Any account with a positive reputation, including bots and yourself, will move your reputation rating upward. Frequency of the voting, percentage of the vote given, the SP behind it, all factor in. For that reason it's difficult to say how much or how little it's changing. The point is, it does.
In other words, instead of your reputation score being influenced solely by human curators, you influence it with a self-upvote, and a voting bot does, too. In my mind, that makes the reputation score a less of a big deal than what I believed it to be. If you can influence your own score to whatever degree, then why have one?
Especially when there doesn't appear to be a consensus about the worth of reputation on Steemit. There are those who swear by it, and there are those who think it does little to tell anything meaningful about an author or their content.
(If I had to guess, I would say using bots at the beginning would move your reputation faster, but that you would have to increase the amount of bot use and the percentage of use in order to continue fast reputation change. However, a person with a large SP or delegation could also move the reputation upward through self-upvoting. Combined, the reputation moves that much more.)
Because the self-upvote is generally immediate, a curator won't see anything from it. Bots upvoting at the maximized for profit moment with enough vote weight and power behind it will beat a human curator. Bots stacked one after the other will freeze them out completely.
Now, I realize that depending on the number of human upvotes you get, and their weight, they might still have a greater influence on your reputation as well as your author rewards. But what are human curators getting out of it if the bots freeze them out? You'll have to be a fairly large account yourself in order to gain any curation reward.
So, I don't know. The more I learn about these practices, the less I like them.
I also continue to wonder how the masses are going to react. With well over 500,000 of 760,000-plus accounts inactive, I think we already have a good idea. If Steemit or Busy or any other platform is not fun and easy to use, as well as truly social and profitable enough, people leave the platforms for whatever works better.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Things need to change. I'd rather it not be a hardfork. I'd rather change come from us, because then it will be permanent, rather than too many of us trying to figure out the next workaround.
It sort of shows how much a person has contributed, but it's not a certain thing. I did learn that only people with a higher rep can negatively impact your rep through flagging.
Yeah, so all of us in the mid-range being yelled at to flag, let alone the newbies, we're just not going to accomplish more than a symbolic gesture, unless we pound on someone new. I guess that's what the big fish want, though, someone willing to waste their time falling on their own sword over and over. That'll show those spammers!
There are better ways, maybe harder ones, to go about this, and you pick and choose your fights.
Most people take it as an act of war when you flag them, even those in the wrong. Then, they have the nerve to ask why you're not flagging every account! Can't see them all and don't have enough juice to effectively do it because they're legion is why. Justification is going to be the death of us all. :)
Ha ha ha, I was thinking about that last night. I'm not sure if Steemit can stand long-term. I'm not sure the foundation is firm. Still, I'm enjoying the ride. :)
If I were going to flag, I'd wait until I had a ton of SP and delegate a portion to an alt account so my account wouldn't be retaliated against. Even if they're peons spamming/scamming, I still don't want that action on my account.
I didn't realise self voting helped it go up too. That seems a little odd. But so does self voting in the first place. :p
It took a while to piece that tidbit about self-upvoting together, but I found it in a comment on a post about something else.
Of course, if you don't have much SP it's not going to move things that fast. But the more you get, the more it affects it. It's still going to be incremental, but combined with what a self-upvote is giving you, plus what it's potentially taking away from a curator, it seems to work more and more against the human curator.
As for the oddity, we'd be in the minority on that one. In my mind, we might as well set a price on how much we think the post is worth, because even if we're just trying to make something off the post by retaining our own portion of the reward pool, we're setting a minimum value to our post.
I wouldn't mind that if the amount went to curation, rather than back to you. Then, it would act more like advertising. Of course, it would only be fair if no one upvoted, or only one did, either the full amount, or a portion of it came back to you. You self-upvoted, no one bit, back to you it goes.
What I find funny is you can flag yourself too lol, I've been very naughty today, time to flag. :)
The thing is if they removed self voting then it would force people to vote for others, that might not fix all the problems but surely it would help? Like it would probably cause some to just make another account, but a lot of people probably would start using it properly... maybe.. haha
I don't know, maybe it would. I'd love to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it's just as likely that second or third or fourth account would get open, or something else would be done to take it's place. People seem to take great pride in creating workarounds, or ways to "game" the system. I mean, it's amazing the lengths some people are prepared to go to acquire every possible scintilla of reward money.
I find accounts all the time, that just post shit to a random made up tag so they don't show up anywhere, they won't comment anywhere except their own basically hidden post because they are in hiding, then just upvote themselves.
So that's your secret. :D
I think if you remove the self-vote, those people will just create bots or use alt accounts to vote for them. There's always a workaround. The only way past it would be some kind of KYC.
Honestly, I'm surprised that Steemit doesn't have some kind of identification system. After all, they allow the posting of NSFW content and they allow kids as young as 13 to sign up. That's not ok in the USA. I' surprised there haven't been legal issues from that as Steemit is knowingly providing a space where kids under 18 can look at porn and not have to say they're over 18. There's no verification process.
Wow, that took a tangent!
One of my many secrets.. :p
Yes people can already use services that auto vote a specific account, so whatever is done it's never going to be perfect.. lol, only way is to remove the reward system completely then they all leave. haha
Problem is, it will still be on the blockchain, anyone can just post stuff to it and it will show up here, no way to police it really, except for flagging it. As far as I know the NSFW feature is fairly new and it's purely just a front end feature of steemit, nothing to do with the blockchain itself, so it just hides anything tagged with that here. I suppose that is at least something good.
Helpful post 👍
What did you find helpful? If you wouldn't mind expanding on that, I would find a comment like that to be helpful to me.