I completely disagree with people self-upvoting, especially using bots. The value of a post is supposed to be determined by the attention it garners from the community, not how much attention can be bought by the author.
The Steem Whitepaper talks about how algorithms need to be put in place to prevent reward pool abuse, yet I see no such thing from any bot I've encountered.
@randowhale seems to believe it's just fine for people to self-upvote, probably because that's where 90% of their profit comes from, and @minnowbooster apparently has just as high of a self-upvote rate. It's unscrupulous, bot as long as the people running the bots are profiting from abuse, it's not likely to change
There is really nothing stopping someone from creating two accounts to upvote each other. Otherwise we probably tried disabling selfgoats already 🐐
This is the same response I got from randowhale, but I still feel like preventing it would deter a large portion of the abuse, and might encourage people to act in an ethical manner.
I feel as though having the image of a goat licking its own backside amid your own comments on a serious post is enough to deter my use of a service to self vote. Perhaps if all the voting bots had similar disincentives to self voting we'd see a change in that trend?
One of the reasons we need to split the post rewards 50/50 between author and curators, like it was more than 12 months ago. The only way to end the self upvote, is to give people a more lucrative way to spend their voting power.
But will creating posts be worth it then? I personally would love a 50/50 split but I can imagine many problems with it...
Let's talk about them then :)
Most people are going to care more about a total than a percentage. It only needs to increase the payouts by 34% in order to make the change of net benefit to the author.
If steemers are madly upvoting anything they think will be popular, instead of hoarding their vp for self upvotes, a 34% increase is far from ambitious.
True that.
This could trigger an even bigger flocking on the top 1% because everyone wants big curation rewards (and educating them on the system seems futile). But that will solve itself over time I guess...
I think you have convinced me.