I actually think that right now it's better to join the self voters than to counter them.
The broken SBD peg with Steem Dollars at $8 means that currently the rewards are provided 22% by the stakeholding community and 78% by SBD speculators. That extra 350% purchasing power can be directed towards removing Steem from the market, which would raise the price of Steem due to the law of supply and demand. Raising the price of Steem would be good for all stakeholders, and in particular it would increase the supply of SBD, resulting in SBD returning to normal and all of our votes issuing more SBD per Steem.
There is a risk that the self voting taboo would be broken entirely and not just temporarily, but those who do this will end up with more voting power to police self voting in the future when there is no peg that needs fixing.
Some good points here to digest.
Interesting perspective, but why is a high SBD value such an issue? And how do you know those cashing out SBD are buying STEEM? Clearly they don't care about the long-term welfare of this platform, so they are more than likely buying some shitcoin that is mooning this week. I'd be surprised if they are buying STEEM. If they wanted to help the STEEM price, they'd prevent this drama and protect the network instead of create it. Stunts like this keep investors away who might otherwise really like STEEM.
SBD is supposed to be a stable token to facilitate commerce. That may not be prioritized by Steemit Inc any more, but it's still worth pursuing.
I don't, but whether they are or not, every stakeholder has the power to direct this excess purchasing power towards removing liquid Steem from the market. This would be the SBD peg in action. While the SBD peg is broken, it makes more sense to do this and to raise the price of Steem via constrained supply, than to try and plug the leak of selfish voting.
Once the peg is fixed those who purchased SP this way will have more power to police when the money is coming primarily from the community again instead of SBD speculators.
I am usually one of the ones who downvotes self voters. You can look through my history, I have regularly burned my voting power down to near 0% on downvoting self voters alone. However right now trying to police self voters is a bit like enforcing a ration during a bounty.
Every sale is somebody else's buy.
Who is buying it on the open market?
Isnt a low price, followed by a pump, in their best interests?
If you counter the votes, then the SBD goes to someone else instead. Some portion of that will be used to power up, most will likely be sold for other cryptos and fiat. Some of it will have gone to people contributing value, and some will have gone to yet more self voters. At least if you vote yourself and use the money to power up or burn Steem, you can maximize the amount of speculator purchasing power (75%+ of the PP is coming from SBD speculators) is directed towards removing liquid Steem from the market.
We're still in a position where well over 90% of SP is held by less than 1% of accounts, so we don't yet know how that will work empirically. My hope is that it is distributed more fairly. Right now when a whale downvotes another whale, the Steem put back into the pool will mostly be distributed again by other whales.
You can see what accounts are getting the most rewards here. You can see who is primarily distributing the rewards, as well as lots of other interesting stuff here