I confess that I played around with this a few days ago. I was giddy because I had as much as $16 per upvote of power, to myself or others. I lost myself for a couple of days and now I feel I've lost of bit of my honor and am working to get that back. I tried to rationalize that I'm accepting it all as 100% SP and not cashing out anyway so it may even be better than me upvoting someone who is cashing out weekly 100% of what they can. The truth is that it's not for me to say what others do with their rewards, but honor and respect need to be valued in this community for it to thrive. There probably is not a good way to mitigate self voting. As you mentioned someone could always just make duplicate accounts or delegate their own Steem Power to a friend who would upvote everything they did. In the end there will always be leaches but the goal is to discourage that. I do think it's acceptable to upvote people you think will be very good for the community long term even if the single 1 paragraph comment isn't worth $5 in real word terms. The goal is to promote and encourage valuable users as much as possible.
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This is a really candid comment, thank you for it. I feel similarly. I would be really up for disabling self voting. The stated purpose of the network is to let the best stuff (as collectively decided by voting) to bubble up and be rewarded. Self voting does not work towards that, I think it's clear.
I think the question is, what's the lesser of the two evils? Self voting as it stands today or people creating multiple accounts and cluttering all of that to achieve the same goal? Cliques are also an issue. Let's say there's 3 people each with $10 per upvote. Person A can always upvote B and C. B can always upvote A and C, and C can always upvote A and B. They keep doing it because the others do. It doesn't have to be a meeting in a dark room for this to occur. These sorts of things happen naturally in the eco system because if you notice someone just upvoted the crap out of your post, you're fairly likely to return the favor (if they deserve it hopefully). The thing I hold dear is that I want each account I see to be an actual person.. just 1 person for 1 account. I don't want to have to wonder how many other accounts everyone has. That makes the whole project lose credibility in my eyes more than self upvoting. What do you think?
I don't think we need to decide which is the lesser, we should just deal with them as we can. Self voting can be entirely removed by disabling it on a blockchain level.
In the meantime as we campaign for this, we are making a bot to "tap people on the shoulder" about this issue with small flag for self votes on comments only (announcement here and here). For normal posts, we decided it wouldn't be fair to do that since it's the default steemit.com interface behavior, so I opened a change ticket for that, hopefully it's accepted.
As for multiple accounts, they can be useful, for bots or organizations, etc. I do not agree with 1 person 1 account. But for self voting, I don't know it's probably a serious issue. I think that because you have to split your stake between multiple accounts to do that it will never be as effective as using just one account, so not as bad as self voting. But to really solve it I don't know.
I do think that just because it is now known the first one should still be solved, we needn't choose between them.
Very good points and honestly I think I agree after reading your reply. I also just realized how awesome bots can be as you could literally as a community member make a bot that did that, right? Replied to self voters on comments? I wonder what the back lash would be lol. For instance, some people upvote themselves on comments just enough to be at the top of the list. Not 100%. Maybe just $0.10 worth.
For sure. We are not going to have the bot comment because you do you open the bot up to flagging itself. Just a little pinch of a flag instead to get the point across.
The point is that if vests are split between accounts they are necessarily small by virtue of being split.
It is impossible in a decentralized system to limit account creation, except as it is currently limited by time, and/or funding requirements on Steemit.
At least I can think of no mechanism that might do so. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, however, and suspect brighter eyes than mine carefully looking at the issue might well find better ways.
That's fresh thinking on the matter, and exactly what I meant when I said someone else besides me might have ideas I couldn't come up with. I am aware that, in principle, the economic constraints on Steemit that cause new accounts to need to be delegated Steem in order to make posting possible, are mechanisms that might potentiate such limits as you discuss.
I'm not sure of details, but that may be the right way to handle spam and plagiarism. At least it's an avenue that has potential.
My question is...based on the way that curation rewards work, if you upvote your comments that were upvoted by other users right before the deadline to upvote, does it give them better curation rewards? Someone wrote a detailed post about the timing of votes and how it affects curation payouts earlier this week...wish I had the link to it...and it inferred that's the way it worked as far as upvoting your posts. At least then you'd be more a team player about upvoting comments, plus you could convert the voting power almost immediately into steem power when it paid out 12 hours later.
I really think moderation is key here, and that allocating your upvotes to other users wisely can be more lucrative than up-voting your own comments.
The white paper states Steemit has deliberately made the rewards for earliest votes highest, in order to reward those that discover content and curate it first more, to encourage curation work.
I fail to see that accounts randomly accessing Steemit per schedules that have nothing to do with when posts are made could possibly be advantaged by this. However, self votes, and coordinated cliques, certainly can.
Draw your own conclusions as to the true motivations behind this mechanism.
Edit: speelingh. Hookt ahn fonix rilly werkt fer mee!
I'm amazed I hadn't thought of that (upvoting someone's post right before a deadline for payout) and then receiving the rewards more quickly. I can't answer your question but I'm curious about that now too. Anyone who's been on Steemit for a few months or more has seen that it's much healthier than it was before (I don't just mean the price being higher). There are some "problems" that will never be solved because they're just impossible lol. I agree that I'll earn more by posting good content and contributing to discussions like this one than I would just upvoting myself all day. Plus, why would I want to shoot the project in the foot if I am an investor?