Thanks for your detailed reply.
I like you analogy to plagiarism, though I think there's less of a consensus about self voting.
What struck me most was this:
I think an important thing that will need to happen though is for people to accept non-abusive self voting.
Perhaps. But this can only really happen after incentives change. Right now it's too easy to milk it with direct self voting, and the same thing but with a few alts.
Well, the problem is that if you change the incentives to prevent voting abuse, we go back to a platform where the votes of the regular users do not really have an effect, and the handful of whales will be deciding on the majority of rewards. There isn't really a clean workable proposal that has a solution to both problems.
Do you remember @rycharde 's idea about votes getting less effective the more you vote on the same people? I'd love to see some experiments done with that.
It's hard to know how things will play out without trying them. No one wants to go back to the skewed balance of before. Still, I think we can definitely see that the incentives are not optimal. Do you suggest they are and that we just need to "police" more?
The more I think about all these proposals the more I think we need to run this stuff on a test net. Wouldn't it be fun to try that out with a few hundred people? @sneak, I don't know if you do this kind of thing in house but I think we'd benefit a lot from StInc's leadership in this area.
I liked the idea, but there were some people against it. One of the main arguments was that the people who are actually abusing the platform would just create 10 sock puppet accounts (or however many were needed) to get around it. Creating hundreds of accounts is actually quick/easy/cheap.
Perhaps that level of determination is best dealt with my the ad hoc methods you advocate in your root post here. I am personally involved with opposing nearly 10 thousand scam accounts engaged in exactly this. Unless there is a really fundamental change this kind of thing is here to stay and needs bot type solutions to.
However that kind of issue is "sexy" - very interesting and easy to get behind opposing because it's so obviously wrong. What I aim to challenge that is not so obvious is the self rewarding of established, reasonable, interesting folks who are actually engaged but who are effectively skimming off the cream of the platform.
I think you're probably not in favor of this as you mention that we all need to accept self voting, that it's somehow "natural" (you did not provide any reason to believe this by the way) and we should concentrate on abuse. Well the data indicates that obvious abuse is far less important in terms of value than self votes.
If there is a user who is engaged in the platform and adding value through what they do, and they upvote their own (good) content, there really isn't an issue with that. As a stakeholder they are using their influence to direct the rewards pool to the content that they feel is adding value to the platform. It is within the 'acceptable constraints' of what SP is supposed to be used for.
If user is using their SP to upvote their own content above what it is worth, then that is abuse (in my view). I realize that this is a difficult thing to objectively quantify (which is why this problem is so difficult). There are quite a few cases that are pretty clear/obvious though. IMO, these are the ones that we should be focusing on.
I can see how some power users would be able to create 100 accounts and develop a voting distribution/bot that optimises their voting power for their own benefit, but this would be a very small minority of accounts. I think it would help a lot by creating an administrative burden for those still wishing to continue voting abuse.
The accounts that are doing the most damage from self upvote abuse are the ones that can easily do it.
Interesting. I just checked a random day, and the 30 top accounts do about 50% of the self-voting by reward share. I wouldn't consider all of this abuse though, there is some percentage return that seems reasonable for these large investors.
Does more of the actual damage not come from the perception that the mid/smaller account holders have about the platform though, and through vote-seeking spam?
I would agree with that.