One Should Avoid Self Votes ... except when the vote sweeps the dust for the post

SteemIt allows users to upvote their own posts.

Shortly after I joined SteemIt, a pod of whales convinced me that users should upvote their own posts as the self vote would encourage others to follow.

The whales, of course, were just trying to justify their own actions.

Plankton accounts should never vote on their own posts.

At the time, very few of my posts were cracking the elusive $0.02 mark and I was not receiving any rewards.

My upvote value was so small that my pathetic self-votes were all wasted.

There were few tools at the time that would show the upvote value of small accounts. Fortunately this has changed.

After several years of frustration, I am finally a redfish. SteemBlockExplorer shows that my account has 755 STEEM POWER and that my 100% upvote is worth $0.0046 ... with STEEM Price at $0.159.

The price of STEEM is low. Even though I am now a redfish, my 100% upvote is 23% of the minimum value needed to receive a reward.

Weekly Curation Rewards

The Curation Report on your STEEM Wallet shows the last week of curation rewards. The report shows that I received 1.254 SP in rewards last week.

Hooray for me!

That is about twenty cents a week ... almost three pennies a day!

Hooray for me!

I've been placing my upvotes on the 5 minute mark. I've managed to front run several whales.

For this article, I need to look at the minimum reward received as that is the true value of my upvote.

It looks like I receive 0.009 SP curation reward for a 100% upvote. My combined curation and author reward is 0.018 SP.

In most cases, I get only 0.009 SP for a self vote.

In most cases ... a self vote is not worth it.

Sweeping Dust

The cut off for a post is $0.02. With STEEM at just under $0.16, it takes about 13 SP in upvotes for a post to get an award.

My 100% upvote is worth 0.009 * 2 = 0.018 SP.

When I see a post that is at or just under the reward price, I can upvote that post and bring it over the reward price.

Yesterday I receive an upvote on my post that was worth 0.13 SP. This brought the vote total to $0.02.

But the price of STEEM was falling!

To assure that the post would stay over $0.02, I decided to upvote my post. This brought the reported upvote value to 0.16 SP.

NOTE, I was expecting that 0.13 + 2*(0.009) would be 15, but there probably is some rounding involved.

Anyway, I believe that I have enough SP that I can sweep the dust of a post with 0.11 SP rewards.

My current stance is that I will drop self votes when the vote sweeps the dust of the vote.

I Miss Dust Sweeper

There used to be services called @dustsweeper and @dustbunny that would automatically sweep the dust for accounts.

It appears that these accounts have gone silent.

So, that means that mid size accounts who want to support small accounts on Steem should occasionally sweep the dust of plankton accounts to help the accounts grow.

About the Picture

I generated the image above of a dapper dude giving himself a thumbs up on Night Cafe.

In an effort to increase my upvote value I decided to try generating an image a day which for SteemIT which I will publish (along with an original essay) here on SteemIt.

I consider this post on upvoting to be an original article.

I will put the images in this Night Cafe Collection.

Conclusion

Small accounts should avoid upvoting their own posts. It is not worth it.

Once an account has enough SP to sweep dust, then it is good practice to sweep the dust of posts that fall short of the $0.02 minimum payment.

I will put the images I generate for SteemIt Posts in this directory