RE: I vote because.... (Let's talk about it)
Great topic! This is a frustration for me, I don't upvote anything that shows no sign of effort, if a post is 1 picture and a sentence, that has not taken effort. I am now starting to unfollow those who post useless spam posts.
The reason for this is so I can see those who I follow because they put time, energy and effort into their posts. I want more visibility for them.
I have recently stopped upvoting for the sake of Curation. To me this encourages thoughtless voting, leaves people who have put hours into posts with barely any rewards, and encourages the kind of spam mentioned above.
I still upvote myself, but then if I don't who does, and I am sacrificing Curation to support others, like me, who put hours into a post and barely get rewarded for it.
As I have only been on here a month or so, I have found a problem recently with the followers I picked up early on, as a fresh Minnow you build followers by networking other minnows and exchanging follows, upvotes, support, etc. After a month, I'd say I see barely any of the minnows I came across who posted quality content on my feed anymore, they are drowned out by the spam or have given up trying to overcome it and become inactive followers, meaning that the follower base I have picked up a long the way has diminished, but even worse, it has diminished mostly of those who voted thoughtfully. Leaving me to get 15 or 16 votes for even less STEEM cents.
I do occasionally get rewarded for my efforts, when a post gets seen by someone who recognizes effort that has been put in and recommends it to a whale group. This is nice and it helps the confidence and encourages me to keep putting in the time.
However this too is not exactly a long term sustainable position because of the reputation caps those groups have and while their support on one post is nice, they do not really become followers who will read your next post. Maybe the right post will achieve that, and from there things grow? I don't know.
I don't know if this is a new problem with the influx of users, because I got on here after the HF 19 so I just don't have the experience, maybe these issues I have raised are things that everyone successful who posts good content had to battle through?
The balance I want to see is good enough content to have end-user that are not earning a ton of money, but still are enjoying the site.
I don't want to "pay" users to stay, so we have to make the site fun and usable on it's own.
I know the curation rewards are there to get people to vote, but it does tend to throw the voting to the same people each day, which frustrates me on many levels.
Exactly, people throw their votes at the same Whales everyday because the curation payout is so much better if they get onto those posts early, then they probably also save their voting power for those posts.
I actually joined Steemit to have a wallet for my Steem that wasn't an exchange. Because I couldn't transfer from Coinspot to Bittrex because Coinspot had a Bittrex STEEM account, so it was trying to transfer Bittrex to Bittrex, just with a different Memo. It didn't work so I got my coins back and created this account to move them to.
Once I looked around and realised what it was, I got excited, at first about the earning potential, yes, but then I realised that was not a guarantee and that I had started to enjoy learning new things like HTML and Markdown and also improving rusty skills like writing. I also enjoy going through my travel diaries and photo's and writing about awesome experiences, while remembering them. Now the rewards mean nothing, I just want my effort to be recognised, doesn't have to be financial, but if I am getting say 80votes, and 10-30 dollars but only 5 people actually read my post then I am frustrated, way more than if 20 people vote, I make 2 dollars and but 18 of them actually read it and properly look at it.