So an interesting conversation with @eonwarped on Friday's Post sparked a thought: can I figure out from my voting behavior how much precisely I value an outgoing vote? What is playing the Core Game of creating and discovering content worth to me over the pure value of self-voting? (To be clear, this is the current actual self-vote value unadjusted for curation or timing. It's the return I would get if I voted my own comments and no one else did.)
Like most of us here I self-vote from time to time and vote my own interest from time to time. Most of my votes go out to other people but enough of them go to me that I should be able to figure out what premium over pure self-voting I feel is worth giving that vote to myself rather than others. In particular this is a good week for that because with delegations changing I've started spending some of my votes on upvoting @steembasicincome in order to get bonuses for their upvotes on my posts. If I wasn't doing that two weeks ago when my effective VP was 2200, and I was doing it last week when my effective SP was 1800, that sets a pretty narrow window for where my value on voting for self vs. voting for others lies.
The way SBI currently works is that a consistent 100% upvote to their daily posts doubles your effective shares and effectively doubles your weekly payout. Conveniently all of this comes in units of votes so we don't have to overcomplicate things just yet. Last week my vote was worth $0.28, and my base weekly SBI vote was worth $2.436. So I would be giving out $1.96 in votes in order to get $2.436 in votes back. SBI votes at 19 minutes and I vote later so curation should more or less balance out.
This gives us a premium of about 12.3% for our upper bound. When I was at 2200 SP my vote was worth about $0.35, so I would have been giving out $2.45 in votes for $2.436 back, which essentially gives us zero as our lower bound. At that time a vote for SBI would have been worth basically as much as a self-vote on a comment.
That's a pretty big range. Can we learn anything from where else I vote for self-benefit? Minute-zero self-voting on my posts is worth much more than a 12.3% premium, so that's not helpful. What about @qurator? They also return vote value for voting on their posts. I've been voting them $0.42 per week in order to get a vote back that varies with Steem price, which makes valuing it a bit more difficult, but even with the price low last week I got about $1.80 in additional votes for that, which is also obviously a much higher premium.
I spent some votes on @socialwallet but I have no idea how to quantify that and those were particularly at moments where I needed to vote on something before I went to sleep and didn't have other good options. Those votes did not make me happy, and I'm trying to do better at avoiding having high VP at those times.
So basically we're stuck with that 0-12.3% range, just for this account. I think it makes sense to double that for the 2000 SP I'm delegating to accounts that are primarily for outgoing votes, @asapers and @doctorworm. I get nothing but goodwill for the ASAPers delegation and Dr. Worm is all about the outgoing votes - it doesn't even earn curation when its autovotes work. (My other delegations have external reasons for not counting them. One was a mistake but I'm fulfilling the contract I agreed to, which expires next week. The other two are to accounts I use to do experiments in figuring out how these things work, obviously worth a lot to me.)
That puts us at 0% to 25%. Which isn't super-helpful. I can't necessarily get there from "at what point do I stop upvoting SBI?" because I'm not sure I can answer that to my satisfaction. (And my shares are increasing anyway.) It's convenient to have behavior to look at and not have to rely on self-awareness.
We can confirm the results of my self-assessment, however: I do put a premium of some sort on giving outgoing votes. It could theoretically be zero but that's unlikely, and it can't be lower or I would have been voting SBI all along.
We can also say that my premium is not more than 25%, or at least that if it is I've been voting SBI in error. My feeling is that it's pretty marginal, but I'm extremely biased by the fact that I'm this far into writing a post about it.
I'm going to pay attention to this and see if I can refine it by my response to other opportunities to use my vote in selfish fashion. If I can figure out a way to set up an experiment to determine the number more precisely I will, but it's hard to build an experiment to fairly judge the motivations of the person building it.
How about you? Does anyone else want to figure out what their own premium rate is? Those who never self-vote aren't going to be able to get good numbers, but if you vote selfishly some of the time you have the opportunity to figure out just how compelling the Core Game is to you. Which is probably one of the most important things to know about yourself on Steemit.
