Until it is one vote with no weighting on the votes of minnows and up then voting will be meaningless until the userbase can counter an account like @freedom (which seems the defacto King/Queen maker at this point) and witnesses swapping votes. Your bot will likely benifit the top 50 which people will pick randomly (and probably the first 30) to get your rewards.
The goal is a lofty one, yet an uneducated vote seems no better than not voting at all to me.
P.S. Your welcome to steal this bot idea instead....
Sorry mate, I never heard about this post... Our bot is already in development, it will be deployed soon.
It has a downside for sure, as some people (minority or majority, hard to tell) will vote just for the rewards.
The initiative will also include presentations of witnesses, and a try at educating people (that's the hard part, but if there's no one trying, there's no chance to get it done).
For your idea, the problem stays : if you don't have a "whale" in your party, it doesn't matter how many users are in your group if they don't weigh in SP.
This said, your solution will be perfect in a system of "one-person-one vote" and could really influence things in that configuration. But the idea of lobbying is a really interesting one, and could be done in a way if we authorize people to proxy their votes to the bot and get the rewards.
Maybe it could be a good compromise : get upvotes for proxying to us, and we'll do our own lobbying, but that way, it defeats the purpose of educating and promoting democracy.
That sounds like a good idea to proxy vote for them. It sounds a lot better than @isnochys who offers to buy your vote in his profile. 😎
The problem for me would be the corruptibility of such a system. I have no link to any witness, even if I already spoke with some, but there's no way for people who proxy to verify I'm not voting to promote my own interests. But I think your comment was ironic...
Maybe proxying for rewards, creating a platform with collegial decisions for the people who are genuinely interested (another layer of democracy but this time with a one-person-one-vote system), it could be done. What do you think ? It approaches your idea.
The only way I'm seeing now (but this can evolve with time) is :
Yes, in my brief idea about a Steem Political Party the idea was that a platform should be voted on by those in The Block. Some examples may be we support releasing witness votes from witnesses inactive for more than 3 months or we believe self voting should be removed again from the software. Then after lobbying, witness votes could be directed proportionally to those that support The Block's platform. That should make things more transparent and less corruptable in my opinion.
I like the idea !
The only problem is, for having on impact of votes, you need SP, so ultimately you will need witnesses or at least big accounts (generally they're linked with witnesses) to support the Block.
So you still have an "independence" problem.
I think, to begin, it could be good to take the proxy system, make a platform for people to vote for the 30 witnesses they want and the votes from the Block are then casted by the proxy to have a bigger impact.
When you have that, you can begin to interrogate the Block about the changes they would like to see, and maybe affiliate with some witnesses with the same vision as the Block (and why not even having them join it), gaining SP and influence with time passing, allowing you to switch from "vote aggregating" to "active lobbying".
Yes, a step at a time sounds like a sensible approach. There is the Steem Power factor yet there is also the court of popular opinion. Embarrassing the witnesses into change if you will. If this is a ponzi sheme by big stake holders, as @dan may have realized, then those that believe in breaking that monopoly should be ready for a real hard fork (not the STINC kind) to make things right.
My interest here is the tech, having used Bitcoin to buy Minnowhood not blog posting. It is my belief that solutions found here will influence an untold amount of blockchain applications of the future. There is no emotional investment in this particular version for me.
Most users will want a more graded weighting to rewards, especially as more users are chasing after the ever shrinking reward pool. There is no way for this platform from stopping folks from advertising a new platform on this one. A real fork would mean that users could start on the new version with their same funds and keys. STINC is very vunerable to good competition.
Anyway, hopefully it need never come to that.
Update: Here is my proposal to the DevCoin Community.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.msg38975686#msg38975686
Good point. That's why we will also (re)introduce witnesses who are outside the top 50. Not the ultimate solution, but...