People have different views about self-upvote, some feel it's good while others feel it's not ideal or best for the growth of the community, of course no one has the right to tell us how to use our steem power because we built it alone and unaided and this is a decentralized platform after all but then again is it a good social behaviour or not.
I will like us to understand what we mean by self-upvote by then let's first talk about what is voting on steemit and the kinds of voting
Just like we have the power to like and dislike a post on any social media platform like facebook also here in steemit voting is the power to use our stake weighted influence power or our sp to vote a post which actually happens when we like a post or we could also exercise our voting power when we don't like a post that's on a post that's harmful to the society.
That brings us to the two kinds of voting we have, upvote and downvote.
- Upvote: This is simply what we do to a post we like, there is no like button but rather an upvote button.
Upvoting is using our influence power that's our sp to distribute reward on a post, and that's usually when we think a post is worth it, a high quality post we like we upvote it like showing we like the post.
From the pic above it perfectly depicts the upvote button
- Downvote: This is like the opposite of upvoting where rewards are distributed to the post by the curators to voters post, do downvoting is making or exercising our stake weighted influence power to this time redistribute rewards to the community.
When we downvote a post or when a post gets downvoted the post creator does not earn from it as the rewards gets redistributed back to the system and this usually happens to a plagiarized or a post that's harmful to the community.
The button to down vote a post is seen in the pic below
Self upvoting is the process of using our stake weighted influence power to upvote our own post ourselves and maybe possibly not caring to vote others.
Is like posting and liking our own post, that's is how it is we will upvote our own self
Is it really a taboo to upvote our own post, of course it isn't I mean this is a decentralized platform and we have the right to use our stake weighted influence power however we want that is very true and correct.
It is true that we can do anything with our sp but the better question is if self-upvote is a good social behaviour for the community or not.
Well when we post quality articles and allow other members of the community to exercise their voting power on it they distribute reward from the reward pool to our post and when they do that it shows they like our post and it's of good quality.
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If our post receives this upvote from curators somehow we will be happy because we know we are doing well and will keep improving on the quality of our contents but if we upvote ourselves we wouldn't really care much about other curators especially if we boost a high voting power which could mean we can post anything harmful or not, plagiarized or not and still upvote it ourselves since no one can veto it.
When we post this harmful content and upvote it ourselves could be detrimental to others.
Also if we are only interested in voting our post it's also bad as we won't upvote the post of others in the community we are only interested in making our own post and Self-upvoting it which could be selfish because we could have used our voting Mana each day to upvote quality contents.
Also Self-upvoting means we don't care much about the contents we put out which is bad for the community I believe no one has the right to tell us what to do with our stake weighted influence power or how to use it to distribute rewards from the reward pool but based on this few reasons I believe self-upvoting isn't a good social behaviour, it is a bad social behaviour.
Of course I believe we should try to desist from attitude that could affect the community in any way and try to keep upvoting the quality contents of others