I suffer periodically from my greed.
Here on Steem I'm happy to support contests by @deemarshall, also my own Pinky and Spiky Drawing Contest as well as Secrets of Organ Playing Contest. However, I sometimes start to feel that my own rewards are too small and try to find some ways to maximize my investment. This happens when I start comparing my own rewards with what other people get for their posts.
The latest episode happened last Friday. I delegated 30000 SP to a bot (doesn't matter which one, but if you are very curious, you can use steemworld to find out as it is public record on the blockchain) in order to receive daily payouts. Not only I did this for my account but for my wife's @laputis account too (8000 SP). By the way, it was @laputis who reminded me about my greed so that I would stop fooling myself about the reasons of my actions. She knows me too well...
All of the sudden our votes dropped significantly, of course. But I thought, that's OK, now we will get more Steem. This Steem would go to donations.
As if this wasn't enough, I also started a powerdown of some portion of SP from my and @laputis accounts. This Steem I figured we can use to buy upvotes from bidbots. About 100 Steem a day. And so our post rewards will become larger. How much larger? Let's just say the profit should be about 2 Steem per day from bid bods for each of us.
Who wins from these actions? Our community or us? Or both?
Contest winners would still get their prizes but since our votes values have dropped significantly, even though we upvote every eligible contest entry, they won't get much at all because so much SP was being delegated to the bot. As a result, people who depended not on prizes but on our upvotes wouldn't feel sufficiently motivated to submit their entries anymore. On some level it's OK because only really serious contestants would enter, those who would sacrifice quality and originality for a quick buck would move somewhere else.
Promoting our posts through bidbots would also require me to send Steem and post links every day which would start to be a burden very soon.
But most of all I didn't like the feeling of this greed.
I know we all want a better ROI and this is a natural feeling. But at what cost? When you win, someone loses... In this case the community loses. They don't receive enough support. And for some, this support means ability to feed their families. For example, people from Venezuela would cash out a portion of the SBD they received from their posts to buy food.
So...
After just one day I removed my and @laputis SP delegations to this bot. On May 1st everything should return to normal and our support to the community should be at the same rate as before. Our accounts would grow at a much lesser rate but many more people would be happier.
By the way, this bidbot issue could be solved by reversing the rewards: 75 percent would go to curators and 25 percent to the author. Then buying upvotes wouldn't be profitable any more and we would see more natural curation and engagement on this platform. @spectrumecons has written a detailed post about this:
Is the Steem ecosystem in disequilibrium? (Part 5 – Combination of solutions):
https://steemit.com/steem/@spectrumecons/is-the-steem-ecosystem-in-disequilibrium-part-5-combination-of-solutions
So here's the strategy for me to fight my greed:
I need to focus on the work and not on the result. The work is something I can control. I can create better posts, engage with my favorite authors more. But I can't control the result. I can't predict how fast my followers count will grow; I won't know in advance how much my posts will earn (well, with steemworld I could see this week's payouts but I won't see what my rewards are likely to be a year from now, for example); I can't control the price of Steem which affects not only reward pool but user engagement in general.
But I can try to create the best blog posts for my readers. Write something that I myself would want to read.
This strategy removes the stress and constant pressure I face if I always want to grow my account. It gives peace of mind and let's me focus on creating and engaging. Not only I'll sleep better at night knowing that I'm doing the right thing but my community will be happier too.
What do you think? Do you also feel this greed sometimes? If you do, how do you fight it?
I feel similarly but, I don't call it greed. There is nothing wrong with earning per se, but it might depend if someone is earning 100 percent on their stake. It also depends on how it is being used after. I have had between 7-10 k of free delegations going out of my account since 2017 and I think it has helped people engage and grow, which has in turn helped others engage and grow. However, if I only do this and don't grow myself, my ability to distribute more in the future is limited too. I delegate to @ocdb which is an @ocd initiative and it helps authors grow and most of them I think power up and note on others. In time, this distributes a lot more. Bidbots aren't great but, here they are and they aren't going anywhere until applications are more profitable than them. There are many factors involved here though and steem is not a closed economy. You bought most of your stake with earnings on off-platform work and help people on platform with it. You could have bought Apple shares instead and helped no one.
We also delegate to @qurator which is an initiative to manually curate quality content. So through this delegation we help even more people.
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you so much for participating in the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!