Is it OK to vote up your own post? What about your own comment? Let's discover the answer together.
This is an ongoing debate "in the minds" of steem users.
Is it okay to vote yourself up?
Is it not okay to vote yourself up?
Sometimes? Never at all? Who knows?
Before we begin this analysis of the problem let us get one fact out of the way:
The STEEM blockchain does allow you to vote up both your blog articles (root posts) and your comments and replies (posts)
Let's see why that policy is in place...
The idea is that if you were a retailer, I don't know, let's say Pepsi or Cola-Cola, and you wanted to write some posts about giveaways or contests on steem to reach this audience....
All you would have to do is create a steem account named pepsicola or something, and buy a TON of steem from an exchange, let's say $1 million dollars (much cheaper than a superbowl commercial)... and power up that steem account.
This way you could upvote your product brand's blog yourself, simply by purchasing steem instead of earning it.
So buying steem power to promote your business blog is a good policy. It brings demand for STEEM
...and we want that...
You can either buy your steem power to upvote your content, or earn your steem power to upvote your own content.
Where this becomes a problem, is how it is perceived.
Some people think it is greedy and selfish to reward yourself. In normal everyday life, it is normal to dislike people who pat themselves on a back, or take a bigger piece of birthday cake (unless of course it is your own birthday).
So what do we do?
What is right, and what isn't?
Until now, if I write something important... Something I really want everyone to see... I will upvote myself, not for the reward, but for the self promotion purpose. That includes both comments on other people's blogs and blog posts I make.
If I write something silly, or unimportant, or just casual, I never upvote myself because it doesn't carry a lot of weight, and isn't important to be seen as much as my other writings. So I never upvote that type of content.
This has worked well for me, until HardFork 19. Now everyone is paying attention to rewards and payouts more than they ever have.. if you're caught upvoting yourself with significant value, you will be shunned or called out on it.
What we need to do, as a community, is set a new defined precedent (that has a timestamp) that is perodically kept current.
For instance, like this:
This way, if you follow the suggested policy, as it is written, you can refer to it if someone chastises you publicly for self-upvoting yourself.
Also, it will also be used to help downvote and regulate obnoxious self upvoters who abuse it and take it to an extreme soley for greed purposes and nothing more.
By the way, incase you never saw it, Steemit does have a really great HELP DOC page here:
...but as this document suggests:
https://steemit.com/faq.html#Is_there_an_Etiquette_Guide_for_Steemit
There are no official rules for participating on Steemit.com
Perhaps we should codify some that affects all users exactly the same? This way we don't need to individually bump into this problem continually which does affect the reward pool vastly.
What do you think should be done?
Should we just codify it into the system that NO ONE can self-upvote "ever"? I might like that idea, this way all of are in the same boat, and we can adjust accordingly. Oh wait, what about our botty friends who will upvote their master instead of self-upvoting him or herself?
This is a difficult problem and a difficult situation. Probably why it hasn't been fully understood or addressed.
Help! I think the majority of us is interested in what each person has to say... Please share your comments.