RE: [Opinion] What is the problem with self voting?
It's really fascinating to watch this whole platform develop and evolve. I love that there's so much civil discussion around these issues.
I really haven't seen self-voting to be much of a problem here, at least on articles if not on comments. It's one of the factors driving demand for Steem Power, and keeping people invested.
Let's see. Best I can figure, if I self-voted at 100% 20 times a day, I'd get about a 0.38% return on my Steem Power. I guess that would be a 139% return on my investment over a year - not too shabby! (Actually higher, since I could compound this if I reinvested in more SP.) So I suppose there is some potential for abuse.
On the other hand, I've found much better growth than that from writing about stuff I think is interesting and meeting and talking to all the fascinating people on here.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree wit you that one of this platform's advantages is its users' abilities to have discussions (Bitcoin has been dealing with factions for a couple of years now). Your calculations are slightly off, you wouldn't return 139% per year because voting 20 times a day on your self at 100% would lower your voting power 40% a day when it only grows back by 20% a day. So, for it to be really effective, you'd have to vote 10 times a day at 100% on yourself, and you'd return 69.5% in a year. So, I agree with you that it's far more worthwhile to earn curation and author rewards.
Whoops - I thought I got more votes than that! No wonder my power always seemed low...
Of course, a 70% return is still damn tempting to your ordinary investor. I mean, the Dow and S&P are up about 15% for the past 12 months, and CDs pay 0.21%. (Making this risk-free investment a loss when you factor in inflation.)
Maybe the most impressive thing about Steemit is that more people aren't self-voting all the time!
I guess maybe that's because most people here realize that Steem's value is tied to the quality of content on the block chain, and believe that the long term growth potential for Steem is higher than the short-term "take the money and run" position. (I know that's what I believe ; -)