One of the changes of HardFork 19 was concentrating the voting power of an account within 10 votes over a period of approximately 24 hours. That means that if you vote 10 times at full power, your voting power gets depleted and you have to wait a few dozens of hours to have it "replenished". Combine this with linear rewards and you get quite a hedonistic view of Steemit: it's like, all of sudden, we're bathing in gold.
After the initial enthusiasm of seeing their vote drawing huge amounts from the rewards pool, the wake call came. Ok, I voted 10 times. And now? What do I do now? Look, there's this very nice post and I really like it and I want to upsteem it but I can only give it just a few cents (if any).
Soon, we all realized it's time to adjust our voting strategy, in such a way that it will make our experience here on Steemit at least equally enjoyable with what we had before HF 19.
Here's what I found working for me (feel free to adjust it as you see fit, these are just general guidelines)
My Core Team - 4 votes full power
These are votes for preferred authors. I like to know that I have enough juice to support the people very close to me (my friends, my girlfriend and so on). Sometimes I increase the voting power for this part, if there are specific commitments, like it is now, with the 30 days writing challenge, during which I committed to vote 3 posts at full power every day.
My Tribe - 15 votes at 20% power
This equates to 3 votes full power. These are the votes that I reserve for people with whom I have a close relationship but can't call them my "core team". These are authors with whom I interact for more than 3-4 months, with whom I exchanged more than just a few comments and who are regularly posting. They are shaping my overall preferences on Steemit.
My Casual Social - 20 votes at 10% power
This equates to 2 votes full power. Those are votes that I reserve for new content, every time I happen to browse the trending page or some tag that I'm interested in. They also serve the function of "discovery votes", like investing in new authors and see if they really take off.
Expect The Unexpected - 1 full vote
This is for the gem that may come out unexpectedly. I hate it when I see something really valuable and my voting power is completely depleted. So I keep one in reserve, just for that.
As I wrote this I realized something which never crossed my mind until now: this upsteeming thing in Steem has a lot in common with trading. I mean, there's the genuine appreciation for an author or a piece of content, but there's always the underlying calculations about how much capital you have, what the ROI can be and how much you can "trade" in a given day. Back when I was doing FOREX, I found the trading discipline to be the cornerstone of a profitable activity (I didn't make millions trading FOREX, but got out with both my balls intact, which is to say I didn't lose either).
So yes, voting in Steemit does require a bit of discipline to get the most out of it.
I'm really curious how this change will play out with bots (already saw a lot of bots are deactivated), and how a new batch of successful authors will emerge after this paradigm change.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):