[Opinion] What is the problem with self voting?
My views on this problem are mixed. On one hand, it really hurts Steemit.com by delegating a percentage of the reward pool unfairly (in some cases) to articles that are not worth the payout. On the other hand, users must earn the steem they vote with either by contributing quality work to the platform in the first place, or by buying large amounts of steem, which greatly helps raise the price of steem, in turn helping users who already possess it. So, it is a sticky situation. I believe that this is the exact reason why the downvote was implemented, and users who give themselves unfair amounts of rewards shall (and should) have their article downvoted to a proportion equal to the amount of work put into the article. However, some users have taken this to an extreme and are downvoting people for self voting, no matter the article. I feel that there is nothing wrong with self voting, as long as the rewards reflect the quality of work presented by the author. Some users have proposed solutions, such as banning self voting. I feel that that would be a mistake. Users who already use this to earn rewards would just use other accounts to vote for themselves, a process that cannot be banned without banning voting as a whole. I also think this would have the unintended consequence of discouraging investment in steem for new users, considering that they cannot vote for themselves. Like it or not, they are shareholders, and want to use their steem as they see fit. Some people are only in the system to earn, and that is okay. There are proper systems (the down vote) in place to discourage abuse. But, I have had my share of articles that I put a lot of time into, and received nothing for my work. I, as anyone else would do, would vote as I see proportionally fit. That is a fundamental that this platform was founded on, rewarding work proportional to its quality. Where I draw the line for self voting is when a user spends five minutes on an article, posts it, then upvotes 100 percent, and repeats 5 more times. That is why the downvote was made. So, as I see it, the platform does not need any alterations to deal with such a problem, other shareholders need to carefully monitor high reward articles, and there are users who are, and do a very nice job. Currently, I think the advancement of steemit and steem as a whole relies on developers working to add cool new features, and users working to bring quality users into the platform.
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Patronage of the arts has been around for millennia. This platform is really no different accept our posts will be obsolete in 7 days, yet live in infamy. Those that create from the head and heart will do so in a blissful manner and the hustlers will hustle. The game may have changed but the players are the same. One old man's opinion.
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 ; -)
Question: Does self-voting 100% translate to resteeming your own post? Also, does downvoting translate to flagging?
Self-voting 100% has a similar impact to resteeming your post, in that it might make the post more visible, but it's not the same thing. Self-voting 100% just means voting for your own post with 100% voting power. (if you don't have a vote slider, it uses 100% automatically). Resteeming broadcasts the post to your followers' feeds, and as far as i know, there's no way to resteem a post from the same account that posted it.
Downvoting and flagging are two names for the same thing. Technically, on the block chain it's called a downvote because it has the opposite effect to an upvote, but it's commonly referred to as "flagging", and there's a little flag icon on steemit that lights up if a post gets downvoted.
I qualify this as a "spammy" comment, and judging by your reputation and comment history, I believe this is a pattern.
Upvoted & RESTEEMED! :)