No-reward from self-votes on comments.
When a user vote on his own comment the rshare ($ value) would count toward ranking but would not be paid out to the user.
This preserve the benefit of SteemPower holder to give increased exposure to their content (thus future reward) but limit the temptation to create comments mainly to self-claim a reward.
Commenting only to self-reward has increased tremendously with HF19. A huge increase in comment spam makes conversation much harder to follow. People have to browse through pages of comments made by bots to find relevant information or real people waste time answering bots.
Note : I do not recommend this no-reward from self-vote policy to be considered for posts at this time, only on comments. (Post usually have a higher expected level of work put into them and are more independent than comments thus less invasive).
Increase down-voting power to counteract the lost curation reward opportunity.
I recommend increasing the strength of the downvotes (flag) relative to the percentage decrease in voting power by a factor of MINIMUM 25% but closer to 50%
People using their their steempower to downvote (flag) content almost always do so to improve the platform as a whole. It's usually to suppress abusive behavior or to demote content to the benefit of better content.
Reasons suggested by Steemit to downvote :
- Disagreement on rewards
- Fraud or Plagiarism
- Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
- Intentional miscategorized content or Spam
Detecting these abuse is a thought intensive process, requiring SteemPower to enforce it almost guarantee that nobody does it unless it's justified, but missing out on curation reward makes it a cost negative action (and that's not even considering risk of retaliation Vs. possibility of a reward kickback).
Example : It would cost a user the same % of voting power to bring down a post by $1.50 than to bump one by $1.00
Some of the latest post related self-voting and reward abuse:
https://steemit.com/project-smackdown/@inertia/self-voting
https://steemit.com/steemit/@kyriacos/deceptively-optimistic-self-shilling-posts-hurt-steemit
Please note that I will be moderating this thread for any small comment that does not contribute to the conversation. (do not take it personally)
While I am personally 100% in support of users rights to self-vote, I would be very much open to a hardfork where this functionality was removed. - not that it would do anything.
In the system, as it is currently designed, self-votes are useful and important curation decisions. Think of this as putting your money (vests) where your mouth is (posts). While some users do not like this practice, the way the (abet complicated) rules have consented to today, self-votes are absolutly ok. Because of the curation incentives, users should be curating their own content.
Your solution can easily be Sybiled, no matter how implemented. You can always just delegate SP.
I think people need to get over the whole self-voting thing. Either vests are vests or not. This "author vests shouldn't count" talk really does not make much sense.
Edit: I am going to spam this thread with links to more of my thoughts on self-votes. This thread was the inspiration for authoring the post and I believe many here might be interested.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Agreed and "Hate Speech" is very subjective. I can say that if you call me a "ROBBER," then that is hate speech and that hurts me. You could say those are the facts. I could say I was Aladdin or Batman or Dexter. I could say I was Robin Hood or Obama. I could have excuses or reasons. I believe in objectivity. I believe in freedoms of speech which includes the freedom of hate speech because hate is a subjective abstraction that is based on opinion and feelings and stuff. When police put bad people in jail, they could say to them, "That is hate speech." But, if a man murdered your mother. You could say, "You murdered my mother." But he could say, "Hey, that is hate speech. Do not say that. I am not a murderer." So, I am saying, I do not like government.... smaller government is better than bigger government... I like capitalism..... I like choices and responsibilities.... I like Bitcoin and Steemit... thanks for sharing....
Cheers
The strongest argument I can come up with for comment voting is for influence, which your change covers (my pros/cons post is here). I like this change. If people want to vote themselves up to make money, they can do it on their own blog. If they post too often with too much crap, they will lose followers anyway. Ultimately there's no way to stop self voting because of Sybil attack concerns, but this might at least make it a little more difficult.
As to the second point, well... I've been on the other end of abusive voting and it's quite discouraging to see 60% or 70% of a payout disappear in the last 12 hours during the time when no other upvote could change things, especially when there are hundreds of positive votes and many comments supporting the post. I agree there's a lot of reasons to avoid flagging, especially with daily target vote change of HF19. That said, I feel we still don't have good processes in place to counter abusive flags that aren't based on any of the reasons outlined in the steemit interface, but just to piss people off because of personal grudges. If it was just a downvote, I wouldn't mind, but the reputation is also impacted. flagging is complicated. I do think the platform could do well with more honest flaggers though, so I'd be willing to support it and see how it goes. Maybe it'll force a prioritization toward fixing the abusive flagging problem.
I think you are right on the influence part - at least mostly. The only thing with that is when others also upvote you, the argument against self votes goes right out the window.
The reputation thing is a major fault IMO.
Take a look at my post that yours inspired, I go deep into the whitepaper and sort out some game theory about self voting:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Excellent post, Kyle! Thank you for pointing it out. I think you covered a lot of details I remember reading and thinking through at the time, but as you mentioned, the white paper is just too far out of sync with what the site is today (reputation, "flag" instead of downvote, radically different distribution amounts with "bad whales" taking advantage of the system, etc)
:) glad it was interesting.
Although, I am not so sure the whitepaper is it of sync with what the site is today. Steemit is a portal into steem, just like busy.
I would just argue that steem is the first of many more experiments to come. I don't think steem correctly addressed all the problems needed by a network like this. I am passionate about the now though.
I think there is a bias of perception between bad flags and good flags. I suggested that there should be an easy way to select a reason or to enter a custom one when clicking the flag. Many people just don't know why they got flag, disagreement on reward can apply to pretty much everything and at it pertain to Steem what steemit inc say are good reason to flag is not really relevant.
The good flags are very rarely talked about because people don't appreciate that some whale downvoting a bigger whale that upvote it's own content increase the reward of everyone else that deserve it more.
Two example from today, who cares really?, the whale who spend SP, who lost a curation opportunity and risk retaliation to flag this isn't getting any praise whatsoever for their good flag. :
https://steemit.com/politics/@joseph/transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico#@mehmoodasultana/re-joseph-transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico-20170716t040758669z
https://steemit.com/business/@bookingteam.com/what-you-need-to-know-in-the-vacation-rental-industry-07-16-2017
you can be sure under the present system fox cnn nbc ........ and the rest would never make a penny on this platform so it may have a good effect on keeping the riff raff out ... lol ...
Very well-said Luke! I totally agree with everything you said :]
Flagging is complicated and one of the poorest implemented features here on steem.
The problem is at the end of the day, I believe vests are vests.
@lukestokes, I do not like downvote or flag options... it could be something that could help.... but maybe not yet like you said.... Facebook does not have a dislike BUTTON..... and it is kind of negative to downvote and stuff..... and it is very subjective to downvote.... like hate speech should be included in the freedom of speech.... but some will say they are not..... but others will say they are..... and that is one of the debates people have.... I want to focus on upvoting... I do not downvote people.... I do not have time to do that and it is a waste of time..... better content will get a lot of votes..... better content will make a lot of money
.
We should not be motivated to post better by downvotes that we get but rather by not being number one..... like Michael Jordan / Jackson...... like Pokemon... I want to be the best.... but downvotes can discourage people too much as it lowers our reputation and that can get people to give up............... it can be very unfair.... like you said as people carry grudges and everything...... downvoting is like going to a restaurant and taking money from it..... because you do not like the food.... but other people are there eating the food and they paid the money.... downvoting is like stealing the money from the store or bank or whatever and it could be like censorship or something........
The whole point is that it is subjective. You are incentivized to vote payouts so they align with your views. If you don't you are risking steem becoming something where your stake is no longer valuable.
I agree with the first idea, as unpopular as it may be with some of our new arrivals. There is a legit use for self-voting comments for visibility (eg when you want to speak with authority on a post relating to you or your business) , but you shouldn't be rewarding yourself with $ in this case.
I also think a variation on your second idea would be worth doing - there is a real mental, social and monetary cost to policing the reward pool abuse and some tweaking is needed here to make it more appealing.
We need to be very careful tweaking that area though, if it becomes far easier to have a larger total influence on the pool as a flagger then we're going to see way too much of it :o/
I wish I had something smarter to contribute to this, I'm resteeming and hope it generates some good discussion
The problem is again: either all vests are equal or they are not. There are not many safe ways to counter this "self voting". You can always delegate power to another account. It can never be detected. Period.
The only thing you can do with respect to self voting is flagging. Although a flag is only warranted in the same case as before - when a post is making more than it is worth. If someone self-votes their post to 50 cents, and that post goes on to make 10 dollars, there was clearly not a problem with the self vote.
The fall to Nash is futile.
I'm doing work with the steem blockchain API, although haven't been for long. Surely SP delegation operations are traceable in the blockchain? I must admit I haven't actually seen any yet, but I haven't been looking.
They are iirc.
That does not stop someone from having anonymous accounts do their work. Delegation smart contracts could provide this as a service. There is always a way to self vote with vests you own. - unless not all vests are worth the same.
There is no way to detect or prevent self votes. Period.
I agree with you I'm similarly worried about making it more than 50%, I feel like 25% makes it completely fair while anything above account for both a positive incentive and offset the negative cost of retaliation and impossibly to get kickbacks. (example of a kickback, @JerryBanfield randomly sent me 20 SBD for upvoting some of his posts.)
Yeah changing the balance of incentives is very dangerous.
Indeed, giving power to people to police content is more self sustainable rather than having to rely on guilds.
I see this as mostly hurting minnows. Meanwhile, those that can afford to buy more accounts and use those accounts to upvote themselves will keep doing that. My only solution is refunding a portion of the voting power IF the flag could be automatic verified as being legitimate. If they could do that then we would not be seeing the kind of abuse that goes on with flagging.
There will always be sockpuppet accounts and ways around these things, but the tools to detect them get more advanced by the day.
This would immediately stop incentivizing ta good chunk of the self comment voting "abuse".
Interesting idea about refunding VP, but deciding which flags are "legitimate" becomes a whole other problem in itself :P
Yep, I wish I could solve that part for you guys. I would not even trust the plagiarism bots with the refunding as they don’t get it correct enough. I first thought maybe trusting the top Witness but then that just creates a whole other mess for you guys to deal.
There is a reason that upvoting your own posts is the default.
It's not anymore.
seems to be for me.
steemit inc. implementation
It was changed 12 days ago, heres the patch for steemit/condensor : https://github.com/steemit/condenser/commit/cefc5b37161f6012abcb928bc532a5350d3ee141
lol well, I won't be patching that lmao...
Lucky steemit inc has a team thats done it for you already then ;)
Won't that fix just push people into vote trading, or taking two minutes to make an alt account, either to post from and upvote to, or to transfer to and upvote from? Or delegation? Does it not just push the rewards from abuse into the more determined and tech-savvy abusers, an even worse scenario?
I talk about a lot of this in my post inspired by this thread:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
The whitepaper is pretty clear about abuse.
And what's to prevent the user from creating another account, delegating SP to it, and upvoting himself with it?
Absolutely nothing, which is why I over and over again come out 100% against this idea. It's silly when you can create multiple accounts, delegate, or vote trade. It might stop the laziest or most technically dis-inclined abusers, which just shifts the "booty" to the more technically savvy, determined abusers. It seems worse than doing nothing. The big abusers don't self-vote, they vote trade in cartels like BookingTeam.com:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
The only solution I see is removing flagging from using the same power as upvoting. There is too much financial disincentive not to flag things, and it's already bad enough there is a lot of social and retaliation disincentive as well.
Right you are.
They even talk about this in the whitepaper. My post inspired by this thread might be of interest to you.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Thanks, I'll check it out.
It's a possible workaround but It's definitely inconvenient and moving the SP earned from posting account to voting account is limited by the 3 month power-down phase. Abuses would be as easy to detect as self vote and can eventually be counteracted with bots.
But delegation is instant.
Indeed. @transisto you don't need to power down to delegate. Delegation can be revoked, and it takes 7 days to complete.
https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_delegated_STEEM_Power
Good question.
Very good question...The better question is how do we grow the platform family:)
That's steemit.incs job.
right?
??
I was agreeing with your sentiment about the responsibility of the platform growing.
I think the only time self voting would be a problem is if all the high steempower holders were doing it, but they're not. Only people who self vote their own comments are minnows who make little to nothing anyways, which you can't really blame them anyways because of the high influx of new users the last couple of months, feels almost impossible to get seen.
Some numbers : https://steemit.com/project-smackdown/@personz/project-smackdown-14th-july-stats
While you may be right it is mostly the new users who do it, they are causing an awful amount of spam comments that but that seems to have slowed down as they may have noticed their voting power become inefficient after many votes.
The race to Nash is futile.
No reward for voting on your own comments makes sense.
Flags seem to be so seldom used that I can't comment usefully. Risk of retaliation from whales seems like an item to be concerned about.
It would also be a valid option but would add another magic % number. Zero for overall simplicity, Steem is already pretty complex.
Agreed complexity is already very high, simplicity is better than complexity
Can't work. Period.
Take a look here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Unfortunately there is actually a lot of downvoting that takes place for abusive reasons too.
The downvote implementation is one of the worst aspects of the steem ecosystem.
period.
Is there a hard outline of the rules and ethics of using the flagging system? I know there is that small “recommendations” that show up when you flag of what it should be for. Looking under FAQ I am surprised its simply as “users are allowed to downvote for any reason that they want. There are many users in the community who recommend only using the downvote on posts that are abusive. . .”
I now understand why it’s such a hot topic and an issue. It seems like a hard task to even try and find a happy medium when the guide lines are so loosely written. No wonder so many feel they have been abused by the down voting system.
Users are 'allowed' to do whatever the blockchain allows.
As I fear the reply from you would be. Blockchains don’t have ethics or morals. It is simply a slave to the highest bidder; therefore, no change needs to be made in down voting power. If someone wants something bad enough they just need make sure they are the highest bidder.
This leaves me with more questions than answers. I simply don’t understand the ethics or morals of the biggest account holders here. Interesting enough very view if any at all do. Since some of these people are unknown and don't choose to share that with us.
Well, it isn't as bad as it sounds (IMO). From what I've seen, the majority of the stakeholders (large and small) do have the best interests of the platform in mind. There are a lot of disagreements over what is 'best', but I do think most people's hearts are in the right place.
I agree. This platform would have been a wasteland long before now if otherwise.
Well said.
I just can’t think of a happy medium. If there was some kind of way to automate the process of verify that a flag was used in a legitimately manner and then refunded some of the power used back to the user maybe. That sounds like a very complex issue of trying solving. Even the bots that deal with plagiarism are not getting it correct enough to trust it.
No matter what kind of changes are made or not made with regard to flagging, we need assigned moderators who have the power to undo any flag not adhering to clearly set guidelines. We've always needed that, imo, but how to implement moderation where a lot of sp isn't needed (mod accounts with little or no sp) is perhaps impossible.
That is very true indeed! Thanks for bringing that up :)
Boom, I said similar in my comments before I saw the comments, good on ya Timmer.
Honestly.
Thanks for saying this. People listen to you.
And I'm think that part of HF19 was just to stop this kind of abuse.
You being an excellent witness, could you answer a question on this subject?
Would it be possible to set up steemit to automate a possible 6th flag be generated when a post is flagged? Then a few things could happen.
1. People could go to the tag "flag" and look at all the people who are flagged.
2. A process could be setup to a. let the populace vote on the abuse or b. hold the purse until reviewed somehow
This would avoid flag wars on the particular post. It would separate and make it easier to review posts that are flagged also.
Could you also tweak steemit to keep reputations/rewards intact until review/7 days is complete?
Thanks for all you do as a witness and valued Steemit member.
While it is technically possible, it would be a major change. It would be better for someone in the community to develop a UI that shows all the flagged posts. I don't know if it is there already, but steemdb ( developed by @jesta ) may already have something along those lines.
Thanks for your fast response.
Improve the platform - yeah right - LOL
Censorship is really not that great...
Which ?
There are lots of cases of retaliation, or 'disagreement on rewards'. The latter isn't really abuse, but it causes a lot of unhappiness among users. Making flagging more powerful would make that worse.
There needs to be a balance. I'm not saying that the current 1:1 between upvoted and downvotes is 100% for certain the right one, but since it is the current implementation the burden is on you (since you are proposing the change) to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the current system is not balanced correctly.. There does still seem to be a good argument in preserving the status quo.
Trying to stop self-voting directly this way is, I think, ultimately ineffective. Anyone can just make another account, and upvote from that account instead. Or, if they don't want to wait for powering down, they can post from the new account, and upvote from the old account. Further, people can just trade votes anyway.
Incidentally, I think the biggest abuse of rewards that I am curently seeing is the "BookingTeam Mafia" in Trending every day. It wouldn't surprise me to find many more groups like this, either. They just repost spam links and paper-junk-mail peppered with links to their website, then upvote themselves $1000 per post.
Well, that is what it was when I wrote this article on it 16 days ago:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
Anyway, I wrote another article more recently speaking to your second option, which I think is the effective route. I proposed a separate down-vote power, or a 1 (or more) free 100)% downvotes per day for each user. I was hoping that if we could remove the economic disincentive from "wasting" one's voting power on downvotes that the community would be drastically more inclined to police this, and they would have the benefit of subjectivity. It's harder to program a rule to find what I noted in my article above than it is for us to see it.
The whole foundation of steemit.com is rewards based. This is why I have no issues with someone upvoting themselves.
One way or another you have to convince one or more people to upvote you. In the end, it is all about what others can gain in return to upvoting you. There is a reason why some users are popular with rewards, because there is predictability for those who want to make a buck or two by helping others to make a buck or two with their votingpower.
It would defeat the purpose and turn this place into an ordinary social media site if you removed that. People have to find a way to "mine" the STEEM. But then, I do understand that some comments and blog posts are not worthy what they are rewarded. This is really hard to define, though. This would destroy this platform if we started to define what is good and what is not.
To every mother her child is extraordinary and exceptional. It would be hard to convince a mother otherwise.
Censorship is something that can easily happen if we even try to define what is a good post and was is not. That will always be subjective. If we go that way to define it, you will turn steemit.com into a police state with a million vigilantes.
If you really want to go that way, then you would have to first write out what the standard should be for a worthy post before a HF can even take place. This is virtually impossible. Only the market can make that value assessment. The market can be 1 person, 10 persons or 100 persons. Now, that 1 person could be the user themselves thinking their material is worthy.
The consensus of the whole community is really important if we are going to start monitoring what is a good post and what is not.
Those who have invested a lot are going to be the losers, but then again if the "abuse" continues that could also kill this place. So it is a fine line. I put abuse in quotations because this is a word that people are throwing around. I don't know whether it is the right word to use or not.
To continue, the communuty has to first decide whether this place is for everyone or some. If it is for everyone then no to flagging comments and posts. If this place is for certain people then we need to define that and start ganging up on those the community has decided are not welcomed any longer.
I think if we leave it as is, it will correct itself very shortly. The value of each vote is going down on a daily basis. Because, let's be honest, in the end, it is all about the money. Those who are abusing won't bother because the rewards will be too low and those who care about the abuse won't care because the rewards will be zero or low
You said it in a nutshell @tamim - I don't want to live in a egalitarian socialist state anymore than you do my friend.
well said.
You put it quite nicely. - followed!!
Interesting. Maybe a place for all but not a place for all content? Maybe all content is not valuable? Not sure here.
You might find my in-depth post inspired by this thread interesting:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Agreed.... DETERMINING what is good or not can become too subjective.... and that can be dangerous...
My take on this is that self-voting incentivizes investors to buy in to steem, and for that reason it should remain at least a while longer. A huge number of the people I see that upvote their own comment for $1+ have recently deposited a large amount from an exchange, so this can be seen as their ROI and a lot of them still go on to vote on other things as well. Eliminating self-voting entirely will result in less interest from people investing into the platform because they may not have much drive to be posting quality content or spending every day curating to get their returns. It would also be tremendously discouraging to the people that are actively investing based on the current self-vote mechanisms to suddenly have this restricted. An example is: https://steemit.com/@adept/transfers he has been heavily buying into steem, and upvoted my post alongside his own comment, so I am happy to have his vote and he gets some return on his recent large investments into the platform, it's good to have people buying on exchanges for this reason even if there is some downside to be seen here, because people buying STEEM/SBD is the only thing that gives them any value.
On the note of flags, I think there needs to be a log curve for their strength where smaller SP holders have a larger impact with their downvote but megawhales have somewhat less than they do right now. The reason is that someone can have 500 upvotes and a single whale can destroy their earnings or reputation because they hold more SP than the people upvoting, and in contrast a whale can post something that has 500 downvotes and still come out ahead. A log curve would skew this scenario more in favor of a popular vote while retaining the whales power to outvote more people than anyone else. It would also give a larger boost to the masses for filtering out spammers if the same change increased minnow flag power from its current value. I see a ton of spammy comments on various posts that get flagged by minnows but nothing changes until someone big comes along and uses their voting power to flag it, and like you said they hesitate to do that because in many ways it's a waste of their vote. So I think the log curve would push higher SP holders more toward upvoting than they already are while giving more power to filter spam to everyone else, which is in my opinion the best way to filter out the spammers since the big guys can't cover it all.
...
sorry for the wall of text, I think the things I'm proposing needed some explanation for risk of sounding poorly planned. I actually have thought about this a lot and the self-voting thing plays into the game theory of steemit and is part of the reason people are so addicted to having more steem power, since it creates a snowballing effect it has a similar addiction mechanism to an idle game where there's never a good time to stop because you're almost always at your peak in terms of the rate of gain. The better way to address the people that are straight up exploiting it would be to rework curation rewards so that there's a better chance of having higher return by voting on other people's stuff, rather than the current system where only the top curators manage to exceed what you gain by self-voting.
Anyway, give it some thought guys. I think this is a really important topic that goes deeper than most people think, glad to have people delving into it.
Interesting!
Well the best part is, you can never stop self voting.
Messing with curves probably adds more harm than anything. Whatever is incentivized will happen.
The only thing is for people to get over the hump and start flagging when the feel it is right.
My post inspired by this thread might be of interest:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
I disagree with you on your point about self voting. If I buy or earn steempower I'm going to use that to support myself. What if I like posting about some obscure niche that most people haven't ever heard of? Of course, i'm going to get next to nothing per post. So basically, one could argue that removing the ability to award ones self, will inadvertently shrink the diversity of unique bloggers. They'll feel more inclined to post about mainstream topics for any hope of making something from their blog posts/comments!
I agree entirely.
Self-votes are important in the way steem is designed right now. There is a reason that upvoting your post is the default for top-level posts.
Interesting. I see it two ways now. You have a good point about self voting. But someone else suggested that if everyone self voted, that would deplete the Steem power and the system would ultimately collapse.
For myself, I think I'll pass on self voting for now and see how things play out.
duh.
The whole point is that everyone only voting for themselves is worthless.
This is why people are incentivized to vote for others.
Not to mention curation rewards.
If self voting is causing problems where overvalued posts are making too much - boom flagging. The race to Nash equilibrium is futile.
If you self-upvote and nobody downvotes you, you get the full curation rewards from the post times 4.
Excluding downvotes from the equation, most people see themselves as incentivized to self upvote.
It is absolutely incentivized.
This does not mean equilibrium is where everyone only votes for themselves.
Agreed.
For sure, glad I'm not the only one who thinks like I do.
ill follow a similar thinker
Thanks! I followed you aswell!
What is that reason? It seems to be a legacy from the beginning of the platform.
Legacy or not, the feature I would mention is curation rewards.
If all vests are going to be treated equal, I want (and should to some equilibrium extent) to put "my money where my mouth is" so to speak.
This all comes down to principle. If I can not upvote my own posts with my own vests then the very definition of steem changes.
Steem payouts are and have been since the white paper a consensus system. You should absolutely be allowed (by the blockchain level rules) to upvote your own posts. But others need to be allowed to counter your votes, to facilitate the end result of payouts by stakeholder consensus.
Witnesses must allow you to have your say, but other stakeholders don't have to allow you to have your way.
oh yeah. that is the only logical solution to this whole self vote thing.
if you think someone self voted more than the post is worth - flag.
otherwise who cares. you should only be judging posts by their payouts anyways.
The differences between posting and commenting would seem to suggest far different parameters of judging value- who would ever bother with flagging a comment for anything except blatant abuse?
In my opinion these proposals don't make sense. If I earn SP I have the right to use it in the best way, including self-voting.
This kind of think to me sounds socialist talk, and I'm a free-market follower. If a person wishes to receive upvote seek to innovate, create services that add value, then you will surely be rewarded.
You are very right.
Take a look at my post inspired by this thread, I support your position strongly.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
@transisto,
I am agree with those proposed policies but if 1st one applied it might hurts people like you! I mean people with higher steem power.
Self up-voting is just ridiculous, but it needs to survive in some stages as well.
Anyway nice posts with two good proposals to enhance the power of STEEM community! Really appreciate it!
Finally, looking for your next post to read!
Cheers~
Both are excellent suggestions! I've thought upvotes shouldn't count on comments as well. How do you push this through? What is the next step? I'm still new to the HF process. :)
I am new here, but recently read a post about people ganging up to downvote someone they had a beef with. This does not seem like a good option to me.
I have had very little spam comments here. I try to engage with the few who did it and then if nothing happens, I mute them - this seems similar to blocking on fb, but I'm not really sure.
I am trying to learn 100+ things in order to succeed in steemit, but this is very daunting since almost everything here is new to me. I'm a health and weight loss author at the very limits of my technical ability right now and know-0- about crypto. Still swimming though :)
Steem cannot fix that some people are going to have beefs with each others.
If it's bad enough a larger whale can always come to the rescue and "sort things out".
Good to have you on Steem,
Bin flagging - problem sorted!
Whales do not sort these things out - post that are censored by flagging are invisible to everyone including whales
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/a-censorship-threat-to-steemit
Correct me if I am wrong but wouldnt your idea enable a form of censorship where the largest SteemPower holders can push down who ever they want?
Currently the largest SteemPower holders in a way control the naritive by incentivising a echo chamber like enviornment.
Largest SteemPower holder control the narrative as intended!
That's where Steem is expected to get it's value from.
With great power comes great responsibility though, and whales that don't behave themselves for the long benefit of the system get put to their place by other whales or groups.
It's obviously much easier to see upvotes as being the origin of new money than it is see downvotes as a more fair distribution of new money. So I can understand where you are coming from.
There would be no way for a "whale" or anyone for that matter to appropriate itself a larger % of the reward by downvoting everything else than it's post with a 25% premium.
Consider how much more of an unfair reward pool appropriation is done by collusion group (guilds & trails) upvoting each-others irregardless of the content. They're not sufficiently being put in check because of high cost of flagging.
In other words it's cheaper by at least 25% for everyone to create more bullshit content to upvote than it is to uncover BS self-upvoter group and flag them.
Agreed. Do we really want more Flag power for the whales?
Whales would still have proportionally the same flag power as anyone.
Understood and agreed. Are we sure we want flag weightings to increase when whales still have proportional flag power? That was my point.
Not clear to me that that is a good idea
I said similar in my comments here too.
That can already happen and it's been happening!! Increasing the downvote power is only going to make it worse. Having said that, we do need a solution to fight spam/troll/etc.
Sometime I feel like I'm the only one using my power to downvote. Do you have any complain about how I use it?
What do you mean exactly by making it worst ? How bad is the flagging to you ?
While I don't especially agree on the point of upvoting your own comments (I don't think I've ever done it, and it would essentially do little except kill my voting power), you've at least presented some nuances on the issue I hadn't considered.
I don't really understand how a hardfork producing two independent systems would even function successfully without a very serious damping of serious conversation at least on the side rejecting the self-upvote. I would think you'd f(r)actionate both sides very quickly with crippling results to the entire community.
The second proposal I agree with- maybe to the tune of a MAXIMUM 33%, though.
Having read through the comments, I notice nearly everyone is confusing your second proposal- it INCREASES the COST of flagging, not it's POWER, nicht wahr?
Great idea, hope to these will be accepted in next HF-
I agree entirely. I posted something similar last week but it wasn't very well received:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@unclehermit/ban-self-upvoting-of-comments-on-steemit
I think those worried about losing value from self voting comments should not be concerned if they are producing good content as their posts and comments should in theory receive higher powered votes from others, who have not used up their own power on self voting. As you say it will also discourage junk posts and help to make the platform more valuable and sustainable.
agreed
If I invest my money in Steemit do I not have a right to gain a return by freely upvoting posts and comments I like, including my own? Let's not take away all the incentives for people invest in Steem and Steemit. That being said, if my posts were earning more I would be much less inclined to upvote my own comments.
I agree 100%
Me too!
For whales or famous authors like @papa-pepper it doesn't change much if they vote on themself. Upvoting your own post and comments is always a subjective perspective. I invested +10000$ and expecting a ROI of daily 5-10$ seems fair in my eyes. If I get enough upvotes from others then I selfvote less.
It is 0.1% ROI daily. @jerrybanfield on the other hand reaches easily 0.5% ROI. Selfvoting doesnt really add anything
You do have that right. Vests are fungible. If they are changed then steem is no longer steem.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
At this point in time your steem - not steemit - is only going to be worth less and less because not only is the reward being self-appropriated by shortsighted opportunist and bots, they are spamming with so much useless comments that the whole place is about to look like a confusing dump. If your comment is of any relevance you will be able to use your voting power to move it near the top and earn reward from additional upvotes thanks to the extra exposure your SP entitled you to.
Well, prove me wrong @transisto. Go to my latest post and upvote it to the tune of a couple hundred dollars and I will stop upvoting my own comments for a while.
I have to admit that i self vote my comments once in a while. But the comments that i self vote, are the ones which i put in effort to write, not the nice post type.
Indeed, I upvoted my comments a couple of times, especially when there's a sea of "thank you's" and irrelevant comments, whereas my response was adding a useful information to the posts. Also, if I have an expertise in a certain field, I would like my time and knowledge to be rewarded somehow, so if nobody is voting for it, why couldn't I?
With my post having low earnings, self voting comments help too.
Looks like that is current solution
Then i am one of those who will loss out.
I’ve noticed some of really good up and coming bloggers seem to curtail their own comment sections by using small upvotes to keep the better information at the top. It something I try and keep in mind and I hope this is something that turns into a trend over time. I can understand it might not be possible on the really big blogs but many of the smaller ones its just nice to keep good content at the top.
I highly agree with the first one. But I think the assumption that people almost always use flagging to improve the platform is wrong. Many only use it as a power tool to pressure others to act the way they like. In cases like this it is mandatory for negative power to be small so only a crowd can use it for applying pressure. Even so, it's still prune to abuse to power groups in the community.
If we are going to make a mature product we shouldn't rely on manual reporting like down-votes anymore. There should be better ways to approach the problem.
I'd be interested in hearing example of
Isn't it also possible to incentivize people to act the way you want by rewarding them ?
What else do you expect from a dumb blockchain "automated reporting" ? Flagging isn't reporting it's down-voting.
Probably you know about all examples of these sorts: https://steemit.com/steem/@heimindanger/don-t-use-vote-selling-bots-use-promoted-instead-a-bot-that-upvotes-you-when-you-burn-money#@napkin/re-napkin-re-gavvet-re-gtg-re-heimindanger-don-t-use-vote-selling-bots-use-promoted-instead-a-bot-that-upvotes-you-when-you-burn-money-20170712t210356197z
A blockchain is a software and mature softwares are not supposed to stay dumb. Automation over blockchain is very possible and some teams already combined it with high intelligence behaviors of machine learning. Something like that in my opinion should be the goal not adjusting the values of upvoting and down-voting times to times. It just doesn't work.
meep
I totally endorse this suggestion from you @transisto and I think the reward going to self comments should be going to other authors or the people who comment on our posts. There are so many great Steemians who never miss upvoting on others' comments on their posts. They are great examples and should be followed.
Say no to self voting!
You should probably read this post before committing to that viewpoint:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Thanks. I'll read and comment.
Change 1
I don’t think this solves the main issue. People are using smurff accounts to vote up their own comments in lieu with something like buying votes from randowhale. I’ve contacted a few people about one account in particular. Everyone tells me this guy is not doing anything wrong. He has also gotten smarter since the account that he upvotes that is also using randowhale got hit with a bunch of down votes. So now he waits till the end to bump up his own three word comments to 5$ or higher. It looked a lot worse 4 days ago when I started to notice this guy. Naturally with current market his posts have drop a lot in value so everyone just tells me “nothing I can do about it, he’s not abusing anything.” My 2 cents worth of voting power and the kind of negative attention I would get flagging it all myself is something that makes it not worth it for me.
Change 2
While I think a cheaper downvote that carry more weight could help fix things. It also gives people who abuse the downvote system more power as well. In the end, I think making the flag more powerful is the only way to go. There are just too many people going around robbing the rewardpool blind. We are punishing those who are using the flag system legitimately by them having to give up huge amounts of voting power just to do the right thing.
https://steemit.com/@kmyang62/comments
https://steemit.com/@leejin-33/comments
They are voting for each other’s comments and buying randowhale votes for comments. They have changed up a little bit now and appear to be waiting closer to 6d12 hour mark avoiding people noticing and nuking the earnings. He’s still got a few comments that are worth a fair bit if they are indeed abusing the system.
Some people now have looked over it and downvote some of the things. I’m not sure if what was not downvoted was consider “fair” or if more needs to be done. The biggest ones can be found nearing the 6d12h mark. Your investigation into the matter would be appreciated.
Whatever this dude is earning from his "abuse" is probably worth it.
From the whitepaper;
Your right everyone should just stop trying to control the wild jungle. The 120 SP/SBD earned between those 2 accounts from the reward pool last week 100% justified. Would been more if it was not for me meddling in their plans. Who cares about all other accounts doing the same thing in a pairs as well that’s only a few 1000 per week out of the reward pool for their 2 or 3 word comment spam.
It’s also just fine the 280 accounts controlled by this guy as well https://steemit.com/@warren.buffet/transfers
Or is it 1300 accounts.. 1500 accounts? It’s so hard to tell anymore. I’m sure most of those accounts are not bots.
Don’t you worry the bots won’t ever notice the potential of extracting out 50,000+ SP/SBD a week from the reward pool. Surly many different “resources” are not being tested out by the smaller subnets in that voting block.
I’ve spoken with a few people spent over 15 hours dealing with this type of thing and research. My conclusion is--why should I bother. It’s too hard to tell what a legit person in that group is and what a botted account. I'm just going be happy others are using there abilities to contribute to steemit in interesting ways.
I guess you are being sarcastic.
The point I make is straight from the whitepaper.
If someone is making 50k a week from scamming this platform - they earned that by exposing a major flaw. I don't think you will find 50k in self votes being a problem.
The hundred bucks those voters took from the pool is justified.
That's a lot of steem power. May I ask what you call abuse?
Becasue self-voting is not necessarily abuse. \
3 word comments = 5 bucks, that might warrant a flag but there is a lot is subjective here. Especially if others voted the comment up after.
With so much steem power going against self votes, I'd really like your comments on my in-depth post on the game theory of self-votes. The white paper is pretty clear in this aspect.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
I always appreciate topics that start me off thinking one way, and I end up changing into another. I now disagree with both proposals. Blockchains simply do not have ethics or morals and nor does steem inc want to impose its own on it directly. This leavings the blockchain being directed to the highest bidder. Which case you can already buy SP and if you need more to do what you want you need to-- acquire more. Changing the rules beyond that simply takes power away from one group and empowers another to leverage what they already are doing. Which is seen as good or bad depending on what side you are on in that argument and how you view the other state actor(s) in play.
I don't think any form of self-voting should be entertained or rewarded in any way, even to boost rankings. Just having a higher SP value than other users does not mean your content is better, and should get higher rankings. It should be up to your followers to upvote you to where they think you belong. We should all be on an even playing field. Sure those that have been here longer, and contributed more should get higher rankings, but that should be evident by the upvotes of their numerous and loyal followers, and not a self-righteous upvote.
My idea is to reduce the maximum voting weight of self votes to 5%, with a higher reduction in voting power, with weight reducing, and VP reducing by and increasing amount with every self vote. I explain it a little better here if you're interested.
https://steemit.com/steem/@bmj/how-can-we-fix-the-greedy-self-upvoting-buggers-drain-their-power
I'm not a fan of the flagging idea, except as a last resort. Increasing the power of the flag also gives the flag-bullies greater power to kill off anyone who disagrees with them. It's a very touchy area to mess with in my opinion, and needs a lot of thought before any changes are made which could make things worse.
It might have been a PITA for you to register an account on Steem but it's actually as easy if not easier to create thousands of account on steem than it is on facebook & al..
How does
works for you now ?
I'm not sure you've understood the context in which that sentence exists. Why should the post of someone with higher SP than another get a higher ranking from a self upvote, when it may not any better? The even playing field here is that we all have the same chance to get up the "hot" list as anyone else, regardless of their SP balance. We get ranked by our peers, and not by our own power.
The creation of hundreds and thousands of accounts by one person is whole other problem for the developers to address. We're talking purely self voting and flagging here (although those accounts could be used for the same).
ehh why limit? vests should be vests
Simply put, self voting is an abuse of power (vests), self-serving and makes no valid contribution to the betterment of Steemit.
But who are you to tell me what is an abuse or not with my vests? Either vests are vests and everyone stops complaining or we set up regulations on how vests can be sent. There is no middle ground here.
Maybe you don't think self-voting has a contribution but the mechanics disagree. Curation rewards?
We should all just upvote ourselves because the mechanics allow it? I'll get my $0.03, and you'll get your $2.50, and the whales will get their $100 for each 100% vote we give ourselves, up to 10 times per day? That's not what the voting system is intended for. The rich get richer, and the poor die trying....
As far as curation rewards go. Upvote your own comment, and if nobody else upvotes, you get the author reward, plus all the curation reward, for adding what others have perceived as of no value, hence no additional votes. That, right there, is self-serving abuse of power.
Read https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf Page 16. Self voting is seen as defecting from the original goal of the voting system.
So back to your question:
Who am I to tell you what is an abuse or not with your vest?
I am nobody, an insignificant blip on the Steemit Blochchain, but I am someone who has read the whitepaper, and is still trying to understand much of it, but who understands that while some things are permissible by their "mechanics," it is not always beneficial for them to be exploited outside of their original design.
That is why I am in favor of implementing diminishing returns on self upvotes, and draining voting power of those who do. Hopefully it will cause a culture change to reward good work over greed. everyone will benefit from this, except the defectors.
That is capitalism. In Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the pirate lords all had one vote and they all upvoted their own STEEMIT content or they all wanted to be the pirate lord but then Jack Sparrow voted for Swan. She became the pirate lord because she had 2 votes, one from Swan and one from Sparrow.
.
I love capitalism. I want the rich to get more rich. But the poor can go from zero to hero too. Some will die trying. We got to try or we can try communism or something.
You know what, I like that idea. We should test that out on the next HF.... Voting on oneself would be ok to due without payout is something we all should thinking about :)
I like both ideas. I can't see the point of voting for one's own comment, anyway.
I like the idea of a curation reward for down voting, but I think it's going to need some moderation. As much as I like a reward to encourage people to root out plagiarism, hate speech and the like, I suspect that down voting for spite or harassment may become a problem.
I think both ideas are worth a try.
I think this policy should be paased ASAP this will be more helpful to author who post good contents.
There has been a TON of abuse by whales and dolphins flagging stuff just because they can, not sticking to the original intent for flags.
Someone decided they don't like YOU or your CONTENT or your OPINION:
FLAGGED!!!
We all know it, we all have seen it, time and time again, and it has cost the platform users, content, and credibility.
I almost want to self vote this to the top so it actually gets read.... but I won't.
What is the difference between a normal user, a dolphin and a whale in your mind ?
and what is THE original intent of the flag? and I insist on singular "THE".
A flag is a downvote, it's exercising power, power that need to be purchased to give value to steem.
BTW I downvoted you not because I "hate" you or your opinion, but because I think you are wrong, your content/opinions is also wrong and has less value so far than everything else that was posted in this thread.
So, now people should be afraid to comment, just in case someone comes along with a higher reputation and doesn't like their point of view? I feel that your action here shows why some people are so against downvoting.
This really is a pity because I don't see that @barrydutton has been in any way abusive. I suppose that my other comment will also be flagged, which means you will not get a full and frank discussion.
I am risking the flag because I feel the point has to be made.
Goodbye and enjoy you discussion.
Exactly my point here David, you are spot on brother. And people know it.
Flags also damage people's account reputations.
This is a great example here of what is not right and God forbid you say anything here to question a handful of opinions.
It really does make and prove my point, in short order.
@barrydutton, @davidnx, yeah, agreed, people downvote as a way to disagree.... and I joined Steemit June 2017 and got downvoted when I said anarchism and bad parenting or discipline practices can be counterproductive at times maybe for some people and stuff............ and I may not like Jihadism and I might not like vaccines or mercury.... and so on...
.
After getting my posts flagged like ten times in a row during my first week here in June 2017, I started censoring myself...... because I am afraid of getting flagged if I say like I like Trump for example.... we can become a place of the left..... of zombies........
.
My goal now is to not mess with whales or bears until I can improve my reputation a bit more first..... and that seems o be what we have here I guess.....
kind of makes my point for me.
Thanks.
have a good week LOL
With muting you decide what you don't want to see - fine. Flagging on the other hand is deciding what you don't think other people should be allowed to see - fascism...
And upvoting my own comments...personally, I wouldn't hesitate! (Hell I've upvoted my previous 1400 comments - not for the money but to raise them up in the feed)
I think we definitely need to come up with a solution that would help us fight spam and censorship(flag abuse) at the same time. I don't think increasing the downvote power is gonna help solve either of these problems. It would probably only increase the abuse of flag. Generally speaking however, the system seems to be designed in such a way that there's no equality of voice. Basically, the more money you have, the more influence you're going to have in the platform as you can buy more STEEM and power up. I'm not sure if a system like that can thrive as it's not something new. It's just fashioned up with a different look and feel!
What's new about it is that's it's blockchain based, trust-less, open and transparent.
If you consider that there has not yet been a reliably way to enforce 1 human = 1 cryptographic entity I think steem is the best we have so far.
It is true.
Some people do not appreciate or like the line of questioning on these types of issues, and it tends to show the character of people good or bad.
But hey if you bought the votes to get to the top no one would have any issues! :(
? Vote buying is disguised self-voting and is also a form of abuse.
People powerup or buy upvotes to get more exposure
I strongly agree with this. I up-vote my own comments only to make them visible.
I've just done a post on this very subject!
People using their their steempower to flag (censor) content almost always do so either for revenge or to control what other people get to see.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/a-censorship-threat-to-steemit
I like the current system, but I also think that some improvement can make the time spent on steemit more valuable, therefore more people will join. I am very curios when steemit will leave beta version! I hope it have a bright future!
Very well-said & Excellent suggestions!!!!!!!!!!! Great
I think no rewards for self votes on comment would be great. It would also be good to limit payment for self votes on posts to one a day.
It would be a big game changer ...... thats for sure ....
The policy seems nice and paves way to newbies that they will not quit for lack of upvotes. Thanks for sharing
Upvoted and RESTEEMED :)
I like the idea of not being able to make money by upvoting your own comments, but I don't like the idea of increasing down vote power. The only place that I've seen down votes used so far is as a troll weapon to shred someone else's account. I've seen that happen to several people on here.
There is a bias of perception between bad flags and good flags.
The good flags are very rarely talked about because people don't appreciate that some whale downvoting a bigger whale that upvote it's own content increase the reward of everyone else that deserve it more.
Two example from today, who cares really?, the whale who spend SP, who lost a curation opportunity and risk retaliation to flag this self-voting isn't getting any praise whatsoever for their good flag. :
https://steemit.com/politics/@joseph/transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico#@mehmoodasultana/re-joseph-transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico-20170716t040758669z
https://steemit.com/business/@bookingteam.com/what-you-need-to-know-in-the-vacation-rental-industry-07-16-2017
That's very true. I've seen that too. I think we need to do something about that and increasing the downvote power is certainly not gonna help, but only make it worse!
What is the definition of hate speech and who defines it? Very often when two parties disagree the hate speech terms starts to get thrown around.
Hate speech is ultimately subjective. At the end of the day, someone is going to get offended if you post about controversial subjects. I mainly joined this platform because I thought it was resistant to censorship but very quickly I realized that's not the case at all. Here, it seems like everything is just like outside. In other words, money talks. The more money you have, the more influence!
i figured it was subjective, that's why i brought it up
There is only indirect censorship your posts are still visible. I dont think censorship is a issue
Censorship is not just about whether something is visible or not(although the flagging does make negative posts invisible and it requires an extra click to make it visible again). Censorship is a lot more than that. Suppressing the sources of income and revenue of content creators you don't like is the most effective way of censorship right now on YouTube. They simply do not allow you to monetize your video if the content is controversial. The abuse of the flag button here can lead to exactly the same thing that's happening on YouTube...
@msg768, agreed, the YouTube thing is a problem. YouTube chooses, also, what to put on the trending list as well. Many left and went to http://Vid.Me
Hate speech is either defined subjectively or objectively. We normally define morality, hate, speech, right and wrong, through limited and subjective perspective. Sometimes, we may believe in truth that is like objective that is defined by maybe God, maybe a religion, maybe philosophy, culture, family traditions or something. But I believe in freedom of speech which includes hate speech. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words may never hurt me. If you gave me hate speech, then I can handle it. Call me dumb. I am ok with that. I would not want to take your freedom from you mostly because I do not want you to take that same freedom from me. Treat others the way you want to be treated.
That's the problem. subjectively measured hate speech, or anything really, is a recipe for disaster, and leads to tyranny.
Steemit is better when people can make money. But it becomes a problem when you can make money by taking it from others.
What if self-voting is just made less powerful? Offer some rewards to the author but not full rewards? Just a thought. I'm relatively new, my self votes don't do really anything, so if they went away it wouldn't be a bother to me, 99.9% of my steem rewards come from upvotes from other users.
Self votes dont matter for you. But people that bought steem want to get ROI
i am commanding bots to upvote myself in my first weeks of using steemit because it is the main program of minnowsupport and the like programs right i'm just giving myself a self-esteem or a boost to my start however i will not abuse it anymore as i see posts like your may ruin my account if it happens
Hows this? Not allowing users to self vote. Also make it so you slowly lose steem power if you don't curate
This user believes that there is a threat by giving so much power for whales to downvote, and so do I: https://steemit.com/steemit/@sift666/a-censorship-threat-to-steemit
I support this... however is there anyway to test this out. I have this funny feeling that these changes would work well short term (like HF19) and then be abused like crazy long term. We need THF's (testing hard forks) :)
Cheers!
Not able to earn from our self votes is really a good idea, if it gets implemented in steemit as an update. This would surely lead to better distribution of the reward pool and also a decrease in flag wars and the community basically splitting in 2. I really liked your idea. probably the best solution to current steemit state.
I agree to this - hardly up vote any comment of mine while I do vote my own posts but not immediately so others might have more options of curation rewards if there are options from my posts :-)-
I agree with your idea. Although I don't think it will matter much now (and for a while) since we will experiencing a price correction and spammers will not find any benefit from such behavior.
I 100% support your first suggestion: No-reward from self-votes.
Just a few hours ago, I suggested this in a comment I left under a post in which witness @timcliff was interviewed.
I do think it's fine to upvote your own post. Creating a post requires a lot more work than writing a 3-word comment.
Like you pointed out, the problem isn't just that the reward pool is drained by this selfish abusive behavior. It also leads to a lot of meaningless comments. Not to long ago, I received a 1-word comment on one of my posts: good!.
I'm like: I appreciate every comment, I really do. But c'mon man...1 word? I don't recall if it was self-upvoted – and I'm too lazy to go back and check 😀 – but that's the typical meaningless comment self-upvoters post. It's just so lame.
When I comment, I really do my best to be genuine. I also put effort into many of those, showing the author that I read the post. Add a gif in there, for fun.
And then it's just a bit frustrating to see so many of these short self-upvoted comments under so many posts. Makes it difficult to quickly spot real comments.
If it was up to me, I'd ban self-upvoting comments today rather than tomorrow!
Still, I'm not sure if that would completely solve the issue. What if a user creates a few accounts, and upvotes comments from account 1 with account 2 and vice versa?
Banning self-upvoting on comments would be a good start though. There is no perfect world, but what we can do is make it better one step at a time, and adapt along the way.
Resteemed.
You can also flag comments from esteem
This is rather like a middle class against the lower class struggle.
If you have been on the platform for some time, you already have followers, and you will AUTOMATICALLY be upvoted for your comments in the group.
I've seen it so many times!
Why do people have to constantly upvote each other with "money" if they have already been agreeing on these things before? It's the same as upvoting one's own comment. The only difference being that it's done on a pretense.
I think we should limit people's investment in Steem Power and make it fairer to everybody. We should flag people people who vote and have more than 500 SP.