RE: To vote yourself up, or not to vote yourself up, that's the question.
Should we just codify it into the system that NO ONE can self-upvote "ever"?
Oh wait, what about our botty friends who will upvote their master instead of self-upvoting him or herself?
Seems like you answered your own question why that rule shouldn't be codified into the system. I don't support any change to consensus that doesn't pass the Sybil test. Unfortunately, this is something many Steemians have yet to learn, since it seems like 99% of the changes I see requested on Steem by regular users don't pass the Sybil test.
The excessive self-upvoting problem is a difficult problem to solve that really needs to be left to human beings to try to find and deal with (via downvotes). It is more important than ever because of the linear rewards change, which I hope will provide more benefits than the abuse downsides, but we will have to wait and see how it turns out in practice. To help with this issue, we should try to avoid associating shame with downvoting (aka flagging) blatant self-voters who regularly give themselves too high of a reward (too high is of course subjective).
Downvoting is a healthy and necessary part of the Steem system to keep people in check and fairly allocate rewards to those who produce valued content. It would help if the UI separated out displaying downvotes for the purposes of too high rewards from the more menacing flag which could be reserved as a symbol for downvotes given for reasons involving fraud, scams, plagiarism, and/or hate speech.
Edit: Also, thank you @jesta for ChainBB which allows me to upvote with less than 1% voting weight. Although, it seems its estimated rewards calculation is a bit off.
You're right... Glad you wrote. Notice I did say botty friends because some of these bots are indeed healthy for the system even if people take time to warm up and learn about them. :)
I often hear the term Sybil, but I'd like to define it for our readers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
@arhag is correct. Humans can want things, but sockpuppets and bots will usually find away around the system. So if you implement changes, you better be sure it passes the Sybil test... (Otherwise you could be jumping out of one fire, and into a nastier fire instead)
I especially like this part:
I would love to see that in place.
Seconding this idea of "downvotes" being separate from flags. Maybe downvotes would be half-power flags or something?
IT's tough though, there are times when I wanna downvote something but I feel really awkward about sticking my neck out and looking like a jerk.
Great post BTW - not something I think about too much. My general strategy is to upvote my own original posts, but not comments - which means I'm only giving myself about 2 upvotes per day.
Problem with down votes is, that it ends up being a tit for tat. I as a minnow, down voted a popular article from a whale, so he picked my best article and slugged me. He lost a tiny fraction off is $1000+ article, while I lost a huge bite from my $100 one.
Ya!! I would not have the balls to flag a whale. Sorry that happened to you.
Tit for tat is childish in my opinion and bullying should not be tolerated. Might does not make it right.
Sure, but it does not stop it happening, right or wrong.
No, but as a society, if we all agree on certain etiquette or rules and someone breaks those rules, then as a group, that person is chastised. If (and that's a big IF) we can ever get everyone to agree, then things get solved.
I did see that applied to one of the Steemit scammers that had his post flagged out of existence.
Unfortunately, there are always a few that attempt to gain an upper hand by less-than-honorable-means. As long as there are consequences, it is possible to somewhat control things. That's what makes society a society. At least in my own definition for 'society' (which is people living in harmony with one another).
I totally agree that simply disabling self-up-voting can never work. There are too many ways to get around it, bots, sock-puppets, delegation, multiple accounts. So any option there is right out.
To expect it to be handled by community distribution is tough, because that requires people to give up voting power to remove rewards from someone else. Even if their goal was to increase rewards for other content, they could do that more directly with their power by voting that content up (probably).
It's a tough situation to tackle, but people will definitely generally act in their own financial interest. So expecting down-vote curation to stop it could be tricky.
This guy gets it.
Thanks for your point of view.
Actually I think the bigger problem than the linear reward curve is the higher impact of fewer votes. Some people are now writing exactly 10 short articles per day (as they have 10 heavy 100 % votes available) just to upvote them all with 100 %. This is an example:
https://steemit.com/@sandrino
Apart from that I think the fast growing number of Steemit users would require the exact opposite of a few high impact votes (whereby big accounts tend to reserve their fewer but heavier votes for other 'big fishes' because of the expected heavy upvotes in return).
Instead of that many small votes for many different users would be a much better idea ...