I recently participated in a spirited conversation that I believe is one of the things that sets Steemit apart from many other platforms. The subject was whether self-voting is an issue or not. The post, titled "Why is it possible to upvote your own post and comments" was an honest and earnest critique of the system by @gank.

I love that this type of conversation occurs because it shows that users truly care about Steemit! That's really cool to be apart of! I was writing a response that became a bit lengthy, so I'm instead publishing it as a post.

Now, being that I'm publishing this as a post, I'm probably opening myself up to a lot more possible scrutiny than if I had simply left it as a reply, so I hope that we can all keep it civil, and I also am willing to accept if I'm wrong, as I'm still pretty new to the platform. If I've misunderstood something, then I'm happy to be educated on the matter. Let's begin!

Why I believe self-voting isn't a big problem

Let's consider a few possible scenarios:

Minnow self-voting

This is largely an ineffective tactic as minnows will take forever to make this profitable. Diminishing voting power also makes scaling it to the point of being effective impossible. Most spam and low quality stuff comes out of the minnow tier. The developers knew that which is why the system is largely effective.

Dolphins and whales self-voting

If you've gotten to the point of being a dolphin or a whale, you've largely contributed a lot of value to the community or you've paid a lot of money to get to your level. I'm not sure if you could convince enough people to vote for you to the point of being a dolphin or whale without contributing value. If you can find a spammy whale, then please point them out, because the only way to pull that off, IMO, is to buy your way in. Who would spend that kind of money to risk the account being banned for spamming? The ROI is just not there.

Bots spamming

While this might be kind of a problem, I'm really not convinced it's a big one because the bots will either suffer from the minnow problem above, or the creators will have to make bots that actually do an OK job of identifying quality content in order to grow properly into a profitable venture.

Even if spammy bots could do OK, that's only because the Steemit community is small at the moment. Once more people join and contribute, bots and low quality posts will disappear into the annals of the post tags as high quality posts surface to the top. A lot of people like to throw all bots out with the bathwater, but few realize how much value bots bring to sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. I don't think they're inherently bad, but there are some bad ones out there.

Don't get me wrong, I know what you're saying, but I think the problem isn't as bad as you might think it is at the moment.

Lastly and most importantly IMO: Voting Power waste

If a whale sits idle with his voting power pegged at 100%, that is a waste. They could be out distributing STEEM with their votes and recharging their voting power to distribute more. In a way, self-voting allows them to retain the STEEM (in the form of powering up their account), which will then result in larger rewards when they do vote on other peoples' content. That would have otherwise been passed over by sitting on 100% voting power (as voting power doesn't recharge passed 100%).

It is also worth noting that many of your concerns are addressed in the Steem White Paper in the section about Payout Distribution which can be found on page 16. Here is a relevant snippet:

The actual distribution will depend upon the voting patterns of users, but we suspect that the vast majority of the rewards will be distributed to the most popular content.

Zipf’s Law is one of those empirical rules that characterize a surprising range of real-world phenomena 7 remarkably well. It says that if we order some large collection by size or popularity, the second element in the collection will be about half the measure of the first one, the third one will be about one-third the measure of the first one, and so on. In general, the k th-ranked item will measure about 1/k of the first one.

Taking popularity as a rough measure of value, then the value of each individual item is given by Zipf’s Law. That is, if we have a million items, then the most popular 100 will contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 989,900 the final third. The value of the collection of n items is proportional to log(n).

Humans are generally bad at math, I get that

I'm not saying, at all, that there aren't people "abusing" self-voting, I'm simply saying that I agree with the developers when they essentially say that it is largely of mathematical insignificance. Basically, the problem looks worse than it actually is.

Now, I'm also willing to agree with people that the perception from users may out-weigh the mathematical significance (we're not computers, so we can't evaluate the true impact like a computer can), and that might possibly damage the community, but I believe that the platform will ultimately win-out and people will realize that the system is working as intended, and working quite well.

What do you think? Let me know!

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