The Etiquette of Upvotes
Next up in what is apparently becoming a series of Steem newbie musings: How do you decide on vote percentages??
When I was first on Steemit, I would just 100% upvote everything I liked. I didn't really know I had an option; after all, the Steemit.com interface doesn't show a vote percentage bar to new users who don't have much SP, and I wasn't using eSteem yet.
Then I happened to look up my stats on steemd.com, and saw "Voting Power", and wondered what that was...and after I found out, I felt really differently about giving out 100% upvotes!
So now, as I attempt to curate posts and comments, and watch my precious, precious VP slowly drain away, I'm starting to experience more and more analysis paralysis whenever it's time to hit that upvote button.
A lot of thoughts go through my mind as I decide what vote percentage to give any particular piece of content:
Is this content really worth 100%?
What if I don't vote at 100%, and the creator thinks I don't like their content?
Is this person going to be offended if I don't give them a 100% upvote?
How long is it going to take my VP to recharge after I give this vote?
Is it better not to upvote this at all than to vote at less than 100%?
And pretty soon I have no idea what I'm doing. Usually I finish reading Steemit with 75% voting power, and a vague sense of foreboding.
I try to put myself in the place of the person I'm upvoting. What would I think if I received a vote of, say, 60% for this content? Or 30%? Or 3%? Ultimately, that doesn't help, because the votes I get are all over the place, and usually I have no idea what the percentages mean, so I don't think about it too hard.
It seems to me that there must be some etiquette to upvote percentages that I haven't figured out yet. Or maybe everybody on Steem has a different scale for upvotes. Or maybe people just scale their upvotes by the amount of VP they have left.
I have no idea.
So I'm going to leave this to my readers to answer. How do you decide how much upvote to give any particular post? Is it merit-based, or VP-based? Totally random? Something else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
This is so true haha I basically decide with my gut and steem power left for the day ;)
Here is one approach... (not saying it is the only one)
Decide how many times you want to vote a dayish...
If the answer is 10, give 10 100% votes and your voting power will recharge each day.
If the answer is 20, give 20 50% votes.
I target 40 which means I usually vote below 25% so I can upvote some comments also.
I'm pretty loose with it. Because it comes out in the wash. I just try to never let my voting power hit 100%, because then I am wasting my influence and I can never get it back.
Oh yeah, that's a good idea--creating a vote budget. It might be hard to stick to with so much good content out there...but much better than not upvoting at all because I'm low on VP. Thanks, that's a great idea! I'm going to try it today.
I set SteemAuto up a little while ago to start following @curie's curation trail if my VP gets above 95% -- but I don't think I've hit 95% since I started!
Sounds perfect.
I certainly don't interpret upvotes like that. I just assume they have a particular mana target.
Same here, but I still worry about it. 🙂 I'm glad to know that other people don't worry about it, though.
Awesome! I think you should just figure out how much you want to vote a day.
Also, you are part of a #commentraid enjoy!
Oh wow! Thanks!
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