Entertaining Voting Patterns

I've been having a little bit of fun, I guess you could call it, getting back to doing some oldschool manual curation of content!

In the days of automation, I know that it can certainly feel a little annoying to have to do some things on your own. I know that it feels that way for me sometimes but I have to take a step back and remember that we are indeed simply human! Lol.

I used to do my own curation of posts exclusively, even though I didn't have nearly as much Hive Power as I do now but it was fun. It was a routine that I would do and just drop votes on content creators I liked, engaged with the posts and moved on. At one point though, I forget when exactly, it got difficult to do that sometimes and I ended up in a few situations where I was sitting at 100% voting power for a few hours and that annoyed me, Hive Power is being lost!

At that point I gave in and signed up for the automation and trails. I subscribed to a few people and gave them automatic votes and moved on. I didn't give them substantial votes so that I could continue to do my own voting here and there and the system largely works out really well.

I've noticed over the past few months though, that my voting power is creeping up quite often to 97 and 98% strength and I think I know why that is. I haven't really updated my hive.vote automatic voting habits as far as authors goes. I follow the Curangel voting trail as my primary source of voting throughout the day and that works out nicely. The individual authors that I'm supporting though sadly are just not posting as often as they used to, or not at all.

This is unfortunate because they were creators that I enjoyed and engaged with quite regularly but alas time does go on and people get bored, sick, or sadly even die. I do know of one person here on Hive that has died and it was sad because I liked talking to her. She lived in Asia somewhere, I forget but she was a Western transplant to Asia and wrote some cool stuff. I certainly hope the other people that I've got on my voting list though, they are still alive I'm hoping!

To the happier part of the post though - with this noticeable change in my voting power being more in a recharged state than previously, that's meant that I'm allowed to do a lot of my own voting and doing it multiple days a week sometimes. This has given me a little bit of fun again, as I get to go to a community and just browse the content and give it some love!

My recent favorite is hitting the

@skatehive community and giving my skating homies the support that I've always wanted to, but never really had the means to do it. I try to get in there 2 days a week usually and go with 25% votes for everyone I can see that has videos up and sometimes the ones who don't post videos and throw up pictures that look cool, I'll give 'em some too!

This is where I'm really appreciating the increased Hive Power I've accumulated! It feels like I'm a "sponsor" of these dudes and if you've been a skater with any serious intent or years doing it, you know that one of the dreams is to get "sponsored" by a company or someone! I'm getting to live a bit of a childhood dream by being a small sponsor of these dudes (and some girls!) content, helping them to get rewarded a little bit for what they are doing. This feels pretty fucking dope, I must say!

So while I am a little sad to see the people that I've set up automatic voting on go by the wayside, there is a flipside benefit to this in that I'm able to keep my voting power higher so that I can go into the Skate community, drop some decent votes, and give those peeps a few extra cents on their content in return for a little slice of the curation pie! I'll take that trade any day of the week these days! There are definitely good things and bad things if you are able to see the brightness through the fog or darkness that's for sure!