RE: CURIOSITY: Why is the number one person in terms of followers someone who appears to only resteem? Digital archaeology/anthropology
Thanks for answering that mystery - I've been wondering for months why people with less posts, less time here, and less wallet content have higher reps than me. Turns out it's because I barely have anyone with a higher rep following or voting for me! So that's why I've been stuck on 62 for at least five years :)
OK, now I'm about to get all freaky stalker on you...
I have been following you for at least 10 years and often find your posts interesting. Sometimes I have commented on them and we have had agreeable interactions.
Recently I noticed you unfollowed me, and for the first time ever I was really curious. Most people who unfollow me are vegans.
The usual explanations don't fit - you are following 775 people, so it's not a random clear out (I unfollow people all the time, mostly for resteeming), and you say you value disagreement of opinion, so it's probably not because you are a vegan.
My best guess is that it's for a technical reason such as my thing of always including an image and a 10% self upvote on my comments to make them stand out like dog's balls (some people freak out about that, while others have started doing it too)
I know this is damn strange, and I fully understand if you ignore this question, but I'm only asking because like an itch I have to scratch, I'm very curious. I hope someone asks me the same question one day, I'll have a good laugh :)
So why did you unfollow me?
Oh I can tell you why I stopped following you. I posted about what I was going to do before I did it. I indicated I was not going to be following people who up vote their own comments. You see I'm pretty good about up voting almost all comments people give me. Yet with the recent draining of pool by people voting their own comments I indicated I would not be following people who up vote their own comments. I started looking and I started doing that. If you don't vote your own comments I'll gladly follow you and if your comment is more than "nice post" you'll likely get an up vote from me on all of your comments. Right now I'm doing that at 1% which is actually about $0.03 due to steem price falling as opposed to your $0.05 there, but I may increase my percentage to 2% or even 3% as I was considering doing that. I like to encourage discussion, so I will support that.
That's the only reason I unfollowed you I also wrote a couple of posts indicating I likely would do that when the commenting self was encountered frequently.
Fair enough - my guess was good then!
I'm following you and still see and read your posts.
As far as not upvoting my own comments go, I'm happy to not upvote them on your posts but will continue to upvote them on other posts.
It's not about paying myself or draining the pool, it's to bring my comments up to the top of the comment feed. I upvote every comment I reply to, every comment that replies to my comment, and every one of my own comments at 10%. These votes are all worth about 5 cents depending on the price of Steem.
But I fully get what you mean about draining the pool - in fact I just said this to a commenter on my most recent post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/a-censorship-threat-to-steemit
"I think it sucks that you just upvoted your own comment to the tune of $25 when to get it to the top all you had to do was upvote it by about $2, but that is another issue. I like to upvote my own comments too, but that is just to bring them up the feed - what you are doing is blatantly giving yourself big payouts"
Well if you don't up vote them on my post then I am in a catch-22. I would like to follow you as I do enjoy some of your stuff. So let's try it see how it goes. You shouldn't have to worry about visibility on mine. I look at all replies to me. :) My litmus test of "If everyone did this what would it do to steemit stands here"... It'd not be a pretty sight. If everyone was up voting their posts for visibility it'd quickly get pretty ugly.
Thanks, much appreciated, you are actually the highest rep person who was following me, so now that I know why I'm stuck on 62 I'm all the more keen.
Just don't look at my comment tab or it might push you over the edge! :)
The only disadvantage will be that I up vote comments I see elsewhere too if I'm cruising around and see one I like. I don't do it if they are self up voted. :)
No worries - I only want one vote on my comment to get it up high, but jeepers that sounds like a lot of work checking every comment for self voting - just don't vote for any of mine, about 95% are self upvoted, I only don't if I want them to stay down the bottom.
Apart from that I fling my votes around like confetti and don't give it a thought - blue dots are what I use to show me what comments and posts I've read.
Me too... and when they are replies to me the ones that are not BLUE stick out like a sore thumb.
i was about to upvote your comment in order to help you, but then I read the part where you said you'll be upvoting all your own comments on other posts.......I'm not interested in helping this kind of behavior. That is probably why you're at 62....
Thanks for your reply. I know you are very popular on Steemit, and your input is much appreciated.
My thought on this is that if I do something on Steemit that I don’t actually believe in, just to get a higher rep, am I different to all the newbs posting spam comments in order to attract followers?
A rule I try to Steem by is to post the sort of content I want to see on Steemit myself. And if that limits my audience, so be it!
When I read most posts, I only tend to look at the top coments, and the ones I really notice are the ones with pictures.
So when I comment I include a picture, upvote the coment I’m replying to (even if I disagree with it) and upvote my own comment. And that ticks my boxes.
this is good to know.
It also was not personal. I just figured I should do what I was saying people should do if they were not happy with the comment self-up voting. Had I not is would make me a hypocrite.
How you can follow 775 people is beyond me - I'm always aiming to get my list down closer to 100 so there is a chance of me actually reading some of them.
I also didn't make it through my entire list of followers to do this. So I am sure there are still people I am following that are doing this. It is something I'll do as I notice it. If you are fine with not up voting your own comments then let me know and I'll gladly give you a follow and at least when dealing with me I'll likely give you what you were giving yourself or more. I've decided I'll switch from 1% to 2% to see how that impacts my pool. If it is not much of a drain I may then switch to 3%. I up vote a lot of comments...
Whoops, so many replies I'm getting them mixed up...
It is proving to be a struggle. I miss a lot of really good stuff, but I am trying to help out as many people as I can. I did drop down to about 300 for awhile because of the struggle but I found steemit becoming kind of an echo chamber for me and I was missing some cool new people. So now I figure I'll follow a lot of people and just a few times a year try to go through them and prune the ones that are not active, etc.
It's still very much a work in progress. I'm trying. I'm sure I'll have to change some things. With the limit to votes requiring a control my %s far more than before it is still a struggle to learn how I can best influence the platform the way I want to. I don't actually curate based on earning potential at all. I curate based upon supporting content I enjoy and I also believe up voting comments is a big part of that.
Neither a vegan nor a hypocrite :)
I love eating meat. I've looked at animals before and thought "I wonder what that tastes like?" but I was raised in a pretty rural environment with a lot of wild life and my favorite meat is actually Elk which we only got really during hunting season. I haven't had elk in a few years.
I have no idea what elk even is - like venison?
Bigger and not as gamey. It is between a Deer (Venison) and a Moose in size. They can get quite big. They taste distinctly different from Venison though. It's actually one of my favorite meats. It's also usually very lean.