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Kevin's Guide to SteemIt

SteemIt allows people to upvote their own posts,
but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

SteemIt Guide - Should I Upvote My Posts?

When I started SteemIt, I stumbled on a post that said that said people should automatically upvote their own posts.

I was trying to learn the platform and I was studying the numbers to figure out the mathematics of the voting system and began upvoting all of my posts.

I finally realized that what I was doing was silly. This article has two parts. The first is suggestions for people in the plankton. The second is for Red Fish and Minnons.

The SteemIt system delegates 15 STEEM POWER to new accounts. On 9/18/2018 the Steem Now Upvote Calculator said the price of STEEM was $0.74. A 100% upvote on an account with 15,000 STEEM POWER was worth $0.62. Dividing by a thousand one finds that the upvote for an account with 15 STEEM POWER is worth $0.00062.

If your account is in the plankton, your upvote really isn't worth anything. Upvoting your own account just looks petty. If you upvoted your account 100 times at $0.00062; you would give yourself at most six cents. Your real reward is less. Most of your votes would vanish as dust. Your actual reward is probably around 2 cents.

If you are in the plankton, your votes are better used for social networking or curation.

The big problem that we all face is that SteemIt tends to erase the rewards for posts that are under a penny. One should upvote posts when the displayed reward is $0.01 or $0.02 five days after writing the post. This increases the chance of getting a reward.

Upvoting With Real STEEM POWER

Life is the SteemIt plankton is a drag. I recommend that people with money buy enough STEEM POWER so that your vote is worth over two cents. This generally takes $380 in real American Dollars. Once your upvote is over $2.00, everything is different. If you vote for yourself a hundred times at $2.00. You are still better off using your upvoting power for social networking, but the amount you can receive for self voting is better than the interest rate you get at the bank. Of course the money in your bank is insured and the money invested in STEEM POWER might go up in steam.

The biggest problem we face on SteemIt.com is that posts with a vote under $0.02 might get washed away as dust. So, you should always upvote posts that are $0.02 or under to assure a payout.

Self Voting to Get Curation Rewards

SteemIt gives out curation rewards to the first people who vote on a post. I have come across some articles suggesting that one should automatically self vote right after writing a post to deny others the curation reward.

This idea is just plain stupid. The curation rewards pay people for reading your post. When you self-vote to take the curation reward, you remove the incentive to read your post and fewer people will read your post.

I guess I should explain. I like to "curate" posts on SteemIt. I go to the page SteemIt.com/created. I then look at posts that are less than thirty minutes old and don't have many votes. If I like the post, I upvote it in hopes of getting a curation reward. I find many new and interesting accounts this way.

SteemIt has a big problem with plagiarism. So I scroll to the bottom of the post to see if "cheetah" or buildawhale has flagged the post. I also check out to see who has voted on the post already.

I often don't read posts if the author self voted. The author self-voted specifically to deny me a curation reward. Why should I waste my time reading your post? There are generally hundreds of new posts.

I've noticed that there is a large number of other people playing the curation game. Many of these people have more STEEM POWER than me.