Seeing how HF19 made us a bit selfish, I started an experiment 5 days ago: I stopped voting my own content.
Why?
Let´s face it, if your vote is worth $.20 you are not getting any richer by voting for yourself. Even if you post ten times a day and upvote each post with a 100% of your SP, then wait 24 hours for it to recharge and repeat the process, you´ll end up with 2 more bucks a day.
Here, I am not lying, you can also check steemdb to see I didn´t cancel my upvotes. I just stopped. Fifteen posts without my vote.
Instead of upvoting my own content I decided to share the love with my fellow minnows.
You see, we care so much about our own content getting those precious dollars that we forget about the most important thing: We are a community. The members of a community are supposed to help each other, to have each other´s back. To lend a hand when we need it.
My vote is worth around 32 cents when I am at 100% SP. It does not matter if I vote for myself or not, sometimes my posts make 2 dollars and sometimes I fall off my chair when I make $50.
I started to get $50 dollar posts when I changed the way I look at Steemit. I even wrote an article about it and then my fate here changed, that post made more than all of my previous posts together. Why? Because I changed my mentality.
I started to think of me as a whale and I started to act as one.
I am nowhere close to being even a small piranha but my attitude towards the community changed. I became a whale in my mind.
You see, whales read a lot of posts, evaluate the quality of each of them and then decide which one they should curate and with how much percentage. They get INVOLVED, they reply with quality comments and reward those who deserve it. But the most important reason is the WHY.
They do this because they care about the community, they have so much money invested on Steemit that it is in their best interest that the platform keeps growing. If Steemit grows, their investment grows.
Wait a minute, aren´t we all in the same ship? Don´t we all want the community and the value of Steem to grow?
Then why are you upvoting your own content?
The moment you stop voting for yourself you end up with a lot more SP in your hands to share with other people thus you read more content and reply more often to more people, then you get more involved and people start to become close to you, and sometimes, when you post, they will upvote your content.
Stop the shameless auto-vote! Be a whale, at least in your mind. It doesn´t matter if your vote is worth $.10 or $10.
Read posts, reward the ones that deserve it, comment on them, reply with more than just a smiley face and a LOL.
Forget about your usual reply "good post, upvoted, I follow you let´s help each other, follow me at @Iamsoselfish"
So what are you waiting for? Get that SP recharged and vote for you community, reply for your pal´s growth, resteem for steemit´s health.
And when I upvote your content, I don´t ever want to see your username on the list of people who upvoted.
Not a single time.
Do you like this idea? Resteem it. Or better yet, Make your own post about it. Steal my phrases and thoughts. What the hell, plagiarize the whole article I don´t care. The point is to make all of us minnows aware of this and they get on board!