Thanks for this post @timcliff, I'm glad the issue is still being discussed.
The people in the community who want to combat abusive self-voting should organize. [...] There should also be easy ways for people in the community to contribute by sharing links they discover, or delegating SP to an anti-self-voting-abuse account. (I encourage those who are already organizing around this to promote what they are doing in the comments below.)
#project-smackdown is doing exactly this, and I'm not aware of another group that are doing it. We target the "worst" self voters for comments only, which would probably fit your definition of "abusive" self voters. We do comments only because at the time we started voting for your own post was default steemit.com UI behavior, and because it is easier to hide self votes distributed across many self votes than it is on posts.
The team is the Steem Coop, which now includes @the-ego-is-you, @transisto, @rycharde, @andybets and me. We opperate using @smackdown.kitty and would happily take any delegations. You can find us on steemit.chat at #steem-coop-public and we are more than happy to discuss our policy for identifying what it means to be a "worst" self voter, or comment on any of our posts (made through my account). I will hopefully be making another report within a few hours.
I'm interested that your definition of abusive self voting is voting more for yourself than for others. Why did you choose this? It looks like this is more on ethical grounds than anything else.
I'll try to keep this as brief as I can, but to clarify my thinking (I don't speak for the group here but I think there'd be broad agreement) I am against self voting because it allows users to contribute nothing or very little to the platform and see quite a large increase in their stake (and we use the term return on investment for this). I think this is in line with the founding ethos of Steemit as described in the whitepaper, and still described in the updated version. I would see this as real abuse, because if you are doing this while others are squirrelling away - posting, commenting, curating -
all with effort and consideration, you are taking advantage of the buzz they bring to the platform which will be the thing that makes it succeed.
I think that unfortunitely there are a lot of people who think that there is nothing wrong with simply having stake and self voting. This could be on ultimate freedom grounds (it's allowed, so I will do), on investment grounds (buying and powering up STEEM is valuable in itself and can be automatically rewarded via self votes), or other popular ideas, but it will always fall flat on the fact that this is a social network and social actions should be the ones the system rewards.
That's why I completely agree with @mattclarke in his idea of better balancing curation rewards. When I originally came to Steemit this was one of the things that I was so impressed with, that they system rewards us for the hard work of finding the best stuff and voting on it. There's literally no curation effort in voting for your own stuff. It's just an arbitrary return on your investment.
This perspective is why #project-smackdown currently operates on what we call self vote return on investment or svROI. We target those who gain the most relative to their stake, so those who are abusing the self vote ability (again, for comments only at this time).
In your closing statement you seem to say the community and each of us individually should decide this. The general sentiment seems to be that we should encourage (or even coerce) each other into non-abusive behavior instead of making a blockchain system level change. Is this correct?
Personally I don't think this will be enough but I would be curious on your direct answer to this question. Sorry for the long reply, longer than I wanted, but thanks again for keeping this issue in the foreground.
Great reply! I will respond with a longer comment when I get home.
Re: #project-smackdown - you should continue to make this more of a well-known name. Why isn't the steemit.chat channel called #project-smackdown? Is there a discord one? Is there a @project-smackdown account? I like the idea - I just think you should continue to build on it :)
It is human nature to vote for yourself and your friends. There is no way that we are going to be able to stop it, and to even try is spending energy in the wrong area (IMO). The key is that people are not voting for themselves at the expense of the platform. There is no 'exact point' as far as when something constitutes abuse vs. being normal accepted behavior. It is easy to tell when things are on the extreme end though, which is really where I think the focus should be. I.e. self-upvote of a "nice post" comment to $50.
The goal of the platform is to distribute the currency to users who are adding value to the platform. If there are people who are actively involved, posting, commenting, and voting on other people's material too - then they are adding value to the platform. If some of the coins they earn are because they are voting on their own stuff, then it isn't really in violation of the spirit of the blockchain.
I've comments on this in a few other places.
Yes. Similar to plagiarism, it is ultimately up to each individual whether they do it, but there is an overall sentiment that it is not acceptable. Abusive-self-voting can probably reach similar status, and I think it is up to the community to make this happen.
I think an important thing that will need to happen though is for people to accept non-abusive self voting. The very difficult part is going to be to determine where to draw the line.
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:
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.