I respect your views on self-voting but I don't think it's harmful in all cases. If a user is providing the platform with quality content, I have no problem with them using their stake to self-vote their posts. I do hope that it's not excessive (for instance, I don't like seeing people self-vote their comments, even when it's only for "visibility"). I suppose if you try really hard you can post 10 times a day, and I think that counts as excessive too. As long as you clock in well below that figure, the majority of your voting power will still go to others on the platform.
You also seem to have a problem with people who tend to vote for and be voted by the same group of people. I confess, I think I am one of these people you are talking about. I don't mean any harm.
I power up so that I can have larger votes to give to the people whose company I enjoy, in hopes that they will stay a while, and to encourage the production of content I enjoy reading. I find new members of that group all the time in various ways, but most of my votes are concentrated to the people in my feed. As I gain more SP, I hope that that group will grow, but as it stands, I would rather have a larger impact on a small group of people I know and like, than a near-insignificant impact on a large group of random people I don't know.
I am sorry if that makes me a "bad guy," but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
It's harmful if you're a newbie and don't realize you're just wasting your vote due to the .02 payment threshold.
I really dislike the payment threshold business. I understand that it is designed to prevent spam but it just seems off to me, right? You're literally telling someone their vote doesn't matter because they haven't bought enough SP yet.
If they're going to have a minimum payout threshold, Steemit Inc's starter delegation ought to at least cover a $0.02 vote. I think my biggest gripe with the Steem onboarding process right now is it seems like such a massive scam to newbies.
Do we want the dumbest people generating our content or the smartest? Because smart people are wired to know scams when they see them, and one of the biggest indicators of a scam (see MLM, 419 scams, etc.) is having to pay up front in order to make money later.
The payment threshold seems like fraud to me. For almost a hundred days and over 1000 upvotes I thought all of my votes had value. This costs us a LOT of users who leave when they don't get paid. I upvoted your blog post since my regular vote doesn't count.
Lemony, you're not sitting on a large delegation voting 50% of your power to the same 4 accounts while writing complaint post after complaint post. I have no issue what people do with their stake, it's the handful doing wrong and pointing fingers at others which this post is directed at. They know who they are, I opted to leave names out.
Again if your vote was $15 and above do you feel you would vote 50% of your daily VP on the same 5 people or do you think by then you would have made a little more of a community than 5 people? To me that is not the ideal thing. Again, I wouldn't care if they were just doing it and not pointing fingers at others trying to make others out to be the bad guys.
Fact is if they would vote themselves and their 4 friends less, no-one would need the bid bots and they would go away. Once you have a few rings at the top just trading their VP everyone else suffers. If you have to self vote to pay for delegation, drop the delegation. Don't try to make yourself out to be the victim and then point fingers at a service that is open for any and all to use. We may not all agree on bid bots but it is pretty basic common sense if those at the top would vote for more users everyone could make it moving forward.
I am also fine with people who own their SP to self vote all they want but when you rent it and self vote you are just buying your own personal bid bot that you vote with. Basically if people would call a spade a spade there would not be much issue with how things are but it comes down to what benefits those who would profit from being overly vocal about bid bots while doing something just as shady.
Well, I do exhibit some of the qualities you identify as problematic, and I have voiced my opinions on bot abuse many times... so please forgive me if I misunderstood. It's good to know that you don't think I'm part of the problem. As it says in my bio, I like to think I am a force for good. :)
I think it's more than 5 already! But to answer your question, I don't think so. I would probably set aside a good chunk of VP and pick a tag to curate. I would also probably have lowered the amount of my self-votes by then, or at least withhold them for a while to give some of it back as CR.
I'm not sure... I haven't looked into the economics of it yet, but I wonder if it is it possible to lease SP, pay for it in self-votes, and still have a heightened impact on rewards for others? In that case I wouldn't have a problem with it and might even consider doing it myself. Something tells me efficient markets would have made that impossible by now though (it's like arbitrage; if you think you might have found a lucrative model, you can reasonably suspect that someone has already done it to the point that it isn't).
My stance on self-voting is that if you believe your content is good content, then you are at the very least attempting to enrich the platform as well as yourself by upvoting it. Steem, like blockchain technology in general, is designed at the protocol level to benefit from our collective selfishness. Really, for me, it has little to do with how much voting power the person has or how they got it, but some function of the effort put into the post as well as its value to the platform.
Obviously, good content is subjective, but as with all subjective things, there is a certain achievable analysis of the distribution. I have seen many, many self-upvoted things that I not only consider wasteful myself, but also cannot imagine being a value-add for anyone.
In general, no matter how much SP someone has or how they got it, I'll never have a problem with anyone 100% upvoting all of their top-level posts if they really feel that their content adds that much value to the platform. I know at least a few people who do this with what we may consider "a lot" of SP. If we consider upvotes as nothing more than an assessment of content's value, then I wholeheartedly agree with at least one of them, and wholeheartedly disagree with at least one other.
Whew. Sorry for rambling so much. It's an interesting topic to discuss.
There are many who use their delegated SP for great things and if self-voting is required to keep it going that's fine. Two totally different topics.
This is more about those who have bought their own personal bit bots in delegated SP and are then throwing rocks at the bid bots from their glass house.