Some of the comments to yesterday's article on self-upvoting reminded me that there are a few other voting etiquette tidbits that are worth mentioning. None of these are outright rules, but they are kind of working their way into what's considered respectable on the Steemit platform.
When you comment on a blog post, it is courteous to upvote the original post. That seems to be the general consensus and I normally follow that. I can think of two exceptions. One is when you adamantly disagree with the post, you might not want to upvote it but may still want to weigh in on the discussion. What are your thoughts? Of course, you do have the option to just ignore the post. The other exception is if the post already has hundreds of upvotes and a handsome reward by the time you get to it. Maybe you still want to comment, but not upvote. I personally am not one to be deterred from upvoting by numerous previous upvotes, but that seems to bother others. Thoughts?
How about this one: asking for follows or resteems. Personally I find those requests highly annoying. They tend to have the opposite effect on me, making me want to dig in my heels and say no way! Some people have those requests in their signature lines, something along the lines of "If you enjoyed reading this article, please follow and resteem." When it's obvious the author puts that on every article I try to ignore it but I would still prefer it wasn't there.
I do have a couple exceptions to the "don't ask me to follow or resteem you" principle, though. One is of course, if for any reason the author is asking for follow requests. For example, maybe I want to follow dog owners in particular so I might tell you to let me know if you're a dog owner so I can follow you. @tradeqwik has been requesting that Tradeqwik customers identify themselves and request @tradeqwik to follow them.
The other exception is if you resteeming my article would clearly help someone other than me, then I might request it. I did that once because I was adding minnows to my autovoting rules and I wanted to get the word out to them, so I specifically asked anyone who had a lot of minnow followers to resteem the article. Another case may be those pay it forward types of posts where the liquid earnings will be donated to someone else. In that situation I'd still prefer to resteem an article by the author I'd want to reward, and then follow it up with an article of my own linking to their article and explaining why I'd like my followers to read and upvote their article. In that way, I don't have to deal with transferring funds from my account to another's (or I could do it quietly), instead directing rewards straight to them.
Those are some Steemit culture and etiquette items I have noticed concerning upvoting and asking others for upvotes. Have I missed any? What do you all think?