Can he be stopped, or is the system still able to be game by him so easily?
What would the developers have to change in order to stop behavior like this?
I have been saying, and still believe that they should take away the ability to self-vote, but would that actually ever happen is a different story all together.
That is a totally pointless and harmful fix. However, I realize you propose it with good intentions. Let me elaborate.
Self-voting cannot be stopped. Not unless you remove delegation and monitor every account for IP addresses, banning multi-accounters and sock-puppeteers.
It's actually better to leave it in, because at least you can track it. If you've been following this thread, you may have noticed this has nothing to do with self-voting. Self-voting is a witch hunt newbies to the platform throw in on (often out of frustration with rewards or jealousy) without even considering the game-theory ramifications (that it cannot be stopped because of vote-trading, multi-accounts, sock puppets, delegation, etc and that it would greatly reduce the utility, and therefore price, of Steem).
Consider if there were two versions of Steem, one that allowed you to vote on yourself to promote posts, and one that didn't. We all know which one would be worth significantly more to the market.
The solution must be carrot based, not stick.
PS - This is not an attack on you, thank you for your comment.
What if everyone on Steemit just wrote, and up-voted their own content all day... could that system survive long-term?
Probably not. We aren't in ideological disagreement. But because of delegation, vote trading and sock-puppets, you can't stop it. You would just help the best of the abuse even better since they'd be savvy enough to do it in private slacks, etc.
You have to make it more rewarding to do the desired behavior, rather than attempt to punish or prevent everyone else from the undesired behavior.
The Steem whitepaper is very clear about this, noting you cannot prevent all abuse and the crabs-in-a-bucket analogy.
Because of sock-puppets, botnets, and delegation, even weighting VP differently wouldn't eliminate the ability to mine the rewards pool.
However, all those techniques are more difficult than the present scheme, and entail more expense.
The various botnet, and sock-puppet schemes are penetrable, as @sherlockholmes is demonstrating daily.
Eventually, the decision as to weighting may be not in the control of Steemit, even stinc, at all, but up to the SEC.
Or whoever buys out the mined stakes and takes over the witnesses.
I don't know if Sherlock's work is sustainable, or if it is fairly rewarded however?
The more Steemit grows, the more of these Sherlock's you need, and most of these bot nets can simply move on and recreate the scheme with new accounts pretty easily. I don't think a reactive strategy will ever work, it's needs to be proactive, ie. not profitable enough to be worth abusing, or less profitable to abuse than act in line with standards.
You are not wrong regarding @sherlockholmes. I reckon he needs a staff already. He's up against moneyed interests with networks of thousands of bots on Steemit.
I am in agreement with you generally regarding bots. However, I am unsure that there can be a mechanism that completely makes such unprofitable at all.
It may be that security is a thing we need to buy, to some degree. Ain't sure.
At least it's being done some right now, and @sherlockholmes is the best at it I've seen. Unfortunately, I always run into his posts when I've depleted my VP =/
Like now =p
Even so, he exposes generally "smaller issues" than captain-votes-every-comment-$20 Craig-Grant and these top two reward pool pullers.
I don't think he has the SP or support to handle the big fish.
Well, in my opinion, people should just blog on Steemit just to blog.
It's a great place to do so, plus you may make a penny here or there... it's still better than any other place to blog for free that's for sure!
I totally agree, but, we do have to somewhat consider investor's concerns too. They are what makes the Steem token have value. If we couldn't sell Steem, I'm not sure Steem would still be the best place to blog free anymore.
?
Sorry, that makes no sense. I meant sell, whoops.