Why you should wait to upvote your own posts
Up until right now I have always upvoted my own posts immediately upon posting. Starting with this post and going forward I am still going to upvote my own work (because I believe it is worth my upvote - otherwise I wouldn’t post it!) but I am now going to wait a day or two before doing so.
Why, you ask? The answer is to give more curation rewards to those who upvote my posts.
Recently there has been a lot of talk about increasing the 75/25 split of author/curation rewards or - even better - allowing authors to choose the curation reward split for their posts. While I cannot make any more than 25% of my post rewards go to curators, I can at least do what I can to make sure that not much LESS than 25% of my post rewards to go curators.
Reverse Auction System
Those of you who are familiar with the curation system know that there is what’s known as a “reverse auction” system for the first 30 minutes of a post being published. This means that votes that come in within 30 minutes of the post being created will give up a portion of their curation rewards to the post author.
So if a large amount of a post’s total rewards come within the first 30 minutes then more than 75% of the rewards will go to the author and less than 25% of the rewards will go to curators. Therefore if I submit my relatively large (~$1) vote immediately, then all of my curation rewards will instead be author rewards.
This doesn’t matter to me directly as I am also the author, but since curation rewards are weighted by the order and value of votes, my relatively large vote being first lowers the curation rewards that everyone else voting on my posts will receive.
More Curation Benefits Everyone
This is exactly the opposite of what I want! More rewards for curators should, in theory, encourage more people to upvote my posts. More upvotes will generate more author rewards, so it’s really a win-win.
So there you have it - I will not be upvoting this post for a day or two, and I encourage others to wait to upvote their own posts as well, especially those who have a large amount of SP. I believe that authors should upvote their own posts, but it seems to me that waiting to do so will benefit both the author and the community overall.
To my wonderful readers: come on in and grab some curation rewards (assuming you feel this post is worth your vote of course)! Please wait until this post is 30 minutes old though (or close to it at least) so your well-earned curation rewards go to you and not me.
How Much Can You Earn?
You can see what my posts typically earn on my blog, and I will be paying to promote this post using some voting bots as well so you can be sure there will be a decent amount of curation rewards to go around.
If you want an estimate of the curation rewards your vote specifically could receive, you can use the Curation Reward Estimator Tool I recently created for precisely this purpose.
Help Support Me As Witness!
If you like my contributions and/or my ideas and vision for the future of the Steem platform, I would appreciate your support by voting for me as a Steem witness.
You can cast your vote at https://steemit.com/~witnesses. Since I’m not currently in the top 50 you can write “yabapmatt” in the vote box at the bottom of the page.
Great way to contribute back to the curators, attracting more upvoters. Contributing my small vote here :)
wow .. i must to try it :) 10x @yabapmatt
Cool article. There is so much about steemit that I don't really understand yet. For example, I just voted for you as a witness. But what exactly does that mean or accomplish? And maybe I should've asked before voting? Lol. Sometimes just taking some action is the best way to get moving, and understanding will follow, is my approach ;)
Thank you very much for your vote! It is important that you (and everyone) understands what witnesses do and why it's important to vote for them. Rather than try to explain it here I'll refer you to this great post by one of the top witnesses, @timcliff, which includes links to a number of resources to explain everything you could want to know about witnesses:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide
If you still have any questions feel free to ask here or contact me in steemit.chat!
Cool, thank you so much, will read and if I have any doubts, will let you know! :)
that is a very interesting tool, I will upvote and resteem. Too bad it won't make much of a difference with what little I have in SP..;-(
Thank you! Even with little SP it still makes a difference.
Just dropping by to say a huge thank you for the Bid Bot tool you created - it's perfect for judging when to send a bid - and more importantly when to leave well alone because you will loose out. Interesting post about curation too - I did not realise this.
Good info! I'm always learning something around here from people like you who don't mind teachin' us! Thanks for taking the time to do so. Things such as this enlighten the one's listening and just make it a bit better for all of us!
Good rationale. I'm a minnow so I never thought self-upvoting would mastter, but I agree you should show confidence in your own works.
Oh and you already have my witness vote ;-)
But anyhow when you publish your post, it gets upvoted automatically for your side. Isnt it?
Just upvoted and wish you good luck :)
There is a check box to indicate whether or not you want to automatically upvote your post when you post it. I just unchecked the box :-)
Ah ok. I still have to learn alot here lol
Thank you :)
It’s good to advertise that you care about who is leaving comments, and that you want the most reward for them. Cudos!
Thanks - and as I said it also benefits me directly as well since I believe I will end up getting more author rewards this way. It's great when a system is set up such that everyone can benefit together.
Hello @yabapmatt,
Thanks for the advice. I actually don't upvote my post untill after a couple of days, but i do it ignorantly of any improvement of reward benefits.