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Wouldn't that leave people to simply create sock puppet account? I think this isn't a viable solution.

Creating a ton of sock accounts would requires vastly more effort and time than an auto-vote bot, unless I'm mistaken. That's a disincentive to pursuing that particular course of action, especially given that new accounts have practically no weight at all.

Wouldn't it necessitate only one sock puppet account. It could be seen negatively to upvote its own comment this way but it still could be done.

At this point I tend to disagree with this solution and I'm still unsure about the course of actions that should be taken.

I agree with @teamsteem, the creation of just one sock-puppet account is an almost negligibly small discomfort to the average (ab)user. That's why my own algorithms have always treated self-votes and sock-puppet-votes the same.

Can't agree more! In fact, Steemit does not differentiate in a post or a comment and count them together as "posts". But while creating a post, "Upvote post" check box is checked by default and that is discriminatory of Steemit. This default setting makes us think that we should upvote our posts ...and by analogy, upvote our comments too. It's all beyond me.

Actually, this has been changed now and the default is not to upvote your own post. You must now check the box to self-vote.

Yep, that was a change I submitted too :)

And a good one. Well done you!

I understand what you mean, but they're clearly differentiated here on the UI, which would lead me to think that differentiating them via the blockchain shouldn't be particularly difficult.