CSI - An indicator with different meanings for different people. You can call it as you desire and it could be a shortcut for "Community Support Index/Indicator". Some people think that communities don't exist and I must say that the meaning of the word "community" can vary very much for each individual in the world. A community for me is a group of people that my focus is attended to more than to other groups which I may even not know exist.
While I was working on the calculation for the CSI I came to the conclusion that it also could be called "Curators Support Index". However we want to call it, important for me is that it is being seen as a number that helps us determining how much a user is giving back to the people around him. When I use 10% of my weekly available voting power (VP) for upvoting myself it is a fact that I can give exactly 90% of my VP for supporting other accounts. With that in mind it should make sense that a user with a self vote rate of 0% will in most cases have a higher (more positive) CSI than a user with 10%.
But...
The question for me currently is if a self vote of a user with one million SP should be seen as less negative than one from a user with 1000 SP or if they should be seen as equally "bad". Fact is that huge stake holders are a significant reason for having enough STEEM bound to the system that is feeding all of us and without them the lights could go off faster than we may have thought. If that is true the next question for me is: "Where is the line?"
How much self voting should be considered as "okay" and how much of it should have a negative impact on the CSI?
Many minnows argue that they would not earn enough without their tiny self votes and therefore they have a right to have a much higher self vote rate. What I have seen since my beginning on Steemit is that it is more important to write good comments and to support other people because it increases the chance drastically for getting back great support.
Why the CSI just indicates what already is
When I read a good article on Steemit and I know that the person who wrote it upvotes himself more than the people around him I don't give any or just a small upvote regardless of how good the content is and I know that many people act in the same way. That means a smaller self vote rate leads to more/stronger upvotes from his audience and may even lead to higher rewards. We should keep that in mind and I hope with these words I can bring some light to the unknown darkness in which the CSI currently resides. It is meant to be a help for us and nothing else.
Some words on the negative impact of always upvoting the same people
Of course there are ways one can have a self vote rate of 0% and still upvote mainly oneself by creating multiple accounts and upvote them instead. Therefore the CSI calculation looks for outgoing votes to the same accounts which frequently occur. Most of us have some favorited authors and of course that is fully okay but here the same question remains: "Where is the line?"
Some people said that their "community" just consists of 3 people and therefore they can only upvote the content of these accounts. I don't believe that one can find only 3 people on Steemit who share the same thoughts or are creating things which are interesting for them. But if that should be true they have a good explanation for their low CSI and should not see it as a badly calculated result. There are curators on Steemit who support hundreds of people on a daily basis and as one might guess their CSI should of course show a higher value.
It is only an indicator
The CSI is an indicator that can indicate strange voting behaviour but of course it can not tell the whole story of a person. Nobody should undertake any negative action like downvoting someones content only by taking a look at the CSI. For such a purpose it is not there. It can help curators to decide if they should do a small or a strong upvote for example.
You may have noticed that the CSI on SteemWorld is "currently NA" and the reasons for this are some important questions for which I don't have an answer yet. Until I am not fully satisfied it will remain not available. Maybe the red and green colors have irritated some people and I should just show the value without doing any further rating so the people can decide for themself if it is good or not. I will think about it and I hope we can find a solution that will at least be acceptable for most of us.
In the meantime...
I have added a new feature on SteemWorld that shows us a list of our top 250 upvoted accounts of the past week:
Thank you for taking the time to think about all this! Please leave me a comment with your thoughts ;)
