The basic concept of Steemit sounds nice on paper. A social media blog platform where your vote is worth something based on how much influence you have on the network which is directly linked to your Steem Power. If there is specific content you really like, you can upvote it and reward the author for their efforts to make an interesting post and you even earn some curation rewards in return. Making posts that people really like should earn you some good rewards while making "cheap shitposts" should not see much rewards at all.
Self-upvoting right now is one of the most profitable things you can do if you have a lot of Steem Power since 100% of the upvote goes to yourself without anyone taking a cut. I do believe being able to self vote is an important feature on Steemit since it gives many an incentive to initially buy and hold Steem Power. It allows anyone who puts time in making a blog to pay themselves out in a way, which is a good thing.
Since it is so profitable to self-upvote and you can only upvote yourself 1 time on each post while having a maximum of 10 daily upvotes, it is a system that highly encourages making multiple daily low effort posts or comments so you can upvote them with your own power. Self-voting is hard to regulate since it is possible to create multiple accounts on this platform.
Properties of Self Upvotes:
When two accounts like each others content, they will often spontaneously start exchanging upvotes if they both have some Steem Power. This often turns out in a silent "upvote for upvote" agreement using Steemvoter to automate the process in a way things are roughly balanced when it comes down to the total upvote amount. When one account removes or lowers the auto-upvotes, the other account will notice and most of the time do the same. Bigger accounts often exchange upvotes as it is in essence a way to use their Steem Power to socially self-upvote their posts more than once. These kind of upvotes tend benefit the overall quality while preventing too much quantity and benefit more social behavior.
Smaller accounts can also benefit from this model by using a service like Steemfollower where they manually curate content and can get votes back equally to what they have given minus a fee.
Properties of Social Upvotes:
If 10 accounts all have 500 Steem Power and make each 1 post a day, they are 10x better off to group up and delegate all their steem power to create a 5000SP account that upvotes each af the daily post with a 100% voting weight.
There are plenty of upvote groups around and many of them like 
Properties of Group Upvotes:
These kind of upvotes have totally taken over the platform as they are simply the most profitable and least time consuming way for Whales to make money in the short term. While they can serve a purpose as promotion for members who want to get their post onto the trending pages, in reality they are just a way for bigger accounts do do 100%+ self voting without having to make any posts. All the active upvote bots can be found on steembottracker.com which also list the expected returns for buyers who most of the time are negative.
To pay for the bid bot upvotes you need liquid Steem or SBD, the best way for accounts that have Steem Power to get this, is to sell their votes themselves by using services like Minnowbooser or Smartsteem (both are referral links). This tends to create one big anti-socials circle jerk where people have to rely on to get the majority of their post earnings.
Properties of Bought Upvotes:
These are the kind of upvotes that make Steemit superior to any other Social Media Platform, but they are becoming increasingly rare ever since the bid bots have taken over on this platform. They are the upvotes that don't ask any monetary compensation in return and are given just to reward good content and get some curation rewards.
Some of the Free Upvotes on Steemit
Many members who still upvote just because they like something and upvote the comments the get to show appreciation. Members that understand the long term and want to help the platform grow.
Accounts that got a lot of Steem Power delegated to them to promote the platform by rewarding specific content. (
@utopian-io |
@dtube |
@dlive |
@dmania |
@busy | ... )
Whale Bots that spread Upvotes (
@newhope |
@hr1 |
@alexis555 |
@mangos |
@redes | ...)
Curation Accounts and trails that continue to do proper curation (
@curie |
@ocd | @Minnowsupport | ...)
Accounts that encourage specific Challenges (#challenge | ...)
...
Properties of Free Upvotes:
@utopian-io and @dtube| Accounts | I believe the solution needs to come from both the smaller and the bigger accounts. |
|---|---|
Minnows | They need to understand relative earnings and that they are often making a lot more than the whales when looking at it this way. |
| Dolphin / Whales | They should understand that extreme selfish behavior goes against their own agenda to make as much money as possible since it keeps the platform from growing because new members quickly get discouraged. If everyone would use 10%-20% of their voting power to give out Free Upvotes to help this community grow, a lot of the problems this platform is dealing with at the moment would be solved. |
| Bid Bots | They would be great for this platform if they were to set quality requirements and quantity limits while giving a positive ROI instead of allowing overbidding. |
| Devs | They Should fix Curation, as long as the reward difference between social and selfish behavior is too big, it's hard to blame anyone but the system itself. |
I Intend to go Deeper Into Getting Upvotes in Future Posts.
