Self-voting and voting bots are entirely separate issues imo. Self-voting is when people never upvote others and choose to always allocate the voting pool to themselves while voting bots are a way to pay bots to upvote good content so that it places higher and can, therefore, be seen by more eyeballs.
From what I gather, downvoting only lowers the reward instead of canceling it and still lowers your voting power. Meaning, you can have a hundred small SP downvoting a bad topic instead of promoting good topic, and it would still make a lot of money if it's upvoted by a super bot / SP owner.
Hopefully we can get accounts with larger SP to downvote such posts. Expelling voting bots and similar tools is probably never going to be 100% possible. It's similar to an issue of steroids in certain sports like bodybuilding. If everyone is benefiting by such an edge and there is no way to stop it, then you have to use the edge as well if you want any chance to compete. If the system can't eradicate such a tool, then it should go after those who abuse it (a.k.a. those who use voting bots to promote garbage content)
Self-voting and voting bots are entirely separate issues imo. Self-voting is when people never upvote others and choose to always allocate the voting pool to themselves while voting bots are a way to pay bots to upvote good content so that it places higher and can, therefore, be seen by more eyeballs.
bots are PAID to promote those who PAY them, regardless of content
Yes, but it is up to the community to downvote poor content that has been wrongfully promoted through bots.
From what I gather, downvoting only lowers the reward instead of canceling it and still lowers your voting power. Meaning, you can have a hundred small SP downvoting a bad topic instead of promoting good topic, and it would still make a lot of money if it's upvoted by a super bot / SP owner.
Hopefully we can get accounts with larger SP to downvote such posts. Expelling voting bots and similar tools is probably never going to be 100% possible. It's similar to an issue of steroids in certain sports like bodybuilding. If everyone is benefiting by such an edge and there is no way to stop it, then you have to use the edge as well if you want any chance to compete. If the system can't eradicate such a tool, then it should go after those who abuse it (a.k.a. those who use voting bots to promote garbage content)
https://steemit.com/downvoting/@thatanimesnob/an-easy-way-to-find-and-eradicate-self-voters-like-checkthisout-and-moses153