Steem Engine is an upvote for upvote, follow for follow service. I talked some trash on it 3 months ago when I started using it, and it's about time for an update.

How it works

When you upvote someone on Steem Engine, this centralized server tracks your vote through the web site. The more you upvote other people the more votes that are owed to you later. Who ever has the most money owed to them shows up higher on the list of people to upvote. It's basically a trending tab that shows who is owed the most.

Up is Down

When you upvote someone else, they are owed less votes and move down the list. Therefore, upvoting someone on the service is almost like downvoting them, because they will receive less visibility. A lot of the time I will upvote trash content with low rewards because I'll receive curation awards and knock them off the front page. Remember, they are going to get those rewards no matter what because they are basically upvoting themselves. Also, my $0.16 vote garners a lot more attention when I upvote a post worth $0.03. This attention brings them to my blog and they post thoughtful replies like "nice post". Isn't that swell?

Steem Engine provides a way to self-upvote the same post multiple times a day. If you don't want to post much but still want to upvote yourself 10 times a day you can head on over to Steem Engine and use the service to do so... like a chump. I don't recommend this strategy. Real networking is much more important.

I'm usually owed between $5-$10 and appear around #8 to #3 on the site. Not a lot of big accounts are using it yet. The biggest one is @lexiconical and he doesn't seem to be exploiting it terribly bad yet so that's good.

Exploits

In my original post I talked about how you can exploit the service to get 15 followers a day. You just follow people through the site and then unfollow them. It was kind of a pain so I only did that once or twice. I could easily program an unfollow bot... but nah.
Now that I appear on the front page for upvotes everyday I get free follows from that.

As you can see I have -324 follow points and 72 followers earned. I believe that means that around 400 of my 700 followers are from Steem Engine alone. All inactives or red fish I assume... very unimpressive. When it comes down to payout, one whale supporting you is better than 10,000 red fish. Plus, I'm sure very few (if any) of my Steem Engine followers upvote me directly. Which means they're just helping me upvote myself. How underwhelming.

Double Dipping

The greatest exploit that Steem Engine provides is double dipping on the rewards pool. I didn't even want to talk about it for a long time because it will completely ruin the service when people start doing it en masse. Basically you upvote yourself on Steem Engine. You'll get the rewards from your self upvote and you'll get the rewards from the Steem Engine votes. It would be very easy to do if you had 10 accounts or if you posted 10 times a day. Currently I'm doing it once a day on my own post. Even that feels like cheating.

It's pretty obvious that this is a dumb service destined to fail, and it's embarrassing that I'm still using it. However, I have found a few people from the service that I follow regularly and it gets you a lot more exposure to the community than you would if you were simply self-upvoting manually all the time, like many people do already. Therefore, you should never upvote yourself directly, you should use Steem Engine when self-upvoting to double the reward. Get in while the getting is good and exploit this service so I have another reason to stop using it. 👍 😎 😝