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Awhile back when the big discussions about people who were self up voting their own comments after HF19 and draining the reward pool came up I indicated that if you wanted to do something about it rather than FLAGGING people for doing it you could simply not follow them.    I did stop following some people, and I will do more when I notice it.    Why?   I am a pretty avid comment up voter.    Unless it is someone being a jerk, or all it says is something like "Nice post" I'll likely be up voting it.    I've been up voting comments at 1% for a week or more now while monitoring my voting percent.   I am now doubling that so will be voting 2% on comments to see how it goes.   I want to encourage discussion.   If my voting percent can bear it I'll keep bumping it until I'm hopefully at 4 or 5%.

I can tell you some of the people I unfollowed I didn't really want to, but I try to be a man of my word.   If people who currently vote their own comments stop and I notice and they are someone I engage with I will be more than happy to follow them again.   I also will support your comments, and you shouldn't need to support your own.

If you are doing it for visibility.   I am pretty good about looking at every reply I get.   I've missed some before due to for some reason how steemit sometimes sorts the replies tab.    It doesn't happen very often.

So if you are someone who has been following me, and I was following you and you are wondering why I may not be following you now, that would be the reason.    If you are angered about this, that was not my intention, but if you feel the need to unfollow me then I would understand that.

If you however, have been up voting your own comments and are willing to stop doing that and instead cast those votes for other people in the community let me know and I'd be ecstatic to follow you again.

I wanted to write this post as one person just asked me why I stopped following them, and they were actually one of the people I was bummed about no longer following.    I did write a few posts and comments about this before I did it, and like I said I didn't want to be a hypocrite.     Practice what I preach.

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