Thoughts on a week with voting power.
When I first came to Steemit a little less than two months ago, it was quickly clear that I was going to want to buy in. I knew that I didn't understand the platform, but I knew enough to figure out that there was going to be value here if I put in the effort to gain the understanding. About that time I also discovered the idea of leasing delegation, and the @minnowbooster market to do that.
I really liked the STEEM:BTC price at the time, so it seemed like a good plan to buy in. I did not, however, just want to show up as a brand new dolphin with no idea what to do with his voting power. I had a very good sense of how much I did not understand about voting on the platform, and I really wanted my account to grow in stages so that I would have an easier time figuring it out without learning my lessons by rampaging over community standards. So I chose to sell six delegations with varying lengths, in hopes that as the voting power came back I would find good uses for it. I spent six weeks as a minnow, which I think was really important for my understanding of the community.
On Sunday the first chunk of delegation came back to me, and with this week's price increases, I now have a vote worth $0.20 in Vote Value. As expected, I had some ideas of what to do with it: I'm supporting songwriters in Open Mic, working to build the Webcomics Contest, and actively curating the #printmaking and #letterpress tags, not that the last ones have been much work.
I'm also giving out votes to reward content that I really like, mostly in arts-related activities. My estimation right now is that I'm spending about half of my voting power on rewarding the rest of the community and about half on selfish pursuits - voting my own posts, rewarding good comments on my posts, trying to launch @zerocloo's poker blog, and upvoting accounts like @qurator and @steembasicincome which will give me a return.
I'm not particularly thrilled with that percentage, and I have two methods planned to reduce it. One is that, as more of the delegation returns, a lot of the selfish uses will not grow as fast as the voting power does. The second is that I expect some of them will become completely unnecessary as I balance out my need for liquid rewards vs. SP, which should be just a few weeks away. On the other hand, hopefully the rewarding quality comments on my posts component will grow significantly.
I'm having moments when it's hard to find posts I want to spend voting power on. Because of the way I'm doing the Open Mic bonus prizes all of those votes go out on the weekend, so I expected it to be slow midweek, and it has been. Evaluating accounts for the Minnowbooster whitelist has led me to a bunch of good posters, but the nature of it means they're less likely to be high-volume. My hope is that as things go on my feed will become a continual source of content that I want to upvote for its own sake.
About half of my SP delegation now is either on week-to-week renewals or expiring on Sunday. So far I've been content to let the renewals go and collect liquid STEEM, but I do have the flexibility to increase my voting power if it turns out that I find a good use for it. So I'm feeling pretty good about where I am. I turned out to be right about the STEEM:BTC price, as I bought in at its highest point recently, leaving me with a nice return just in currency rates. And the longer I'm here the more I think that the platform can be an investment asset for me while I'm being an asset for the community.
curating and finding great blogs is sometimes difficult but by having people like you that like to get their hands dirty and find those, specially in the communities you want to focus is great. Also spending some time as a minnow was a great idea to understand better the system :). You're doing an amazing work here and it's very well appreciated my friend :)
I find that are endless posts on here that should be rewarded with great content. Yes, we all selfishly upvote because if you don't reward yourself, who will? Can someone explain leasing delegation though? This topic is alien to me. Maybe do a post on it?? :)
We all don't selfishly upvote. And not many people upvote their own comments with 100% of their voting power while not even upvoting the post they're commenting on.
You may notice here that I have patiently answered the questions of the people you leapfrogged your comment over but will not be answering yours. Maybe the answer wasn't worth a quarter to you, but I guess we'll never know.
if you're serious about it, the more you have the more you can give without going hungry so i dont think there's anything wrong with that as long as its not an automated process of posting cute puppies on 20 accounts who praise each other into the sky , this thing has huge potential ... i feel the biggest threat is actually regulation
or witnesses with a mission , if i dare say so
because we have had government for a few thousand years now and that's clearly not helping
:)
i wish i had 10k 100% votes a day too, i was reluctant to get two accounts until someone showed me you can use it to give while asking nothing (but a vote ofcourse) , now i have more votes to give
im fairly new, just like i knew bitcoin from long ago but took a while because trust comes hard to me
i was skeptical
and i still am, but since i dove under the surface, deep enough
where the obese fish don't fly
i kinda like it here
the first place that DOES ubi for real instead of yapping
money out of nothing was a gift from Nakamoto but all of this ?
thats creativity
Nice post. I have not yet played with leasing Steem Power, but having read this post, it's something i should look into.
"And the longer I'm here the more I think that the platform can be an investment asset for me while I'm being an asset for the community."
That's exactly the right spirit.
I have a longer post marinating about how the blogging platform makes the investment more attractive than other active crypto investments, and the investment platform makes the blogging more attractive than other social media.
I'd like to see that post myself. There appears to be a disconnect for some reason (not sure why), between the investor and those here to use the platform. The utility of the STEEM ecosystem most definitely provides a value that other cryptos don't currently possess, and even with those that might be surfacing this year or soon thereafter, STEEM is older and proving itself to be resilient. If any of the promised updates or improvements hit before the end of the year, and actually deliver those improvements, STEEM will be even more attractive. Those of us blogging and commenting just need to keep on doing it, and those who are investing need to recognize the value of a social platform connected to a crypto blockchain.
I've found that every crypto investment opportunity is full of people who have a ton of money and no self-awareness, and people without very much money and the expectation of unreasonably high returns. For all that that's on the minds of so much of Steemit, I think that's considerably less true here than anywhere else I've been. It's just that we have a built-in platform for talking about it incessantly.
Probably because we do talk about it incessantly, it's less true. And or we convert it into why are the whales doing this or not doing that, or minnows/redfish/newbies can't make any money on Steemit. It seems we still find ways to be oblivious or complain. :)
haha, yeah i fully agree. For me this all fits in nicely with the econommic/social transiotional period we are in. Very exciting times.
Its always hard to decide how best to spend your votes. For growing my own steem or for sharing the wealth. It seems to me that you have found a good balance. A way of growing not your account but others. You shouldn't feel selfish for spending your voting power on yourself as you are so involved in thee community and helping the steem ecosystem grow. Keep up the good work. If half of the users put in as much work as you did this platform would be unstoppable.
The eventual idea is that my investment ought to fund the growth of the account (and repaying the principal) on its own, leaving the voting power for me to use to reward creators and build organic audience. I'm a ways away from making a post about how to do that, but the machine is being built and tested.
It takes time to figure out the strategy that works for you. Every month changes occur on Steemit, as we keep experimenting and learning. I have been thinking for a while about delegating SP to the Minnow Support Project, even I dont have really that much. I wanted to give it a try and see how things work out.
This is what makes me certain that I'm never going to get bored.
I need to gain better understanding of bots, delegations and how to grow. I have 500 followers but I have seen some people with fewer followers earn hundreds on a single post.
Understanding the system is worthwhile if you have the money to invest, either externally or from post rewards.
One thing I think is important to understand that a lot of people struggle with is the fact that the post payout isn't particularly meaningful. That can be very frustrating for people who are producing good content and not seeing large numbers. But the large numbers tend to be more correlated with who has money to throw around than who is making good content or even who is profitable.
One of my plans with this project is to make a post in a week or two analyzing where the rewards from these boosted posts are coming from.
Hmmm ok.. invest how? Using bots or delegating with a group? My account is worth 350 or so and I can put some more into it. I’m just not sure how.
If you have liquid SBD, the basic Minnowbooster bot is great. @earthnation-bot is tiny but even more profitable and you're still eligible for it. If you prefer longer-term rewards with less work @steembasicincome is great if you expect to post every week for a long time.
If you have voting power, there are a lot of options for delegation and vote-selling and I haven't done good research on all of them. If that's something you're interested in you may have to do the research yourself.
Thanks for the help. I appreciate it!
you should check out kryptonia.io it has a lot of steemians on there looking to purchase upvotes and they normally have some pretty good content.
This is an outstanding article. My husband and I are both minnows and learning how all of this works. We will be looking at @minnowbooster. One of the things that stood out to me in this article is that you listed others in the community that you are supporting. I will definitely be following you. Thank you from us newbie minnows!
I hope from all of the attention this post is getting that some of it passes through to those communities. Thanks for your comment.
This post was very informative as I'm deciding between using MB to increase my VP or buy more SBD/STEEM to power up on my own or hold. Either way, I see increasing my stake here to be a wise thing to do.
Minnowbooster has been running out of non-whitelist votes the last couple of days, but assuming they come back, running your liquid SBD through their voting bot is a much more profitable (though slower) way to increase your voting power than powering up. The way it works is you get most of your SBD back in your post payout but the profit comes in SP. So your liquid SBD decreases slowly but you get 18% return on every cycle.
Thanks. I did notice as I tested the other services out, my visibility increased as I lost some SBD each time. What do you think of delegating votes for someone at my level? My near-term goal is to increase my SP to 500, and reach 1000 in the future. I've used MB, but wondered which way to go next.
Not sure which direction you mean. Delegating your own power is great if you're looking for passive income, and vote-selling is another option. If you're taking short breaks from the site vote-selling will be better, for longer breaks delegation. But if you're active and have good uses for your voting power you're better off keeping it.
It's pretty hard to be profitable as the one leasing power unless you're either running a bidbot/voting circle or you're seeing your profit in community engagement rather than money.
Cool thread, boss. I'm just a minnow...been here less than a week, but I'm beginning, JUST, to figure stuff out here.
I've concentrated, thus far, on getting a good blog rolling (and I think I have) and in finding folks to follow and have follow me back. I think for five days+, I'm doing OK.
But, reading your article (and watching some steemy youtubes) has me thinking I may eventually have to take this powering up thing seriously.
Thanks for taking the time to clearly elucidate that!
(upvoted and followed.)
P.S. Is there kind of recommendation as to how much $$$ to put in (i.e. worth the investment) for someone with no more than 20-30 hours per week to spend on this site/venture?
TIA....
If you're interested in being here long-term, there are things that are worth the investment at every buyin level. (Though if you have more than $100k USD to put in you might end up in political wars.) @steembasicincome shares are a really nice value and you can buy them for as little as 1 STEEM.
The question is more how much investment, or how much return, do you need to justify spending your time here? Then you can figure out what you would need to put in to get it.
Very helpful. Thanks!