DON'T POWER UP - You'll just end up losing it all!
Minnow Hell
This is the first of several posts that I'll be doing based on my experience as a minnow here on Steemit. It is aimed at other minnows, and specifically those who have only been on the platform for a week or two. My first 2 weeks on Steemit are something I've dubbed Minnow Hell, and the objective of these posts are to help early day users to avoid the mistakes I made, and maybe even share a few tips I only learnt after they were no longer useful.
Is Powering Up really such a bad idea?
OK, so first up... let me apologise for the very click-bait title... It IS 100% true though (assuming you've got less than 15SP and Steemit is still delegating free Steem Power to you).
Let me explain
If you started your Steemit journey as I did by registering a free Steemit account (and waiting for a number of days before being approved), you will notice that you have ~15 SP (Steem Power), and if you look on http://steemworld.org your Steem Power looks something like this:
on http://steemd.com it looks like this:
What that means is that you've actually only got 0.1 SP of your own, but Steemit is giving you another 14.90 for free. The reason for this (I assume) is that with just 0.1 SP, I doubt you'll even be able to update your profile, let alone post anything. You see, Steem Power pretty much determines your life for you on Steemit, and in your early days on Steemit, the most noticeable effect it has is going to be on your bandwidth (read about Steemit Bandwidth here: https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_bandwidth_work_on_the_Steem_blockchain).
In their FAQ, Steemit claims that "Normally everyone's bandwidth allowance is quite high", which is unfortunately only true when the network isn't busy. When it IS busy you will frequently be running into errors like this:
and when you go have a look on http://steemd.com , your bandwidth might look something like this:
Does that mean I had to 75 hours before I could use Steemit again? Luckily not... Fortunately I would generally just need to wait an hour or so and I would be able to comment/vote again. The one day I was completely unable to use Steemit the entire afternoon/early evening though.
OK, so just buy some Steem and Power Up?
According to the FAQ:
If you are unable to transact for extended periods of time, or you are frequently running into bandwidth limits, then you will either need to reduce your usage to stay within your limit, or purchase more Steem Power for your account through a third-party exchange such as BlockTrades.
which is exactly what I did... I got so frustrated not being able to post/comment/upvote that I bought a small amount of Steem (it was near $5 then, and with the South African Rand being what it is... ZAR500 got me about 8 STEEM). Pretty shitty in the bigger scheme of things, but still a 50%+ increase over what I had, and would alleviate by bandwidth problems by at least 50%! Unfortunately, this was not to be.
Remember the 14.90 "Free" SP that Steemit gives us? Well, that is only temporary, and all the SP that you earn from curation and author rewards while being added to your base of 0.1, is also deducted from your free 14.90 in equal amounts... leaving us with a total of... you guessed it... STILL JUST 15 SP!
)So what's the solution?
Fortunately you do have options (other than turning off your PC and coming back tomorrow when your bandwidth is looking better).
1) Use any SBD that you earn on upvote bots (such as @MinnowBooster and @SmartMarket over on https://steembottracker.com/#paid )
- My reasoning for this is that by doing so you increase your author rewards (both SBD and SP) on each post you've boosted like this.
- Remember: Converting your SBD to STEEM and powering up simply reduces your free SP (getting you over your 15SP target sooner, yes... but losing the SBD you would have gained from author rewards which you can use to repeat the process again)
- NB: DO NOT USE the "bid bots" over there until you are 100% sure you know what you are doing.
2) Use your SBD/STEEM to buy SP Delegation from @blocktrades
- The delegation you get from @blocktrades in this manner stacks with your free 14.90, and you'll finally be freed from the Minnow Hell that is limited bandwidth!
- P.S. The minimum amount of delegation you should request is 2 STEEM (giving ~17.5 SP for 90 days at the time of writing), I don't know what happens if you request less than that, but there's a warning on @blocktrades mentioning this, so I'd heed the warning if I were you.
Disclaimer
I've been on Steemit for less than 2 months now, and could be talking out of my ass... however, I like to think I've learned from my mistakes and my advice will help you avoid the mistakes I made. If any veteran Steemians reading this notice any errors in my thinking... please correct me wherever I went wrong!
Connect with me on Social:
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@braaiboy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BraaiBoy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/braaiboy
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braaiboy/
Some other useful posts for life on Steemit:
- Introducing GINA - This is a MUST HAVE, and if you don't have the 0.001 registration fee from author rewards yet, then hit me up on Discord and I'll send it to you.
I've written a very cool dice game (OK, that's my biased opinion) where you can win free SBD every couple of hours.
- please go check out @PlayDice: https://steemit.com/@playdice
- NB: Unless you've taken my advice in this article, don't play the game, as you probably won't have enough SP to reach the minimum 0.006 UpVote value required to play.
footer by @bearone for #TeamSouthAfrica
@ awesome article. you have gotten 55% upvote from @audreylogan
Good advice that I will pass along. I found you from your sharing your post on curie discord, and glad I did.
Cool... glad to see people do actually go through those post shares :-) I've been wondering if it wasn't a fool's errand dropping my links into those channels... glad to hear it isn't :-)
In economics this effect is called a 100% marginal tax. If you earn 1 SP you lose 1 delegated SP (out of the 15 you get at start). Just like in a welfare program. You lose your benefits when you get any income. In the ratio 1:1
This is one of the main problems with helping the poor using welfare programs. It gives the poor no incentive to work. Because they don’t increase their income when losing benefits in a 1:1 ratio to their increased income from work.
There are many proposed solutions for this problem. A popular solution is basic income. You get to keep the welfare in addition to whatever you earn. This way it doesn’t kill the incentive to work. You always get better off by increasing your income.
I couldn't agree more! Absolutely 0 sense in powering up (no benefit to doing so)... and so as a result you're stuck in the system that is supposedly helping you, until you manage to become free of it completely.
P.S. Thanks for weighing in!
Great putting down your thoughts on this I think it’s good advice for new arrivals
I didn’t go that way but maybe I should have but at the time I didn’t know
I have always powered up and never bought delegated SP but I think if I had done it may have been better for me at this start
Yeah... I've had lots of these chats on various discord channels with many other minnows that were going through the same thing... so luckily I didn't feel too alone :P
FWIW (and in case anyone else is also reading this): My Plan:
Continue to use delegation until I have about 500SP (not least of which is so that I can get a vote slider). I like to upvote people who have commented on my posts/videos and being forced to use a 100% UV each time limits me to 10 or 11 of these per day (definitely not good if you want to have an active blog and follower engagement).
After that though... Use all my SBD to power up normally. Delegation is a pretty bad deal if you do the math, so unless you are requesting a delegation for a bot that is going to be utilising the delegated SP to its max, you will be losing out.
Yes very true
Btw there is a chrome extension for Steemit that gives you a slider even under 500 SP that you may want to check it out
On my phone here so don’t have it handy
Also esteem app gives you a slider option as well
Yeah... I saw the chrome extension, but flagged it as "TODO" ... to be honest, my machine is struggling as is, and more extensions probably won't help matters :P
Re esteem: SWEET! Will check it out... I'm looking for a good mobile app for Steemit as is... perfect reason to finally check it out.
It’s worth checking out I don’t se it mainly for replying to comments it’s so much faster to work through them all
When we started on steemit we got much more than 15SP... if I remember well it was around 50... and we kept it for several months... Mine dissapeared in one time after 5 or 6 months I believe...
Yes the same with me, now it is a lot less and not sure how long the leave it for people
This is really good to know as I am helping many others with their early days on Steemit. I had no idea about this because I bought in with several hundred dollars. Unfortunately, many of the people I refer can't do this. Thanks for putting this article together.
BTW... just checked your profile and see that you mentioned you're a BBQ lover... then you should have a squiz at my @dtube channel ... Braai = BBQ (well sort of) here in South Africa... it's kinda what I do :-)
Yeah... buying more than 15 STEEM and powering up is obviously another way of doing it... although you still "lose out" on 14.9 SP that way (which isn't that much, unless you're just 'dipping your toes in the water' like I was when I first started).
Awesome! I will definitely check it out. I thought about that when I saw your profile picture.
You have some good points there, one I might add is to use the currency market instead of blocktrades, you get way better deals when powering up.
I agree with you 100%... but I'm going to save that for another article.
The post was already getting a little bit too long :-)
I only recently discovered this, and because blocktrades was so easy to use, I was buying SP delegation using SBD instead of first converting to STEEM on the market and then using STEEM to buy the delegation... even if using blocktrades themselves to convert SBD to STEEM, you still get a better deal when leasing SP using the resulting STEEM.
P.S. Any idea why this might be? I have no clue :P
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I have been powering up, once I figured that it was a good thing to do. But I mostly had my bandwidth problems licked before by doing three things...1) I stopped loading pictures directly to Steemit, and used a hosting site..tinypic...instead 2) I quit revising after I posted. Every time I edited to add a couple punctuation marks, it used the whole bandwidth I used to originally post. So I try, try, try harder to get it all right before I push post and that made a big difference. 3) I just did other things and would stay off during peak hours which is when I had issues and for me was 8-10 AM,
I had no bandwidth problems if I did all three. And yes a lot more SP didn't suck either.
Yeah... # 2 was a real killer for me too. I was posting to DTube , but there isn't a way (other than using a 3rd party site for hosting pics) to edit my associated Steemit post to include pics, so I would have to do the post on DTube and then go into edit it on Steemit and add the pictures after.
It also definitely didn't help that I would have to go back and fix the odd grammar/punctuation problem every now and then too. I think "Proof Read, and then proof read again", eliminating the need for edits is possibly one of the biggest bandwidth savers!
P.S. Are you sure that image size affects bandwidth usage? The way I figured it was that just the text/url pointing to the actual image is what consumed bandwidth allocation.
e.g.
HERE IS SOME TEXT BLAH BLAH BLAHuses the same amount of bandwidth as
Look here, http://abc.com/image.jpgeven if the image was a 3MB file.
That merely like what I did before...but then try to cut my curious over it because I saw some post were without too many upvotes or comments able to push their earning better than those who had a good author.. and they were kept by this thing called as a whale or some who are good in using software aka the bot. That is just some strategies.
Nice post braaiboy, I think the blocktrades idea is nice :)
Yes people grow your SP to 15 with paid votes dont power up with the SBD you earn early on unless you're 'buying the dip'. ;)
ॐ we are one ॐ
@lanmower is a
steemPunk
agreed... and even then, only if you're doing a lot more than 15 Steem