that because Steemit is a social network, you generally do better on Steemit by being social and generous with your upvoting. If you want to get ahead, help others get ahead and you'll get there faster. That really does apply on Steemit. So, even though it's not wrong, if you're self-upvoting at the expense of upvoting others, you're really shooting yourself in the foot.
So I say upvote your own posts and comments all you want. But be sure to also upvote other people's work.
If you're reading this and happen to be a small minnow (less than 1,000 SP), feel free to let me know that so I can take a look at your work and see if it would be a good fit for wiser automatic voting.
I absolutely agree! Self-upvotes really work to help you indivdually and the platform collectively. That's really the genius of this whole thing and part of the reason why I think steemit has major potential. I'm just getting started here but I can already see the value of this long-term.
It's a really fun platform. I've met some amazing people here. Welcome!
I go with 50/50. The people who claim it's bad to ever upvote yourself they sound upset they're not popular or have enough Steem Power themselves.
Yes, generally people who protest too much have an axe to grind :)
It took me a while to understand the Steemit ecosystem and how to leverage my own investment. I DO upvote my own content and comments when I feel they are worthy of a ROI. I DO NOT however UV only myself... I consistently UV others as well. If I UV another's comment and then comment, I might assign myself the same value UV. What this does is help to build my own SP which in turn increases my VP to others to help them grow. I've read all the arguments about "raping" the rewards pool and I consider it to be nonsense - as long as you continue to use those rewards to UV others with even greater VP going forward. It's a two way street which in the end equates to a Pay-it-Forward system of growth. And until dolphins and whales begin UV'ing some of my hard work and content, I'll just have to take care of myself. It is afterall my money that is invested here.
Thank you very much for that information. As I am still learning about steemit, that is exciting to me. I will upvote my own comments and not feel bad.
That is how I'd like it. Just FYI, there are some strong feelings out there against self-upvoting of comments. I have since discovered two bots that are reinforcing this, one positively and one negatively. Gentlebot upvotes comments he likes (according to whatever algorithm he uses) unless they've already been self-upvoted. Smack down kitty has 100,000 delegated SP that he uses to downvote self-upvoted comments to match the value of the self-upvote. I have already posted an article on Gentlebot and hope to soon post one about Smack down kitty. So, while my own opinion of self upvoting hasn't changed, I did want to mention that people are designing bots to "enforce" their opinions in the other direction.
I’m also new to Steemit learning how all of this works. Your thoughts on this are helpful.
Thank you for sharing his perspective! I have not known what to do after reading all the different posts. I started out not and then did and then not...gah! Glad to have a new perspective on it, with which I think I completely agree! I like the thought of waiting to upvote. Makes much sense to me.
I feel that if you will upvote 50% yourself and 50% your friends is ok...
I don't upvote my comments generally
@wiser, I don't really see anything inherently wrong with upvoting one's own comments... although I choose not to, most of the time. My personal perception is that Steemit is primarily a community and "gift economy," and if you use most of your voting power on yourself it can end up thinning the community. I think the concern also has been about the quality of what people upvote... it's one thing to upvote a meaningful comment that engages the original content... quite another to scatter "nice post" around the site and then upvote yourself 100% for doing so. If everybody did so... why would anyone bother to post anything worthwhile? And then, why would anyone bother to join the site? And with nobody bothering to join, what would happen to the price of Steem?
Just playing Devil's advocate here.
All fair points. I believe that those who are too narrowly focused (read, on themselves) when upvoting ultimately won't do very well here, so they kind of weed themselves out. For that reason I'm not too concerned. Personally, I avoid commenting or posting unless I actually have something to say, and I think posting empty words will also ultimately hurt someone because they then get the reputation of producing poor quality content. Again, those people will weed themselves out.
I think it's ok to upvote your own comments on occasion. One overlooked point is, if you are here every day up voting others, then over time you can help others more if you also up vote yourself to add more voting power for future votes from the steem power you give yourself. Not worded well, but its late here! :P
Excellent point. And it's really fun to be able to add value to other people's work. That in and of itself can get addicting!
I fully agree with you on all your points. I see no reason why you can't upvote your own posts or comments. I have set up my steemvoter account as well as streemian account again, but I have chosen specific people I have been following for a long time now and then I manually upvote people when I have time.
Looks like a good plan.
I rarely upvote my own comments but if I make an especially good one I will upvote it. I've noticed a bunch of minnows making lists of people that upvote their own comments and trying to flag them. Now I must admit there are a couple of people that upvote their own comments for a lot of money without a upvoting the original posters blog. That is not cool. But if you made a good comment you should definitely be able to upvote it as long as you also upvoted the original posters blog.
You bring up some additional good points about voting etiquette. As a general rule, if you make a comment on someone's blog post, it is courteous to upvote the post as well. But if it's a post that already has tons of upvotes and a high monetary value, that might be grounds for an exception (as it is less likely to be noticed). I don't always apply this to someone else's comment, though. If I really don't like the comment, but feel it needs a response, I'm not going to upvote it just because I responded.
As for the minnows making lists of people who upvote their comments, I would say they should probably be focused on producing great content themselves and not be so hung up on what others are doing.
Absolutely! Share and share 'equitably' alike is a good approach!
Nice post. @wiser I just Followed you. Please follow me
Actually, just FYI, asking for follows (unless specifically asked to do so) is kind of considered a breach of Steemit etiquette. I'll take a look at your work, though :)
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Jul 12. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $16.44 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
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I don't self upvote as often now. Not because I think it is in some way wrong though. I host several tags like #oldtimers, #monochromemonday and #treetuesday. I try to spread the love around there. (I'm not sure that it helps me in any way, but that's ok). I also try to upvote decent comments on my posts :)
thank you for sharing this. It is more valueable to those who rent SP.