Since I first got on Steemit I've been debating self voting, and honestly, I've never had a problem with it.
When you're a minnow, your only vote might be yourself.
So go ahead and look in the mirror, and give yourself a shiny gold star, because you're awesome!
If you work hard on your content, you deserve to be rewarded for it. Fuck this bullshit people are saying about entitlement. It sucks to work hours on something, and then get nothing. So you click that little box to automatically upvote yourself, and you upvote yourself. Yeah! Good job.
Yeah, you click the little box, below the post...it's built into the interface to automatically upvote yourself, and it stays checked, forever, if you check it once. I actually planned on unchecking it like over a fucking week ago, and I kept fucking forgetting to!
Think about that for a second.
It's built into the Steemit interface to upvote yourself.
Yet these people are going around and verbally abusing people, and flagging them, for just upvoting themselves.
I've flagged a lot of people, for legitimate reasons. Primarily spam, but also overrated content. If I think you should have tried harder for the amount of rewards you received, I will give you a flag. Occasionally I will give a 1% flag, just as a message to work harder.
Image used under Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. (source)
Now, of course, there are entitled people. If you're receiving a fuckton for shit content, chances are likely you feel entitled to what you think you're going to receive.
I started writing a story the other day, and I got curried on part 1, and then Steem price skyrocketed, and it's now around $300. Did I work fucking hard for that? Fuck yeah. And every part of the story after. After one of them, I felt like crying tears of blood. While writing certain parts, I actually got so into the story that I did make myself cry at least twice. Every one of those stories in that series took me hours. Are the ones that followed worth more than the face value on them? Probably. But maybe SBD will shoot up to $1000, and I'll be a millionaire.
Am I entitled to that money though? Honestly, no. I fucking cried. I worked until I could barely keep my eyes open multiple times. I fucking stayed up til 4am more than once. I pulled an all nighter because of the adrenaline rush after posting one of the stories and getting feedback and stuff, and then the next day, on no sleep, I cranked out another story. And you know what? I don't feel fucking entitled to that payout. But if you flagged me, I would fucking cry, and I would feel fucking horrible, because I really did work my fucking ass off.
But, eventually comes a point where you vote is worth more, and if you post enough, you can upvote more people with that vote. I've come to that point where I've decided FOR MYSELF that I will stop upvoting my own posts. It's gonna be hard, but I'm gonna do it. When you work your ass off, you want to be rewarded for it.
You also want people to tell you that you did a good job, and show that they fucking care.
But you can upvote at least one more post per day by someone else with that vote.
But that's the voter's decision, not your's. You can't declare who someone votes for.
Do I wish all the people voting for the shit in trending would stop doing it? Honestly, some of it, hell yeah. Some of it I like. A lot of it's over rewarded. But that's supposed to be controlled by flagging.
People do need to be responsible for their own votes, but it's not your job to abuse them into voting the way you want.
Curation is hard as fuck, especially once you get a huge vote. You gotta split that vote among a ton of people! When you're a minnow, you get 10 votes a day. When you're a whale, you can split that among 100 people, and still be giving them big rewards. But to find and read 100 good posts is fucking hard work.
Of course, delegation and curation can help with that.
To me, it has nothing to do with self-voting, it has to do with voting for shit.
Is what you voted for shit? No? Then bang on! But it would be nice if you spread the love. But that's totally your choice.
It's also kinda bullshit when people talk about entitlement in this regard, because you are actually entitled to use your vote how you wish. They are not entitled to your vote. But they are entitled to their own vote, including a flag.
So, no, you aren't entitled to the rewards from a post, and people can downvote, but you are entitled to be able to use your vote.
Note: I finally did fucking remember to untick upvote, which is good, because this is my third post of the day, including one that took over 8 hours.