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my next question: why only a lousy 50 SBD?

lol mostly cos I can do the joke in the last paragraph
but also because I'm no where near as popular as I use to be and don't make anywhere near as much from my posts :)

you're almost at $100, which i have not seen in my payouts for a while. Why do you think i'm making STEEM GIFs for people now? i don't have a side hustle......haha I'm giving you a hard time...:)

haha not at all
it's mostly so I could run that self aware joke in the last paragraph as well

It was just a bit of fun, not meant to be a real contest :)

considering you self-upvote like me, you just proved that you're going to hit trending...

hmm I haven't hit trending since returning
might never be able to
I burn out really easily
trying to push for short content on here too, I feel that they're more likely to go viral and be better for the platform overall
A website filled solely with long winded but rushed writing isn't ideal imo

the rich can afford to burn out....

the rate at which steem price is going I wouldn't be surprised to see Ned on food stamps in a months time :)

but yeah it's sorta true, it takes me maybe an entire day to write one of these things, I probably wouldn't for the money alone, I get a kick out of it I suppose

If I wrote only for the money, I'd have stopped a long time ago...

First of all: your long articles deserve to be trending in my opinion.

And I have to admit I am happy for every long article I can find here (if it's well written). Anyway the site is full of memes, one-image-'articles' and jokes.

Finally it's a matter of taste and of course writing short posts (plus upvoting them) is an ideal method to earn more within a shorter timescale and in addition it can be very entertaining.

Altogether I doubt that the 'circles', you described very well in your article (in case one has not enough 'circle-friends' instead of that socket puppets will do the job) as well as extensive direct self-voting lead to a communicative platform which attracts new investors and thus leads to an increasing Steem price.

Even if I profit myself (short-term) from the current system I would try to make extensive self-voting respectively using multiple accounts or being a 'circle-member' less attractive by the idea of diminishing returns.
In my article I explained it like this: "How about if after each vote on a specific account (including ones own account) each further vote on the same account would lead to significantly less curation reward for the voter and less profit for the upvoted account? Thus, when upvoting an account which I had already upvoted before, my voting power would be smaller than in case I upvote an account which I didn't upvote before."

I wonder what you think about that idea and hope this text was not too long now ... :-)