I've been wondering lately when the best time would be to post a new article. I sit here in the very far east on a big island and always have to keep an eye on the times in the rest of the world.

Asia is halfway awake at the same time as me, but what is Europe doing right now and is America still with me? Probably many of you feel the same way, we are all sitting in front of the computer but are scattered all over the globe. That's what's so fascinating about the Internet and the social media that at the end they turn the big world into a digital village.

Mostly I write during the day and then in the evening I work on my articles and format them a little bit. And before I go to bed, I send everything and see if I can already answer one or two comments.

Unfortunately most of the time not, sometimes it starts off super slow.

When I wake up in the morning, I quickly check how many notifications there are and estimate my chances of my contribution having become a hit overnight. Haha.. doesn't it sound a little funny?

How about comments?

Comments I answer mostly in the evening on the computer, on the smartphone it is often not so easy, but I try to do it too from time to time. And I actually upvote as soon as something catches my eye what might deserve some upvote, of course on the smartphone the little slider can also be a little tricky.

I usually read the posts from my follower list first and then what comes around. These are mostly articles about football, one of the main topics here at Scorum. But I also try to educate myself further and like to visit other sports, such as cricket. Although I don't understand the game, I try to get my hands on it very slowly.

To explore some new writers and different topics I have started Scorum Patronage, where I ask the community to nominate some aspiring newer users. One of them I will accompany for a week and read all their articles and also upvote them. I hope this will motivate and push them a little further. And at the same time I can broaden my horizon. You can read the announcement of the first beneficiary here:

https://scorum.com/en-us/scorum/@sport-frei/the-first-round-of-scorum-patronage-the-community-has-spoken

And voting?

When voting the posts of other users, I first vote the posts which haven't yet received such a high reward. Articles over 100$ are already successful and I think I should contribute my SP to other authors as well.

But it's interesting to see that often the articles with a very high reward are pushed even further. Maybe because they are probably well visible in the trending list and quickly catch other people's attention. It would be nice if our whales would look a little bit more at articles that haven't made it this far yet. And there are quite some out there.

How about self-voting?

The Scorum platform makes it possible that not only authors, but also readers can be rewarded as curators. Since 25 percent of the post-payout goes to the curators, the reading and evaluation of articles by other members is explicitly encouraged.

But of course Scorum also has the function to rate our own articles. This possibility is extra permitted and of course is also happily used by many users.

We might want to consider, at what point we vote our own articles, so that other curators are not feeling some disadvantage and get demotivated to rate our articles as well. As much as I understand how curation works, there is some algorithm which favors the first big vote. For this reason I usually wait a few days and give other users the chance to vote for my contribution before I reward myself.

But I noticed that some users here vote their own contributions first, or at least after a very short time, maybe to push themselves into the hot section and help to get more attention.

That makes probably a lot of sense, so that the own post does not get lost without being read by others.

Maybe I should do it myself. A pretty good question!

How do you handle self-voting?
Do you wait until the first third-party votes have arrived or even some days, or do you push your articles immediately after writing?

Maybe someone already has some experience and can tell us what works best! I'd like to hear more about it, so keep the comments coming!

Thank you for stopping by today and reading my recent thoughts about our exciting platform. I'm still trying to figure out how to contribute here as best as I can, therefor I wanted to share some of my concerns and questions.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you and please stay tuned for the second round of Scorum Patronage. Nominations will open soon!

Cheers!