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Buying SP and then self-voting isn't investing, it's just draining funds from the reward pool that could (should?) be used to reward authors, otherwise STEEM isn't worth anything. Voting on others earns you curation rewards without any negative effects to the platform. The less you vote on others, the more you're hurting your own investment.

This isn't about what people are earning, it's about the way they're "earning" it.

extreme selfish behaviour will indeed ruin this platform. Those that have like 98% of the rewards going to themselves is exactly the kind of thing that could make this place irrelevant. Looking at this info actually helps me understand human behavior better. I think @teamsteem is a great example of how one does not need to self-vote, even though he could. I guess I still have a ways to go.

To be fair, he only self-voted 0.84% of the total rewards he assigned. That's almost negligible.

As you said we need to focus on the massive abusers for now, starting at people that self-vote more than 50% of the rewards they assign.

yes, it's quite amazing how he does not abuse his delegated SP. An example for us all...

The situation is actually much more complicated than the current analysis gets into. Not to disrespect the current analysis, it is fine for what it is.

BUT, have you thought about and looked into voting behavior in cases where single individuals own multiple accounts and do cross upvoting.

Or what about cases where we have groups of people that have allied to upvote within their own "team", to pull the entire team up independent of the quality of any individual post.

You aren't going to be able to make "rules and laws" to handle all the special cases that people will be able to invent to try to game the system in their favor.

You will provide a valuable service just by posting data on "greediness" measurements. Leave it to the community to sort out how each individual wants to behave after that.

It is a decentralized social media platform. If you don't like decentralized and prefer someone at HQ to make the rules an enforce them secretly and top down; and always in a way that helps HQ, that is a different place.

You want to go to FB, or Reddit, or .....

Yes, i'm part of #project-smackdown and #steem-coop and there's much more to come on voting behavior.

This all sounds good but misses a crucial point: Steemit already has encoded rules that encourage certain behaviors. It is not a rule-free-zone. The algorithms that calculate rewards are a rule set. The only freedoms are those within the current rule-set.

In my opinion the current rule-set is just far too simple - just look at economic modelling to see the other extreme. Changing or adding to the rule-set is an evolution of the platform to steer it towards its original aims. Those aims were just not encoded properly. We are heading towards an extreme of the system - as systems will do - so we can either let the system drift further towards this extreme or change course.

The stats are skewed. I usually upvote myself with 99% of my votes.

More seriously this post was really interesting to me and the tone of it, at least the version I read, was presenting the stats in a pretty neutral manner.

Abusive selfish-voting and its perception are an interesting issue. We'll see out Steem evolve from here and where we take it.

Just to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of abusive selfish voting and bigger % of self-voting isn't necessarily equal with abuse...

but maybe you do vote for others much more than yourself. I always upvote my own post, but I don't vote for my own comments (rarely). I do spend a lot of time voting for others, that is why I"m at 4%.......which I think is reasonable. I think when someone has the 99% of votes going to themselves, well then that is really problematic. It's interesting data to look at for sure.

Buying SP and then self-voting isn't investing, it's just draining funds from the reward pool

No it isn't. The reward pool is fixed in terms of STEEM but not in terms of value (dollars, etc.). STEEM only gets its value from people buying it or holding it. Without people buying it, you can earn all the STEEM you want from the reward pool, but they will be worthless.

Someone who buys SP and then selfvotes is not 'draining' anything and at best can get back a portion of what was put in. It causes no harm at all.

Investors are the ones who underwrite all of the rewards on this platform. If you are not an investor, or are only a smaller investor, you need to focus your efforts on creating inspiring content that makes investors want to give their money to you. Whatever else they do or don't do with their money (including self-voting) is not your concern and does not harm you in any way. Nevertheless, you do have a downvote that you can use to disagree with what you think are underserved rewards. I suggest using it.

How can you not see the harm in self-voting? I just don't get it, it's so unbelievably obvious why it's bad. All you have to do is think about what value this platform has if nobody voted on others.

Of course people can do with their money whatever they want, but self-voting just isn't smart (except for content promotion obviously). Your alt account only self-votes 4% and i'll assume your main is similar, so you're a good boy :p

I do have a downvote of a few cents yeah, but i can't do anything against your upvote for example ;)

All you have to do is think about what value this platform has if nobody voted on others

That's not what is happening. If it were, and you posted about it, you would have a useful contribution (though of course everyone would have already recognized the issue most likely)

Someone who votes for good content whether produced by self or by others is not doing any harm whatsoever. Likewise someoen who votes for good self-produced content that is also supported by others is doing no harm.

Your own statistics show that self-voting is awarding about 8.5% of the reward pool. I don't find that suggestive of any problem whatsoever. It is probably a very reasonable number given that the current parameters give people 10 full power votes to make per day. Thus one is being applied to the voters' own content and nine to others' (on average, of course). Seems fine.

your alt account only self-votes 4% and i'll assume your main is similar, so you're a good boy :p

I have no 'alt' accounts (in the sense of accounts run by me to interact on the site and which hide my identity; there are several accounts for things like internal market trading but they all have my name in them). I don't know who runs randomwhale which likes to vote for me. It is not me.

Again, this may be viewed as a reminder to please avoid witch hunts and demonizing people without a full understanding of what is going on.

I agree, 8.5% is not that problematic at all. It's just the principle that's important. The few problematic abusers and the incentive problems in the protocol are the problem.

I have a pretty good understanding of what's going on. I don't want to demonize or shame anyone. I don't even care about the names. I impulsively released the list this way, i guess i could have done it differently, but in general we should just face the truth, no matter how harsh it is sometimes.

By the way, there are enough rumors about who's running Randowhale ;)

EDIT: oh oops you said randomwhale, yeah no idea.

By the way, there are enough rumors about who's running Randowhale

I haven't cared to pay attention.

What's wrong with rewarding yourself, I would certainly love to upvote myself 10 if I had the steem power but I don't, so it's 1 or 2 cents, if they value their post at 20 dollars and upvote it, then what's wrong with that. I can tell you I have certainly benefited from the upvotes of quite a few folks on the list, and many others. It's not a spread across the ground wealth thing here, part of your earning depends on your investment. You don't know what folks sacrifice to reach at their SP level, don't trump the "reward pool" card.

Anyone can be a top rewarded author without buying any SP. It's all about loyal followers.

Read the white paper. People can invest in Steemit with dollars or time. Both add value. You are obsessing on the folks that bring more dollars and invest less time than you. I believe the point daudimitch is trying to make is same idea as the white paper - both time and dollars add value. And when people bring dollars, who is to say how they must use those dollars for upvotes?

If you over-rotate to the point that only time has value on steemit, and dollars are not valued, that could be argued as another path that will devalue the total platform.

I spent a week very upset about the voting behavior of the whale hendrikdegrote. He was upvoting stuff that was shit in my opinion. Vacation rentals from bookingteam.com Get real !!

But then I realized that if he wants to bring $2.5M to the platform, it is his money and how he upvotes is his business. Not my business.

It will take a lot of time and sweat to grow to the point that you or I have $2.5M of SP based on our blogging skills and the upvotes we get. True dat.

But it took hendrikdegrote time off platform to get the $2.5M fiat, and then he chose to bring it here and upvote as he chooses.

Do you want to chase all the whales away? Will that increase platform value?

Or you want to change the rules so that the only path to becoming a whale is lots of posts and being a top rewarded author, which is the path you are on?

Diversity is good. Everyone takes their own path.

Not surprisingly I got a small upvote from a whale worth $1.6M. Who woulda thunk it? LOL

And I don't mind giving myself a very small additional upvote - that comment took some time to craft and adds value to the platform by providing more opinions to the full community - who can choose to agree or disagree with my position, and then vote as they choose based on their own opinion

 7 years ago  Reveal Comment

This site has a mgmt team. Presumably they have long-term goals and a plan to achieve the long-term goals.

If they see current issues on self-voting as problematic, they can and should step in and address it.

Else we end up with community standards.

Which may or may not a positive outcome, depending on the community that chooses to join and stay

STEEM On!!

 7 years ago  Reveal Comment

Keep in mind some of us write 150 blogs a month on here for content and those are all upvoted, I went into that on here too.

Perspective is important along with the engagement we try and create in the community.

Post like these create bad blood, the data is tilted in a negative light, some of these folks also bring a lot of quality content on a daily basis, I am pretty sure you upvote your post as well, they made their investment in SP, don't make post in bad blood like that

No i stopped voting on my content, it's not going to change much. If the content is good it will get rewarded eventually anyway.

You concisely said what I have been preaching. Word up.

Some of these folks, hate what they are not getting... for me, I am happy to see folks earning and expressing themselves, we finally have something that shares the pie... I am more focus on trying to get followers that would actively vote on my content and get the level of making a decent earning... I hope he see's both side, the platform code always finds a balance