It has been about a week since I bought some delegation to increase my voting power. I am not great with numbers and there are already plenty of posts talking about maximising returns and whatnot so instead, I am going to focus on my experiences.
Firstly, I have been largely against paid delegation as I think that there is too much room for misuse yet, felt that it is ridiculous for me to condemn it without trying it. My thinking is that if I cannot get it to work (pay off the rent and still maintain quality standards) many others will struggle.
I said that in the first week, I will see how it goes by maintaining as close to normal behaviour as possible and I think that I have managed to keep relatively true to that except for my voting on others which I will get to later.
I have been posting around 15-20 posts a week in the last few months but can easily go to 25-35 if needs be without too much drop in the range. This means no spam, no shitposts, no self-voting comments. Currently I have 19 open posts. I self-vote my own posts at around the 30 minute mark at 100 percent. This is around 20 full votes go to myself out of the allocated 70 per week.
My vote was around 70 cents prior and currently at about 2.70 with delegation. For me it is hard to track precisely because of the market fluctuations. I am yet to experience a 100% vote at 100% power because, I haven't come close to it yet. I find it hard to get above 85% voting power.
From a curation perspective, prior to delegation a good day was around 2.5 SP and today it is abut 8 SP. If that is the 'norm' that means it is about 56 SP a week, a little over half of the costs and with 19 posts, getting about 2 SP each, I will just cover the rent. So, this indicates it is possible to break even but, I posted 19 articles averaging around 1000 words each.
I am unsure how many people are able to produce content at the rate I do while still maintaining some value that other voters would vote upon. This is not bragging, I am trying to be objective (hard with own work) and base it on the engagement I get. Including the time it takes to reply to comments, the personal investment is high. For me to 'make profit' I would have to post more, which is possible but, also bites further into my already thin time.
But, this wasn't about making profit from this for me, as even if I only Spam post, the votes I lose from real voters would be more than I gain by self-voting. This is an issue with delegation as many of those who take delegation are doing it for profit and the profit made from shitposting is much more than they can get from their normal content. I was fortunate enough to already have a clientele base who support me, for which I am very grateful.
This didn't come easily though and I have worked extremely hard to get to this point, but if I had had this delegation to begin with, perhaps my incentive to do all the work would not have been there. This is perhaps the major problem with delegation, in the wrong hands, it disincentivises content providers by giving them easy return by rewarding their own low quality but, it also lowers their potential ceiling as their content is not engaging.
This in turn lowers their engagement and willingness to interact in the community as all they must do for a return is to post anything and self-vote. Why would they stay and try to build the community, why would they share their votes to others?
Which brings me to the core reason I took delegation in the first place, the community. I started to feel that if I didn't take the delegation, someone who would spam and run may and more importantly, it gave me an opportunity to build in a way I haven't been able to before.
I have been voting on 
But, this wasn't all. I have been able to reward comments with the same percentages (I voteup nearly every comment) but provide significantly more return for them. In most cases, the return from the comment will outweigh the return they get from their voting curation. I have always seen voting the comments as a symbolic gesture but now it has a little more weight and incentive. I am fortunate, I get a fair number of thoughtful responses (Sorry if my replies are less so) and I think they deserve to get something from it. If I had ten times the VP, I would still do this although maybe not at the same percentage. Good comments mean something and have value to me, so I treat them as valuable when I can.
But, i have also been able to support other people more heavily too. Some that I have always supported and I think have always deserved more than they get, as well as some new ones that I have come across or have failed to pay attention to before. I have been able to spread some votes wider which means, value wider to people I think are either long-term creators or could be in the future.
I have been able to add some to people I follow but rarely vote upon because I didn't have the VP but now, I feel that giving people 10% votes makes a noticeable difference to their payouts at the end of the week. Sure, it might only be a few SP extra but, I see that Steem has potential so that few SP a week in a year from now, may be a very welcome sight in their wallets.
One very big thing I would like to mention is that I feel more part of the community and more responsible for it. I know it is relatively insignificant but, it is worth mentioning as I can 'somewhat' imagine those with high investments and voting power and why they feel they way they do. All of them have different approaches and very few are going to satisfy all parties on the platform. Even though paying, I am grateful for the opportunity to try this on for a little while.
So far, my experience tells me that I am able to manage a higher Voting power without degrading my behaviours (it has only been a week) but I am skeptical if someone new to the platform or with less than generous attitudes would do the same. This is not because I think myself better, but I have seen some terrible uses of delegation recently from people who should perhaps never have had access but, this is the blockchain and freedom reigns.
This was meant to be much, much shorter so I will finish it here and if I have missed something you would like to know, comment below and I will answer there or in the next report update.
Now, I have other content to write and people to vote upon. :)
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
