as much as I like the community, the steem I bought is also an investmant for me and one of the largest in my whole portfolio.
I bought in as a dolphin, so I started with no followers but some voting power.
Of course I want my investmant to grow and protect espically here with a calculated inflation. I also think this is more then fair, since I took the risk in powering everything up so I am in it for the good and bad.
While I still upvote a lot of others peoples content and comments under my own posts as a thank you and to keep readers engaged. I also upvote my own comments, as in some I put a lot thoughts and see them almost as an own post but also for tactical reasons in big posts like this, to see my comment at the top.
I saw posts with just 1 sentence and 5 comments from the author were he just upvoted all of them also and to be fair it is his right to do with his voting power what he wants to do but for me this is somone I will propaply not engage with.
To totally not be able to upvote myself would be a huge turn off, for me and I think also for a lot of other people with smaller followings. Also it would create more "behind closed doors circles" were votes get exchanged, which would not help steemit because it would make it less accessable imo.
I am still quite new and learning more about steemit everyday and so far my experience here has been very positive and I think regardless how the system would be changed there will be people trying to exploit it.
Your investment will grow also if the value of steem increases. It will not likely increase if it has negative perceptions associated with it. Food for thought.
I up vote my own posts. I don't up vote my comments. I do up vote A LOT of comments though. Just not my own.
My idea of investment in growth is to grow followers so I naturally grow more from their interest, while working hard to grow the community and keep steemit and other steem blockchain projects a positive place. Thus, I earn more from my work from my followers while hopefully also helping to increase the value of steem itself, so that becomes a force multiplier on any investment I already have. It is pretty neat that there are a lot of different ways to grow investments here.
Self voting of comments could potentially lose followers, or not get people that otherwise would have followed. If that is not part of your investment model then that is completely acceptable. If it is then it is perhaps worth reconsidering.
I also am I hope pretty reasonable. I almost never flag people. I very much dislike the flag. Yet, there are many people that will use it. I foresee self voting of comments (perhaps not for a few cents amount to bump it in a coversation) leading to some people wielding the flag. I wish they wouldn't, but I do believe it is going to happen.
That is partially why I wrote this post. I was seeking a way to address the issue and to at least get people thinking before war breaks out. War is never good for our investment here.
"Self voting of comments could potentially lose followers, or not get people that otherwise would have followed. If that is not part of your investment model then that is completely acceptable. If it is then it is perhaps worth reconsidering."
I actually have not considerd that...
I am not sure yet how much time I want to invest into steemit yet and were my journey will go, for now it is a mix between a hobby and investmant.
Also we are talking about self voting on comments in general not under own posts right?
Yeah it is just the comments that we are seeing the blatant exploitation at the moment.
I note that capital markets exist because capital gains exist. Expecting self votes to be necessary to gains is metaphorically comparable to a stock investor in a broom company expecting to receive the change that is swept up with brooms the company sells.
It is neither necessary, nor does it promote the appreciation in the underlying company. In fact it directly impedes it.
The white paper states "In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."
While they state weighting VP (vote power) by SP held by the account is intended to prevent sybil attacks, in fact such weighting merely replaces number of accounts with number of SP. Since it is less expensive and far faster to deploy lots of SP than it is to deploy many accounts with separate votes, the present system makes sybil attacks far easier and less expensive.
Self votes, and coordinated cliques, are sybil attacks.