RE: Since it's now acceptable to reward yourself.
I don't think we should stop and wait for ned to do anything. The culture of this platform needs to change. There's money grabbing deception via inorganic voting for instance. It's a broken system. I know we have interacted on the self voting and I have chosen to opt out of that practice. I think if others had a "bigger picture" mentality that they should do the same. We have allowed mechanisms onto this platform that serve to reward stake over value of content and it is painfully apparent with even a cursory glance of the trending page.
One of the Marine Corps leadership principles is to set the example. If one is not willing to forego rewards of self voting and perhaps even use their voting power to both incentivize non-self voters as well as the more controversial option of deincentivizing overvalued content of self voters (via flagging), that aspect of the platform will by no means change. It takes more than just a handful but most people are too comfortable or I'd like to say complacent and complacency kills.
Seems to me the flaws are inherent in the system. Money is power, survival of the fittest or cleverest, formation of tribes. It’s like an experiment in Anarchy. Not sure how it will end.
Am I missing the call to action. What are we doing about it?
Supporting non-self voting posts is one of the best thing a minnow like me can do. I've developed a rudimentary script to determine self vote status but it's not really for the layperson. It requires the steem piston python libraries. It will return true if self voted and false otherwise.
It would be nice if I can figure out how I can integrate something like this into a Steem front end that would filter but I haven't really gotten that far in my experience with python. It may be easier just to ctrl-f from steemd but sometimes the node is unavailable so I would use this alternatively.
The likely hood of getting community consensus seems low to me. It also doesn't work because most Steemians have more than one account. :)
Agreed on the former. It is true that people can use alts to self vote which appears to be the case with pilgrimtraveler / explorertraveler / karengentry (I've inquired w no response). I digress. From my perspective, removing the self vote would hinder the problem albeit not fully remove it.
It may not be feasible to fully address. Scammers gonna scam.
Exactly, which is addressed in the Whitepaper along with the idea if people are abusing the system the community can flag the rewards.
We have come full circle. Nice discussion.
Right, yes flagging those posts does help; however, in the current state there isn't really a compelling incentive for people to use their voting power for that purpose.
That may be the shortfall and I think we can both agree, with the rise of controversy in regard to reward pool rape, that the flagging capability seems ill equipped to fully address the problem because it is costly for those that take it upon themselves to do it. I wonder how much this recent campaign has cost Bernie for instance. Probably a pretty penny.
I've been considering more creative solutions and I think I have one heck of an idea but it needs to be refined. I know that you likely fall on the other side of the self voting issue so I hope I am not boring or annoying you too much. :) Merry Christmas by the way!
Merry Christmas.