No More Fear on Self-voting!

In every reward system in Steem, self-voting is one of the main concern and the devs attempt to discourage self-voting or group-self-voting(a.k.a. collusive-voting) through reward distribution curve design. But is the self-voting truly fearsome disaster? Does penalizing self-voting have disadvantages as well? This post will delve into the self-voting issue in a brief way.

Problem of Self-voting

The worst scenario with self-voting is all users voting only for themselves. This implies that decision-making on contents is neglected. In other words, it's no more than PoS system; staking STEEM (as Steem Power) and earning interests via self-voting.

Overcoming Fear on Self-voting

But is it really bad, especially in linear-based system? Assuming everyone is doing self-voting, a person who is holding 10% Steem Power will earn approximately 10% of contents rewards. If one is holding 1%, he/she will get 1%, and 50% will get 50%. It is literally selfish, but a self-voter doesn't over-use his/her power more than one owns.

Point 1: In a linear system, self-voting does not have more impacts than one owns

Secondly, self-voting can be punished by downvote from others. To fully utilize voting power, a self-voter needs to vote several or tens of times per day for him or his sock-puppets. This increases probability of being detected and if one is really trying to abuse the voting power, the person will face severe backlash soon.

Point 2: Self-voting can be detected and punished

Anti-self-voting can be Anti-dolphin or Anti-minnow

Currently, the way to discourage self-voting is applying discount to piled voting power on posts. For instance, if a post received 10,000 MV will get 5% discount, but a post with 100 MV will get 90% discount. By doing so, people are more likely to vote on same posts in order to increase their curation rewards. While it appears sound, the height of bar matters.

Let's assume that a generally acceptable discount level is 10% and 5,000 MV is required to reach this stage. In other words, this means a post with below 5,000 MV is considered as self- or collusive-voting. Here, please remind that there is no other reason to discount voting power except discouraging self-voting. Therefore, the bar generates a kind of Type II error (A hypothesis is true but incorrectly reject it due to too strict criteria. A false negative). For instance, a post is voted by thrity 100 MV dolphins (3,000 MV), who are not self-voters. It actually is not self-voting post but will get significant discount due to the high bar (e.g. 5,000 MV). Therefore, higher anti-self-voting policy can give penalties to non-abusing posts. This results in weakening dolphins and minnows. Unless several tens of them vote for one post, they cannot make it beyone-discount level without whale's help

Point 3: Higher anti-self-voting policy can weaken dolphins and minnows

In addition, a higher bar brings about fewer posts that have non-significant discounts. This is able to help for-profit bots(I am using a term bot for convenience, but I am neutral on it). More specifically, for-profit bots only will focus on small number of authors who have higher probability of creating beyond-discount posts. A reverse auction can make difference, but if the gap from discount is considerably greater than loss from the auction, bots don't care. For example, an author produces 5,000 MV(10% discount) posts on average, and another author produces 1,000 MV(80% discount) posts, bots can compensate losses from the reverse auction from the difference in discount levels (80%-10% = 70%). But if the gap of discounts is only 10%, bots may get more rewards by taking advantages in the reverse auction.

Point 4: Stricter anti-self-voting policy helps bots

Current and Suggestion

Currently, the bar seems too high. According to the suggested parameters, 8,000 MV is required to reach 80% level and 20,000 MV for 90% level. I would suggest to decrease the bar to like 500~1,000 MV for 80% and 2,000~3,000 MV for 90%. This is more fair to dolphins and minnows as well as will make Steemit more dynamic (more randomness on beyond-discount posts). Don't afraid of self-voting. Just let it go and enjoy your voting power. This is what we should aim.