I can see a major problem with allowing anonymous upvotes (especially ones that have power in the rewards system) in the fact that hackers would then just create tons of accounts and point them to articles they write (or articles they are paid to upvote) and reap massive rewards.
Could a simple "I'm not a robot" check help? Including them in the rewards is definitely a longer shot, I probably should have left that bit out. Unique upvote ip addresses as a sort of metric of good content? It's potentially useful data. But yeah, skip the anonymous upvote as an input to the rewards for the moment!
Even with IP address logging, hackers could probably find a way to use an IP randomizer to spoof the system.
I would love to see anonymous voting though. I have a ton of friends on Facebook and Twitter that have stated they would upvote if they could without signing up for another site that they would only have done so they could upvote my one article. Catch 22. They are interested in certain content but that content is not here on Steemit so they don't see enough value to joining, yet.
Exactly. A casual user just wants to be able to say thumbs up or write a congrats without all the bother of actually joining up. Then after coming back a few times maybe...
Exactly. I see responses like this a lot. While we, Steemit users, see and think we understand the power/earning of being on the platform, sadly others do not.