How I Put My Voting Power to Use When I'm Not Around
This is how I've been putting my Voting Power to use to support folks that are making the world a better place, even when I am not logged in.
When I started using steemit almost 4 months ago I was following only a few people and I had a lot more free time. I was able to keep on top of everyone's posts and did a lot of manual voting.
Now that I just moved and spring is here, I am starting a new garden, meeting folks in the community and much more. I find it a lot more difficult to consistently find the time to manually use my voting power to promote quality content every day.
I ended up setting up a system of auto voting + following curation trails to help vote on the content of steemers I want to promote - even when I don't have time to do it manually. If you are curious to learn how I did that.. read on!
I was inspired to write this post when I read @wwf's words in Stewards of Terra Mater update - March 27. If you have a chance, it's a worthy read. He shares some insightful ideas about steemit as a gift economy and why we shouldn't be as concerned with the value of SBD/STEEM in comparison to Fiat currency such as USD. @wwf also explains why keeping your SP at 100% is wasting the potential reward pool that we can be sharing with eachother as part of steemit's gift economy.
This is in line with how I prefer to use my Voting Power. I want to vote on posts made by people who are helping to create a better world. Those people I believe in and whose efforts on steemit and efforts in their lives are part of positive change and positive transformation. I believe these votes can in part help to encourage people to continue contributing to positive change. And also to help reward them for it, regardless of whether they need encouragement or not - because I want to. That is the gift economy that @wwf is talking about - the gift economy that steemit is helping us create.
Auto Voting
When I first heard of auto voting (which was within a few weeks of my signing up to steemit) I was turned off by the idea. As I mentioned above I was happily manually curating as much content as my SP would allow, every day. I was diligently keeping my SP below 100% so that I could make the most of it.
I also thought that if I used an auto voter, I would be defeating the purpose of manually curating because I would not be as interested in supporting some posts as I would be in others.
As time went on I found that I could not always put that much time into steemit so I decided to try SteemVoter in order auto vote on some of my favorite steemian's content. I found that the benefits far outweighed the downsides and continued to use SteemVoter to this day.
What I realized is that SteemVoter allows me to support a group of steemers that I believe are contributing to a better world. My vote can help encourage their positive actions.
So what I did was start adding accounts into my SteemVoter to support with my votes. I chose those that I was manually voting on anyway.
As time went on I added more steemians that I wanted to support into SteemVoter. The nice thing about SteemVoter is that I can adjust how much percentage of vote I want to apply to each account. So I can fine tune how much percent to apply to each account so that I don't over spend my SP too fast.
When I first signed up with SteemVoter it allowed me to vote on up to 50 accounts I believe. I enjoyed using the service so much I ended up upgrading to premium and it allowed me to add up to 500 "voting rules". Now it looks like their unpaid service allows voting for up to 3 voting rules. It is too bad that they lowered it so much, but I imagine they needed the funds to keep the service going since it is so popularly used.
Also I should note in January they offered a discount sale for upgrading to premium. Hopefully they offer more sales in the future.
SteemVoter website:
How to setup SteemVoter:
Basic:
How to use Steem Voter - Step By Step Instruction [ @rgeddes ]
Detailed:
Understanding SteemVoter : Learn How to Use SteemVoter to Automate Voting and Maximize Curation Rewards! [ @ilyastarar ]
Curation Trails
I also found out about curation trails shortly after signing up to steemit. But I didn't use them because they seemed complicated and I didn't quite understand how they worked or what their value is.
It turns out curation trails are another great way of putting your idle SteemPower to use and support quality steemers. In my case I want to support folks that have similar interests and are in my opinion making the world a better place.
What I am doing is following one or more curation trails. As a follower of a curation trail I am placing my trust in the hands of a curator to support the type of posts and steemians that I would like to support.
There are many accounts that are hosting curation trails, so it takes some time to search through them and see who might be doing curation work that you want to support.
There are two websites I know of that support curation trails. One is Streemian and the other is SteemAuto. They both work quite well. I mostly use Streemian because it seems to have more curation trails at the time being.
Where to sign up to follow (or host) a curation trail:
This post is aimed towards folks that want to create a curation trail, not follow one. But it is helpful in understanding the concepts:
What are Curation Trails and Delegated Steem Power [ @acidyo ]
Finding the Balance
The trickiest thing about setting up auto voting and/or following curation trails is not eating up all your voting power and not using so little voting power that you are not maximizing the potential.
I use SteemWorld.org to keep an eye on my voting power percentage. I like seeing it under 100% because that means that I am making use of my voting power. The longer it is at 100% the less it is working for me and for others that I share it with. I also don't like to see it too low because the lower it gets, the longer it takes to regenerate.
It takes some tweaking and adjusting to find the right balance. Luckily SteemVoter allows me to adjust the percentage of all the voting rules I have set up.
Streemian and SteemAuto let me scale my votes in by percentage. This means that if I follow some curation trail and I set my votes to scale in at 50%, then my votes are 50% of the vote percentage of the curator I am following.
I can adjust both SteemVoter and Streemian to find a good balance of my SP usage. It has taken me some time and patience to keep an eye on my voting power and make adjustments, but it was worth my effort because once it is in a good place of balance it is mostly hands off.
I still prefer to manually vote on posts. Some days I manually vote more, some days less. This is part of finding the balance between manual and auto curation.
Conclusion
I want to share my SteemPower by voting on quality content made by folks I want to support. I can diversify my votes between:
- People I want to regularly support
- People that are supported by curators that I trust
I want to encourage people to continue helping to make the world a better place. I can do that by sharing part of my share of the rewards pool. In my case that is including people that are homesteading, gardening for self sufficiency and contributing to the world with love and generosity rather than fear and greed.
SteemVoter, Streemian and SteemAuto help me accomplish this even when I don't find the time to manually curate my favorite content every day of the week.
Your Thoughts?
Would you, do you or did you use any of these services? Why or why not?
Who is @sagescrub?
I am a ex-suburbanite turned permaculture homesteader. Follow my journey and I will share what I know and am learning along the way. You can learn more about me in my re-introducing @sagescrub post. Wishing you abundance in your life!
Know that I am likely NOT an expert on the subjects I present. Please do your own research and be your own expert!
This was a really helpful explanation of the voting services. I have heard them mentioned but hadn’t taken time to investigate. I’ve also had the thinking that I wanted to keep my voting power around 90-100% (I didn’t like giving some people a high vote and then have to give someone else less who had better content) but it makes sense. Now to figure out the balance...
Thanks for your comment @helenoftroy. That's exactly what I am trying to do is keep my voting power around 85-99%. It is a balancing act for a while, keeping an eye every few days on the % and then adjusting here and there. Now that I am happy with it is more automated... but the setting up part can certainly be trying of my patience :)
Whao this is amazing to hear. I actually used auto-upvote for some of my friends on steemauto, even though it doesnt worth much, I just gave it a trial, but I guess its not working. Because when I go to their posts, I see that my upvote isnt there
But that of curation trail worked
I have not yet tried auto voting on steemauto so I can't attest to it. You are the second person in these comments to say they had some problem with it, so maybe they are still working out the kinks. Thanks for sharing your experiences :)
Been appreciating your support, and I hope you skim through the posts you curate once in a while. There are a lot of new minnows coming in every day with great content who need support too, and I think supporting the best ones we find is a big part of helping the world too.
In a way, using the auto voters is a good way to better reward people when they share something amazing that you cannot thank them enough with the measly amount one vote provides. With the auto voters it lets you continue to tip them to show an ongoing debt of thanks and trust.
I still curate the old fashioned way, even though some of them could be dillied out automatically and have the same effect. Lately I feel like my life is running on timers. "My VP is full, have to find a good post. Going to bed, better find 4 more posts, so I can find 3 more when I wake up before I head to work." It can be really tiring trying to maximize voting power all the time.
Hey @creativetruth! Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. It is true I do keep an eye on what I am curating even the auto curating - though not every single post. You have a very good point about supporting minnows and I could definitely be putting more time and thought into that than I have.. thank you for that suggestion and inspiring me. One thing I do do is delegate to projects like @minnowbooster, @minnowsupport and @qurator who are making efforts to support and highlight quality minnows.
That's exactly why I decided to automate some of my voting power in auto pilot and that way I can be inspired to manually curate when I am inspired and not feel like it is something I constantly have to be tied to :)
I started using auto voters for pretty much the same reasons. When I started with steemvoter it let me do 5 for free, but then increased to 25. I keep my most important ones on there and the rest are on steemauto because I can set it to stop upvoting at a certain percentage. I find it's not as reliable as steemvoter though and will randomly stop voting even though I have enough voting percentage.
That is interesting. I guess they have some sliding scale of allowances? Or maybe they are trying different amounts of free rules out to see what works best. Good to know about steemauto and their features with voting.
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Nice one bruv, I started off here 6 months ago and almost immediately got into Shadow bot so naturally you can't choose who you vote for which is different from your I like it though and I feel no matter how one auto votes its an intergral part of the longevity of the system. Cheer$;)
I haven't heard of shadow bot, I will have to see what that's all about. Thanks for recognizing the value of spending our votes in steemit :)
True story. Let me know what you think of shadow bot
This is very helpful. Thank you. I'm resteeming the post in the hope that more people will be able to read it.
Thanks, I appreciate it @bhop43moro!
You really have a good heart to have seen the need for supporting worthy authors in your absence. It is an enviable move.
And thanks, too, for the tutorials here. They are of valuable use.
Thanks @gandhibaba :) I'm glad you found this info helpful.
Great information @sagescrub . Time is valuable and hopefully steem will someday be to.
Thank you @manorvillemike :)
Tried streemian once, had difficulties setting it up, even with the driver´s help, and since I´m very impatient with technical stuff, it has to work immediately or I won´t bother, I forgot about it.
Yeah I agree, there are some technical hurdles and I had to come back to it several times before I got it working properly. I can learn from you @likedeeler and expect technology to work for my own peace of mind :)