While whales and dolphins are incentivised to curate tactfully in order to make a profit, minnows like me don’t have enough steem power to play this game.
So what is it that compells a minnow like me to give my quarter worth of a vote?
Nothing really…
I confess as a minnow there is little incentive for me to not be arbitrary with my quarter cent worth vote.
My vote won’t have much impact in most cases, unless you’re already trending. However, I would bet I’m not the only person with these voting tendencies.
I’m not proud of this that’s what makes it a confession
Reasons I might upvote / flag / dismiss a post
My vote weighs nothing
Most of the time when I vote on something the payout doesn’t change. The way the curation works, the more a post is making, the more each recurring vote weighs. So when I vote on something that is already trending, the payout increases sometimes significantly enough to make me feel like I can have impact.
There's obviously a lot of people who vote on what's already trending. How else does somebody make over $8K on a blog post. I'd love to know what percentage of the 700 people who voted for the post, actually read it. Considering there is a budget to how much steem we can distribute, should we really be giving away our curating powers to those who are already doing well?
My own posts & comments
Most of the time I only upvote my main posts and not my comments, however sometimes having seen my comment wash down the thread too far for anyone to bother reading it I have given myself a naughty upvote.
This naughty upvote doesn't give me any payout as a minnow, but if it did, it should probably be frowned upon. I mean doesn't everybody value their own opinions above the others. And imagine if it became the norm for minnows to do this... It wouldn't be long before it also became the norm for dolphins and slowly but surely even the whales! I'm speculating of course.
Diplomacy
Often after reading a post I have questions I’d like to ask. If the author hasn’t got many votes yet, then I feel like it would be rude to ask the question without voting first.
Perhaps this one is OK for a minnow though. I mean, if not many people have voted then my vote isn't worth anything anyway and it's worth the quarter penny to get the answer. Honestly though, most people wouldn't actually notice if I didn't vote but you know, just in case!
Your idea wouldn’t work
I often read posts about significant problems with steemit. I am always interested in reading proposed solutions even though most of the time, somebody if not me, will poke holes in it. If I don’t like your solution to this problem, despite your efforts, I dismiss them and keep my vote.
I'd like to think I would use my vote more wisely here. Even when ideas are not that great I think it's a good idea to encourage people to brainstorm and come up with ideas. If they are attempting to improve the steemit platform then they are doing something for the steemit community and that should definitely get rewarded even if their ideas won't work.
Click-bait
Even if I like your article, I won’t give it my vote if what enticed my curiosity to read it was irrelevant click-bait like a woman in a bikini for an article about veganism, or a phrase like ‘wait till you see what happened next’ in the title or first line.
Steemit doesn't pay you for the click. Click bait is just an unnecessary irritation here. I understand that you think a half naked woman attracts readers, but 50% of your potential readers likely have the opposite reaction.
Awww a cute lil puppy...
Before steemit came along, whenever I needed to switch off my brain for a bit, I would take out Facebook on my phone and go for a scroll. I wouldn’t actually read anything, I would just scroll down, like something, scroll down further, watch a video, scroll again and it was all very mindless. Now I do this with steemit… Which means I don’t always read the post… Sometimes I’m just in that scroll and vote mood where I just mindlessly ‘like’ things based on the title or thumbnail. For the same reason I might completely dismiss your well written article, having not even bothered to read it.
This one I am most ashamed of. I do this knowing that I shouldn't. I even tell myself to stop! But I'm in zombie mode... Not to worry my vote is pretty worthless. But I do think as it is now the steemit platform needs to be split in two: one platform for the content you don't have to click to read, and another for the articles which you shouldn't be able to vote for without at least entering the page first to read it.
Deep feelings of hate or admiration
When I come across an article about a public figure that I have a strong (positive or negative) opinion of, I can be stubborn with my vote. I often don’t read the post in detail but seek out whether this sheds a negative or positive light on them. Whether or not I agree with the perspective they give will determine whether I either upvote or dismiss your post.
We all do this I'm sure of it. I should really read the posts properly though and base my vote more on the writing and the argument that on the fact that I agree with them.
It has been tagged wrong
Usually if your post appears to not be relevant to what I’m looking for I can just dismiss your post, but sometimes curiosity gets the better of me. Sometimes I will wonder, what part of this is about #steemit, and I will read the whole article thoroughly to find that it isn’t about steemit at all and I find that I’ve wasted my time reading this. For this reason, you get a flag.
Again, I'm not the only one who does this. And I'm pretty sure most people consider this a good reason to flag somebody. The next one you might consider a little more dodgy though...
Revenge flag
Tit for tat is what they call it. It seemed like a really stupid reason to flag somebody when I first came upon it on steemit. But after getting my first flag on a comment on a post about a particular flag abuser, I decided to give a tat for his tit and with that began a flag war. Luckily I wasn’t the only person being flag abused and so when the recruits appeared his reputation was destroyed. But I've also taken revenge on a commenter when flagging him once just wasn't enough. After being indirectly called a whore, I went to the culprits page in search of other wrong-doings such as flag abuse or irrelevant spam. I still check this persons comments from time to time in case he ever decides to use that language on anyone else!
This is almost like a guilty pleasure... I realise I should just get over it when somebody is nasty, but online abuse and trolling have gotten to me for a long time before steemit came along. It shouldn't happen here. I won't involve anybody else if you're not abusing the platform itself, but if you get on my black list I'll be checking up on you, just waiting for a slip up... Oops... I don't even sound sorry about this one!
How much money has the article already made
Here’s a controversial one I’ve had to give careful consideration.
Let me ask you:
When you find a post that you really value as a contribution to your steemit network do you give them your vote because you think it’s worth...
1. the value of your vote
or
2. more than the value of the payout it has already acheived.
Before I started asking myself this question, I was finding the voting behaviour of some of the whales questionable. I don't think I need to say what whales, I know that I'm not the only person who questioned this use of the flag.
There were various arguments as to why the reasons for flagging were not good enough and I think a lot of people felt that the power of their vote had been negated which frustrates people as they find that they don't have even the little bit of power they thought they had.
The reasons given for this behaviour is to further distribute the rewards around the steemit community. Since the reward pool is limited, when a post does extremely well, the funds for this reward get pulled from everybody else whose content is also worth rewarding for its valuable contribution. It is better for more of us to get a little than for a few of us to get a lot.
What I hadn't realised, is that as the whales are competing for curation rewards, the use of a flag is at a cost to them. That vote could have been used for something that would reward them with $P but instead they choose to use it to further distribute the rewards to us. Believe it or not, it is really a selfless act when a whale uses a flag for the sake of making the platform more valuable to the rest of us.
Is this post worth more than the value it has already achieved?
What if we were all to ask ourselves the question above before we vote? Instead of just voting for something because you like it, but to actually consider a limit (say for example $500) to the amount any post is worth. Perhaps if you chose this number for yourself, and when reading a post that you liked that was above this number already (say $1000) you could keep your vote for somebody who needs it more.