How to delegate Steem, and why you should

I have written about this topic before, but it is worth repeating. I think delegation is a very powerful tool on Steem. It allows you to lend someone else your Steem Power. You can take it back at any time, but have to wait seven days until you get it back to prevent double voting. You do not earn directly from the delegation, but you can charge for it and some accounts will pay you anyway based on what they can do with it.

So, firstly you need to know how to delegate. I should say that you need to ensure you retain some SP or you will run out of resource credits and not be able to do much with your account, so you really need to have at least a few hundred SP. I am really aiming this at those with thousands as they can do a lot more to change the balance of Steem.

My preferred way to delegate is using the @steem-plus browser plug-in. This adds a button to the Stemit Wallet. I was having issues with this only appearing when I was logged in and I kept getting logged out. A discussion with SteemPlus developer @stoodkev on Discord clarified that I could be logged in with my posting key when I had been using my active key. I only need the latter when making a transfer or use the market as before. The posting key allows you to claim rewards.

Button

That button takes you to a screen to set up the delegation. When you submit you need to confirm by logging into SteemConnect. I would hope you have already used this. It is developed by Steemit Inc and can be trusted
with your active key. I strongly recommend using a password manager such as LastPass. One advantage of this is that it is not easily fooled by fake sites as a human might be.

Delegate

There are other ways to delegate, but I really do not know why it is not a standard feature of the Steemit site. I see busy.org does have it. If you want to check the state of your delegations then Steem Reports can do this. That is also useful to see what others are doing.

Who you delegate to is entirely up to you. Projects such as @actifit will send you some rewards for doing so. I give some to @isotonic, which is a small voting bot for the runners that also pays me a little. Others such as @steem-plus, @steembasicincome and @steem-ua take it into consideration when calculating how big a vote to give to your posts.

I found out at the weekend that another account I delegated was holding some rewards I could claim, but was changing its purpose. I used that Steem to buy more SBI shares for the small accounts I am supporting.

I delegate a lot to small accounts to help them out. If I get then up to 500 SP in total then they at least get the voting slider and their vote will be worth about a cent. This is as part of #TenKMinnows and #MayBeAMinnow. I would love to see more dolphins doing this. By empowering the small accounts we give them more reason to stick with Steem. I do not mind if they use it to self-vote their posts, but I hope they will also support others and earn a little curation rewards in the process. This spreads the votes further than I would. All my voting is manual and so is limited by my available time.

Another group I have delegated to are people who I created accounts for. If you go through the verification process by signing up with Steemit then they delegate a small amount to you so you can use the platform. I give a bit more to those accounts I create. A few of them are active and I will review adjusting their delegation in future.

I know some people mainly delegate for profit, but that is not my prime motivation. I want to make Steem better and this is part of my small contribution to empower others.

I hope this has been helpful to someone. I welcome further suggestions on what can be done with delegation. Just do not beg me to give to you are I am very choosy.

Whilst I am here I will mention a coversation I have been having on Twitter. DK - Full stop is obviously a true believer in the Church of Bitcoin and considers all other crypto to be 'shitcoins', including Steem. Feel free to go and wind him up. Despite his efforts #Steem is trending well on Twitter according to @demotruk. We can help that by tweeting about it and linking to good content here.