LOTS of people upvote their own posts, even minnows with next to no SP. So why not call those people out as well? Everyone who self-votes is taking something from the reward pool and giving it to themselves, so my question is where (and why) is the cutoff? If I am a guy with 500 SP and I upvote ALL of my posts how is this any different? Sure, my vote is worth less but the action is the same, self-voting, and if I can do it so can you, and anyone else for that matter.
You say if this action (self-voting)is allowed to continue it will lead to bad things for steemit. First of all who can stop someone from self-voting their own post(answer-only the person who self-votes their own post has that power). I mean this is the way the system was set up, for better or for worse, and I knew that coming in so I'm gonna roll with it. I certainly do not want some kind of Steemit police set up to stop only certain people from upvoting their own posts because where does it stop? In haejins case, he also has a single whale upvtoting all his posts to the moon. Well now are you gonna tell this guy he is not allowed to vote this way? It's a slippery slope man.
This leads to your, "long answer short" paragraph. Who is to judge what content is good and what is shit? Steemit police again? I mean I LOVE this post from Skepitc, but I bet someone saw it and hated it. So who is right? If Steemit fails because of self-voting, so be it. I would be sad and hurt as hell but at least I know I did my best to upvote, comment & encourage the posts I enjoy. I turned to Steemit (and crypto) for the freedom of it and the last thing I want is someone telling me what I can and can't view/upvote. If I wanted that bullshit I would have signed up for fakebook or twitter.
There is no need to 'forbid' anything, but the platform could make it less attractive to upvote oneself (including multiple or 'friendly' accounts) again and again.
One idea would be 'diminishing returns'.
The other one not to let the reward curve start linear any longer.
People who want to game the system will always find a way to game the system. The issue is not @haejin or anyone else raping the reward pool.
The issue is that if people were to create quality content and promote it themselves, either by paid vote bots or by sharing links on other websites, it would be irrelevant because they could individually monetize their own posts and not have to rely on getting STEEM/SBD as a reward.
Nice to read from you: I like it a lot if famous authors take their time to reply to me. ;-)
Actually I don't blame the gamers (at least not predominantly - they act as humans more or less just tend to act if there is a possibility), but yes, I do blame the system.
Every system can be gamed, but it shouldn't be as easy as possible. I guess you agree that we need any kind of reward curve? OK, if we need one, then we also should think about which kind of curve would be the best ...
It is a simple fact, that the more attractive self-voting (including the use of multiple or 'friendly' accounts) is, the higher the percentage of self-upvotes will be. (In my own case for example upvoting solely myself would definitely lead to a higher profit than I am currently making - therefore I decided to opt for a mix of self-voting and - manually - upvoting content which I like).
Is that a problem? In my eyes, yes, it is: why should people try to make as good articles as possible if - in an extreme case - anyway everybody upvotes himself only? If I upvote my own articles (and others are upvoing theirs), then it doesn't matter if I write a novel or a one-liner. And if then potential investors check this site with all these 'one-liners' ... do you think they are interested to invest in Steem and thus contribute to increase the value of our beloved coin?
Of course the above scenario is exaggerated. Some authors do have their pride and - even if it's not worth it - continue to create really good stuff ...
Of course you also have a point: many authors don't really invest all they can in their articles, and instead of that produce a lot but at the same time rather cheap stuff which nobody is really interested to read.
But that's only part of the truth: I know many good authors who really give their very best to produce something they can be proud of. If it would be more attractive to upvote many different accounts instead of the same ones again and again (for example by introducing 'diminishing returns') then I think more new Steemians would get the attention they deserve.
Concerning promoting ones stuff that's just not my cup of tea, but, well, people are different, methods are different ... that's alright. Maybe I am just not enough of a 'businessman', but it has nothing to do with the quality of my articles: I have nothing to hide :-) , and I can assure you that in every single article I do the very best I am able to do (even if I agree that everything of course is a matter of taste: for example for you my articles about water striders or the near forest are probably even less exciting than the "68 white rhinos", haha).
Have a nice day! :)
Awesome, I would support both of these ideas. Thanks for the enlightenment!
Spread them on Steemit then ... :)
There really is no answer to this. If you disallow self voting, you'll just have more people participate in the group pools where they essentially trade votes, or they'll make alt accounts that vote themselves. It's going to boil down to a culture thing to stop self-voting, and I honestly don't know if it's even possible.
Self-voting is not the problem. Lack of quality content is. Lack of an entrepreneurial mindset is.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you were to create a piece of content that you knew 100% would go viral if enough people saw it. Your friends would share it on their FB page, people would post it to Reddit, etc.
If your livelihood was dependent on this post doing well, would you spend some money to promote it?
If, on the other hand, you knew it was trash and half-assed it because someone told you that you could get free money on here for posting stuff, would you pay to promote it?
The problem is that people don't create shareable, quality content. That is what will grow this platform. That is what will attract people here.
Let's pretend for a second that there were 20 other people who wrote posts like I do. Maybe in a different style, but let's say they were long, engaging and entertaining. Let's say they wrote 2 per week. Let's also say that they paid money to use upvote bots to promote them. What would happen?
You would transform the Trending page overnight. All of a sudden, Steemit would be a fucking cool ass place to go to see what kinds of crazy shit was posted there in the past 24 hours.
How is this not blowing people's minds? Shit, if I had $5m to invest I'd put it all into STEEM, teach people how to write something entertaining and fill the Trending page with posts that I deemed entertaining.
But people don't think big enough. They can't look beyond some random picture of their backyard or their 3 year old that they think is going to get them some pity upvotes. Think bigger.
The addition of literally 20 high quality content creators could blow this platform off the map. Where are they?
Self-voting is not a huge problem. It's more that it's neutral. I don't think it damages the platform that much, it just makes it run completely sideways. You are right that an entrepreneurial mindset is missing. Even looking at bid bots, who are the entrepreneurs? The owners of the bots. They could upvote themselves, but why would they do that when people are paying them far more than their upvotes are worth right now?
The main issue people have with self voting is just that people upvote themselves instead of quality content, but there honestly isn't much quality content in the first place. Part of the problem is that people just aren't making it, but I think a reason for that is because there is an incentive to make content that appeals to a select few people here on Steemit. If I made an article that went viral and 17 million people read it and loved it, that fact alone earns me 0$. It is only if STEEM holders upvote me that causes me to make a profit. Now, if I wrote that article then I'm sure I would get plenty of high upvotes, the point I'm making is more just that people choose to target those STEEM holders directly. Cater to their interests, write articles about STEEM itself, it is the one thing we all have in common after all. This leads to the content on the site being very insular, and not having broad outside appeal, because why should it? I don't make money from making things that everyone loves, I make money from making things that STEEM whales love.
I'm not much of selfvoter, as my ratio of sv is around 1:5. But for those who do...I think they would find a way to get around. If not anything else, they could make a deal with few other steemians to vote on each other's comments and posts. There are many services, you can pay to be upvoted with 200-250%. You did not do it, you are not the upvoter. But everyone is dealing with their own way how to handle things. So yeah, I wouldn't change that, and certainly would not like to have "I'm looking what you're doing" kinda script in the system. That's why we wanted to get out of the centralised system.
"Everyone who self-votes is taking something from the reward pool and giving it to themselves"
Which they deserve and are entitled to as investors of Steemit.
Not agreeing/disagreeing with anyone in particular, just jumping in with a factoid.
Agreed. Just pointing out that fact as well.
@baah
The problem is about honesty and integrity. If we stand together in trust to say that we will upvote quality content, then we have to do that...he should go and read it