Curating takes up a lot of time and attention. When the option to make curation rewards without putting in much effort is there, we can become irresponsible curators. Curating is a big responsibility. Rewarding as many users as possible without making people after months of creating content feel left out can be tough, and it's an importort part of user retention.

About three weeks ago I decided I was spending too much time on steemit. But I also didn't want my feed to go without my votes. I signed up to a service call steemvoter.com. At the cost of just one vote per day, I could vote for up to 100 authors without ever logging in. But of course my addiction to steemit wouldn't let me stay away. When I logged in I noticed one of the posts I voted for made it to the trending page which is always nice to see! Especially because I try not to target the regulars!

Unfortunately it wasn't a post in my list. It was the post I agreed to upvote in order to use the service, the @steemvoter post. Since the content was being valued at $80+ I decided to read it and it was indeed an interesting read.

@steemvoter/steemvoter-com-curation-guild-proposal-dec-15th-2016

This post outlined an interesting idea to use the votes of the users of the service as a voting guild. I thought if the guild would be used to bring new users or undervalued users to the trending page then that would be brilliant. However, my concern was that many people who use the service were going to be opted in automatically, and they may not realise if they have voted for something they otherwise wouldn't want to.

These concerns were promptly answered in another post here.

@steemvoter/steemvoter-com-guild-proposal-continued-dec-16th-2016

But I personally wasn't really satisfied with the defense of the Opt-out only option.

I was very pleased when they began an author spotlight series in which I could see which posts they would probably be supporting with their guild.

Then one day...

Without receiving any notification I noticed that steemvoter had 2 posts on the trending page. Each post made $90+. I felt very uneasy about this as there was no communication regarding a change of agreement so I decided to email @marcgodard and find out if there had been some kind of mistake.

It seemed like very bad customer service to change terms without notifications so I chose to change my keys and immediately decided to never give my keys to a third party again.

Is this service free?

When I signed up it didn't seem like I was paying anything to use the service, since all I need to give is one vote. However nothing in life comes for free. With the accumulation of all of those upvotes by customers who agreed to those terms, this service takes (currently) around $90 per day from the reward pool. This is not at a cost to the voter, who received a curation reward, this is at a cost to every pending payout post.

Those who do not use this service do not benefit from this service and so some users used their vote to decrease the price paid to a service they don't use. This may have caused the retaliation you see below.

@marcgodard/steemvoter-com-stats-dec-4th-2016

We are the beta testers of this social media site and it is up to us as the "guardians of the blockchain" to reassess potential issues and try to find solutions before we can really go mainstream.

If you have signed up to this service, you should know that your voting keys were used today, not on a post, but on a comment on a 3 month old post. In fact, even if you haven't signed up to steemvoter you may have unknowingly voted for this comment rewarding it with $90 from the reward pool. Some users have found that their own curation trail has opted into auto upvoting this content.

Though the system may be designed to allow this to happen, the community doesn't have to be.

Curate responsibly, beware of autovoting.

Native speakers only.

Google translate not permitted.