I don't know how many people remember @grumpycat, and his trying to show people what a bad actor could do with self votes. If a person wants to give themselves a really big payday under the 1 minute rule it will be easy to do. Very easy in fact. Make a post, self vote it, make 9 place holder comments like gumpycat did, then on day 7 at the last possible minute up vote your own comments. 10 100% votes, you may lose a tad bit of curation on the original post if others voted your post, but the 9 comments at the last minute no problem all yours. So if you have a $10.00 100% vote value you could potentially have a $100 dollar payday. This would work for little people also, as log as their vote was above the dust vote threshold, they could grow their accounts with out any assistance from anyone at all.
Do away with the Self Vote rule and above problem will never happen.
Even if we couldn't self vote it's easy to delegate to another account. It's an seems race to deal with each form of abuse and Steem cannot evolve quickly enough.
it will always be a race. If they coded it in proper so that self votes could not be done at all, it would kill a lot of programs. Still if they coded it to where if you have delegated to an account then that account would be seen as a self vote and would be unable to vote on your account. Of course all this would do is force people to send their steem to an account and not delegate to it.
Doing away with bad actors is never going to happen. It does not matter how much code is written it will never be enough to stop greed. and the hunt for easy money. People can scream, whine and rant all day long about steem block chain being decentralized, and it is. The Block Chain is Decentralized, not the protection of the coin, or the other front ends.
People can put and say what ever they want on the block chain. No one is going to be able to completely hide that information they were so proud to post. The protection of the Coin Steem is not decentralized. The witnesses may be the ones that determine how the reward pool works, but does that mean they own the reward pool?
Criminal activity will never end when there is money involved. Those that have it, will do what ever it takes to get more of it. Those that do not have it will do whatever it takes to get it.
I am not sure when the payout window completely ends, not allowed to vote any more on a post/comment. So lets just say it is on day 6 at 18 hours. Code it so that any vote received in the last 5 hours, day 6 hour 13-18, will be erased from the pay out. This give the so called protectors of the reward pool a 5 hour window or better to catch bad actors and down vote the rewards. Of course if they did this then it just lead to complaints of I just saw the post, I wanted to vote the post cause I liked it, or post about well lets just shorten the time frame then to 6 days 13 hours for voting, and completely miss the point.
I have no solutions, will self voting grumpycat style return? no clue. Can it be done as describe and give a good pay out, no doubt. Will the bad actors be caught and if they are will anything be done? Depends on who they are, how big a rep they have and how much SP they have.
With 50%/50% and the move away from linear rewards, that method is obsolete.
With 50/50 If you comment, and then you vote and are the only voter then 100% would go to you? or not? I was just informed that with the new reward curve the only accounts that self vote would make a difference on are the very large accounts, so I guess the reward pool protectors can just ignore any last minute voting then.
I'm not fully sure how the rewards are allocated with comments, but I think that who ever is in the comment string might share the rewards.