criticising downvoting because of political agreement. I think this is the real problem - not the self upvote.
You have found the biggest blemish in the steemit platform.
The down vote, and how people use it. I was very anti-flag for the first half of my journey here on steemit. The problem is that most solutions open other doors. Without the flag there is no way to counter when someone is caught colluding and voting their own stuff and creating like a perpetual reward pool draining monster that just grows and grows.
You see there is not centralized group of people that get to police things. That is on us.
So a lot of solutions in the past don't work here. We need to do some seriously out of the box thinking as we are in knew never before explored territory.
I am familiar with the woes of the down vote. I don't have a workable solution for that though some people at various times have proposed ideas I'd be willing to participate in as an experiment.
We need to be willing to try new things, and if they don't work take a step back.
Steemit has problems. Even with the problems it is a wonderous place. We simply need to try to as a community come up with NEW solutions to these totally NEW situations. Otherwise, yes there will be many things we've come to know and loathe. Namely war.
Agree - thanks for your thoughts.
Happy to participate in any reasonable and honest experiment and out of the box approach.