RE: The Main Reason I (and my witness @l0k1 thereby) are Anti-Self-Voting
I think you clearly explained that you feel the rules now make your self vote profitable. I am not going to check your SP holdings, as I feel it's nunamybidness, but I suspect that your vote is probably more valuable to you when it increases the power of the network effect regarding your account, i.e. voted for someone else.
You are a coder, and better understand the guts of Steemit than I. I understand logic, however, so feel competent to comment on those logical operations, although, as I have not read the code (cuz it'd be like trying to read Bulgarian for me =p) I may not be aware of all the operations.
I suspect that a great deal of the concentration of SP in a small number of accounts is caused by only two logical 'laws' in the code. One is the weighting of VP by SP. Were VP equal, disregarding speculations about whether people would continue to hold Steem, there would be no, or only a very small, reason to self vote.
The second relevant 'law' is that of post timing, and how curation rewards are doled out. I have witnessed this being intentionally abused in order to mine SP from the pool. An author sure to trend is in chat regularly with a select group of similar authors. As these accounts hold significant SP, they each wield substantial VP.
By understanding how curation rewards are calculated (the specifics of which have remained unimportant to me, as I am unconcerned with building my SP), which is HUGELY impacted by time, such that almost all curation rewards are divvied up between curators that vote after a certain waiting period, and before those rewards are dramatically reduced, this collusion can capture almost 100% of the curation rewards for a given post, while propelling the author's post onto the trending page.
They can then do this for another author in their group, and so on, until their daily VP is exhausted, and then do it again the next day.
I submit that this also can be detected via the algorithms you could employ, although it is more complex. The repetitive nature of such collusion is probably simple to detect with the tools you use to detect the most abusive self voters.
I will note that, because of the way I use Steemit, mostly as a means of ingesting content, and entering debate, rather than as a way of simply publishing a blog, I get about 66% of my rewards from curation (so saith steemdb).
So curation rewards, particularly if well timed by collusion, are substantial. Further, equally weighting VP eliminates the financial motivation to so collude, and would return the purpose of the rewards pool to than intended by the devs (according to the white paper), rewarding content creators - NOT providing an additional profit motive for holding SP, as some have argued (this is argued against in the white paper).
Whaddya think?
Edit: spelling and additional info.
I think you bring up valid points and of course I like how you have taken what I said, and then extended and expanded and thereby reinforced the logic that I am using in my argumentation. I will digest this further, but I would suspect you could get a bit of rewards by posting a more formalised expression of these ideas in a new post.
Thanks! I really don't care much about my personal rewards (although I'm not agin' em), I just do thrive on reading good posts (like this one) and entering dialogue. It's how I learn stuff I don't know.
Thanks for teaching =)
If you can't vote for yourself why vote
If you payed money into this investment offer why not take your dividends?
There's a couple good reasons not to self vote. The first is that curation was designed to provide rewards to content creators, not dividends to investors. The white paper clearly states how such financial manipulation is a threat to the platform.
The second is that votes are more valuable as a means of attracting a community than they are of providing dividends, if you aren't so loaded with SP that the community can't compete with your ability to mine rewards from the pool.
My self votes are worth a nickel or so. Each follower I attract to my postings has a monetary value far in excess of that, because all of them have votes, and most of them have votes that are worth more than mine.
But these are merely financial incentives, and Steemit is a social media platform, not a capital market. The real benefits of Steemit aren't financial at all, but leverage the rewards system to create a robust market for ideas and community interactions.
Just like money is a veil behind which real wealth is obscured (those goods and services which determine quality of life), so rewards are but means of creating robust and diverse communities that can deliver relevant ideas and mechanisms of enhancing our understanding of the world, and provide opportunities to take action based on that understanding in concert with like minded allies.
Capital gains from price appreciation in Steem is a direct result of Steemit successfully growing and creating that community, and this mechanism, time tested and proven to work for other cryptocurrencies like BTC, for example, is also far more potential of profit than mining rewards.
Steem has recently lost a lot of value, seemingly in concert with cryptocurrencies generally, rather than for reasons specific to it. It's about $1 presently. BTC is over $2k. If Steem appreciates to even 1% of BTC, investors in Steem stand to achieve a gain of over 20000%.
For reasons, I think Steem is a better currency than BTC, and I am far more bullish than that in the long term. However, even at that low price, investors are far more rewarded by capital gains through the traditional price appreciation mechanism than through manipulating curation to mine the rewards pool.
The fact that you can mine the pool today with self votes, and that there is no guarantee of price appreciation, is a factor promoting self votes presently. However, that rewards pool mining is a direct attack on Steemit's ability to produce that price appreciation in Steem, and this should be viewed as a threat to capital gains, and strongly opposed by investors that desire those gains.
That there isn't an outcry against rewards pool mining by whales is valuable information regarding whether they view Steemit as pump and dump scheme, or a long term driver of price appreciation in Steem, imho.
Here's a metaphor for mining the rewards pool of Steemit in terms of capital gains. If stock investors purchase stock in a broom manufacturing company and then claim the change those brooms sweep up after they're sold, sales of those brooms is going to be negatively impacted by this 'dividend' mechanism.
There's exactly the same impact on Steem price from financial manipulation of curation that you would expect to see the broom companies stock price experience in that situation.