wiser voting, stats, and musings for April 10, 2017

Today has been an almost full voting day. I will say again that it is actually a real challenge to make 40 upvotes in a single day. I feel like I've been at it all day long. It hasn't been continuous by any means. The routine goes something like this: check out my wantwiserupvote page to see if there are any new articles. I notice a handful. Open one, read it, double check on SteemWhales that the author is truly a small minnow. Cast my vote. Stop and read a book to the three year old offspring. Come back. Open up the second article. Pick up baby who has pulled himself up to a standing position using my chair as a support. Set baby on lap. Start reading second article. Notice baby has a smelly diaper. Change baby's diaper. Notice time. Speed read through article and cast vote. Then fix quick lunch. Finish with wantwiserupvote articles and start hunting for more small minnows (to fill my quota). Stop to chat with neighbor who has brought her adorable three year old great granddaughter to play with my son. Load up boys in van. Drive to pick up girls from school. Do some shopping, get gas, come home, start dinner, sneak off and read and upvote a few more articles, break up arguments, keep children on task...

...Anyway, you get the idea.

So here's how I voted today. I upvoted six new articles that were tagged with wantwiserupvote. I'm starting to see some regular posters there, which is awesome. Then to complete my small minnow upvoting quota of fifteen votes I went over to the introduceyourself tag and found nine more brand new Steemit users, read and upvoted their posts. When I have to go out looking for the minnows, I leave a comment that lets them know about my tag and provides a link to the details. It's a standard copy/paste, but I'm manually doing the copy/paste. At this point I do not use bots for any aspect of my Steemit life. I'm not saying I never will; I just don't now.

I upvoted fifteen posts by other people that I happened to like. I haven't broken it down, but a few of them were comments. You can get the analytics by checking out my profile on Steemd.

Not counting this post, I upvoted six of my own posts or comments. My upvote on this post will make seven. After I publish this I may or may not find or compose three more of my own comments to grace with an upvote.

I'm not legalistic about it, but I like getting my small minnow upvotes in first. This was especially fun today because the introduceyourself posts I came across were well written and had cool pictures. And it was also cool to have six upvotes for posts using my tag. It is a lot less work on my part if the small minnows can come to me. At this point I am upvoting every single article that legitimately uses my tag. I'm considering doing a daily resteem of one of those articles, the one I consider the best. Once I start to get more than 15 new articles a day, then I will have to make judgments about which articles are the best. If I can't upvote an article (because I've used up my quota) I can at least resteem it if it's well written enough.

My goal, of course, is to make these upvotes every day. Realistically, that can't always happen. But the more I do it, the more convinced I am becoming that every serious Steemit user should intentionally allocate a given percentage of their votes to upvoting new users and small minnows. I would add that current Steemit whales should do the same. I say this because I know that if you don't have an intentional plan to upvote the work of small minnows, it won't happen. You'll upvote stuff you see in your feed, the witty comments your Steemit friends make, and you'll basically be upvoting the same authors over and over again. If those authors all happen to be whales (or you all become whales in the future) then you'll be a whale who only upvotes other whales' work with all the baggage that entails. My point is that if you have a desire to support small minnows with your upvote, then you are going to need to have a plan to carry that out. It won't happen by itself. Now if you have no interest in supporting small minnows, then I'm not trying to preach that you should. I am preaching that if you want to support small minnows, then you need a plan.

I've gone on the full strength upvote soapbox before, so I'll try to keep this short. One of my pet peeves here on Steemit is the slider. I personally do not like it, and I really do not like getting 1 percent or less upvotes. Now, I'll take them. I just have to ask what is the point? Is someone really going to vote 4,000 times a day, with each vote at only 1 percent strength? To really do that, they would have to be using a bot, which of course is a whole other subject. I have to wonder when one of my posts gets 47 upvotes and they are all 1 percent or less. It's almost as if the powerful voters are trying to mimic the other social media sites where "likes" or upvotes are nice but carry no monetary reward. I'm all for spreading the rewards around more equitably, but do the rewards have to be spread so thinly? I think I'd rather take a shot at getting a full strength whale vote with a nice fat reward even if it means that the rest of the time my posts barely earn pennies because they are only supported by the votes of other minnows.

I understand there's been a whale experiment going on where the whales have been discouraged from voting full strength, and where other whales will even follow their full strength upvotes with a downvote just to keep the rewards coming from a single upvote low. I can't help but feel sorry for that poor minnow who saw his work really score with a nice potential reward, only to have that all erased by some other whale's downvote. Then I heard talk about perhaps sometime in the future Steemit might just through the code cap the monetary reward to something like $3 per upvote. I really hope that doesn't happen. Not only will those who know how to program bots quickly find a workaround, I just think whales should be allowed to do what they want to do and not get pressured into doing something different by other whales.

I am not an anarchist when it comes to the subject of how geographical locations should be governed. I tend more towards the "law and order" side of things. However, I believe the concept of anarchy could work quite well on Steemit within the very broad parameters that are hardwired into the code. People should be able to vote however they want, and whatever influence they have either worked for or outright bought should not be capped or otherwise hampered in any way. In other words, let every Steemit user do what seems right to them. It would be a useful experiment, for one, a microcosm of what a society with an anarchist form of organization might look like; for another, it's a safe place to experiment. I mean, seriously, what's at stake on Steemit is the amount of rewards a post generates. There is nothing life threatening going on and nobody is getting hurt. I hear rewards are currently low. I say, so what? Any reward, even one piddly cent, is a HUGE improvement over every other social media platform out there. On those ones you post and comment for free.

So my overall view is that whales should be free to vote for whoever's work they want to, regardless of how SP rich or poor the author of said favored work might be. If a whale only wants to vote for other whales, he should be free to do so, and it's not right for the other whales to bully him into voting a certain way by punishing the upvoted author. That freedom of choice over how to exercise their voting power should always be there.

With that said, I also believe all whales and future whales should be strongly encouraged to deliberately allocate a certain percentage of their upvoting power to small minnows, come up with a plan to carry it out, and then work the plan. By "strongly encouraged," I mean just that; I'm not using that as a euphemism for any sort of enforcement. The whales should with their voting freedom intact, be made aware of the value of deliberately seeking out and supporting small minnows, explained the part about how if it's going to happen there needs to be a plan, and then they get to decide what they will do about it. Taking this outside of Steemit for a moment, in an ideal society, those who have plenty would voluntarily share with those who do not. But you get onto a slippery slope the moment you start enforcing such sharing. Governments and laws can only curb the excesses of crime; they can't force anyone to do good. On Steemit, though, there is no way that the way you vote could be a crime. It's not a crime for whales to upvote whales anymore than it's a crime for minnows to upvote minnows. So why not just let it play out the way it's going to play out?

That's my little rant about the rights of whales to vote full strength on whatever they please. I sure hope no one takes that right away from me when I finally get a full strength upvote that's worth something.

As I write this my rank on SteemWhales is 3577 and my reputation score is on the verge of 54. My voting power currently sits at 92.18 percent.