Many, if not most, of the whales were self-voting in the early days of the platform.
This was especially true when curators received only 25% of the rewards. Apparently the whales felt that self-voting was the only way to receive a decent ROI.
Today curators get 50% of the reward and there are many utilities that analyze voting patterns. There is less justification for the self votes allowing utilities to stigmatize the practice.
Speaking of Looking Good
Personally, I think that sweeping dust looks good. It shows small accounts that you value their upvote. This is why I loved #dustsweeper. It assured that small curators got the reward for my post.
I thought about ending the post by saying that authors should hold enough STEEM in their accounts so that they can assure that their posts crossed the $0.02 mark. I don;t have the cash to buy STEEM; so I said I dream of growing the account through posts.
I checked your blog - looks sad in that respect.... Your topics aren't necessarily mine - the AI stuff tempts me to skip over it rather than read in. It will be the same for many. But not all: so where are their votes? Maybe you could try joining a Community? For a wider audience...?
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I probably should admit that I have a HIVE account which I grew to 6K HIVE.
I created several communities prior to the Justin Sun kerfuffle. I also helped create tribes on Steem-Engine and HIVE-Engine.
Steem-Engine went bust.
So, I know for a fact that everything changes when one's account starts giving $0.02+ in SP awards. For example, I would have upvoted your reply on HIVE.
AI Images
I have mixed feelings about AI images. I was really sad to see that there were no #inktober posts on SteemIt in 2023. So, I decided to play a game in which I drew images for HIVE and posted AI images on SteemIt.
Generating an AI image a day was fun. Drawing a picture a day really taxed me. Of course I am not an artist.
About 20 people played the Inktober game on HIVE. Some did AI images. For this reason, I thought the AI images were tasteless.
I was the only account that posted with the tag in 2024. So, it was not tasteless.
Putting AI Images in a Community
I don't think I would want to put the AI images in a SteemIT community. I figure the best place is my blog.
I see that there were communities for AI images, NFTs and even memes on SteemIt. They seem to be dead.
I admit I am doing the images on SteemIt just to see what would happen. The technology has some value as posts need images and AI generates compelling images.
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I understand your approach. That's not my style, blogging doesn't need to be ‘decorated’ as far as I'm concerned - unless there are personal shots to go with the content. But anyway: thank you very much for your explanation! I'm sure we won't meet on HIVE ;-))
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Your upvote of my comment threw me into an ethical dilemma. The upvote was worth 10 SP ... the post was worth under the $0.02 cut off.
My 100% upvote increased the vote to 0.14 which brought the vote to just over the cut off.
Sweeping dust benefits small accounts. I consider it to be a worthwhile effort.
If I had any spare money, I would buy enough STEEM to sweep dust. (One needs about $500 in SP).
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Don't worry about such dilemmas - next week it's forgotten ;-))
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