Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour
A little update on the pull request (change to code) I made recently and talked about in my witness update.
It has been accepted!
This change will become part of Condensor, AKA steemit.com, and will set that little up vote check box to "off" by default instead of "on".
The change should come into effect soon when they push code changes to the production servers. I also closed the ticket I opened related to this as it is now solved.
It must be the smallest code change on record, just changing the letters "true" to "false 😂 But meaningful beyond that.
This is part of #project-smackdown, the initiative @l0k1, @the-ego-is-you and I have started to question self voting on Steemit. You can check our blogs for the other announcements on that but to summarize, we have a few ideas:
- Change the default steemit.com self voting behavior when submitting a post - DONE!
- With @smackdown.kitty flag self voted comments with a 1%, incrementing for each self vote recorded up to but no more than negating the self vote
- Publishing some kind of self votes report, most likely ranked by highest total value of self votes in a period (probably a week)
- Engaging the community to promote the idea of voluntary refusal to self vote
- And ultimately a hard fork change removing self voting as an option from the Steem blockchain
Change of plan and reflection
HOWEVER there is to be a change of plans specifically regarding point 2 above, the flagging bot.
We ran a test where only the three above mentioned users were flagged and the bot performed well after some teething problems were fixed. But we noticed that small value flags do not show prominently up on the steemit.com interface. This goes for the others too except eSteem, which obliterates the comment if the flag has moderate value.
As we don't want to flag a lot of comments hard (and it's not practical to either) we feel it would not be effective.
As a revised idea what do you think of this: flagging the top rewarded comments every day, let's say the top 4 or so, depending on how much delegated SP we have at any one time. In the end of things the most broad agreement we had was over so-called "abuse" of self voting, where authors are able to reward themselves sometimes hundreds of dollars worth from their comment.
To be clear, it's not that these comments may not be deserving of rewards. However we feel it is widely held, we certainly do, that these rewards should be awarded by peers, not the commenter.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who as engaged with us in discussion about this. As you can see we engage with you too, take it on board, run tests and revise our plans. This is no different and is not set in stone.
Steem Cooperative
This is broadly under the banner of the Steem Cooperative ( #steem-coop ) a group of likeminded users experimenting and trying to make tools and discussion to benefit Steemit in the Co-op style, for common benefit. Join us on steemit.chat in channel # steem-coop-general.
I have started making a tool to allow us to easily make posts which share rewards between members which is an ultra simplified version of my Team Work app idea from a few months ago. I realized there is no easy front end interface to shared rewards yet so I'm working on one simply called Rewards Share app.
It doesn't work yet but I'm hoping to have a beta release in a few days. 🤓 👍
Sooo... this is sort of related... I am pretty new here and was trying to figure it all out. I was on Steemnow.com typing in usernames out of curiosity when I noticed that someone had a bunch of upvotes from usernames that sound familiar or somehow relate to that of the user being upvoted. I looked at some of these users that looked kind of suspicious to me and they were all very new accounts, all had blogged nothing...It looked super suspicious to me, like someone created a bunch of accounts to upvotes themselves. Not sure what do to with this information..I know there are no "rules" but I feel like that kind of thing sort of breaks the code of conduct, right? And, I could be totally wrong... But if I am right, what should I do with the information?? Thanks!!
There's no explicit code of conduct for voting, it is completely up to you how to vote and with which accounts. There's nothing for creating multiple accounts either, though steemit.com implies you should only have one account by disallowing new registrations to use previously used authenticated methods (i.e. phone number and email). However it is easy to create an account, you just have to pay for it yourself (check out Anon Steem).
However self voting was explicitly disincentivized in the founding plan of Steemit (which you can read here, though it's not an easy read and a bit out of date). So the idea was not to ban it but to make it not as worth while as voting for other people.
When the recent changes (known as hard fork 19) came in this incentive went on it's head for a few reasons:
Suddenly it became really attractive to vote on your own posts. Since people do what makes sense based on the evidence they have and box they are in, lots of people started doing this.
But we think this is not a good thing for the Steemit project as a whole so we're looking for solutions.
A long way to say it, but what you should do with that information, in my opinion, is talk about it like you are now and support people who are trying to do something about it.
Thank you! I really appreciate the explanation and history!!! When you get a chance, please let me know of others I can support.
I strongly disagree with the idea that self voting is wrong and should be discouraged, and I strongly would oppose any hard fork that removed it as an option. Steem Power is valuable because it represents influence on the Steem blockchain. More Steem Power = more influence. The ability to self vote is one of the things that makes Steem Power influential and therefore desired and valuable. Prohibiting self voting will make Steem less valuable than it otherwise could be. Yes, some people abuse the self-voting privilege, but the community can easily respond to such abuse via flagging.
Which is what we are doing...
On that point, exactly
If self voting is going away, so will I alongside my Steem Power. No point in supporting another Reddit. This is why I love Steemit, the freedom here compared to other sites.. but this would just piss me off endlessly.
Self-voting is allowed on Reddit. In fact, your posts there are upvoted by default.
Being able to self-vote is not what makes Steem distinct and it is certainly not a merit of the platform.
On the contrary, I believe it retards the rate of adoption by people who understands the natural bias of self and how that affects actual quality and the level of effort authors put into their work. Self voting lends to complacency (especially higher stake holders ) don't necessarily have to work as hard whereas a minnow busting their ass creating content is under rewarded. This is centralization and has the tendency to result in less diversity of content.
I have seen a ton of low effort content receive inordinate rewards because of rampant self-voting and vote-buying. Because of this and other problems, I agree with this initiative of @l0ki and @personz 100% although I am not sure of it's current state.
To be frank, it is the nature of the self voter to oppose this because it undermines the very mechanism by which they are profiting in a manner that MANY believe is ethically questionable. They are making relatively easier money which is precisely why they don't want to level the playing field. Well, the end result is Steem is "pay to play" not unlike politics. I will say it and will say it again. Self voting is antithetical to decentralization and is why I have been apprehensive about investing any more money onto this platform and I would venture there are not only a few of us that feel the same. We are many but are voices muzzled while the voices of self voters get louder.
I think you're forgetting that self voting from the same account only just became really lucrative, since hard fork 19. You and several others talk about it like it's some kind of institution but the truth is that it has exploded since hf 19 when everyone realized it gave them so much.
Are you aware that self voting was something the creators of Steemit explicitly tried to incentivize against? Check this out from the whitepaper which I'll quote at length in an attempt to deal with this criticism generally:
Some something has happened here, either this is no longer relevant as Steemit has changed, or the current situation actually amounts to a bug. I believe it is the latter.
The Steemit guys talk about collusion and giving those with most votes a disproportionate amount of rewards as if it's a good thing, but they don't really explain why.
In what way does it help Steemit that 99% of its users get close to nothing but 1% get the vast majority of rewards?
It also creates some kind of perverse incentive, which makes quadratic voting even worse than FPTP voting, if it were to be used for politics. Think about it - with FPTP you're already incentivized to only vote for the two biggest parties/two most popular candidates, due to the spoiler effect.
With quadratic voting you're super-incentivized to vote for the two most popular candidates/parties. Can you see how bad quadratic voting would be for a democracy, by creating a permanent super-duopoly? If so, then you draw the same conclusions for why quadratic voting is bad for Steemit.
And you can still game the system by using another account :)
But that comes with several costs: one, the effort of managing at least two accounts (I am now doing this, and it's an irritating load on my attention) and two, that the rewards cannot be quickly moved to the voting account from the reward receiving account, at least, the half of the rewards that goes into SP.
Nope. It costs very little time if lots of money is on the line. You obviously have little idea what you are saying here.
I can tell you of 2 projects that can be used to automatically vote for peoplenusibg more than 1 account.
Streemian and steemvoter. ALL u are accomplishing with this is helping those who have sockpuppets and bots.
Gg on making sp more valuable...not happening this way.
It takes 3 months to power down all the SP in an account.
Even though you're clearly not intending to contribute anything interesting here your point is the same as a few others and valid, sock puppets are an increased issue. I suspect this @fuzzyvest is one such account. Amirite @nOgAnOo ? 😜
Reducing self voting at all would work towards the goal.
You can delegate the power from one account to the other account, and then it gets rid of the effort issue. Sure eventually you'll need to wait the 3 months out, but still.
Helping bots? What's the functional difference with bots and streems? I don't think they implement the vote following without a bot. Pretty damned sure of it.
It's literally the other way around. Self-voting removes value from SteemIt. Every single cent you aren't spending on good content creators is lowering the overall value.
Curators can make more money by finding undervalued posts (30 minutes+ old) and resteeming it or otherwise promoting it. That's a win-win, because the content creator is happy, the curator is happy and the curator didn't remove value from the platform.
The value of STEEM will rise anyway if you never self-vote, in fact it probably will rise even more in the long-term!
Self-voting is so terrible for the platform that there should be a hard fork to disincentivize it on the blockchain level.
You assume that the people who are self voting aren't "good content creators". If indeed they are not, then we can counteract their overindulgent self-voting by flagging (and people are already starting to do that, myself included).
Banning self-voting can only undermine the price of Steem. For instance, I have personally purchased thousands of dollars of SP (and I know many others who have done the same) so that I can influence what content gets visibility on the Steem platform, INCLUDING ESPECIALLY MY OWN. I (and many others) would have NEVER purchased so much, much less held it for so long, if doing so didn't increase my ability to get more exposure for my own content.
What you are overlooking is that it's NOT the authors and curatiors that give Steem value. The authors and curators come here only becasue Steem HAS value, and Steem has value not because it's "earned" by posting and curating but becasue people like my are willing to BUY it with money and HOLD it. It has value because capital (money) is flowing into it. That money flows into it in large part becasue people who acquire and hold Steem have a greater likelihood gaining exposure for their own content. The more Steem one holds, the greater one's voice on the platform. If we only allow that voice to be heard when it speaks of others and not when it speaks of the Steem holder himself or herself, then Steem's value declines.
Were there no other way of dealing with inappropriate self-voting, then I would agree that the damage done to capital inflows by banning self-voting may be worth it. But when the problem is easily solved by other means (like flagging), banning self-voting will do nothing but limit capital inflow and thereby reduce the value of Steem. Lower Steem prices means inferior authors and curators.
Look around, friend, Steem is healthier than ever. New users are way up. The price of Steem is way up. Alex ranking is way up! Growth is exponential. Your panic over self-voting is completley unjustified and unneeded.
Here's the bottom line: Those who want to ban self-voting are mainly folks who seek to acquire Steem by posting and curating rather than by PURCHASE. But it's only the latter that gives Steem value. And folks who are willing to purchase Steem do so in large part becasue they can influence the exposure of their own content.
true... if you want influence buy/earn steem power that's it
it's the same as hashing power, you need to invest and have skin in the game
From the whitepaper:
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
More from the whitepaper:
The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution.
The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people over-estimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people
gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.
Thank you very much for the truest words
I like the idea of limiting the use of self-voting, however, that would mean that minnows will have to try much harder to publish great content to garner a following. I suggest hard coding per user, an arbitrary amount of 5 self vote a day would be more useful. This would reduce the amount of abuse while not deny those people who actually put time and effort to shine through over the years to reap the benefit of their work.
After reading half of the comments it's very clear a compromise needs to be made. The fix is very simple, self voting on comments should be banned, however self voting actual posts should remain! If for some reason the community at large is interested in being allowed to up vote comments, steemit should go back to the 40 full strength up votes rather than the 10. To make those people work for it!
Self-voting doesn't add value to the network!
Great work @l0k1 and @personz and everyone behind this!
I stand behind you for this as I believe that self voting isn't standing for what steemit stands for. Steemit should be about adding great value instead of massive content, and self-voting doesn't add any value what so ever.
Punishing the top self-voting comments to the extent that they are loosing what they would earn from that vote is a good way to do it. As many point out, the comment can be good enough to deserv any possible earnings, but they shouldn't gain any benefit from voting on it by themselves.
Voting should be for finding other great content, not for self-voting.
And no, it's not hard to make a second account
But you need to lock your steem in some way on either account, so it will be more costly to do it this way. You will need to sacrifice some of your curation power if you do it this way, cause the SP you lock in your self voting account could have been in your own account making you a more powerful curator.
They will loose this battle.
Vote @sc-steemit for Steemit Witness.
Proud Supporter of the Cryptocurrency Gridcoin
You sure about that?
Self voting on an average of 1 post per day was how i paid to have whaleshares built.
This is like telling a miner...he cannot mine tokens for him or herseld and that u and the community will take away mining rights as soon as they get jealous. Meanwhile there re real problems...like sock puppet accounts that upvote everything from a distance.
Something tells me people wont care.
Also...what about people who are witnesses AND post. Maybe since they are earning sp from being witnesses...we just make it so they cant make money from blogging...cause how is it right they get to double dip?
See how easily this can get out of hand?
Well, I still think that a post/comment should be rewarded based on its value to the community. If people vote on it, it obviously have value to the community. Earning shares from the pool because you're a wealthy entity isn't what I think is good practice.
Sure, the issue has been very much more pressing since the rewards curve was flattened and the power per vote increased.
I understand your view to. But one full vote per day isn't the same as just using all your votes for voting on yourself, which is what I think is pure wrong. And there is, as you point out, more issues as sock puppet accounts to. I will reflect on this some more 👍
I hear you man. Thanks for your reflections as well!
You're a supporter of the community and I know you're using it for good. Maybe I should have larger trust in the greater whole? Self voting is a way to earn, but it's contradictory to what I think steemit stands for.
We need to discuss it more though
Maybe you're interested some day.
The ability to self-vote absolutely adds value to the system. Specifically, it makes the Steem token more valuable. People want to own the token, and will pay good money for it, in part because they can self-vote their content and thereby gain more influence and a larger voice within the Steem community. Steem was never meant to be "fair". Rather it was meant to reward holders of SP with INFLUENCE, thereby increasing demand for Steem and raising its market value. Deny SP holders this influence and all you will do is diminish the desirability and value of the Steem token itself. That's short sighted.
Yes, SP designed to reward holders with influence, and for their investment to appreciate over time. But this appreciation comes at the cost of the other purpose of Steem which you have not mentioned - distributing rewards to other members, not yourself. Every token that someone allocates to themselves is necessarily not allocated socially. Steem is not simply an interest deposit where you can post any old thing and self vote to get your "dues".
Increasing the value of the Steem token is not a simple cause and effect, it's complex. There are a lot of people bringing up the concern that self voting is in fact scammy behavior and this might actually go against adoption and the value of the coin.
Nobody is proposing to deny SP holders influence, it's pretty much gospel here. But letting their influence increase too much is not the goal either.
@sean-king You're so unbelievably wrong. Buying STEEM makes the token more valuable. Having SP gives you the ability to earn curation rewards. That's how the platform was intended. It was intended to be fair, as in that everyone would be making money.
If you are self-voting, everyone is making less money and it becomes less "fair". The more people self-vote, the less people will earn, until everybody is earning hardly anything and the price of STEEM will drop like there's no tomorrow. It's as simple as that.
And why do you think people buy Steem, friend? Just so that they can upvote OTHER PEOPLE'S stuff with more influence? NO! They often buy Steem because owning Steem ensures that their own content gets more exposure.
Steem was NEVER intended to be "fair" (read the whitepaper since it's quite explicit on this point, analogizing Steem to a "lottery"), and it most DEFINITELY wasn't intended to be a place where "everyone would be making money." Again, read the whitepaper! Steem can't afford to produce enough tokens to reward everybody "fairly". If it did, the system would be flooded with tokens, and those tokens would be relatively worthless. Instead, Steem was designed to pay huge, outsized rewards to a few lucky people. And it's the HOPE of earning one of those outsized rewards (and not a "fair" distribution of those rewards) that keeps people posting, just like the HOPE of winning the lottery (and not a "fair" distribution of winnings) keeps people buying tickets. Again, read the freakin whitepaper.
People acquire Steem in part so that they CAN upvote themselves and get more exposure, just like advertisers acquire air time so that they can likewise get more exposure. Airtime is limited and desired because it gives influence, and STeem is limited and desired becasue it gives influence. Therefore airtime is valuable and Steem is valuable.
Imagine a system where people who purchased airtime could ONLY advertise OTHER PEOPLE'S products and not their own. Would airtime be as valuable as now? Of course not. The value of airtime would decline greatly b/c people are not all that altruistic. They are not going to spend their hard-earned money only to provide exposure for someone else.
This is not even a hard question, man. It's really quite simple. Depriving Steem holders of the right to self vote is the equivalent of depriving purchasers of advertising the right to advertise their own products. It's insane, and it will kill the price of Steem.
Agreed
+1
totally
That's a good point, I hear you.
I feel the need for it to be more openly discussed, this is good.
I'm mearly expressing my view in my previous post, but my view may change as I discuss this topic. Nothing is fixed.
Thanks for your view of it, I need to think on this more 😀
I agree with you. I hope you and I are both wrong. :)
That's right, the extra effort isn't the only cost, the spreading of SP around will also diminish the benefits. But people so often don't think more than one step ahead with anything, or to the secondary outcomes after a primary outcome. This is the result of humans short lifespans and is called 'Time Preference' in Austrian economics. The effect it has on behaviour here is unquestionable, and that is why the defaults need to be changed.
BTW, I voted for your witness with @l0k1, keep up the good work :)
I disagree with the term "punishing" but yes, letting our opposition be known and felt is the idea 😄
Thanks for the support!
To be honest this was more effective under the square rewards curve, and I think the reason @ats-david previously suggested actually rolling back hard fork 19. I'm going to consider the multiple accounts argument more. It was something we explicitly said was outside the scope of the project but it's becoming clear to me that support for this project may be contingent on an answer to this too.
Fully agree. Maybe punishing isn't the word, but at least set a statement.
This issue has arrised much more after the new rewards curve system AND a higher voting power. Many smaller witnesses where pointing this out.
I've resteemed this for exposure. I don't know if I like it or dislike it yet.
I think the idea is good, but the possible workarounds are endless, which could penalize small new users who are trying to buy STEEM to power their accounts so they upvote their own posts and get noticed.
In order for this to work these same new users will have to be using the promoted feed instead, and the various whale upvote services. (Or spend a long time getting a following through commenting, etc).
I don't know. I'm on the fence.
By the way, there was an extensive commentary on this subject on an old blog post I wrote 14 days ago. I'm not spamming the link... (it already received its payout)
Look through the 127 comments on this exact same subject about how people feel.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@intelliguy/to-vote-yourself-up-or-not-to-vote-yourself-up-that-s-the-question
Self-voting and clique-voting (aka circle jerks) can never be wholly eliminated, but rules can be put in place to make it less effective compared to the overall aim of max social utility - assuming that is the primary objective and Steem price is the manifestation of that objective.
It seems silly but I think there actually is some disagreement on that assumption, that the aspect to maximize is social utility. I think for some people the investment (or rather return on it) aspect is the most important.
Perhaps this should be the topic of another post, it's coming up a lot.
mmm... a post on the philosophy of monetised social communities - not so different to a big city. I could write it.
There is room for multiple strategies - we are not bots, I assume - but the underlying algos must promote the "common wealth". If there are only the vote-miners then earnings as a percentage will drop until such "income" reaches an equilibrium which may still be good but no longer great.
What then is the role of newbies?
The common wealth!? Socialist! It's that misunderstanding that would be good to unpack because it's what many people hear when you talk about social good here. Add to that the idea that a change in the rule set is more regulation and you're well on your way to a comparison with Marx.
This might be the touchstone of the rebuke.
Less politics and more analysis would be useful.
The common wealth is a term used by Francis Bacon, philosopher of science and advocate that science and technology should improve the lives of everyone. Technology is thus a wealth multiplier not a redistributor.
The Steem White Paper is not crystal clear as to the ultimate metric of success; as a startup it talks a lot about the number of users, but can that be a valid metric: to maximise users?
That's as close as we get to a "maximal social utility". We may call this whatever we want but what it amounts to is the total wealth within Steem. So it may make it easier to drop the economics jargon and call it essentially "maximal market cap of Steem and SBD". Possibly more useful is "total market cap per member". For highly skewed distributions such as Steem wealth, a median of earnings is a better measure.
The White Paper also mentions the Prisoner's Dilemma but, I think, makes an error here:
The current problems were foreseen but the algorithm was not created to mitigate them. Indeed, the subsequent paragraphs are used to justify the N-squared rewards curve, now changed to proportional N.
Looking at this more closely there is a hidden variable that should be changed: rshares or vests. Changing that formula will allow us to return to more votes per day.
Well put, thank you for that.
I posit that in fact, this default is damaging to new accounts in the light of the greatly accelerated rate of vote power decay. They can't then send votes to other accounts to build up their fanbase, and that's the 100% most important factor in growing an account, I have proven it once with my @l0k1 account, making at least 15000SP over 6 months of networking and engagement, and I plan to prove it again with this new account, it will only take a couple of months to see that my strategy is the most effective.
BTW, don't confuse resteeming and linkdropping in a relevant discussion with self-voting. These two ways of promoting yourself do not take away rewards from the pool nor do they (usually) conflict with the keeping of discussions on topic.
Thanks for the link, I will check it out.
I'm not sure the new users argument has any weight. A minnow self voting their own post will have minimal effect. The best way to get noticed is to comment on other people's posts.
But the worksarounds, sure they are a problem too. I'm thinking more about it now and will have more to say on it soon, it's the best hole in the plan 😉
Minnow makes new account. Worth under $50 SP
Minnow makes comments, makes a post, gets unnoticed since he doesn't have a lot of followers.
Minnow buys $2500 worth of STEEM and powers up his account.
Minnow creates new post, and votes up himself. While looking under the "new" feed, people notice this post is already voted well above 25 cents and wonder why. They read the post, and upvote it too.
When this happens, it encourages those tho can afford it to buy STEEM to power up. We want that..
Do you really look first at the reward on a post to decide whether to click?
Sometimes... sometimes no. I know a lot of people and bots do. If something is new, is already getting votes, chances are its curation is going to be worth spending vote power on insteads of a dead post that gains no traction.
I personally like good content. I notice a large number of curators gravitate towards posts that are already earning something.
I am sitting on some 90% voting power on my @l0k1 account, and I just realised I often evaluate my decision to upvote on the reverse criteria... If it's already making lots, I look for ones that are good and neglected.
Funny enough curators would earn more money that way, but in reality everyone goes for the trending ones and make fractions of the rewards, take away rewards from neglected authors and over-reward trending content in the process.
It's a mess currently :)
It certainly is. I have suggested the idea of increasing the curator share as a positive incentive against self voting, from 25 to 33%, an increase of 75%, by the way.
Interesting narrative, I hadn't thought of that. Here's the clincher:
The hypothesis here is that post which are already highly valued are of greater interest. I think this could be correct but perhaps not.
In any case the bot (as it currently is configured) is only interested in comments. That's what I tried to say in the post, that I think there is broad agreement that high self vote payouts for comments is not beneficial to the platform.
This feature had pissed me off quite a bit. Thank god it's off.
Couldn't agree more, maybe they should even get rid of the checkbox as well.
😊
"And ultimately a hard fork change removing self voting as an option from the Steem blockchain"
Not productive. Will simply punish the low level users. All large abusers will simply recreate sock puppets, delegate, vote trade. I do not support this.
"However we feel it is widely held, we certainly do, that these rewards should be awarded by peers, not the commenter."
I'm concerned this is turning into a witch hunt. I don't feel this premise has been proven.
How will it punish low level users? For low level users they have only had any kind of self voting effect at all since hard fork 19, which is a matter of weeks.
Whether the premise is convincing or not this is not a witch hunt. The idea is to be only minorly discriminate in flagging (if we end up going down that route).
I think this is a better reply to your first question than I will generate here in an ad-hoc fashion:
https://steemit.com/steem/@sean-king/life-ain-t-fair-and-neither-is-steem-deal-with-it-and-self-vote-away
I had to say this.
While I don’t encourage self-voting, I definitely don’t think it’s right to look at someone who self-votes as a criminal and flag that person. All of us are here to make money, and we all choose our own path to achieve our goal.
Some of us who understand that the health of the community is important, make sure we follow the etiquette that such a community demands. But when people from all backgrounds are ENCOURAGED to sign up, it’s not right to degrade/demotivate them purely on the basis of self-voting.
I have come across many wonderful people who self-vote, even those that are doing everything they can for this community. By flagging such people, we are only harming the community.
As we all agree that self-voting does not serve the purpose of Steemit, we should be looking at other options:
Look outside the Steemit doors and see what’s happening. People talk about Steemit as a way of earning money from comments and posts. People are flocking in by the thousands each day – hoping to make some dollars.
Please don’t misread or misinterpret what I wish to convey. I am NOT AGAINST RULES. All I’m saying is that it will help if things are done by not hurting anyone's self-respect.
If someone is behaving in an untoward manner or posting stuff that should not be posted – deal with them – because inappropriate behavior is not acceptable anywhere.
I hope you don’t mind a minnow jumping in with opinions, but I think the flagging option should be reconsidered.
No I don't think "criminal" is appropriate either, but it is selfish, and a kind of selfish activity that is not aligned with the goal of some benefit for all. For example, previously because of curation rewards it was win-win to vote for someone else. Now we have win-lose, a zero sum game if we self vote too much.
Perhaps etiquette and social norms will be enough to encourage restraint in self voting by and large, and I feel that flagging some users will add to a culture of this. I don't think flagging self votes is harmful especially when we decide to only flag those making the most. We aim to do this until there is a blockchain level solution in the form of a hardfork, or until we are satisfied either it's not effective or has had it's effect.
I very much appreciate you taking the time to post, especially as a minnow. But flagging is always an option and I defend its usage.
Being a minnow myself, my opinion is based on the fact that flagging may be demotivating and hurting. I'm placing myself in other minnows' shoes.
However, I also understand and appreciate that your opinions/decisions will be based on your experience here, having seen thousands of us enter and abuse the platform.
Thank you for being so patient with your response. :)
These changes are interesting. Thank you for writing this up. While being relatively new to Steemit and having only just posted an article for the first time today, I already feel like Steemit is on uneasy ground when it comes to this self-voting stuff.
I've seen a lot of opinions on the topic representing a few sides. Personally, I think this update is great – if self-upvoting is false by default, it basically requires you to stop and consider why an upvote is necessary before checking it to true – instead of just doing it automatically and leaving no room for further thought.
Do I think people NEED to be considerate about self-upvotes? I don't know. But, I do believe the following objective you/you guys are working on is pretty interesting.
It's not simply a promotion of voluntary refusal to self-vote, it's effectively promoting the discourse of an honor system(s) on Steemit. And honor is a pretty darn good thing, right?
Exactly the point, well put summary.
There could be an argument that honor in this sense could work for your own self interest, as it might increase your reputation, garner followers and ultimately votes. But if self voting is easier and very effective in the short term, we are going to see it I think.