With Steemvoter down, I'm learning that manual voting is tougher than ever!

Manual curation? Been there got the T-shirt

Since I joined Steemit in May 2016, I’ve been on all sides of voting/ curation equation.

I’ve been that guy whose upvote wasn’t worth shit, yet upvoted and curated religiously.

I’ve been that guy that spent hours creating a ‘masterpiece blog post’ only to receive little or no upvotes.
_{Sidebar: I once accidently downvoted myself when scrolling through my posts on a phone (it was easy to do back then), and the UI displayed -1 vote – that was definitely a ‘what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-on-this-site!’ moment)}

I've been that guy watching from the sidelines as (to my mind) 'whales milked the rewards by uploading crap, that wasn't my crap.'

I’ve been that guy that on the receiving end of obscence upvotes/ rewards from whales.
_{Another Sidebar: I once did a post that got upvoted by ned, dan and berniesanders… yes there was a time when all three actually agreed on something!}

I’ve been that guy that was a top curator on the site, outdoing bot voters by manually hunting down and voting on good content before they did.

I've been that guy that has tried to support other content creators eventhough I only had peanuts to offer as rewards.

I’ve been that guy sick of spending every spare hour god sends on a social media site that resorted to using bots.

I've been that guy that spent Bitcoins on Steem Power (when it was expensive and dirt cheap) to try and have more influence.

I’ve been flavour-of-the-month, I’ve been the zero votes and zero views guy. I've been a 'manual curation maximalist'. I’ve made crazy curation rewards, I’ve made pennies. I’ve written plenty of posts and comments about curation, voting, bots etc.

Now I’ve 'paid my dues'... what's my conclusion.

I use a bot (most of the time)

I use a bot not so much to profit from curation rewards but to ensure the author rewards are distributed as widely as possible (and in a meaningful way) for people I believe provide value to the platform.

For me this is important for two reasons:

Firstly, I’m passionate about rewarding content creators. As there is no ‘long tail’ reward/ royalty structure in Steemit, focusing on rewarding content above consistent creators of content doesn’t make sense to me. I know what it is like to create post after post and rewards being ad hoc. It feels like a lottery and can be disheartening. Knowing that someone appreciates your body of posts and rewards consistently is a great motivator.

For me, rewarding creators of content by using a bot is not an issue, provided the rewards are being reviewed and adjusted regularly. It’s just a more efficient method of rewarding content.

Secondly, I prefer to put (meaningful amounts of) Steem into the hands of as many ‘good’ content creators as possible. I prefer this over only rewarding good content that I have personally read.

I think that is the best way to protect my investment in Steem. I also think in the long run it is the best way to project my cryptocurrency investments across the board. Cryptocurrency only works if it gets adopted and Steem rewards are (for now) the best way to onboard new users. I'm not talking speculators and investors. I'm talking people that actually use blockchain technology and their currencies/ tokens in everyday life. This is the 'big picture goal for me.

Wisdom of Steem Power

I want Steem to be all-pervasive. I want millions of people to have some Steem in their easy-to-use Steem account. Yes , right now the temptation for many users will be to cash out their Steem for bitcoin (and then fiat), spend it, whatever. However eventually once a critical mass of users is reached, they will use Steem (with its 3 second confirmations and no fees) to trade and transact peer-to-peer as Satoshi intended. That’s the vision anyway.

And that is part of the beauty of a decentralised platform like Steem. I have a vision, and I can take steps to try and implement it. Other people are free to try to implement their own vision of how to move this blockchain forward and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ (or rather ‘wisdom of SP’) will dictate the direction we go.

Manual is crazy

Over the last couple of days (with Steemvoter down) I’ve tried to allocate a few hours a day to manually curating again.

It has been crazy!

Being an early Steemit adopter I remember the days when I use to go to sleep (I live in the UK), wake up in the morning and scroll through everything in the new section (that had been posted overnight here but during peak hours in the US and other places). It would take me ten minutes, literally to catch up.

It was easy to manually curate then.

Now it takes me hours just to catch up on the posts and resteems just on my feed. I lost a few hours curating and I hadn't even left the circle of people I follow. Ironically, manually curating for the last couple of days has cut into the time I would usually take to explore the site to find new content creators to add to my bot and support.

Early adopter perks

To my mind we are in really early days of bot curation.

As Steem grows curating will need to grow with it. Manual curation (particular with large Steem holders) cannot scale.

I said it previously, if Steem 'moons' to a point where a single ‘whales’ upvote is worth tens of thousands of dollars – 'whales' will need to treat ‘curation operations’ like small/ mid-sized businesses not play-things. The platform will be a pariah if it becomes a play where a select few give out obscene rewards on a whim. Each whale to protect their investment will need to become more and more sophisticated about the way they use their voting power. With great power comes great responsibility. We'll like need a combination of bots, curation teams and AI to ensure we are accountable to the community that give our Steem value.

For now, however we can afford for our ‘operations’ to be pretty crude.

In my case I’m probably erring on the side of being over-generous, in the same way, I’ve benefited from whales before me being over-generous in rewarding my ‘early adopter’ contributions. It is one of the perks of being an early adopter. We get the opportunity to earn as much Steem as we can get our hands on while it is dirt cheap.

There will likely come a time where I need to make really tough decision about removing people from my bot but right now I’m happy to share the Steem love as wide as possible to valued contributors here and now. And hey, if you disagree with who I upvote for, don't vote, how much vote powering I use, drop me a DM in Steemit.chat and we can discuss. The community is small enough to do that now, it won't be soon.

However don't jump on me about using a bot. I do think just classifying all use of bots as ‘evil’ is lazy reasoning. People can ‘circle-jerk’ and ‘lazy curate’ manually; conversely people can use bots to implement a sophisticated, well-thought out, meritocratic voting strategy that they work diligently to update. I’d love to employ a team of curators that sit around a triage what to upvote and by how much… however we are not there yet, so voting bots it is!

Hold tight

Okay so I went on a bit of a tangent with this post!

Back to my main point which is my having to manually curate the last few days...

For my own sanity I’m not even trying to match (manually) the output of votes that I was able to do with the Steemvoter bot. So that means, unfortunately that some people that I voted previously, won’t be receiving my customarily upvote. I'm taking the time to write this post because I know a lot of people appreciate my constant upvote. I know because people tell me. I also know because I’ve been there! For example, I remember when @wang (much maligned) would consistently upvote my content. As much as people resented @wang voting tactics at the time; I appreciated the support when my content was getting very little recognition. Psychologically it helped a lot.

So my message to those on my authors list is hold tight... I'll do what I can to ensure my bot is pointing in your direction soon!

NB: If anyone knows of a script (preferably python) I can use to build my own voting bot (so as not to have to rely on third party apps like Steemvoter), hit me up in the DM… else I back to trying to work out how to hack one up myself