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When I vote on articles I have two main things that I do.

1. I vote for people that I know, have voted for me or that I like for whatever reason. If you follow me I will follow back. If I remember you have voted for me ever I will always vote for you when I see anything from you.

2. I vote for anything that has some momentum and is close to the 30 min mark. I tend to not vote on an article that is older than 1-2h and nothing that is newer than 15min. If an article has a few votes around the 25-39 min mark it gets my vote. Of course 1) can be an exception to this.

 If I really like something I will vote for it any time, because intrinsically I want to reward cool stuff. My vote is only worth $0.02, so it does not really make a difference.

I do this a few times a day, and I am sure this is not ideal. I have not found an article that actually describes how voting works in detail, but from experience I have seen that it only makes sense when voting within the 30 min mark. Even if the article only gets 2-5$ voting this way is relatively profitable. As such voting has become a game, sort of like a computer game I play. Whenever I have free time  I get out my phone and see if there is anything I can vote for.

This way I make maybe 2-5 steem a day. Sometimes I get lucky, such as yesterday and I make 7 steem in a day. 

The problem I have with this is that I have stopped voting for content or things I like. 

In my opinion this curation system is flawed. It turned curation, which should let us tell somehow what we like, into a skill game focused on financial rewards. I play this game very badly, but it is enough incentive for me to focus on the financial aspect of it. On youtube and Facebook I am an active voter. I know that voting matters and is valuable and makes people happy, so I do it as much as possible any time I like something. As a result my activity as a user on steemit has changed as well. I don't read articles any more, I just analyze trends and click.

On steem, voting has a game theory aspect to it. In order to understand the game one would have to understand the code, but in essence and since we have to vote about 40 times a day in order to not waste voting power it would make sense to pick the 40 most popular authors each day. Ideally everyone would just let a bot pick these votes according to history and other things that can be read from the blockchain. There are already some bots out there that one can use. I should probably use one of them. 

But the rebel in me that things there is still good in the world, wants to at least let me do the clicking manually. Probably 50% of the time there is still some sort of emotional decision in my voting, such as recognizing accounts or glazing over one post over another and giving it a like every though it is only borderline profitable.

But I really hope that voting will change to a system that rewards users for being active, and not voting according to game theory. 

We need to reward users for showing up, consuming content and voting for things they like. We need to not reward them for certain votes over others, because that changes what they would normally vote for. You see i would normally never vote for anything just because it has a certain age and has financial momentum.

Knowing what users like is the most important thing for steem to be successful. Because when we reward things that users like, we will attract more of them and the site will also be sticky.  But manipulation votes via financial rewards is the worst we can do. I understand the initial motivation:

- we want to make sure that people don't just click anything without thinking and instead pick quality content.
- we want to create viral content

But is what I am doing not exactly what we want to avoid? The reward system has made me click things randomly instead of letting me chose what I like.

I think it would make a lot more sense if users would get rewarded for simply voting and for voting every day or being active overall. 

As to the viral content: we don't need to create this artificially. Viral content will become viral anyway. And then get rewards anyway. There is no need to support that process or artificially create it. It would be a lot more valuable to reward users, even if they are not very invested for being active. 

The current curation system distort the purpose of voting and thus artificially decreases the value and quality of content on steem. 

I urge the steem team to really look at what we want to accomplish with curation rewards and review if the rewards really support the right user behavior. 

I really don't want to have a computer do the voting for me. It should be human process. 

Thanks for reading and upvoting!