Self-Voting: Scammy Behavior, Rational ROI, or Something Else?
I've jumped into a few interesting discussions about self-voting and wanted to put my thoughts down as they are today.
I'll be up front with some of my own biases. I get frustrated by an entitlement attitude. I think improper expectations breed frustration. I think Steemit has always been designed as a lottery, though the flattened reward curve has changed that a bit. I don't think trying to make everyone equal is how we can improve the world, because equality of outcome can't exist between people with radically different ambitions (though equality of opportunity is certainly something we should aim for as a compassionate community).
So right up front, I know Steemit isn't "fair", and it probably never will be, much like life. It's not fair that I was born in a wealthy country to intelligent parents. Yeah, at times we didn't have much money and had to sell the house and live on a boat, but I've had a lot opportunities, more than many.
With all that said, let's jump into a Pros and Cons list for self-voting. To be clear, self-voting is when you vote up your own post or comment.
Cons - Why Self-Voting Is Bad
You're essentially adding noise to the system.
I forgot where I first saw this argument in conversation, but I think it's potentially the best reason not to vote for your own posts. The rewards mechanism here is designed to increase the signal and decrease the noise. Votes from Steem Power holders determine rewards pool distribution. It's supposed to be a signal from stake-holders to indicate the best authors and posts. Now by "best", I acknowledge this is a subjective concept. Not everyone agrees on "best", but hopefully all Steem Power holders at least try to vote for things they think should be repeated and supported in order to increase the value of their holdings. Unfortunately, I think many fail to consider timescale in this process and go for short-term gains.
You're signaling to the community something important about your intentions. Are you greedy?
This one's a little more controversial. If you regularly participate in behavior which ensures you get more than your "fair share" (whatever that might be), then the rest of your tribe may begin to resent you. In some tribal gift economies, to take more than you give out is considered a terrible offense. People who are overly concerned about their own wellbeing are difficult to trust. Trust is hugely important when building strong communities.
You're gaming the system.
In its worst form, some people add valueless comments just so they have another post they can vote up. This is similar to the early days where the bandwidth constraints weren't working properly and many were spamming the network looking for rewards. Steemit implemented a "4 posts a day" target with decreasing rewards beyond that. This limitation has since been removed, but the idea remains: If you're spamming the network just to increase your own rewards, are you really adding value to the entire network? Should the network be rewarding your behavior?
Pros - Why Self-Voting Is Good
You're a serious STEEM investors who needs to see a good ROI to remain engaged.
The way I like to think about this argument compares Steem Power holders to bitcoin miners. If someone invests $10,000 in a miner to obtain their "fair share" of the bitcoin rewards pool, no one complains at all. No one cries foul-play or considers that person a bad actor, even if their actions and investment decrease the rewards for everyone else. If that same person invests $10,000 in Steem Power and starts posting, commenting, and voting all their own stuff up with a similar mindset that a portion of the rewards pool is their "fair share" based on their investment, are they actually wrong? Just as the Bitcoin protocol allows for ASICs, the Steem blockchain allows for self-voting (and there is no real way to stop it anyway). If a Steem Power investor doesn't see an ROI incentive here, they will go elsewhere and the value of the entire network could go down. We all have an incentive to see Steem investors gain rewards, stick around, and bring in more Steem investors.
You're sending an important signal about the quality of your voting.
If the network agrees with your self-vote, they may join in (especially if they are follow voting you via a voting trail). If the network does not agree, you've given them important insight into your process of determining quality. A self-vote on low quality content may provide more signal than any other action, potentially leading to unfollows, lost trail voters, loss of perceived status and reputation, etc.
You've invested real money and time into Steemit in order to have power here.
Some people are afraid of the concept of power. I am not, only the immoral misuse of it. I see power and influence as closely related. I greatly appreciate power used voluntarily to benefit humanity. For me, I see this influence/power dynamic play out in the comments or in the newly created posts page where high Steem Power authors who self-vote get to have their ideas, their influence, stand out and rise to the top. That's a good incentive to purchase Steem and power it up. It's part of the design of this system.
With that said, I'd like to mention another point. To me, it's arbitrary to be okay with self-voting on a root post but opposed to self-voting on a post with a parent (i.e. a comment). The blockchain doesn't really care or make much of a distinction. Each comment can be viewed as a standalone post. In my opinion, much of this thinking comes from the default action on Steemit.com which votes up a newly created root post immediately. Notably, ChainBB does not vote on your new posts by default.
So now that we've unpacked all this, where does that leave us?
Could it be that the Pro and Con list above is too black and white? What if the ideal behavior for everyone is somewhere in the middle? Maybe we shouldn't demonize those who upvote themselves without first understanding their justifications and asking the tough question of whether or not their actions, over the long run, will increase or decrease the price of STEEM and the mass adoption and use of the Steem blockchain. Maybe taking a hard stance either way isn't beneficial.
As this discussion has taken place since hard fork 19, I've been thinking about my own actions a lot more.
The last week or so, I've stopped voting up my own root posts (note, one of these is a Resteem I did vote for, so ignore that).
I was curious how not voting on my posts would impact the rewards and number of votes I get. When I compare to the week before, I see what looks like a pattern:
I seem to have had more votes (and thus, higher payouts) when I voted up my own posts.
I've been thinking about that, wondering why that is. I know some people follow vote my account meaning they've gone to Streamian's Curation Trail system and added lukestokes. Could it be when I don't vote up my own posts, those accounts also don't vote and any accounts following them in turn miss that vote as well? By not voting on my root posts, are they losing out on curation rewards they'd otherwise get and could that mean I could lose vote followers?
From this perspective, maybe a root post and a comment are actually different. Maybe we should continue to vote up own root posts but keep the self-voting on comments to a minimum? Or maybe I'm imagining a pattern and creating a narrative when neither actually exist. Maybe we should use our new 4x voting power to support other authors instead of ourselves.
Maybe we're back to the original discussion about fairness and (dare I say it) privilege. If someone's just starting out, their own vote might be the only vote they get until they build a following. Someone like me who's been building a following for a year still does very well without my own vote (though I may be leaving something on the table by not voting up my own posts).
I don't have the answers, but as always, I enjoy tinkering with the system to find what works, what doesn't, and what benefits the community.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
When is self-voting okay, if ever?
Why the stigma towards how investors use their Steem Power but no stigma towards how miners use their mining rigs?
(image source, CC0 public domain)
Edit: Looks like the default policy on new posts will be changing as this PR was merged in: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/1541
A long time ago, when I was a software engineer in an AI lab, we did some work with Fuzzy Logic. It sums up my approach to almost all knowledge. Nothing is totally black or while, but its some shade of grey and that shade may change due to context.
Self voting is fuzzy to me. In my opinion, people stating out with low SP should always up vote their own posts and occasionally their comments.
People like me in the middle should up vote their posts if they are doing about 1 or 2 posts a day. Seems to me that if they are doing a ton of posts every day, then up voting them all might be seen as an attempt to take as much reward as possible, which may be good for them and less good for the community. I'm not against the occasional comment up vote at this level either.
Whales who post occasionally should up vote themselves, maybe at less than full power. Up voting their own comments might not be the best idea.
But its very fuzzy! Different people are going to have different ideas. How do you define hot? What does it mean to be tall? When is self up voting bad? All fuzzy!
While I agree minnows should largely upvote their own comments/posts, I wanted to make everyone aware it doesn't really do much. It takes 112 to 119 days of upvoting your own comments 10 times a day just to double what you have(assuming no one else upvotes you). Upvoting yourself when you have the 75ish steempower they give you doesn't really do anything because it goes away after a certain point. You might get 30 days I think it is before it goes away, or until you earn a certain amount.
The only real way to get ahead here is making quality posts frequently, or commenting good comments a lot, or having a following to bring with you, or buying into the system(I did purchase about 195ish Steem).
Upvoting yourself without first buying more Steem is an exercise in futility, because you will be making less than 20 cents per day when you do your 10 upvotes. A person could make way more by putting some thoughtfulness into their comment or by making their ow blog post.
Usually when someone upvotes a blog post I make, I upvote them back then and there or a day or so later. I go back and look at who upvoted me and click their name and upvote if they had a good blog post. I think that is how Steem should be used for the most part. But just my opinion from a newbie! :)
Although I had noticed this trend of upvoting of own posts and did not think much of it, I just happened to see this conversation. @truthforce, I am in agreement with the points you have raised above.
meep
Wow I agree! My brother just started here recently. His vote is worth only 0.02 and I actually told him he should upvote himself, And his comments. That way he can build himself a bit as fast as possible. It's kind of a difficult decision on whether or not you should, When you are much smaller than everyone else. It doesn't bother me personally when I see smaller people upvote themselves, but not everyone will agree on that. because at what point do we stop?
In my case he would better upvote my articles instead his comments, because I upvote commenting newbies, as long as they upvote my articles as well (even if that has more of a symbolic value). If everybody keeps upvoting himself (or close members of his 'club' whatever they write) the motivation of writing time consuming high quality articles decreases. In my opinion that can't be the sense of this platform.
In my case, I do a lot of commenting but very little upvoting. Why? Because I upvoted a lot when I first got here (12 days ago) and now I'm recovering my steem power from that mistake. But even so - I have now been advised to only upvote 10 or so times per day to keep the steem power. So are my comments a waste of time?
I think they are worthwhile for the engagement and knowledge I get - plus they pay substantially more than my posts. I'm not sure if this is a long term strategy. Later, when I get the slider bar I will figure out how to upvote more often, but for now I think I am stuck at 10 a day.
It isn't a mistake to upvote others, you actually get curation reward and in addition many people should upvote you, too, then. If sometimes voting power decreases, so what? It will recover soon: you lose just nothing.
I upvote you now (30 %), so that you see how nice it feels to get upvoted ... :-)
Edit: you can also upvote comments with a very low percentage, so that voting power decreases very slowly only.
Edit 2: If you can only vote with 100 % it is indeed reasonable to upvote about ten times a day. But even then I would suggest not to upvote your own comments only.
(In my opinion it's a big disadvantage of HF 19 that newbies can only upvote 10 times per day in average anymore.)
Well, I was down at 40% a week ago and now I'm trying for the 80's so it seems to take a long time. I drained the power right away when I first got here.
I upvote about 5-6 times a day right now. I am not upvoting myself ever on posts or comments or replies.
Thank you for the upvote! I do really appreciate that. I followed you and will be sure to use one of my weak votes for you as soon as I can. It's midnight in Bangkok and I am done voting for today :(
The slider would help for sure and I will use it as soon as I get it so I can spread the love better. I wish it would come when you join and that someone would explain the reason to use it, but at least I understand now. Thank you so much for helping me.
Dang! I just saw the amount of your upvote. Holy cow! Thank you again :)
I like this perspective also and yes have and do up vote myself but with that being said the majority of my up voting power goes to content that I want to see more of. I see nothing wrong with the up voting of one's own self especially in the beginning of their steem journey. Thank you Mr. Stokes for starting a great discussion.
I'll try it, thanks everyone for the insights!
Great perspective. I like it.
A concise assessment of both pros and cons
One question I have is whether the community looks at investment in writing is equal to a cash investment...does it matter where the SP power from?
The underlying theme that runs through all these posts, your and others, is that Steemit isn't fair. People who take the time and effort to build networks of readers, and I daresay friends are going to be rewarded a lot more than those who put effort into writing...unless the roulette wheel lands on their post that day ;>
Finally, for me, it's not a self-voting process that is the question, but rather whether the value of any given self-vote is valid. My own judgement is that a "me too" comment isn't worth an upvote, but that if you spend time on a comment or a post, you should reward yourself.
This was a nice read, thank you
What is even more unfair are people building a huge following list using unfair tactics. I personally want to do everything organically so I am not taking or inhibiting anyone else. If I succeed in the end noone can say I took advantage. This is what I mean
Great comment, thank you.
I think the "earned" SP verses mined or purchased SP is a misnomer. What if someone earned BTC solving childhood diseases for a decade and then decided to invest that money into Steem Power? Are they less deserving than someone who writes blog posts? I don't think we can measuring things so easily.
I'd say that both writing and a cash buy-in provide value to the platform; the first in providing content and the second in proving value.
And as you say, hard to measure which benefits the platform more
I personally bought in 195ish Steem by spending BTC I earned from Bitcointalk Ad-campaigns. Double value added! hehe.
But yes, I think we need more people using it and the signup system should be something that makes people want to sign up. Getting that 5 steempower is a decent incentive I supposed, but to make that back for a total newbie likely won't happen for months unless they comment on big articles where whales are. I think that is the underlying issue that all the minnows have to go to a whale post and try to get noticed because it is more profitable than to make your post or to comment on other newbies posts.
And here I am proving that! But I do comment on a lot of stuff made by not so big people hehe. Also, hi!
It takes a while to build up a network, for sure
you will have LOTS of quality posts that drain down the Memory Hole in the meantime. but keep writing, commenting, and making friends
;>
Well said!
If you don't upvote yourself in the posts or replies, you reduce your chances of being seen.
I say upvote yourself imo.
And if you upvote your comment you reduce the chances of others of being seen. :)
Was it OK to upvote myself to increase my chances? ;)
I understand that feeling, and I share it to an extent, though I don't often upvote my own comments.
However, it irks me when people upvote themselves far more than they share the love. Worst of all, when people will upvote their own comments without upvoting the post they commented on.
Exactly what @sethlinson says, and a quick glance at your history @sephiroth, it looks like you upvote others at least 3 or 4 times as often as you upvote yourself. No issues there. I think the main debate and concern is those who are the opposite of your ratio, and simply "mining" Steem with low quality content and self votes.
I'll quote Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court when he ruled on an obscenity case in 1964.
(Bolded substitutions mine for the analogy!)
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I try to upvote content that I like more than the stuff I have. I think it is selfish if they just upvote themselves especially if they do not upvote the thread that they responded in.
This makes me laugh since I am the biggest prude on the planet. I see porn everywhere now! Nothing to do with steemit but the very reason all major media is out of my life now :)
Right on. I always upvote the main post if I even bother to reply to it before upvoting myself.
As someone who previously built a minnow account up to 15,000 SP, I call BS on that claim. I got visibility by engagement and following and periodically feeding my audience with more positive and helpful feedback (account @l0k1). And I am doing it again, with a new account, although once a week I will have a boost of 85 Steem... In fact, I am just going to be cashing that out, to make sure I keep my fiat surplus ahead of my costs. I'm moving again next month. So most of the growth of this new account will be also organic.
I also like that for the most part, big accounts have stopped playing God so much with new accounts. I am sure that at least a quarter of that big gain I made over 6 months was just ned, bernie, xeldal and others, attempting to reward people for joining the network. There is some aspects of what should be going on that are purely a matter of custom, there is no way to enforce it algorithmically.
On your edit about the PR, that was me! Very happy it went through. 😆 You beat me to an announcement, so I just made one I was planning for a slightly less tired moment
It's really interesting that you mention the increased economic impact of HF 19 made you consider your own actions more. I've spoken to many who have also had this experience, as have I.
But a system like Steem must be designed to take into account all aspects, especially the negative. I don't think we can expect everyone to behave "well" unless the incentives are there to do so. Even a few scammers, spammers or otherwise negative actors can disrupt things for the rest. After all blockchain technology is built on the assumption of mostly honest actors while allowing for some dishonest ones. We need to bear that in mind.
I really think that self voting should be removed at the blockchain level. I'd love to hear your thought on this proposition.
Btw I think that answers the question "when is self-voting okay, if ever?" - not at all. I've laid out my reasoning in other posts, but it boils down to this: we are not qualified to judge our own work and reward accordingly.
Great job! I upvoted your announcement just now and thanks for resteeming this post.
It's not really possible. If someone really wants to do this, they will. They will create other accounts to do it. I'd actually prefer to know who these people are in a much easier way (see my signal argument above). If someone is going to participate in activity I disagree with (as an example), I'd much rather have that activity be fully public, not hidden in a corner. That's the problem I see with many government regulation attempts. They make something "illegal" and yet people will continue doing it anyway in the shadows. I'd much rather see people discuss the activity openly and honestly and that's what I've attempted to do with this post. So far, I think the conversation has been great. Some people love self voting. Others hate it. I think both have reasons for their positions.
Reminds me of this old post: We Disagree. Are You Ignorant, Immoral, or Stupid?
It doesn't have to be that way. :)
Thanks for all your efforts on this topic.
Prohibition often has worse outcome, than the problem it was trying to fight, as it creates an underground economy, and then creates a lot of judgemental attitudes. It's one of those things that divides a community, making it easier to bilk it, rather than support good behavior and tolerate things that not everyone agrees about..
Wow, interesting perspective, I hadn't thought of it that way. You've certainly given me more food for thought with that analogy.
I'm fairly new to Steemit (just a week old), and in this time I've read as much post I could've read.One thing I noticed that doesn't seem fairwas when started coming across post in which people would ignore voting on the mother post(the main post) but activey votes on comments..some even go to the extent of commenting on a post selfvote the comment then reply their own comment and selfvote it again.
Yep that's exactly the kind of thing I want to highlight and oppose
See my post below, why I think this is a very bad idea, now that I've looked into it, and finally have an opinion.
I say, 50/50.
To me it's all a matter of the percentage. If you're splitting your vote power 50/50 between self and others, I'll be ok with it, though I'd prefer less self voting. As it creeps above that I'll start to grimace, and at levels of 80%+ self voting it's just egregious.
It's not illegal, yes the code allows it, but it's a matter of community standards and etiquette which we all organically form by our behavior. No one can stop a person from self up voting 100%, but no one can stop a person from posting plagiarized content either. What we do control is the community reaction to the situation.
I feel like the bitcoin miner comparison is somewhat flawed. I think a better analogy is to consider ourselves shareholders. I mentioned in another comment elsewhere, that if you can show me a company where the shareholders voted that all profit be paid out to them in the form of dividends, completely foregoing spending on employee raises, hiring, development, improvements to infrastructure, etc... and that company is thriving... then I'll change my opinion.
That's essentially what 100% self voters are doing, and they're relying on other more rational voters to pick up their slack and keep the overall organization running while they continue to reap profits that others are foregoing for the sake of the business and a more long term vision.
If heavy self voters consider themselves short term investors and follow this valid profit strategy, it's up to long term shareholders to down vote them in the interests of the whole. If people feel the self voting practice is harmful to long term success , it's ROI needs to be mitigated and made less profitable.
We force people to self tag potentially objectionable content with the nsfw tag so that it can be properly filtered. If they don't they'll have that content filtered for them through downvotes. We do this because we recognize that having such content clearly and randomly visible on the site would be a huge deterrent to it's growth and success. There is no code, no rule prohibiting people from posting porn under the tag familyfriendly. So to me the "it's part of the code, it's allowed" argument doesn't fly.
Of course that kind of depends on how "allowed" is being used. If it means that we should leave heavy self voters to their own strategies and devices then I disagree. If however someone takes the "code allows it" stance and equally agrees that if self voters begin to be flagged into oblivion, they are equally ok with that, then I respect their viewpoint because it's consistent and based on community consensus.
Yes! I agree with the 50/50 concept!
Great comment! I agree, I like your analogy better in that, unlike mining, here blogging is the new mining and rewards are what interest people in participating in this platform. If those rewards are forever unreachable because too much self-voting, the platform itself will not thrive.
Yup. I envision it like some vulture capital firm in the business world buying up stake in a company, selling off it's assets and bleeding it dry at a tidy profit and moving on.
It really got under my skin when I saw a user who literally only up votes themselves, 100%, make a post touting how they're stopping their power down because they're so committed to the platform and asking for others to help them reach their Steem Power goals. That just seemed a bit too audacious to me. And they're getting legitimate sincere votes from other users who have no chance of it being reciprocated. Not everyone goes into a blockchain explorer or keeps an eye on stats, most would not have any way of noticing this kind of behavior.
I'd like to see some kind of visualization, badge, meter, have it factor into rep score, whatever. If someone comes on the platform and never upvotes another living soul, I don't think they should be able to build up to a 70 rep. I'm sure if people saw this community building metric at a glance, it would influence their voting behavior.
I was thinking along similar lines. If all comments and posts made it clear if the author voted them up, that would be interesting also. The reputation score might some day include all of this behavior, good and bad. That would be cool.
I think the stockholder model is precisely what it in fact is, even down to how your votes count by your number of shares. Crypto mining is not anything to do with organising the actions of a group. It is just participating in a lottery. I have seen attempts to argue that Steem was intended to be also a lottery, but this is wrong, because if it was, why have a voting system at all? Not that anyone with big SP is not entitled to do as they wish randomly distributing it.
Steem has a rewards budget. It's part of the social contract and stated pretty explicitly in the white paper.
The budget comes from dilution of stakeholders and doesn't exist to increase the holdings of major stakeholders. Extracting the rewards at the expense of the network undermines the premise and value of the network as a whole.
Some won't see it that way, but it's in the financial interest of the largest stakeholders to counter this behaviour.
Edit: I don't want to ban or punish all self voting. There is plenty of blatant milking going on though. It's at everyone's individual discretion where they draw the line and what's worth disputing/downvoting over.
I like that point. The "social" aspect of Steemit does imply a different understood contract between all the participants.
I would actually argue that there's a social contract in Bitcoin as well, and it's the neglect of the social contract over time which has resulted in the community becoming dysfunctional.
Well said. Without a shared, uncensored community platform for communication things can and do get toxic.
This is a subject I haven't seen yet talked about in this, but it was always something I remember posting a lot about. A great example of how counterintuitive it is, is the fact that cutting the issuance rate of new steem from 100% per annum to 9%, and within 2 months the price rapidly climbed to a valuation that more accurately reflected the growth of the platform. What it shows is that it's not how big the rewards are, that matters so much, but rather, that people see a good reason to hold it. Too much going out to rewards erodes that.
On the contrary, the empirical data has shown that when all rewards are going to the same people (which is still inflation), with little for new users, the network stagnates. When new users are getting rewards, it grows. This can be seen quite clearly in @eroche's payout distribution posts.
Exactly, almost the rate does not matter, except for the fact that it keeps the selling pressure up as users cash out their rewards. This data you speak of it seems logical to me that we should not be letting them burn their votes without them mutually supporting each other, a la minnows unite and similar campaigns. Sure, I can see how the big accounts have resources to conceal their self-upvoting but this just confirms its illegitimacy, once it is discovered. It isn't that hard to do traffic analysis to discover where the money flows back via external cryptocurrencies either.
The mutual support of users is part of how the system grows more resilient. I just want to help the newbies avoid burning their votes not helping each other increase their visibility and that sense of comradeship that it produces, which is very positive for community building.
If you have a decent amount of SP, voting on your own post can also give it some extra exposure, people tend to read posts that have some payout as they see other people must have valued it, so they go and take a look too.
I think people are more inclined to look at a post that has $20 than one that has $0.01
I fully agree. That could be it right there, but I was surprised to see so many more votes on posts I did last week. It's also possible many other factors (variability in the quality of my writing, this being a holiday week in the US, etc, etc) had more to do with it than anything else.
@chitty you took the words out of my mouth :P
I also tend to look at posts that generated more "dollars"
I've noticed this as well. Some of the newbies with no power, come out in the "new" section with 0 or 0.01 while I can come out a bit higher. Which gives me more exposure.
I feel this is somewhat justified because I have put more work into the platform than some of those newbies. So It's kinda nice that I can make myself "stick" out a bit. Maybe we could even have a limit of self votes per day, that Isn't included into our 10 or whatever it is. That we can give to ourselves at our own discretion, Whether it's a Blog post or comment.
A limit sounds fair. Or perhaps a self-vote could deplete voting power faster than voting for somebody else?
That would probably work! And it would encourage people to vote less for themselves. Or it could have the opposite effect. People would still destroy their power on themselves. But that would also leave less power for them to use on themselves. LOL.
Hahah! Yeah, it could go both ways, good point.
I don't look at the number, I look at the headline, the preview image and the preview blurb. If I was only loving a post for its rewards, why would I ever leave the trending page?
If your policy was universally applied, no new users would be able to get a word in edgewise.
Top 3 things I researched when starting to post in Steemit:
1 - when I write a post, should I choose 50-50 rewards or 100%
2 - what % of voting power should I use
3 - should I vote for my own posts
Most answers seem to be personal choice.
One thing I would like to see done as an improvement would be to limit whale voting power.
As they gain power their max voting percentage could drop. For example they may drop to a max of only 80% per vote. This would allow them to vote more often per day but their single vote would have less power. Especially since the K19 upgrade more votes would be valuable. This may allow them to upvote more quality content (and raise viability to more material ) rather than just content from their inner group.
Darryl
Hey Darryl! Thanks for commenting.
So... this is awkward for me. We were roommates in college. I've now become an "orca" which is one step below a whale. Is it wrong if I upvote your comments as part of my "inner group"? Or is that a benefit I get for earning Steem Power for so long and rewarding my friends?
The 80% cap is an interesting idea, but they can already do that be self-limiting their own voting power. They could vote thousands of times with only a 1% vote, right?
(btw, my question is somewhat rhetorical, I'm going to upvote you anyway because it's also a great comment).
I agree that the larger fish have paid their dues to create a community that people want to join.
I don't disagree with upvoting your inner group as that is how it is currently set up. You play with the hand that you are dealt.
It was just an idea that came up while reading alot of
Comments and posts complaining about votes being given to friends over content.
No matter how a system is set up, there will be those who look for ways to abuse it. Those who use it as intended are the ones who will help new comers flock to Steemit and stay!
The last point, this is important, though I would qualify it by saying that the wisdom developed during the dialogue about these things, and even game theory models and statistical analysis, is how we get more people involved, get them to hold more than spend, and get more of their friends to also join.
Even when there is 'voting circles' not everyone who plays just runs an autovoting bot, and ignoring the entire rest of the platform's userbase. That would be quite strange, really.
I don't think that's wrong. It's a perk, and you are still using it socially to distribute stake (unlike a self vote which only increases the stake of the voter, which is the opposite of distribution as you have not diluted your own stake). If people feel you're going overboard with it, they can counter your votes.
Well said.
Whale voting power, relative to the rest of us, is now far lower than it used to be. This is part of the reason why we are seeing this. I am not a supporter of the concept of plutocracy, by any means, but essentially HF19 has brought a light upon the issue of self voting, and its effects socially and to the distribution patterns. Which is why it's such a hot topic now.
People up voting their own post never really bothered me. If someone posted a bunch of things that clearly had zero effort and voted those up to high payouts then most of the community would be against that, but that's about it for me. I don't tend to get on the flagging for reward pool train.
I also understand up votes for visibility and often that takes just a few cents and I didn't really see people complaining about that.
Recently I've noticed trains of comments from some people that up vote all of their own comments apparently as high as they can. They sometimes don't even up vote the post they are responding to, they just dump all of the steem power into their own comments. It is not a sense of entitlement it is more a view that if we all chose to do that this would quickly become a rather unpleasant environment. It could potentially reduce attractiveness of steemit and by extension steem and that impacts all of our investment.
I am all for freedom, yet I am also against things that can give the platform significant negative PR.
This right here! I completely agree. That simple test, "If everyone did this, would that be a good thing for the network?" solves so many problems.
Thanks @dwinblood.