SteemFest² Speakers Inspire My New Upvoting System!
Day #3 of Steemfest filled us with inspiration which inspired me to ask "How can I do the most good with my votes every day on Steem?" My initial answer to that below along with the story of our day together today!
Day #3 begins at 10 am!
After a wonderful night of sleep, @tomasgeorge and I met @ashleypeat for an Uber over to the conference venue. The lunch spread was wonderful today with so many delicious fruits! I’m amazed that it was no big deal for me to not eat for a 17 hours between dinner last night and lunch today!
Not long after arriving, @furion and @ned stopped by to say hi and chat a bit! @inquiringtimes was kind enough to ask @ned a lot of questions I was interested in which made it great for me to just listen!
After talking to @ned, @awesomianist stopped by and helped me to see Steem from his point of view. Living in Malaysia, $1 means a lot on an upvote. My $0.10 upvote would add up to about enough to eat for an entire day every week. On top of that, with 16,482 followers today the odds are that for the majority of my followers I have never even upvoted one post. That sucks and I am ready to do better! Talking with Ian inspired me to open my mind to be a better way to give back which I was about to receive!
Next, the Steemit Inc panel was wonderful to hear the upcoming plans for scalability and hearing questions answered!
I was perfectly primed and excited after that to receive the talk @starkerz gave! His talk reviewed his work with promo-uk and focused on our responsibly as Steem Power holders to do the most good with our votes. His full talk was recorded by @tomasgeorge in the video below from Tomas's original post at https://steemit.com/promo-steem/@tomasgeorge/starkerz-steemfest-talk-or-2nd-nov-2017-or-promo-steem-and-responsible-upvoting.
New Autovoting System
After @starkerz's talk, I could finally see a way to do better with what up until this point has remained my top challenge on Steem. How do I use my voting power to do the most good? Up until now thinking of maximizing my own rewards by simply voting those voting me back and voting up comments on my posts has driven the majority of my voting including 20% or more of my voting power spent on myself and about 50% or more total spent on myself and friends. If we all vote like this, why even bother joining Steem just to vote our friends up and help each other make money?
A better way as explained by @starkerz is to make sure we vote for those where our votes do the most good. When he shared this, I got a clear vision of having my votes going out to users consistently receiving small payouts that would most appreciate and be excited by my automatic upvotes.
To empower this change, starting today I am setting a 10% per post per day maximum for my autovoter including on my own posts, my wife @laurabanfield's posts, and everyone else I am voting for to enable me to distribute my votes more to those especially earning under $1 per post that will appreciate that the most such as in a country like Malaysia where a dollar as day is enough to feed oneself.
See the difference with a little math. Currently I can give 10 full power votes a day for about $5 or $10 each which I have been often giving to those voting me the most who often already earn $1000+ a month on Steem. Does my $10 do much good being thrown in with so many other votes? No. Will $1 on every post for the same authors I am upvoting now still show my support while allowing me to vote $9 to authors often earning $5 or less on every post? Yes.
At 1% voting power, I can autovote 2,000 posts every day for about $0.10 each. That is 1,000+ authors I can give a few cents to every single day which might not seem like much in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and some other countries where the cost of living is high. In countries where the cost of living is low, just $0.10 a post from me alone would equal enough to eat for several days every month plus a show of support for every contribution.
The more those authors are inspired to write for us, the more users we get which is our bottom line in terms of value of the Steem price. We get 100 or 200 million wallets before Bitcoin and we win the #1 cryptocurrency spot along with a $100 to $1,000 price per Steem. Every author publishing posts each day helps us do that especially those willing to do the most in exchange for the least amount of rewards.
Going forward I will make a system for me to notice posts by many more authors hoping to get added to my autovoter using the tag jerrybanfield. Most will start at 1% and be able to work up to 10% per day maximum voting power. For example, if an author makes 5 posts per day, the maximum is 2% for a total of 10% voting power daily. In the meantime, I have reduced my autovoting power to allow my voting power to recharge and begin this system. If this means those mutually autovoting me reduce votes, this is okay especially if those votes go to help out other authors. Anyone seeking to follow my votes and do the same thing can follow me as a curator on Streemian.
More about this in an upcoming post and video after I return home from Steemfest. For now, if you would like to apply to join my autovoter as an author, will you please use the tag jerrybanfield in your posts because that is how I will begin discovering new authors to add?
Back to Steemfest!
On top of the first talk, @terrybrock and @ginacarr gave an inspiring talk about discovering our best opportunities to contribute which confirmed my new autovoting system! Afterwords I got to meet @sterlinluxan and talk with Terry and Gina about setting up our next Florida Steem meetup in Orlando hopefully in the beginning of December.
We enjoyed an amazing dinner together starting with vegetable soup! @andrarchy invited me to sit next to him and @lukestokes where I also got to meet @roadscape for the first time while @lovejoy & @wolfcat took the final seats at our table!
!
For dinner they were kind enough to serve me the vegetarian option which was basically triple broccoli instead of meat!
My diet is founded in whole plant foods meaning most of what I eat is unprocessed fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and whole-grains because these are what the doctor in the book How Not To Die recommended. This means I go from mostly vegan approach and I’m guessing this desert might’ve been an exception!
After dinner, I rode the shuttle over to the SteemFest Snooker. There I had long conversations with @transisto, @exyle, and @cervantes along with making some fun photos with @karensuestudios, @rea, and @ezzy. At 11 pm I felt it time to leave and headed back to the hotel. Here are a couple photos from the beautiful walk back.
On the way in, I met @jeffberwick for the first time in the lobby while @tomasgeorge and @ashleypeat were just on their way out! What a wonderful day together learning and growing our community! Thank you for taking the time to join me for my story of what happened today!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
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PS: Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because 100% of the rewards I receive are spent advertising Steem? Thank you to the 1800+ accounts voting for me as a witness, the ~700M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!
You have good intentions here, but I think the problem should be solved by the system in a way which I described here.
The key should be "diminishing returns" so that it would be just not worth it anymore to upvote oneself or close family members/friends again and again. I explained it like this: "How about if after each vote on a specific account (including ones own account) each further vote on the same account would lead to significantly less curation reward for the voter and less profit for the upvoted account? Thus, when upvoting an account which I had already upvoted before, my voting power would be smaller than in case I upvote an account which I didn't upvote before. "
Automatic voting is the worst thing that has happened to Steemit!
This is the reason why new people cannot get on the trending page like they used to.
If you are not willing to manually curate it would be better to delegate your SP to someone that will, but if you are just going to reconfigure your bot and get all your friends to trail it, you are still part of the problem.
Also by making rules, forcing new people to use your tags and creating a guide to maximize your weird voting percentages, you are just unnecessarily complicating Steemit.
Steemit should be this simple:
Anything more than this alienates people.
"Automatic voting is the worst thing that has happened to Steemit!"
Code is law. Half-handed attempts at shaming will do nothing to prevent people from aligning their actions with game-theory.
If want to stop auto-voting, it must be disabled technically. If that is not possible, you are wasting your efforts.
I seriously doubt that holding our witnesses accountable for their decisions qualifies as shaming and I am sure that Jerry is not as delicate as you think.
I understand that people will game the system, but if everyone went this route Steemit would fail.
Since Jerry is running for witness he really should be above reproach.
If enough people voice their opinions about automatic voting, maybe the witnesses like Jerry might change the code before it's too late.
"I seriously doubt that holding our witnesses accountable for their decisions qualifies as shaming"
That's great? I didn't say it did. You seem to have assumed I meant that, which is understandable, but I didn't.
You'll note my support for removing Craig Grant votes going back almost as long as my blog does. Just a single example, but I don't believe in trying to control how others use their stake outside of clear shenanigans like referral link for Bitconnect/Genesys pushers.
"I am sure that Jerry is not as delicate as you think."
You don't know what I think about Jerry, so at best, this is baseless speculation, while in actuality, it is false. I am on the record repeatedly praising how Jerry generally handles criticism.
"If enough people voice their opinions about automatic voting, maybe the witnesses like Jerry might change the code before it's too late."
I agree that this is a valid path for this grievance.
However, have you bothered to look into whether it is TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE to do what you ask? I'm not sure that it is. Perhaps you can stop Steemvoter, or other specific creations that attach to an API...
How will you ever stop client side scripting? I can write a bot to type or vote for me entirely on the client side by pixel matching get.pixel colors. You can't distinguish it from a normal click without substantial data and machine learning.
Can we establish that this is even possible before we leave Rome on a massive war-time campaign?
PS - Philosophically, we are aligned, but I gave up swimming against the tide. Technically, it seems impossible to stop, even if we had witness consensus for a fork. I don't know how to technically achieve it, which makes discussing it a pointless venture.
Thanks for the discussion.
The only way would be to change the incentives. Shaming will do no good, as you say, or won't do much good in the long term.
We must change the incentives! The way for long term valuable content to be valued probably involves -
Lengthening payout time or creating drip faucets on locked articles based on views or under certain favorable conditions.
Considering a negative incentive for upvoting (probably automatically) an artivle that turns out to be worthless or of detracting value.
Basically we need more levers, we need more experiments!
Thanks Lex for cutting through the feelings to try to see the truth.
"Lengthening payout time or creating drip faucets on locked articles based on views or under certain favorable conditions."
This is an awesome idea. I think we should definitely implement it based on traffic brought to the Steemit website!
I tell you all my great ideas because you seem like a guy who know how to get things done! 😃
Quick addition:
"Steemit should be this simple:" (FOR NEW USERS).
All advanced functions, which we DO need, can be hidden in the settings menu and toggle-able like NSFW. Vote slider should be available in there from day 1, for any SP.
I cannot help but to also agree with this. Autovoting does take out the time/attention factor, and it does keep less mind power OUT of the steem ecosystem. Keeping mind power INSIDE the steem ecosystem is what will drive it--our conscious attention is incredibly valuable...and one of the only things that are truly scarce.
Truthfully, what things are scarce?
Source: Money's Fundamental Problem (the Truth)
"Keeping mind power INSIDE the steem ecosystem is what will drive it--our conscious attention is incredibly valuable"
You are completely ignoring the fact that brain power wasted on mindlessly voting for the same people and same type of articles, as most users do, cannot be used on creative pursuits.
I use an auto-voter so I can reliably produce more content, instead of spending my time managing the legion of sycophants who whine at me if I don't vote their most recent flower picture. (Not that they are getting a vote anyway, as I vet each person's post history via chainBB and weight their vote weight and frequency accordingly.)
Auto-voting does not mean you don't vet bloggers for quality, first and regularly. It just means I don't have to manually place 200 votes per day.
I use bots to help me optimise how I spend my time on steem for more human interaction.
I don't auto-upvote on my main account, nor am I too particular about vote timing/sizing to maximise curation rewards.
However, I do have an auto-voter running on an alt account that I have manually curated authors I would like to support long term. When that has spare VP then it throws votes about mostly randomly, but with some bias towards minnows. If we want steem to grow then we need minnows to grow into dolphins.
A huge fist pound for @gonzo. The struggle is real for minnows and an awareness shift is long overdue to help everyone succeed here.
Glad you've seen the light @jerrybanfield. This should help generate a lot more goodwill across the board. Replies talk, but per Steemit itself, "money talks". Giving without expecting anything in return is better than receiving for the long run.
"Giving without expecting anything in return is better than receiving for the long run."
Why is this the rule for whales, but the opposite is practically encouraged for minnows?
I can see I'm going to have to write a whole series called "Minnow Marxism".
I appreciate the engagement and dialogue, but honestly wasn't anticipating a public breakdown of each of my statements (and, yes, I know that I made a public comment to generate this). I respect all of your efforts and will reach out via discord. Re: your question here, you're making just as much of a generalized assumption as you feel I did. I see that you personally have used auto-voting for a good cause, so I'm glad for that. To be continued on private chat.
"you're making just as much of a generalized assumption as you feel I did."
What assumption would that be? I'm just trying to accurately describe what I percive as the "democratic majority's" viewpoint on this topic (ie minnows good, deserve more - whales selfish, need to give more).
Incidentally, I don't consider myself a whale, so I'm kind of in the middle of this situation. I'm just a perennial devil's advocate that likes to ask uncomfortable questions that hopefully prompt discussion. Don't interpret any curmudgeonly questions as offense or aggression (if possible, heh).
I'll keep an eye out for your dm.
"The struggle is real for minnows and an awareness shift is long overdue to help everyone succeed here."
What shift is that?
I support over 200 authors this way, most of them minnows. I could not do that otherwise.
Nothing personal at all really if you took it potentially that way. I'm sorry, but I need a bit more background as to what you're talking about so I can answer properly. Does this mean that you're automatically voting for a preset universe of 200+ people, mostly minnows? I'm personally a believer in manual quality over quantity in general because I want to read who and what I support, where upvoting is dynamic relative to their current content, as well as engage them on their blog posts when practical.
Please feel free to send me a chat at mattcoin8 if you'd like discuss. I'm happy to learn about your view.
"Nothing personal at all really"
No apology necessary, I'm not offended/annoyed.
"Does this mean that you're automatically voting for a preset universe of 200+ people, mostly minnows?"
Yes, and it was a huge task. I had to create a spreadsheet where I tracked their post quality, frequency, and created notes. However, it was either that or not support them at all, as focusing on my own work takes a lot of my time up.
That goes on for over 200 entries, and everything past about 30 is minnows with no SP.
"I'm personally a believer in manual quality over quantity in general"
Me too, but when you get to my size, you start getting people whining at you everyday for not voting or following them. You either put up decent people on an autovoter or take crap every day.
You can DM me in MSP PAL if you like.
This post may also answer some of your questions: https://steemit.com/blog/@lexiconical/i-finally-converted-to-steemvoter-partially-it-s-quite-a-relief-actually
Agreed 💯% .
Autovoting is not the best part,
Upvote is similar to a 'like' where you read or see content, if you find it good , press like or upvote button.
But auto upvote just for curation reward without even actually seeing the content doesn't seems positive for community growth. This will always leave newbie but excellent authors isolated.
Thank you Jerry for reconsidering autovoting for maximized rewards. As @starkerz mentions at the end of the video that his curation rewards have dropped by curating content that isn't as popular, I have also been sacrificing those big curation rewards of the last months to OCD and at the end of the day it feels a lot better knowing they are being spread more wide to the community instead and doing good for the platforms longterm.
Thanks for sharing that clip, following that user now. :)
@acidyo, thanks for the echoing my sentiments above! I truly believe that there’s is a sentiment shift happening right now that is along the lines of harnessing the huge amount of people on the platform to partake in value added activities and having the community support Them with upvotes. It spreads the steem love and should result in a higher demand for steem via value creation. It is certainly far from complete, but then conversation has started and I guess we need to see how the community reacts from here. Thanks to @jerrybanfield for acting in his own way on inspiration taken from my talk! )
This is a great project @acidyo. I've been loving the OCD daily reports and upvoting/commenting on the ones I like.
I have been doing something similar with my autovoter for some time. I support over 200 authors this way, most of them minnows.
I like to point this out to the anti-auto-voter types. Code is law, after all. If you don't like it, it must be technically disabled, not shamed into the shadows.
Great to hear what is happening at Steemfest. As a member of Team Malaysia, on behalf of the whole team I would like to thank you for your support. One USD is about RM4.30 which can buy a decent meal, our ringgit has been declining. Thank you for voting responsibly.
"At 1% voting power, I can autovote 2,000 posts every day for about $0.10 each. That is 1,000+ authors I can give a few cents to every single day which might not seem like much in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and some other countries where the cost of living is high. In countries where the cost of living is low, just $0.10 a post from me alone would equal enough to eat for several days every month plus a show of support for every contribution." : @jerrybanfield
After talking to @ned, @awesomianist stopped by and helped me to see Steem from his point of view. Living in Malaysia, $1 means a lot on an upvote. My $0.10 upvote would add up to about enough to eat for an entire day every week. On top of that, with 16,482 followers today the odds are that for the majority of my followers I have never even upvoted one post. That sucks and I am ready to do better! Talking with Ian inspired me to open my mind to be a better way to give back which I was about to receive!
The best point is "...BETTER WAY TO GIVE BACK WHICH I WAS ABOUT TO RECEIVE"
You also pointed about living in Malaysia and i well known that how important your vote or other whales vote because im also Malaysia Malaysians..
Now you thinks about your follower and supporter. How nice and kind of you while some (not all) other whales still sit and just maximize their own wallet.
I hope many person will come to follow your step @jerrybanfield..
Thank you and as always; "you are the star of steemians.."
Regards
"How nice and kind of you while some (not all) other whales still sit and just maximize their own wallet."
What quality content have you provided to the community that qualifies you to critique community members, and would justify such socialized charity angled in your direction? (Your last two posts averaged 34 words each.)
As a redfish, i do not have any qualify to critiq community member. Read again. The word i mean to appriciate who give back to community. And other which dont give back, its all depend and up to them because they maybe had thier opinion and only them know how struggle to grow themselves from minnow to whale..
And for me, i will try my best to support too because i know, i will not move too much if i dont have support from community too..
I also hope to get guideline from you and other too.
And if my write had come with not satisfied meaning, im ask forgiveness from all reader and community..
Have a nice day..
Regards
THIS IS SOOO AWESOME!!! People do want to autovote anyways, and you are a good example to the community on how you distribute your votes. I am still actually using my conscious voting power. There's just so much to learn about STEEM...it's awesome.
@jerrybanfield if you see this message or think to do this... would you grab me a small t-shirt? :D I'll do whatever I can to repay you! I truly wish I could be there!! Let's chat some Steem when you get back. I miss you!!
For having been in Malaysia several times, I don't see where you can eat for $1, except if you are living in the jungle, have your own cows and chickens, fish pound, rice field, garden and orchard.
For $1, in a street stall in Malaysia, maybe you get a bowl of rice with 40 g of chicken and some veggies, a small plate, without water. Food is expensive, rent is expensive, transport and education is expensive in Malaysia.
Voting someone $0.10 is alright, but the idea that this will be of great help is not right, $3-4 would be.
Personally I will always vote full-power to selected authors and quality posts.
The argument that someone's economic situation should somehow factor into their post rewards is a non-starter with me. I hear a lot about "could live on $1 a day", but nothing about the fact my last apartment (864sqf) was $4500/month or walking into a doctor's office costs me $500+.
Results, not efforts, are rewarded.
It surely is very expensive to get an apartment where you are.
Indeed it did. Regrettably, I was in one of the world's most expensive cities before I moved out to Jerry's neck of the woods by chance.
Also, to be fair, the 4500 was furnished and included utilities.
Interesting voting approach. Thank you for sharing @starkerz's video about @Promo-steem and Responsible Upvoting