Time to revisit an "old" topic
I remember seeing much more discussion about self-voting in the early days. People against it were mainly arguing that it is unfair, greedy and selfish to do so. It obviously becomes problematic when the stake/HP gets high. Everyone would disagree if one of the top whales regularly upvoted their own posts, it does not only place their posts instantly on the trending page, but it also amounts to considerable vote farming of the reward pool. However, an argument from the pro side is that one has essentially acquired that stake and should be free to decide what to do with it...
Personally, I always thought that it's okay as long as it's not above a certain threshold, like stake (whale status, 200k+ HP?) or a % of the total upvotes received (maybe 10% of the total?). But that threshold is obviously very blurry and open for discussion.
@galenkp has just recently started to downvote my posts because of self-voting (he was kind enough to clarify the reason when I asked him). So... maybe with around 150k HP I am a big enough orca to stop doing so?
How wide spread is self-voting?
By following the vote trails I did some small research into this. It's clear to me that while self-voting is not an all too common practice (especially for the big accounts - I couldn't find a whale doing this), it's still being done by many larger accounts. After around 15 mins I found 7 accounts participating in this practice (min $1 self vote value):
| User | Reputation | $ Self vote Amount |
|---|---|---|
| @stayoutoftherz | 79 | 4.1 |
| @zuerich | 71 | 2.4 |
| @emrebeyler | 76 | 2.3 |
| @encouragement | 67 | 2 |
| @jedigeiss | 74 | 1.4 |
| @trumpman | 88 | 1 |
| @nuthman | 74 | 1 |
Interestingly, these accounts also receive whale upvotes by @trafalgar @solominer @curatorhulk @theycallmedan @balte @leo.voter @stoodkev @appreciator @haejin @ocdb @blocktrades of which many are Hive witnesses or play an important role in the Hive ecosystem...These are some pretty big numbers by some pretty old and "reputable" accounts and so far it has gone "unpunished" (@galenkp you might want to adjust your downvote settings). Many of these authors also frequently make posts, so it's not a one time thing.
So, are they aware of this? And if so, do they think that self-voting is okay? In the end I guess it's a personal decision, since there is no law or even an argument that is completely persuasive. We are free to disagree here. But it seems to me that self-voting is at the very least not being sanctioned by the large stakeholders as long as it is not being done in an abusive way (like making 10 posts a day and upvoting them all).
So what's your opinion on this issue?
[edit:]
Alright as expected, this is getting some attention (when money is inolved emotions apparently roll) Creating a "target list" wasn't my intention - but then again, how should I reveal my quick research without showing the data? I would like to know what percentage of users are doing this and how the community sees this. Should I create a more comprehensive list so users don't feel "targeted"?
Promoting this post to put more fuel into the fire 😅
Check out the Love The Clouds Community if you share the love for clouds!
You wrote a public post asking for opinion, you got it
You are well within your right to self vote, I have not asked you to stop. You are free to do so, the blockchain is all about freedom of choice and I applaud that.
But...the same freedom you enjoy to self vote (use your stake as you please) is the same freedom others also have to use their stake as they please by upvoting and downvoting.
You've chosen to call out other accounts which is your choice, but I think your choice to do so wasn't very well received and has ultimately worked counter productively. Maybe simply ceasing to self vote and choosing to upvote others (and earn that way) would have been a better option.
I have downvoted the comments you made which you self voted on as I believe that is selfish and greedy of you...which is the whole reason I began to downvote your posts...because I find your self voting greedy and selfish.
hope this is not going to get personal since I actually followed you (lol). And will you start downvoting other people that are self-voting or only the accounts that are smaller than you?
curious, so you are still going to downvote my posts even if I do not upvote them anymore?
What I do and when is my own business, however, why don't you cease upvoting your own posts and comments and find out.
I have removed all of my upvotes on my posts except for the community contest since this is going into the reward pool
I will downvote any post you create (or have created) which you self-upvote for the very same reasons I began to do that in the first place. Let me reiterate - I find it selfish and greedy.
You post well, I don't mind your posts at all and can see myself choosing to upvote them at some stage but the text in the previous paragraph still applies. It's not personal, I don't know who you are so it's certainly not personal.
This post of yours complaining about being downvoted, that you hide under the guise of a "discussion" didn't surprise me and while I disagree with posts like this if the net result is that you stop self voting then that's a good thing. Maybe it'll even gain you some upvotes from me down the track. I'm sure you've checked my wallet and have seen I'm happy to upvote posts and comments others make - it's how I earn curation rewards - and you can do the same. (So you don't have to self vote.
okay, so just to clarify: I have a community contest called "love the clouds" and it's been running for several years paying out over 4000 Hive at least. I upvote this post so I can grow the reward pool that gets distributed back to the community. I don't see how this is a bad thing. But prove me wrong.
Also that comment was like a 5 cent upvote :) But seems to me that this is a black/white issue for you. If you take this so seriously, I'd really like to see you follow through on this and let others know as well.
Btw, I find it ironc that emrebeyler is upvoting this comment. He also likes to upvote his posts. Anyway, have a nice day.
People do with their stake what they do with their stake. You self vote, others can counter. That's the joy of it.
sure, I just hope it doesn't become a vendetta or personal - e.g. I have stopped upvoting my posts and wonder if the downvotes will stop. If not, that would say quite a lot about that person
As kids, we were always taught that 'self praise is no praise'. One cannot be objective of one's own work. But as you say, each has the right to do what he will with his own stake.
We have been taught the same and I think it is a good rule,
Me too, but not everybody is as humble and self-effacing as we are🙃🙃🙃
Self-voters are less likely to get a vote from me and probably others, so it may make you less. I just don't see the point and so haven't done it since the early days. You can earn from voting up others.
You can do what you want, but expect to be judged. It's been argued over endlessly, but I don't accept most of the arguments for doing it.
Downvoted since you kind of put a target list in the post, without any serious data or arguments.
I have probably voted my own posts 5-6 times in the last 6 months, while upvoting thousands of other people posts, maybe even including yours, yet your post shows me in a list look like "I farm my voting power".
That's what I have been telling Mr. Galenkp but apparently he didn't like the response.
Sorry for making "the list" I wasn't intentionally targeting you
Btw you are now actively downvoting all of my posts and no reason given. You are also downvoting a community contest that has paid out more than 4000 Hive to the community. That seems pretty lame to me.
https://peakd.com/hive-131609/@tobetada/love-the-clouds-finalists-215-21-hive-prize-pool
Maybe create a new post about complaning my downvotes 🤷♂️
No, you are not that important, I just wanted to point out that you are actively turning away community funds which will upset a lot of people.
After this comment to emre; be careful what you say to the next person. Here is a suggestion, take you tone down a few levels, please. And thank you!
🧡
Those are not community funds. How you distribute your rewards, to yourself or somebody else, is up to you, but either way, they belong to you only after 7 days.
Okay, that's actually true. However if you look at the last 5 years you can see that I paid out the rewards to the community.
May I ask for a reason for your downvote?
Inappropriate mass-tagging and insinuating bad behavior of specific random accounts, even indirectly suggesting to others not to vote those specific accounts, without any thorough analysis or data.
You probably should have avoided putting a list of "offenders" in your post, as @emrebeyler and @trumpman point out. As is, you make it seem like you are jealous that they can "get away with it" while you can't. You can make your point without naming names.
That said, personally I am divided on the issue. I almost never upvote myself unless my accident but that isn't because I am opposed to the practice, but simply because I want to save my VP for curation. As you say, if people invested a lot of their money here, well, it is their's to do with what they will. At the same time, as @galenkp often points out, it is well within his (and others') rights to also use their investment as they will, which might involve DVing people. If we all only upvoted ourselves, after all, the social experiment here of helping other people and being a community might suffer. Why curate, after all, if I can just buy Hive and upvote myself everyday? Or multiple times per day! On the old chain that Korean charts guy who upvoted himself for quite a lot of money... how many posts did he do per day?
Anyway, I don't think it's necessarily a cut and dry issue. It boils down to 1) On a personal level if you upvote yourself you are taking away some VP that you could be using to curate others. Whether you think that is greedy or wrong is up to you. 2) On a network level, if you decide to use your stake to upvote yourself, you have to accept without complaint that others might DV you for that.
no, I definitely don't want to avoid any confrontation. I think it's good to have this discussion. As already stated it wasn't my intention to create a target list, but how else should I reveal what I found? I also didn't claim this to be a comprehensive list at all.
Thanks for stating your opinion on this matter!
I would say... you would get more respect from the community if you cease self-voting your own posts (comments are a different matter). It's not something I do..., not now though years ago (literally), I did.
I would not personally castigate you for doing it either, it's a personal choice. Like many aspects of HIVE, we all have our opinions about these matters.
yeah, I am going to stop doing that - seems like this is a good time to do it :) I still think it's a threshold thing, but with 6 figure HP levels I guess one should stop
Good call!
Everyone has their own opinion about self voting, you won't find any rule or even a guideline what is acceptable on Hive as everyone has their own stake to use as they wish.
For me personally, it really depends on your stake and how often you self vote. One one hand you own the stake and can use it as you please, and why shouldn't you vote your own content and increase your rewards for your investment. On the other hand, doing so gives you an unfair advantage where you make both curation and author rewards and you remove the community from the equation.
I generally stay away from self voting but as an abuse fighter, I generally only get involved if it is unbalanced. Although I do particularly hate when people self vote comments more than anything.
This is my opinion, everyone is free to have their own and you won't find any rules or guidelines that will avoid someone downvoting you for it. It's generally best to avoid it all together and let the community decide your rewards.
Thanks for clarifying
Dunno what beef you guys have, I have been upvoting my posts since when I was a minnow who barely got any votes ^_^
But yeah, as emrebeyler said it feels like you are trying to draw other peeps in whatever drama you have goin on. That's a great way to get even more flags as you just found out 😂😂😂
We don't really have any beef as far as I know. I genuinely wanted to have an open discussion about this topic. My intention was not trying to draw anyone into any drama. But seems like this is what it's heading to 🙃
If this was not your intention, why you tagged so many accounts then?
because I wanted to present the "data". Seems like that is an act of controversy by itself. Sorry you were on "the list", I just picked some random accounts
I used to self upvote. When my upvote was 5-15 cents and i got a 1-4 dollars a post… it seemed fine to me. As soon as my stake raised i stopped. I’m not really even so sure how i feel about it. A part of me thinks i invested a lot so should be able to recoup. I guess with the bigger amount i can see how it feels leechy. I’m on an old vote trail from 2017… and that vote trail gives a small % self vote. I never took the time to figure out how to make it not vote on me. And i dont even know what triggers it. As not all my posts trigger the trail. 🤷♂️ i dont feel so bad about that though, as it’s normally well under 10 cents. I figure i do the vast majority manual voting, im actively engaging and commenting on users posts and in general supporting the chain, i care about hive and so im glad nobody gives me shit for this dumb vote trail self votes that i cant be fucked to figure out. lol and so it goes, we each do what we do and others respond as they wish.
Seems reasonable
I am personally against selfvotes and even wrote about it in 2020: https://peakd.com/hive/@zuerich/self-votes-aren-t-rational
When meritocracy and hivewatchers started unsubstantiated downvote attacks against me (around 2 years ago), I upvoted my posts, mostly to make them stay visible (not valued below zero) and to offset the downvotes.
Regarding the downvote attacks I wrote:
I write and upvote approximately 1 post per week. In the same time I upvote hundreds of other posts.
The table you show is irrelevant as you just mention the $ amount of self-vote. At least that number should be taken relative to the $ amount of all votes by this person.
okay thanks for clarifying that!
I don't like selfvotes, I think its milking the chain. The users on your list, do they really need that? Why?
As you write, they even get big upvotes from whales. Is the not enough?
Hmm, this is a tricky one. I get both sides of the argument, honestly. If you’ve earned your stake, it makes sense to be able to vote for yourself, but at the same time, it can feel a bit unfair if you're pushing your posts to the top all the time. I think it's all about balance. If you're not overdoing it, I don't see the harm, but once it feels like vote farming, that's when it crosses the line. I understand galenkp's frustration though
thanks for the feedback
my pleasure 🙏
Thanks for putting me on the spot here. You should have considered discussing this topic without mass tagging (another habit which is frowned upon by some users).
Unlike many whales who were fortunate enough to be on Hive since the first blocks of Steem, I invested a lot of my own money to reach the stake that I have. Self-voting is just a means to regain some of the investment. If the community thinks, this is a bad practice, I will have to look to somewhere else, or stop posting.
Moreover, I write posts that I consider as high-quality and worth the few $ upvotes (compared to the average posts here) that is anyway in no relation to the time spent. And so should everybody who spends hours on writing good posts not be shy to vote him/herself. If you don´t think that your own post deserves this upvote, why should others do?
I would not upvote myself, if I would churn out everyday posts with a pic and 3 lines of text. So I think when you evaluate this habit, you should not only check the stake of people but the quality of the posts.
PS: And yes, I (mostly) manually curate and upvote app. 5000 posts per month (you can check this here).
I agree about mass-tagging though, and you yourself don't selfvote that often compared to OP so it hasn't been seen as a problem by me.
Ahem, I literally wanted to catch the attention of the people involved - hence the tagging. Hope your downvote is not due to this and more because for previous self votes. I don't regret starting ts shit storm at all, it's good to have this conersation. Personally I am stopping self-voting due to it. So it was constructive over all.
My downvote is cause you think emre posting once every full moon and selfvoting is considered the same as you selfvoting every day.
I haven't stated that at all. I simply randomly selected users that were self voting their posts regardless of the quantity and asked the community's whether this was acceptable. That this has caused such an extreme reaction is of course interesting by itself. Also I make on average around 5 posts a week with 2 of them going into a reward pool for the LTC contest. I will also stop upvoting my (normal) posts, due to the friendly debate we all had here, but that insight is probably missed for the others that continue to do so.
Well I saw your back and forth with him both in comments and downvotes so figured you were in the wrong for comparing each other, I guess not the first thing you wanna stumble on early in the morning so may have overreacted.
"I will selfvote because I wasn't here early for easy rewards" is a dumb justification.
What you wrote was a dumb simplification of what I meant. Crypto is also business and return on investment, sorry if that´s new to you.
ROI comes from the valuation of Hive, not beating others at the same game cause you have lower morals.
thanks for clarifying
Mark me down as against selfvoting, if everybody did it the game breaks.
Mass pinging folks wasn't a good move, plenty of accounts that like to cause trouble for others onboard, those folks you pinged would have found out about you mentioning them from those accounts without the mass ping.
I'd sure like to see a comprehensive list, for far too long the good 'ol boy network has protected people from the disdain of the crowd, imo.
Much of the crowd here would sell their mothers for another upvote.
IF the crowd knew the backstories of some of these folks, they wouldn't be quite so popular.
Certainly not fawned over like they are now.
Anyway,...
source
It's okay for me. If it shows the true personality of some then this was a success. Overall I think this is a productive conversation. Thanks for your input
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STOPA new project (apishive.blog) launched to provide help and support (by delegating HP) to beginners on Hive has outlined the requirements necessary for someone to participate.
No self voting is one of the items.
It seems that new accounts on Hive are being directed from the beginning to the correct way of thinking about life on Hive.
Is it OK for old accounts with hundreds of HP to vote for themselves, everyone has a choice. None of us knows what shoes another Hive is in and what his path is.
I have never done it (except maybe a few times, when fat fingers were to blame, which I immediately canceled).
I don't vote for myself, because I believe that the community will recognize and reward the posts I write.
If that weren't the case, what would stop me from converting most of my $ into HP, boosting my HP a lot, and living only from curating, without posts (or with occasional posts), with the occasional self-voting on some short comments?
PS. I would recommend accounts with a large amount of HP to check out Apishive.blog and provide occasional support to those young and small accounts, who are on the right path to Hive progress.
Alright as expected, this is getting some attention (when money is inolved emotions apparently roll) Creating a "target list" wasn't my intention - but then again, how should I reveal my quick research without showing the data? I would like to know what percentage of users are doing this and how the community sees this. Should I create a more comprehensive list so users don't feel "targeted"?
Promoting this post to put more fuel into the fire 😅
[slight upvote for visibility]