Auto-Upvoting And Responsible Posting - Plus Colorchallenge - Friday Blue

I want to talk a little bit about automatic upvoting and question whether there is any responsibility to maintain a certain level of quality in posting by those in receipt of them.


I myself am fortunate enough to find myself in the position of having another member of the community place what I see as their confidence and trust in me. It has only been a few weeks now since I realised this and in that time I have tried to improve the quality of my posts and make sure that I at least try to add some value to the platform and others within our community.

Beforehand I felt no obligation whatsoever to produce quality posts, though it was always my aim but it was my belief that if others looked at my posts and liked them, they would vote for them and if they didn't, they wouldn't. Really simple.

Knowing that regardless of what I posted I would be guaranteed a certain level of reward as a minimum though, changed the game for me as well as my thinking and I now feel a sense of responsibility to do my best to add value by creating quality posts as best as I can and this is something I appreciate because it allows me the opportunity to improve myself at the same time.

I don't think it would be right of me to abuse that trust by putting out weak posts because I knew I'd get a certain level of reward. I wouldn't abuse that trust.

For the sake of making my point, I will tell you that the automated upvote I receive is worth around 90 cents. I feel this is a generous amount, especially given the current value of SBD and STEEM, not to mention the future potential value we all expect, so I do feel I should have some responsibility in earning that reward. Others may disagree and from the evidence I have seen, clearly many do.

When it comes to those earning automatic rewards of 10, 20, 30 or 40 dollars per post, I definitely think there should be more responsibility attached to the quality of posts. I've seen a good few members of the community now dropping the quality of their posting since finding themselves recipients of automatic patronage.

Quality is of course a subjective thing but we each have our own individual idea of what that is for us but it's not hard to see when someone who is capable of so much more and has demonstrated such is clearly just taking the piss.

I think it's also important to recognize that each of us is in a different position in life and have different opinions as to what constitutes fair reward for their efforts. I am aware that an amount which I might deem to be insignificant may in fact be a fortune to someone else and this has some bearing on my thoughts.

The 90 cent automatic upvote I receive for each post I put out isn't actually a huge amount from my point of view, even with the current values attached but I realise that to some, this would be a huge amount, so when I make a post, I try to make sure that I am justified in accepting any rewards I might receive.

I have no problem with auto voting but I do think there are a lot of people taking advantage of this function and that we should all be more vigilant in our responsibilities when putting someone on auto upvote or accepting one from someone else.

There are a few that I would like to put on auto vote myself as I am impressed with their consistent contributions of quality to the platform and I have every confidence that they will continue to produce at a similar level but that is not to say that I won't be checking in often to ensure that is still the case.

Part of the idea of the auto rewarding system, as I see it, is that it should enable each of us the opportunity to build a regular patronage which might in turn lead to us being able to spend more time creating content of substance and less time worrying about paying the bills in the real world but instead I am finding that with a lot of people, guaranteed rewards lead to lower quality posting and abuse of trust by allowing those who would abuse that trust to post, for example, a collection of poor quality vacation photos and literally a few words of no consequence or value to anyone, split over half a dozen posts, each receiving 40 to 50 dollar rewards.

This is what I found last night when checking the blog of someone who, in my opinion, used to post really good quality posts. It really disappointed me and I decided to unfollow him but in truth, he is far from the only one indulging and certainly not the biggest culprit.

For my own part, I feel a sense of responsibility in living up to the trust and confidence that's been placed in me by someone else. I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same way but I would urge all who take the time to read this to consider it.

Below is my entry for today's color challenge. A photo with a few words. :)

Above is my Friday Blue entry for the #colorchallenege taken with my Samsung S5 and below is the view from my window this morning. :)

Thanks for looking. :)

I think I'll just stay indoors for the rest of the day. :)