I know that many people considering self voting as unjust. I can't agree with that. People with stake are not got it for nothing. Some of them were early and bootstrapped community. Some of them took the risk and put their own money in STEEM (they could buy ETH for example). All of them were through the hard times, then the STEEM price was declining for 10 months. Because of people who hold the stake - the price is at that level today and we all could share the joy of high authors reward.
STEEM is a system with stakeholders, they own the part of network capacity. They decide how to dilute their own stake by voting for others, if they provide value. If they decide to vote for themselves - then they don't see enough value and their stake don't get diluted. System punish those who don't vote so they must vote somehow. From that perspective you could see that system working efficient - stake gets distributed to people who provide value, not on some moral basis.
Curators.
Stakeholders who make decisions on what way dilute their own stake. They make subjective decisions about the value provided value. They could chose to not dilute their stake by voting for themselves. They must be active all the time or their stake will be diluted by others. It is a good thing, because it is preventing voting apathy.
Inflation
Currently inflation on STEEM around 10% a year. By voting stakeholders can distribute it to others in a subjective manner. But you can notice that by self upvoting stakeholder can get a much better deal than 10% a year. This is because there are a lot of accounts that don't vote and only active ones split the reward poll between themselves.
Better be active
You could illuminate self-voting by providing options for stakeholder to receive dividends than they don't vote. So they could not bother about writing comments and upvoting themselves everyday. But it will destroy all activity on STEEM, we don't want this kind of outcome.
Bitshares case
Take the case of BitShares. It was designed with self-funding model in mind. The idea that people could create a proposal with description of the work they are going to do, stakeholders will approve and proposal get funding in the form of inflation. If no working proposal gets approved - no stake will be deluded by inflation. Guess that stakeholders are chosen? No dilution at all! Voting participation rate now is around 7%. There is no self-voting on Bitshares, because there is not much voting going on.
HF19
In STEEM we are doing better. We are funding infrastructure around us. Look at chainbb.com, it is funded from author rewards. People don't stop voting for @jesta after HF19. And there are tons of money distributed to people for their work and I don't see it will stop anytime soon. It is just so easy here - saw that you like - click upvote.
Unjustified rewards
STEEM is designed to distribute tokens based on an estimate of value provided for platform. This estimate is very subjective and dependant on person making the decision. So we can expect that some value will wrongly estimate and rewards will be unjustified. It is not a big deal, much more important is to compensate those who do work and don't lose them. Self-vote is justified by the value of locked stake. Self-vote is better than a wrong or random vote.
Agreed, also self voting helps keep people active who like me are not the best bloggers. I dont get many votes per post but i try to improve, however having over 1k SP ensures i can continue to increase my SP daily without needing anyone to upvote me. Ofcourse i upvote others aswell, like this post =).
Exactly. Many of us not the best writer in the world, but it doesn't make us useless for the community. Just don't do it solely for yourself. If you see value something - reward them. After all, we are in a social environment, communicating with people are good for us in the long run.
I can't agree with your assumption that stakeholders could be forced to upvote themselves just because there were no other options! Greed is a much simpler explanation. If you look for example at this account which (since HF 19 took place) posts about ten minimalistic 'articles' every day and upvotes them all with (now fourfold stronger) 100 %, then you cannot tell me he is forced to upvote himself, because nowhere on the Steemit platform could be found any other articles which are worth to be upvtoed:
https://steemit.com/@sandrino
There are enough good articles, and if everybody starts upvoting himself that will lead to big and unnecessary problems, frustration of the newbies and a decrease ot the Steem price.
I am a (even if not really big) stake holder of more than 50000 Steem as well and so far I believed in the success of the platform, but in case this problem continues to be ignored I may abstain from investing further money into Steem in future.
I already wrote an article about why self-voting has become a much bigger problem since HF 19 in my opinion.
Followed, upvoted and resteemed.
Wow! That's a powerful vote to get your comment on top ;)
;)
People with power and influence. It's like our own "world" here :O
And help others too
Which I see you are doing. Thanks bro!!!
meep
thank you
Appreciate this counterpoint @pal. I vote for myself when I feel appropriate and hope others would do the same.
We either bought or earned the SP, it would be a shame not to benefit from it as well as benefiting others.
I agree with your points.
Copy the mindset of successful people to gain leverage in life: Posting 42 inspirational articles everyone can relate to. Following all steemians interested in the project:
Blog: Above average - The 42 Millionaire Shortcuts
Kind of surprised your own posts or comments don't get an automatic 100% upvote like Reddit anyway...
You mean in general? Or my personal posts and comments?
I mean in general...
There is automatic self-upvote option then you are creating the post.
Just not for your own comments though...
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS.
your points is what was going through my mind, but i just could articulate them. thank you.
Excellent post, thoroughly enjoyed it, I wrote a post on the matter and I got some fire in the discord with some folks, please have a read if you can and I would be happy to get your support https://steemit.com/steemit/@daudimitch/what-s-wrong-with-rewarding-yourself-no-one-knows-the-sacrifice-it-could-be-all-of-your-savings
Please follow if you can, I am now following you
very interesting, I have been thinking about that, I am new here this is my day 12, so I have a lot to learn on this platform still but I plan on being around and being active providing my content and hopefully some will like what I do ... Thank you for writing this article so I could get a bit of insight into the selfvote subject
Yes you are right. I saw some post related to problem of self-voting and i was somehow brain washed. But thank you for this post.
Yeah. Better to be not brain washed at all.
Acceptissima Semper Munera Sunt, Auctor Quæ Pretiosa Facit
those gifts are always the most acceptable that owe their value to the giver
I appreciated your article. It was interesting how you proposed the option of rewarding inactivity, then correctly rejected it for the other problems that it would cause. I hadn't even thought of that option. Followed.
Thank you for usefull feedback and kind words.
self-voting is like masturbation. it's pretty healthy, just don't do it excessively :)
On steemit we have to do it on public🤣
public masturbation! just how i like it
Bahaha!
Can learn a lot here. Isnt pos the way were cryptos are leading too anyway. Youre last point should be clarified to all new content creators, because they do have the expectation that quality of content should be the only variable which deserves to be payed. If some whales would throw all their token on the market, the price would drop significantly.
Quality of content is subjective matter. Stakeholder do with property that they like, but most of them interested in platform growth. We have unfair system here, but in comparisons to anything else on the market, it is the most efficent system of destribution of value.
Bitcoin is like burning the wood.
Steem is like burning the coal. Dirty, but more efficient.
Wind energy will come much later.
Thank You for clarifying this issue. When I first joined I watched a video and it was "normal" to upvote yourself and then it seemed as if it wasn't. Now I know.
You're absolutely right.
What good is sp when you can't vote for yourself?
Its like owning a mining rig but not mining for oneself!
It is like owning a business and be ashamed of it.
Exactly!
Like everything it can be abused. But do we want to take away freedom to keep stupid people from being stupid? I did not ever realize I could self vote until I read a discussion talking about it. commenting...upvoting....resteeming....upvoting my comment here... ; >
Upvoting is the way @pal! Upvoted myself...Upvoted and followed you also! :)
Hah. People got too excited about upvoting themselves.
Hello brother @pal . Happy day . Actually, the price of steem from the last few months is now low and now if I have money I will buy Steam without hesitation I believe that it has a very big future and therefore buy steem and better
( My brother @pal please vote on my page for your vote great honor )
Precisely.
( I will upvote my comment later once my voting power tops :D )
@pal i agree with you man ..because i too am addicted to self-voting.Am new to steemit and not much people upvote my content so i start upvoting my own post.
I consider self voting as a sign to show some growth and a sign of positivity because when u see your upvote that seems better than none ...
@pali itz really a good post i like it...
Fully agree and yes i vote for miself also ..... if i do not respect my work why the people here will ?
I'm ok with people upvoting their comments from time to time.. but I just hate the fact that some create a ton of junk content just for the sake of upvoting the posts.. this isn't fair and I don't agree with it..
I fully agree with you.
This is good to hear. But, my votes don't seem to carry much weight in anycase at this point. So I just try to be myself and share my thoughts as they come to me. Some times it is about my past and sometimes it is due to what I see or hear or a blog I see. But it all boils down to this... I just want to have conversations and find interesting people to converse with. I have no family and the friends that I have at this point in my actual local life are less than half the digits on your hand.
I do have to ask that when you here on steemit get a number of people following you. How pray tell do you place the people that you want to follow much closer and keep your site on them? That is one drawback to this bogging here one steemit is that you can't seem to have a way to put merits on your followers from a casual passer by and one that you find as very special to your feelings.
I find your blogs special and will try to keep you on my list of special blogers on a piece of paper beside my computer. For the time being, that is how I do it.
Thank you for you thughts! You're quite right, most of the followers are not real, they just followed to you following them back.
Someday, then steemit UI will improve, we will have more options to communicate.
anyone remember this? xD
but now it pays ahahaha
Oh!Wow! I will do the self upvote now 😀😀😀 Thank you 😀😀😀
Thanks o much for this info @pal - there's been major debate about self voting. This seems to make sense though :)
I totally agree with you mate! thnks for this awesome post!
The theme of my friend is interesting.I wish you a happy day
I just wondering why such option as upvoting oneself was provided in the first place. I was even not aware of it and that you have to disable it if you don't like that.
well, no any sort of guilty feelings now, thanks to you : I'm gonna vote myself !
No, self-voting is not beneficial to the community. 10%/yr Inflation is there to promote content creation and curation and self-voting is a way to bypass this incentive. If possible, we should take points off from the reputation of self-voters, or just outright ban/prevent self-voting. There is no walking around of this truth. You either ignore it and benefit yourself by taking from the others, or try to be a good member of the community.