RE: Whitepaper Discussion on Voting Abuse
Perhaps that level of determination is best dealt with my the ad hoc methods you advocate in your root post here. I am personally involved with opposing nearly 10 thousand scam accounts engaged in exactly this. Unless there is a really fundamental change this kind of thing is here to stay and needs bot type solutions to.
However that kind of issue is "sexy" - very interesting and easy to get behind opposing because it's so obviously wrong. What I aim to challenge that is not so obvious is the self rewarding of established, reasonable, interesting folks who are actually engaged but who are effectively skimming off the cream of the platform.
I think you're probably not in favor of this as you mention that we all need to accept self voting, that it's somehow "natural" (you did not provide any reason to believe this by the way) and we should concentrate on abuse. Well the data indicates that obvious abuse is far less important in terms of value than self votes.
If there is a user who is engaged in the platform and adding value through what they do, and they upvote their own (good) content, there really isn't an issue with that. As a stakeholder they are using their influence to direct the rewards pool to the content that they feel is adding value to the platform. It is within the 'acceptable constraints' of what SP is supposed to be used for.
If user is using their SP to upvote their own content above what it is worth, then that is abuse (in my view). I realize that this is a difficult thing to objectively quantify (which is why this problem is so difficult). There are quite a few cases that are pretty clear/obvious though. IMO, these are the ones that we should be focusing on.