Hello Again

Hello! It's been a long time since I've posted on Steem. I joined up in May 2016 and found Steem to be very interesting. After seeing some discussion/predictions about bots and how they'll affect Steem, I began creating one called "steemvote." Knowing that bots would be unavoidable, my motivation was to create an open source one so that automation wouldn't be exclusive to those who can code.

An important thing to consider is that it was more rational to upvote a random new post than to let your voting power be "wasted" at 100%. The common use case I imagined was for someone to start up this bot and go do something else, then later participate on Steem as usual.

From the start of developing it, I had my complaints. There was practically no documentation on how certain aspects of Steem worked. The steem daemon's GitHub readme proudly asserted that "code is documentation." To this day, I don't understand VESTS. Unfortunately, things got worse. One thing I remember significantly is a hard fork that made voting more costly to your voting power. It was advertised as making your vote "worth" more, causing confusion amongst some steemians. Around that point, I figured that things would probably fix themselves as Steem got more popular. Documentation would be written, upcoming protocol changes would see more discussion, etc.

After seeing some friends talk about Steem recently, I decided to pop back in. Things seem to have worked out nicely. One of steemvote's features, which I called "delegated voting," is now an actual part of Steemit. That was cool to see, even if it's just a coincidence.

Anyway, I'm busier than I was previously, and steemvote is unlikely to receive further updates. Apologies to @au1nethyb1 who posted about steemvote's usefulness and even donated 100 SBD to its development. I can refund that some time. Also shoutout to @klye for the art that accompanied new steemvote version announcements.

introduceyourself didn't exist when I joined, so this is the perfect opportunity to use it! For those curious, you can find steemvote here.