RE: @Whales, @Witnesses, We have to talk!
I just made a comment over on the latest @steemitblog posting asking about the 2018 roadmap. If there is a way for every user to only self-upvote themselves or any account no more than 10 times per 7 day period that would work well.
...but I know exactly what you're saying. It would involve expanding the chain to constantly save and retrieve this data.
The only time it becomes important, is during the payout of a post or comment to do the calculation so you could nullify the votes automagically by the payout algorithm.
Perhaps this could be done by a huge account, like @ned with a bot which looks at posts "after no more votes are allowed" before payout and then does this research and adjustment.
Of course though, this is decentralized. A round table discussion by developers is necessary though to see if we could solve this in any number of different ways.
Thanks for your comment, you're right. What sounds easy, rarely is... when it comes to the decentralized and autonomous nature of the chain itself.
Banning or reducing self-upvotes sounds reasonable until you realise that an account can just create sockpuppets and upvote by proxy. Of course, with good auditing you can discover these voting rings, but it does take someone to do it in the first place. I'm keen on creating a bot that identifies this sort of stuff algorithmically and then acts on its findings.
You know about @Patrice and @steemcleaners, right? It has done exactly that for months and months. She busts her ass to find and defeat these voting rings.
I'm only vaguely aware of them. I'm looking to automate the whole process. The bot identifies vote rings via an algorithm and then down votes them.
There is a lot more too it than an algorythm can solve. Patrice has been fighting bot rings since the beginning, there is quite a process involved and human intervention often required. Bots are involved too, but its a big operation. This effort might could use your help, but its already widely known and being done pretty well by steemcleaners. They have a discord and you could go find the project witness @patrice and she might enlist your aide though.
Cheers for that. I've got a lot of projects on my plate at the moment, so I'm happy to not go and reinvent the wheel. ;) I'll try and check in with them on discord at some point.