It's curious how HIVE has been working lately. Before, it seemed to have some sort of predictability in terms of rewards earned, especially for someone who's been here for as many years as I have.
Yes, it's true, after so many years and having worked hard at networking here, I've been able to establish a fixed base value for the average rewards earned, whether for long-form or short-form content. I mean, if you've been here for a while, your upvote base increases and can even be sustained over time since your followers tend to automate their voting power to a certain extent, making you part of their automation.
For this, services like HIVE.VOTE has made things easier for those who are more lazy.
This has worked this way almost from the beginning. I use it myself to prevent my voting power from stagnating unused, although I always prioritize manual voting...
Lately, what I've seen is that these recurring automated votes are coming in less, at least on my end.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were due to some kind of restriction by those who manage these services. It's still a service that one could do oneself with a little programming know-how and a computer that's always running. However, fortunately, for the moment, the service exists, and most of us find it better to delegate this work to someone else by granting them permission on the key used for voting.
As I've already said, the potential downside of choosing to delegate the work to someone else is that this "other" person might have a problem or stop offering the service, either temporarily or permanently.
It's also a "risk" in the sense that when you give your voting key to a third party, you're also allowing that third party to do whatever they want with it, perhaps voting on posts or comments you have no interest in or favoring their interests and not yours.
In the past, when this blockchain was called STEEM, I remember hundreds of developers offering extensive documentation on how to automate voting by creating a small program. I'm having a hard time finding such documentation on HIVE now.
If anyone has any information on this, I would appreciate it if you would let me know because I think that in the future I'll have to use it, as always, in a residual and not primary way, obviously.
