Ok, I'm back from the gym. And slightly dead. That class hurt!
I get where you're coming from as well. You've got a decent stake in steemit and it makes sense to play the game to get the highest rewards. You've weighed up the benefits of steemit compared to other investments. I get this, I have ploughed a decent chunk of money into steemit too, which obviously I could have put into other cryptos. So I don't begrudge you for upvoting your content straight away to maximise your own curation. That makes perfect sense from your perspective and I do it with my stuff. But it is a game, and all the choices we make regarding voting come with tradeoffs, regardless of who you are. I also understand why you would look at selling your vote. Financially it is attractive and I don't begrudge you for that either. In fact, I bought one of your votes on a previous post!
I think the real problem is this is all new. These things don't exist anywhere else which we can look at for guidance so of course, the unintended consequences are playing out in real time, which we all have to deal with. Unfortunately, the last few days has shown that some people with a lot of power have taken it upon themselves to decide what is good content and what isn't. This is my main problem at the moment. The thing I like about steemit is it should let the market decide what is good or shit content. In reality, this is not happening. However, I hope that over time, most of these problems will get resolved so we can just get back to doing fun stuff, and that steem will moon and make us rich.
I'm almost certain that if this place survives, over time it'll slowly balance out and improve
I'm just not sure what to do in the meantime. I either vote myself up aggressively to justify working really hard on the content, and even then it's hard to make more than just renting it out, or I just rent it out and sit back like a lot of others have done, many of whom far larger stakeholders than me. Either way the rewards are leaving the pool, a lot of it is either going back to myself, or to the average vote buyer whose quality of work is questionable, not implying yourself.
You can see how content creators who invested in Steem face this dilemma. They basically stand to make about as much doing absolutely nothing while avoiding all the controversy of self voting etc.
I can't afford to pass up on the level of rewards I can get from doing absolutely nothing and renting it out. So is that what I should do?
The rewards will be leaving the pool either way, to traf or to the buyers is basically what everyone gets to decide
Yeah it's tough. I don't know what you should do. Either way you are a target at the moment cos your vote is worth a lot so you are being watched. Certain people will come at you for renting out your vote but they will also come at your self voting. It's a sucky situation.