This post is about how I intend to use the extent of my voting power concerning my own posts to shift rewards to would-be curators.
Surprising even myself, I am including upvote buying services in the mix.

Crashing pause.

Wait. What? For those that care to keep track of my position on upvote buying (that’s like 0-1 of you out there, because it’s probably buried in some obscure comment on the innumerable bot discussions out there), you would know that upvote buying is something I was completely against. Did something change?

I was trying to remember why I hated them so much, until today when I watched a bid bot in action on Bot Tracker, clicked into one of the voted posts, and saw a very lonely post whose only comments were the comments left by bid bots. The post itself? Predictably trash. And that’s by my relatively low trash standards. Made quite a pretty penny too.

My original reasoning for why it was bad was simply that Steemit is about curation, and a community deciding how to value posts. Who are we to decide the quality of our own posts, or whether our posts deserve to be rewarded? But actually thinking again, the whole point is that the allocation is dependent on one’s stake in the platform. Self voting, and voting bots, are just an extension of that. I don’t 100% believe that though. There should be some accountability for ourselves and the bots to weed out trash and encourage interaction, but eh, beyond the scope of this post.

The First Drops

Come to think of it, I've always used self voting (not on comments) without even thinking about it. The default option simply made sense. As you'll see by the end of the post, I am tweaking this behavior slightly.

I can remember the first juicy drops of the vote bots. I joined @qurator. A one time membership fee and light auto voting requirements gave you a daily vote. I liked the promise of its curation project and its vetting of members. I met some interesting people as well. It could probably use more member interaction though, and maybe the occasional re-vetting.

Shortly after they had @qustodian, a member-only post promotion bot. I like their fairness system with an allocated vote quota that could be spread out so you did not have to necessarily be forced to make one post a day to take full advantage of it. I started to use this as well, telling myself, “well they qurate so… ok.”

Bots, Bots, Bots...

But after that, using a voting bot just felt natural. The gateway drugs... Occasionally I used the bot to vote posts of others that I wanted to support as well. Extending my say in the rewards pool by buying the stake of a bot account.

I recently started to use @minnowbooster, which behaves similarly to @qustodian. It gives good returns, and does not leave such an unsightly comment (leaves a hidden one).

Now I'm exploring the whole menu. The Bot Tracker shows a good list, and explains how they work and suggests how best to use them.

Shout out specifically to @buildawhale which has a curation aspect to it as well.

Voting Strategy (TL/DR)

I like human community interaction, and to that end I've joined several groups that encourage participation. More on that in a future post, but you'll see some of that in the comments below (Hi all of you!). So I have a strategy to reward even this participation!

Instead of using self voting power immediately on publishing a post, I want to increase rewards to the curators of my posts. So at around the 6th day after publishing a post, I will be placing my self vote and my bought votes on my post.

Just a little extra thank you for my dear supporters.

This strategy obviously does not help put the post in hot or trending. But I want that to happen if it actually is getting attention from people, not bots.

That being said, don't vote my posts if you don't like them, obviously. I won't be going full retard on these services. The resulting curation reward is not likely to be significant anyway. I do like to interact with comments and reward what I can on that front though.