Use Your Voting Power, or Lose!
Today, I'd like to make a parallel between steem and the world of games.
It's not surprising for me gamers prefer some of the apps on the steem blockchain, the reward system is very familiar to them.
Talking to each other to share tips and tricks, supporting each other, holding each other's back and cooperating for reaching a tougher objective, that's in the DNA of anyone playing team games.
In the same category of elements they understand really well, we have voting power, and especially the fact it regenerates.
For anyone who doesn't know yet, voting power regenerates 20% per day, that's a little less than 1% every hour (0.83%). When the VP reaches 100%, the regeneration stops, of course, until you use some of it by casting votes.
Now, back in the world of games.
In a MMORPG, let's say you play a wizard or a healer (but that can be extended to pretty much any character class). If you have full mana and don't use it on you but most likely your nearby friends (for positive spells) and foes (for negative spells), doesn't make it more likely that you and your team loses the game at some point? In fact, if you are a gamer, I don't really think such a thought of not using mana when you have it has occurred to you.
Back to steem world now.
We have a "mana" called voting power. It can be used for good or evil, that's up to you, it's your game, you play how you want to. But if it's at 100%, why would you choose not to use it, since you know it regenerates continuously?
You can use upvotes to:
- support your friends
- show your appreciation for content that you enjoyed or was useful for you
- curate and receive curators rewards
- help someone else grow
- hoping a whale will remark you and upvote you in return
- for profit
Now the warning. Don't use too much voting power, the more you use the less rewards your vote will carry. A recommended threshold is 80%, because your VP will be regenerated completely in 24 hours, if you don't use it any more. But anywhere between 75% to 90% is fine, depending on many factors, including the price of SBD and Steem, which influence your full vote amount.
There are many ways you can make sure you take full advantage of the regenerating voting power, by not allowing it to ever reach 100%, but close enough (99% sounds good?).
Using SteemAuto you can (I'm only listing the features I find relevant for our topic):
- Select a few friends or people you follow to automatically upvote their posts (you can choose the weight and time when to do it)
- Select a few loyal followers you'd like to reward automatically for commenting on your posts
The above is especially useful if you already have a nice share of Steem Power, so you can use use voting weights effectively.
Using SmartSteem, for example, to sell your upvotes. Why SmartSteem? Because they upvote previously whitelisted authors, and you can choose the quality of the posts you'd like to upvote. If you choose a high threshold for the voting power when selling upvotes stops, like 99% as I do, even if you're not around, you will only sell a very limited number of upvotes, and leave the consistent part for your manual voting.
Now, I understand if some whales would rather wait to upvote the right post or not upvote at all (like steemit), to not mess with the reward pool. But I wasn't really talking to them in this post.
There you go. You have your voting power at 100%. What are you going to do about it?