Good writeup, but one thing I see you did not cover here was up-voting yourself being a default setting, at least for me. I personally would like to have the ability to turn off that option. My settings tab does not give me the ability to set that option on or off, too often I miss the check box just before making a post. If there is a place to change that option somehow, then please do this community a favor and write a post that directs us to that place so we can turn that option off. I do not do it on purpose, I just do not see it before posting! So before you start up a crusade to down-vote people just because they have up-voted themselves, it is a witch-hunt in itself. These people might have missed the check box, and posted without unchecking it. For pete's sake people! You're turning this community into a petty bickering, nitpicking platform like Facebook or you-tube!
You DO have the option and FREE WILL to NOT post a comment, NOT up-vote a post, that will limit his/her posts exposure no matter if he/she up-voted themselves or not! Posts are only paied on the first 7 days from what I understand. And think about this, would you upvote someone that has a history of flagging for whatever reason?
We're not concerned with you up voting your posts. Most everyone views that is fine. You did the work you should be able to up vote it.
The problem is in comments. People are exploiting the system and upvoting all of their comments they make on other posts by large amounts. Often more than the post they are commenting on. They then sometimes will not even up vote to post they were commenting on.
You're not going to get flagged for voting on your own BLOG POST. It is the comments where the shady things are occurring now.
Then my sincere apologies for my last comment post, I was getting the understanding that it was about the blog posts getting self up-voted as well as comments. My apologies for my misunderstanding and thank you for clarifying.
No, I don't personally know anyone on steemit that has problems with you up voting your own blog posts.
We actually didn't care about comments either when it was just a few cents for visibility.
Lately though we're seeing people up voting all of their own comments for large amounts. This is not a good thing.
The pro-communist guy I was debating with started with like around a $3 up vote of his comment and we did enough back and forths to where he was down to around $1.50 or so for a comment... but I bet he up voted easily $20 - $30 for himself in his short comments in that back and forth exchange.
Now apparently there are people with a lot more power than him doing the same thing.
The pool of rewards is shared among ALL of us. So if they use this tactic they essentially are syphoning rewards to themselves and impacting EVERYONE on the platform.
I don't up vote my own comments. I do up vote a lot of comments though. :) I just do a small amount for each. I like to encourage discussion. Up voting my own comments does not encourage discussion. :)
Then in that context I have to agree, I do not believe I have ever up-voted my own comments, I will go through confirm that statement. But yeah the commenters I believe should not have the option available to up-vote their own comment.
Or at the very least we could experiment with disabling that and see what happens. It is not the only option, but it is one.
I agree.