Voting Strategies Redux

How we vote in many areas of life, is a really important thing. How we change our strategies and methodologies can also be equally as important!

When we are in a bit of a "habit" with something, it's very easy and fun to stay in that same narrow frame of mind. It's convenient and it feels really good for us to go on autopilot and go into smooth sailing mode. There are a lot of evolutionary advantages to this, as our subconscious mind takes over instead of our conscious mind and that saves us some mental capacity for other things that our mind can look to take in and process. It's pretty remarkable stuff for sure! I have been nerding out to these type of fascinating things from a neurological perspective.

Where it can be a little tricky though is to be able to break that comfort zone, and do things differently. Some people are so stuck in their ways and preferences that they don't want to do that. I get it, it's difficult to change the way we do things because that means we have to potentially re-learn something entirely. It is, however, incredibly important that we go through the exercise every once in a while!

I will admit that I am also victim to this type of thing because let's face it, we have a lot of things that come at us on a daily basis. We need some ways to just shift on autopilot! It's an easy thing but there is always the important thing of not taking the easy road, and actually taking the hard road. I know this may be a bit of a stretch in terms of a metaphor.. but I am trying to take the hard(er) road with my stake on the platform here on Hive!

I've been talking to some people lately such as NoNames, AntiSocialist and others (Taraz too) about various things of the platform and how we can better change our own habits and do things differently so that we can potentially do what we can to "stop the bleeding" in terms of people just cashing out all of their assets constantly. This is a big problem on this platform, because people (in the words of Taraz recently!) are just regular employees or visitors of it, instead of owner/operators or citizens. This means that they don't feel the need to have any skin in the game, or stake in the platform. They bring in something, and immediately take it all out. It's pretty pathetic in a lot of ways.

For various reasons, there are a lot of issues with that and one being that it's a constant downward drain pressure on the price of the Hive asset, and can be a psychological challenge for many new users to get past.

There are ways that people with actual stake on here, those with a few thousand and up in terms of Hive Power, can actually take what they are doing and enact change by changing their own habits. It may not feel like anything super crazy, but the best thing about this is that small changes add up. The more people do this that have some stake, the better off we become in the long-run.

There are certainly limits and exceptions to this strategy, as well as draw-backs but like anything, there will be benefits as well as risks and downfalls to it. The benefits of it are that we can support the people who are actually users on here the most, by distributing stronger votes to those people instead of giving them 10 or 20% votes, I have personally started to give out 50 and 75% votes. Granted my stake is mid-range at the moment, but it grows continually because I am an owner-operator here and definitely a citizen of the chain! This means that in the long-run, we can help the people around us that are here to grow their stake, actually grow it at a better rate than those who just wish to use this as their piggy bank and drain it to nothing. That ain't cool behavior bro!

The obvious risk to this is that there are going to be people who are caught in the crossfire, where they could be planning on keeping all of their stake but a crisis happens and they have to power down and sell some assets. Then I see it and don't give them a good vote, or a vote at all because of that. I think it only bothers me in that I do like to use my stake instead of hoarding it, but at the same time we have to be realistic. We have to foster an environment that supports the chain first, and the people second not the other way around!

There can be more said on this topic but getting near 1k words, I think this is a decent spot to leave it and see what the good people of the Hive community think.

Do you think it's a good idea that I and others are focusing our votes and support on people who actually maintain a healthy stake in the platform? Let me know in the comments why or why not!