The high hidden cost of self upvotes

The title of my post might look like I'm going for the clickbait, but I can guarantee you this is not the case my friend. There is ample evidence to show that I'm on to something here, and that this might be an aspect of Steem you may have not considered.

It's a common mistake, at least It looks to be the case specially if you browse around the trending pages for a little while on Steem. I guess we can attempt to rationalize the behavior, participate in some sort of logical contortions, and arrive to half constructed justifications, as to avoid any feelings of guilt. But is this reasoning short sighted? I strongly believe it is, and I'll attempt to explain my point.

Penny Smart, pound foolish

The high hidden cost of self upvotes
meno (60) in philosophy • 4 days ago
The title of my post might look like I'm going for the clickbait, but I can guarantee you this is not the case my friend. There is ample evidence to show that I'm on to something here, and that this might be an aspect of Steem you may have not considered.

self voting.jpg
It's a common mistake, at least It looks to be the case specially if you browse around the trending pages for a little while on Steem. I guess we can attempt to rationalize the behavior, participate in some sort of logical contortions, and arrive to half constructed justifications, as to avoid any feelings of guilt. But is this reasoning short sighted? I strongly believe it is, and I'll attempt to explain my point.

Penny Smart, pound foolish

penny wise.jpg
Before someone attacks me for insinuating you should not do as you please with your stake, let me clarify. By all means, do whatever you feel like doing with your SteemPower, I have absolutely no right to tell you what you should, or should not do. I would even argue no one has the right to do so, that was the whole point of a decentralized social media platform, there is no big brother per say. But this does not mean you are not shooting yourself in the foot for thinking with a mind of scarcity.

On the first image I shared, I've super imposed a pie chart of a user (no need for names) that has about 200 Steem Power sitting on the wallet. This user spends hours and hours a day making the most meaningless comments and self upvoting them, on whale accounts hoping to catch from random upvotes, but..... those never happen.

Let's do some napkin math..

Just because I want to make this as simple as possible, lets make some assumptions. Let's assume this account only upvotes 10 self comments per day, and that this account keeps on pulling the SBD out as they make it because they need it so badly.

This user would be able to bring in 3.5 SBD per week at best, and this is assuming nothing goes wrong. Meaning, this user does not catch a couple flags for being spammy, or gets its account nuked for acting unethically by steemcleaners or alike. So to conclude that this tactic of "making money" is about effective as filling pools with a tiny plastic cup, is not an exaggeration. I would simply not take a job that paid me that little per week.

Who has time for that?
Can you see yourself working every single day, on your little self upvote farm to make $5 a week? I can think of ten thousand things I would rather be doing, and one of them is nothing, but to these users, this is a "master plan", they figured it out, they rigged the system, they found the free lunch.

I can almost guarantee a giant percentage of them give up, they simply have to, there is nothing in the human psyche that allows us to work without results indefinitely. It would make no sense, It would simply go against natural processes required for growth and survival. In other words, nobody has enough time as to throw it all away.

What did I mean by cost?

The high hidden cost of self upvotes
meno (60) in philosophy • 4 days ago
The title of my post might look like I'm going for the clickbait, but I can guarantee you this is not the case my friend. There is ample evidence to show that I'm on to something here, and that this might be an aspect of Steem you may have not considered.

self voting.jpg
It's a common mistake, at least It looks to be the case specially if you browse around the trending pages for a little while on Steem. I guess we can attempt to rationalize the behavior, participate in some sort of logical contortions, and arrive to half constructed justifications, as to avoid any feelings of guilt. But is this reasoning short sighted? I strongly believe it is, and I'll attempt to explain my point.

Penny Smart, pound foolish

penny wise.jpg
Before someone attacks me for insinuating you should not do as you please with your stake, let me clarify. By all means, do whatever you feel like doing with your SteemPower, I have absolutely no right to tell you what you should, or should not do. I would even argue no one has the right to do so, that was the whole point of a decentralized social media platform, there is no big brother per say. But this does not mean you are not shooting yourself in the foot for thinking with a mind of scarcity.

On the first image I shared, I've super imposed a pie chart of a user (no need for names) that has about 200 Steem Power sitting on the wallet. This user spends hours and hours a day making the most meaningless comments and self upvoting them, on whale accounts hoping to catch from random upvotes, but..... those never happen.

Let's do some napkin math...

mathissimple.jpg
Just because I want to make this as simple as possible, lets make some assumptions. Let's assume this account only upvotes 10 self comments per day, and that this account keeps on pulling the SBD out as they make it because they need it so badly.

This user would be able to bring in 3.5 SBD per week at best, and this is assuming nothing goes wrong. Meaning, this user does not catch a couple flags for being spammy, or gets its account nuked for acting unethically by steemcleaners or alike. So to conclude that this tactic of "making money" is about effective as filling pools with a tiny plastic cup, is not an exaggeration. I would simply not take a job that paid me that little per week.

Who has time for that?
Can you see yourself working every single day, on your little self upvote farm to make $5 a week? I can think of ten thousand things I would rather be doing, and one of them is nothing, but to these users, this is a "master plan", they figured it out, they rigged the system, they found the free lunch.

I can almost guarantee a giant percentage of them give up, they simply have to, there is nothing in the human psyche that allows us to work without results indefinitely. It would make no sense, It would simply go against natural processes required for growth and survival. In other words, nobody has enough time as to throw it all away.

What did I mean by cost?

socialworth.jpg
I don't want to bore you with platitudes and talking points you have probably read and heard before. The idea of social worth is nothing new, specially when we live in a virtual world of social-media where we allegedly require understanding it to navigate the waters. But do we really? Do we honestly get it?

Let's run a little Mental experiment

tinybrain.jpg
A valuable Steemian

Think of someone you look up to, it could be a whale, it could be a dolphin, it could even be a minnow that in your view, in your eyes, brings a lot of value to your Steemian experience. This person is loved by many, respected and almost never has posts or interactions that fall flat of expectations.

Now imagine that person, losing access to their account, losing any possibility of regaining said access so the account, in other words, imagine that person having to start from scratch. How long do you think it would take this Whale, Dolphin or even Minnow to get back up there? Think hard, remove the default bias and really run this experiment in your head. Does it seem like an impossible task? or does it seem like it might not be too hard at all?

Why is that? Why would it be expected for this Steemian you look up to, to recover his/her status? Could it be because you and many other people like you care? Could it be that not because this person lost the SteemPower it means that this person lost his/her Social Worth/Value?

A shitty Steemian

Lets try the opposite, try to think of someone who is a terrible Steemian, it could be a whale, it could be a Dolphin, it does not matter. It's someone that you know is protected, at least in a way because of their Steem Wallet. What would happen, if this person lost access to his/her account? How many Steemians would offer their support? Would help this Shitty Steemian regain their position/status on the platform?

It's easy to get confused
We equate sometimes the size of the wallet, with the social worth of a user, but that is an illusion, not only on Steem, but in the non virtual world too. And the question becomes, who do you want to be? Do you want to accumulate empty wealth, chase after a ghost in hopes that life's lotto will choose you? Or do you want to be someone who gets it? Someone that understands Social Worth, that does not ignore the first word "Social" from Social-Media.

It is easy to get confused, staring at those trending pages distorts the truth in more ways that I care to describe. But I for one intend to not allow that to ruin my days. I intend to not get caught up in the illusion that I need to think of my pennies, of conserving my VP because my 20 cents will become 19. Pennies are pennies, and I have a lot more to offer this platform that my stupid upvote.

Sorry for the tough love...