Hey Steemit,
My current self voting policy is 1/3 to me and 2/3 for everyone else. Keep in mind that when I say 1/3 to myself, this is more of a theoretical maximum, rather than something I actually practice.
Right now, I don't even think I vote 1/10th for myself. I can't be bothered to look at my history and do the math, but that's my gut feel.
I think I'd be ok with someone who voted 50% themself and 50% everyone else. It's not the best but..I could live with it.
However if you are not even voting for others half the time? I have a problem with this, very selfish voting.
Dan worried about this too, and you see it in the whitepaper (you have read the whitepaper yes?):
The naive voting process creates a Prisoner's Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.
- From the Holy Whitepaper...
I love that the Prisoner's Dilemma is mentioned here. This is the classic example. A prisoner can benefit in the short term by acting in his own self interest, but cooperating prisoners will do even better in the long run.
Mr. Big Investor might say:
Hey Neoxian, I just dropped 60000 USD on steem, why shouldn't I vote myself twenties?
Dude, I totally get where you are coming from. I've dropped some serious cash into Steem myself, and feel sorely tempted to scoop up some bills back. But now..both you and I are heavily invested in Steem, and Steemit. We want this thing to take off right? (And ultimately get more rich, hey I'm not a saint here).
To many large SP accounts voting for themself and Steemit becomes this:
(Ouroboros pic from aquariusthewaterbearer.com)
The Ouroborus, a snake eating it's own tail. You may rack up mountains of SteemPower, but if Steem falls below 10 cents due to lack of network effects, then it all comes to nothing.
Steemit is a social system, fleshy human beings, interacting with each other, discussing, learning, being entertained, spending money is what we need. So sure, quietly build up your steem power if you must, but also share the love. This is the true path to success.
Thanks very much. One thing recent game theory has concluded is that "bad" behaviour - defined as sub-optimal - cannot be wholly eradicated, but can be minimised. This means this discussion can move forward towards an algorithm that is encoded that minimises the effect self-voting and voting-rings on the whole system, while still allowing some measure of it.
I already made a proposal about this a couple of weeks ago; section 13 in this article
This makes perfect sense, if more do this Steemit will fly a very very long way.
If accounts don't start to do this....Steemit will as you show, end up swallowing itself and there will be many many losing out on invested money and the reputation of Steemit will be totally destroyed.
It is a bad situation right now with 'pay for upvotes' as most seem to just upvote themselves and voting 'clubs' are also voting blindly on content...anything could get collectively upvoted into an undeservingly high place.
upvote & resteem
Great post. I completely understand self-voting and I do it myself. I just feel that I need to give some love to the rest of the community aswell, otherwise this whole idea Steemit is based on will fail. I don't think the platform can work if no one votes for others. That would just ruin the price in the long run.
I agree 100%. I do vote for myself, but probably have a similar ratio to you. It's idiotic to only vote for yourself strategically, as you won't get return votes.
Well said, I can see that you really apply it yourself but not just saying it. Appreciate your help to countless Steemians. If everyone apply this voting policy, Steemit will have become a great platform!
Man I totally agree, I don't see how the site can be healthy with that going on. We need to bump up curation to 40% and put a limit on self voting. Maybe 3 a day. Also for the good of the platform. Might need to put in place you can't vote on the same person within a 48 hour window.
This helps me understand and I do self vote but at about the same rate as you. I think the more Steem Power you have the more important it is to make sure you are voting for others in amounts equal to or greater than your own self votes.
Yeah it's important that everyone votes for others and not only themselves. I'm glad you're bringing this up !
I didn't know it was called the Ouroborus. It's hard to know what a inappropriate level of self-voting is.
According to our tool you're not much of a self-voter:
http://www.steemreports.com/votes-graph/?accounts=neoxian
(it doesn't quantify yet though)
Pretty nice tool there.
agree, but very difficult to convince people who invested a lot.
@neoxian - Well said. While it is natural for large investors to think there is nothing wrong in earning return on investment through self votes (and there really isn't - everyone has a right to use their own steem as they want), they should realize that the Steemit platform can get more valuable if Others get an opportunity to earn through their blogs (which is based on others upvoting their blogs). I think this truth will be realized soon by every one. Thank for sharing and voicing concerns. Upvoted.
At my end - after I created a GIF based post on 'Bathing beauties - Save water Elephant style' , I have posted a blog with a concern about Endangered species of Ground Hornbill. I would be honored if you take a look and help me spread the message. Your valuable comments will be eagerly awaited. Thanks
i vote myself as long as i can and i hate it as long as it is possible.
fundamentally i'm against voting myself except my own post.
to vote your own comment is contrary to common sense.
I agree with you, I feel the same.
@neoxian finally there's someone who spoke out my heart. I've been thinking about it for a while now and it's really getting out of hands. Many people just votes their own comments and that needs to stop! Respect and thumbs up for your post! 👍🏻
It really disturbs me when I go on to some posts and see that the creator of the post purely upvotes himself and every comment that he makes.
It is sad to see how greedy some people can be for money but that is what this world is fueled by. Greed and Materialism.
For this site to keep growing and for it not to keep losing users we do need to start upvoting others.
I try to upvote a couple of meaningful posts on my blogs to reward their work and commitment to my work.
I hope this post can spread awareness and lead to people being more giving.
Thank you @neoxian
It may not be greed. As a newbie, there are many types of advice. So far I have learnt;
Vote for yourself
Do not vote for yourself
As a minnow do 100% powerup.
For the community do not do 100% power up
Add many people to broaden the community.
Do not add alot otherwise the feed is a nightmare.
Hunt for whales.
Do not expect whales to care.
Follow trends.
Do not follow trends if there are already many votes....
Alot of (mis)information.
For me now, I trial different methods to see what feels right for me. Right now;
So, for a new world such as this, I am forgiving.
I am less tolerant of people who try to find profiting loopholes, such as bot voting, spamming etc.
I agree
I agree @neoxian! You can't stop others from self voting but you touched on a very impt point which is remembering Steemit.com is a social platform - so giving to others is just as impt or even more impt than looking out for yourself..
Totally agree with you. And by upvoting others whales/you give back to the community, making the community bigger, thus benefiting yourself in the future as well
Thats the spirit @neoxian ♻
I agree, we must share the excess with the next, as Santo Tomas de Aquino said.
We should only take care to not impose this, because the consequence would be to transform Steemit into some socialist project.
This is more about the morale of the individual than forcing people to do this.
but arent we a decentralized socialist network? or oh I guess i ts called a "social" network like "social" democrats in europe or "democratic " socialists...hey with all the voting i guess programs like minnowbooster and democratic socialist welfare programs l;ol
they should make u work for welfare
like if u want a job on steemit we should pay people to go market steemit on facebook and youtube comments and leave lots of social media posts about steemit, report back with screenshots and theyll get paid a small stipend as a way to make money and we can pay for it all with upvotes from posts showing how many social media posts we were able to generate with our army of minnows all seeking "steemit jobs" and we can incorporate @stellabelle 's #steemitgigs and we can create a system so efficeint at finding steemit minnows who want jhobs that we will run out of workers! like a good economy SHOULD do! it should be diffiocult to find employees ! we could create SO much work that all 7 billion humans can have a job! its not hard! its amater of just thinking up more companies! we just need more companies thatr work! its not like its something we cant do, wherever you havepeople you have jobs because peopel spendmoney peopel need to be kept free and indivisualistic and free markets must be allowed to operate with the most minimal of gfovernment interferance as the government ALWAYS makes things worse unless your Eisenhower building the highways or rebuilding europe with the marshal plan, but our leaders today are not that Noble. We have a president who is TRYING to be noble but almost none else is down to give up their assets and money to fuckin help America for a few years, noone wants to stop thinking about themselves, and ALOT of us just need to become self sufficient and then more and more will see how cool it really is to actually give back and actually make the world better more efficient more vibrant to invent some new form of architecture that people start building everywhere that realy makes the world a nicer place, its al possible, we can change everything including the sidewalks themselves, we an rearrange everything to look and perform better, we can redesign our towns and cities and roads to work better and to allow humans to have nice spaces they can walk through we can all have those nice little italian style town squares with coffee shops etc and parks, and we can all have little ewok villages in the trees, we can have a fractal paradise
I am also concerned with Steemit feeding a welfare/begging culture under the guise of coin distribution = network survival.
We all need to work for our coins, accepting the market value of our production, even when we think it should be higher. (Try making Adsense rev. from a WordPress blog...)
Some of that work can happen off network, as you mentioned Zack.
Steemians tend to heavily reward promotion of Steemit on rival platforms. Sounds like an excellent job for minnows, or anyone else really.
I was thinking that there will a certain percentage who will just always vote for themselves and that's what you get. It's their state of mind and it will never change. They still invested so ok.
But there are others who can be convinced and who will be enthusiastic if they change their ways. Here's hoping :)
True. There will always be a spectrum in a population
My practice is to vote on my own posts...maybe twice daily. The rest of my votes go to other writers. The way I see it this practice helps them by way of me giving out a few pennies of SBD here and there, and it definitely helps me grow my reputation score and getting to know some of the other creators here. I used to upvote some of my own comments, but I just don't feel right about that practice. Praise in this regard is better if it comes from somebody else. :-)
I totally agree on this.. we have to upvote others if they deserve... Even I never upvoted my comment because I think that's not right..if people will like it then they will if I deserve... And even I'm not upvoting my own post too from a long time... Because i hope people will notice if my post deserve or not. I agree on your concept what you are trying to explain and I liked that The Ouroborus picture.. seems so true and perfect..
Short term gain versus long term wealth?
Most people upvoting & dumping like that aren't interested in the long game. But I don't know how you educate them on that. Steemit has so much more going for it than the simple power of compounding interest but most people aren't bright enough to figure that out.
I know what I'm talking about, I pissed away a few decades chasing the quick thrill and ending up with $400.808 SP
I only upvote my posts and normaly I post around 2 posts per day. The rest votes I spread for supporters and for minnows too. So that everybody gets a piece of the cake.
Resteemed :-)
Someone sent me here to read this and I really appreciate your insight and position and your attitude. It would only make sense to invest in the little guys or the place will collapse in time.
I was there when it happened to tsu last year. The exodus of the little people caused a huge collapse and then I don't know what happened. I was also on an art collaborative years ago that collapsed when a few at the top got famous(ish) and the rest got zero out of it and all left.
I'm trying to figure this place out so I can invite friends who are content creators like me. So far after a month here, I cannot invite friends. Too much confusion so far, but I have great hopes.
I'm so dumb that until reading this - I did not know that people were buying their way to power and then just letting the funds drain back post by post. That is a strategy alright.
I can see the appeal if you have money to invest. And I absolutely agree with taking back some percentage. That's only reasonable. I hope one day I can worry about what that percentage should be.
Also - white paper? No - never heard of it. I'm sure it's long and will fill my head with all kinds of new info. But you did not give a link so I guess I will add it to the many things I need to look for here. {{{Beats tired head on the keyboard.}}}
I really do love it here at steemit, but you're killing me Homes :)
https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
Thank you so much!!!
I'm okay with people getting some return on investment, but at this stage Steemit needs support. Voting for others encourages them to keep on using it. Steemit will fade if it's not really being used.
I agree. Some people are spending their all upvote only on them self. This need to be changed.
This is the answer to my question why you are kind to others by upvoting them. Every big investor should learn about this and realize that it is not good to solely vote for one's self as it hurts the steemit economy in the long run because of the points you raised in this article. @neoxian
Dear Whales
If everyone upvote their own posts, I'm afraid the goal of the steemit will not be achieved as founder want because when someone has a large sp power, he will upvote his posting without thinking about the quality of the post
Steem On Dude!
Admittedly, I vote for myself; I truly believe my work deserves that love. (...and at this point, my upvote value is symbolic, anyways.) There are some caveats, though — I never vote my own comments, because that feels...gross. I only upvote my post after a few hours, to make sure that I'm one of the lower cuts of curation. And I never post more than once a day, as the long stories or thorough photography that I do best takes me hours at a time to edit and put together. It adds up to about five upvotes a week for myself.
It's important to me that I spend time manually voting in my feed, and auto supporting some of the people that I know put out well created content day after day. It will take a long time to reach the point where I'm worth something for real, but I'm counting down to when I earn my slider so I can upvote every thoughtful comment on my work. Thanks for throwing this out there...people sometimes forget that the community aspect is such an integral part of the success of this platform.
One selfishness can kill the whole platform.
For @neoxian have actually spoken out.
Setting New example to all.
Hail to the Chief @neoxian
After someone told me not to upvote your own post and i tried to find some articles since then i never ever upvoted myself your post truely make sense in all aspects.
This is something even I really wanted to say but I can't because i'm new here but I do see lots of people who mostly vote themselves in post as well as comments ...
So I'm Thankful that you raised your opinion against such selfish people ... Shine on @neoxian !
I love how you've explained self voting, very well. Thanks for sharing.
I have a dilemma: to vote or not vote myself? Why is it allowed? When I had much more voting power than now, I very carefully upvoted my own posts, with only 10-15%. Now, when I have not too much voting power, I apply 50% or more for myself. Until now! Because I stopped it, I have to recover. Yes, the Ouroboros is a great illustration. Better to avoid this!
don't see me in a wrong way but i see those who have huge amount of SP they vote them self and they create their own group and give them self votes so what will be the use of this platform when you can decide by yourself how much i want to give myself.
you today clearly stated your policy of giving up voting policy i liked the fact that you are open to all ,i have seen your posts where you decline payments too , helping many people in times of need thats really nice of you i guess steemit need more people like you.
I guess we have to find a balance between rewarding oneself and helping the community. I usually just upvote my posts but not my comments. I save the rest for the @ocd project I'm in.
Awesome! I dont even give myself like 1 percent of my own upviotes! I may have to soon though, hopefully though I feel i make enough posts to be able to give out my upvotes alot but if i was like you and had a substantial amount of steempower i would be viewing it as income, id see it as potential money that has to goi tio someone or it gets wasted
it will get wasted if you dont upvote anything fir like what 5 days in a row and let ur upvote power get to 10 percebt? And ont use it? It will just not get used right? As long as my upvote power is below 100 percent i can just let it recharge and im not "wasting" any chances right?
i think this is more than faiur
its your right top upviote ur own posts comments and honestly u could jhust make comments and no posts and or just upvote a seperate account evenn and never ytell anyone and so giving ANY of ur upvote power rto anyone is more than generous!
iuts a whales right to upvote only themselves for as long as they want ESPCIALY if they lost a bunch of money investing in steemit at the wroing time and just wanna amke their money back, thats MUICH more attractive to us than the whale just vcashing out nd leaving steemit for good as a large investor! So we should be encouraging the rich to get richer because oim sorry biut the trickle down effect DOES work on steemit! how can you not see it hahaha when a whale gives you an upvote thats one of the coolest ways to spread wealth i cant think of a better way to distribute wealth more fair than steemit!
hyes its a SOCIAL system! HAHA I almnost called steemit a "Socialist Network " today lol I was gfetting tired while at Comic Con today yelling out "Get paid to blog join Steemit.coim !" and i blurted out "Join steemit its a decentralized socialism network ..uhh i mean SOCIAL network"
but yeah man go look at my recent post! me and @monkimo went to comiccon and got to show ALOT of people the steemit ad sign they made and we held up and yelled "steemit is like if Instragram paid you for posts and comments!
If everyone were to vote for theirselves there be no Steemit. And what ur saying is very true, I think u will be one with the greatest influence and riches due to upvoting of readers/participants in ur postings. People just blindly upvoting themselves will get zero attention and only be disliked for doing so.
That is a nice balanced view on self voting. Most people are on either extremes on opinions of self voting
I have no problem with self-pleasure, but to do it in public? I'll pass myself :-)
Cheers
Great post dude..! We all need to back ourselves as well as the community which is most important. Thanks alot @neoxian. This is very helpful for all..
I agree with you in that we need to act as a community, also with our votes. Self voting in itself I do not find an issue, but needs to be in balance. You seem to have this in balance with a maximum of 1/3 for yourself. I generally upvote my own posts with 100%, and post 1 to 3 times a day. I generally do not upvote my own comments, that leaves me 70-90% of my vote power for the community.
In the end we can only survive as a community when we share what we have, and we have vote power that we can share. The more we share, the more the individuals in our community can feel that we are a community and when we are a real community, then we will share more, I hope. We all shall be in it for the long term, since when only thinking short term, our community will fall apart and with that Steem will be de-valued in which we all loose.
The other day I was doing a calcultation. If I would buy and power up for 100k US$ worth of Steem / Steem Power and I'll vote every day 10x, every day starting with 100% vote power int he bucket, I would make about 60% return on annual bases, ie my 100k$ would become 160k$ provided that the value of Steem at the exchanges would keep the same value. That gave me a clear answer why self voting is not really profitable. Ok, yes, 60% annual return sounds a lot, but when crypto currencies can double on a daily bases, and Steem went up from around 6ct to 1,65$ within half a year, 60% return is nothing. So better to create a fantastic and great community and with that help Steem price to go up with another factor of 10, than start circle jerking and or even worse, self voting only. I assume when enough community members are following us, we will be able to come out very well, all of us.
Neat and precise. After reading reminds me the game "Star Craft" with cheat code "showmethemoney".
Some selfie people are spending their all upvote only on them self. Steemit should do something against this type of people.😕
the chain goes round and round and it will might eventually lead to fall.
you have some nice numbers keeping others in mind that's great.
I like the way you think @neoxian, always ahead of the pack my friend, cheers.
Its a nice way , what i can say just much respect for this :)
My policy for the moment anyways is:
Self vote my own blogs.
I do not upvote my comments. I think it behooves me in the long run to make a lot of authentic comments and upvote others' posts. I also upvote others' comments left on my posts. I usually upvote at an average of 15%. That allows me to make many votes, but also recharge so I can do it again tomorrow.
well said @neoxin , some of them are investors and others are actively participate on steem community. yes ofc i had brought some steem bucks to power up my account. but id does not give me a sufficient steem power. as i am not a investing guy, So i keep looking at other options . such as participating a Esteem project like that. now with the help of that project and big whales like you i am able to climb to 46 now. So i do 2 or 3 post per day and support my friends and followers too. I am very happy at the moment b'cos it is almost 3 weeks after Join with this Steem community . thanks for brainstorm steemit idea's @neoxian
I'm glad you added practical insight into "why you shouldn't vote yourself". Your reasoning for the betterment of the community to see STEEM take off and be successful is ultimately what we're looking for here.
I learned about Prisoner's Dilemma in college psychology classes and it's great Dan referenced this ahead of time and saw this as an issue.