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RE: Introducing Smackdown Kitty
Self voting is spam, as far as the central purpose of Steem goes - rewarding content that is highly regarded. People only do it because button.
Self voting is spam, as far as the central purpose of Steem goes - rewarding content that is highly regarded. People only do it because button.
I disagree with this as a blanket statement. Yes, sometimes it is true, but often, it's not. It depends on where the vote is placed. You need to know more about the post/comment to know whether it was spam or not.
For example:
My 15 year old son, @cmp2020, has studied piano for the last 6 or 7 years, and music theory for the last year. When he posts on those topics, his self-vote is far more valuable than many other votes in conveying information to the system. Similarly, at a higher order, @lemouth is a particle physicist and @justtryme90 is a biologist. If they want to promote their own comments to the top of a discussion in their area of expertise, they should certainly be able to.
I'm sure that almost everyone on steemit has specialized knowledge on some topic or other, where their own self-vote should carry more weight than the vote of a random person who happens to see the post/comment.
I think the number of users now has led to a place where there is an audience for every niche. This argument steadily becomes more invalid.
As long as non-experts are able to vote on comments and posts of all topics, the argument will remain valid. You can't assume that all of the people voting are the ones with expertise.
Experts only rule in the world of governments. Here in the wild west, experts are rare, most people are generalists.
Not only that, there's more people who think they are experts than there actually is experts. So the argument still diminishes in validity over time.
ok. But I don't see how that's relevant. The fact that generalists exist doesn't justify silencing the experts' votes.
The comment that I responded to made a blanket statement that self-votes are always spam. I provided counterexamples demonstrating that self-votes are not always spam, and in fact, they often convey more information than votes cast by others.
This is basic logic. If a counterexample exists, then "always" is shown false. qed
Your point is valid, however, even 'experts' cannot be considered as such without their peers. Declaring something doesn't make it so. Same applies to voting.