I think accounts should not be able to upvote their own posts. This way abusers will be forced to create other accounts to upvote. Those other accounts won't have a lot of SP and as such won't be intimidating to users who want to downvote their posts.
Maybe in the current situation a lot of people who would have downvoted the posts were scared off by the SP.
Its just as easy to transfer or delegate sp to a sock puppet.
The account posting spam and the account with the SP will be different. Other naive users will be more confident to downvote a spamming account with little to no SP. The SP account might still retaliate but might also have to deal with many naive users who downvoted his Spam account.
Let me try and give an illustration:
Mob boss (SP account)
Puppet (Spam account)
Government contract (Rewards from self voting)
Currently the mob boss can go for government contracts and do a bad job. People will keep quiet about it because they do not want to suffer the wrath of the mob boss.
If the rules didn't allow the mob boss to get government contracts, the mob boss would have to get a puppet to get the government contracts. If the puppet does a bad job, people who are not aware of the puppet's links to the mob boss will act to punish the puppet. If enough naive people act against the puppet, the well-informed might join in to punish the puppet. This is how revolutions happen. It requires enough naive (or brave) people to act.
Moral of this: it is easier to scare off individuals before they act than to scare off masses after they act.
I hope I made sense.
It makes sense but not sure I actually agree it would apply/work here on this platform.
Anyone with little sp/rep will not do flagging if they get retaliated on, regardless of it its from the boss or henchman. People are just as scared of the henchman as the boss. Because everyone knows the boss calls the shots and the henchman dish it out.
Steemit does have potential to be a place of honor and ideals but is currently very far from that. This community would probably actually be a lot better without the money yet none of us want to give it up either hahaha
Unless a spam post has two votes and a big reward, it requires some work to identify henchmen and people are generally lazy.
Laziness kicks in before fear.
Somebody will come across the spam post, check the posting account REP: