Thanks for the link, I will check it out.
I'm not sure the new users argument has any weight. A minnow self voting their own post will have minimal effect. The best way to get noticed is to comment on other people's posts.
But the worksarounds, sure they are a problem too. I'm thinking more about it now and will have more to say on it soon, it's the best hole in the plan 😉
Minnow makes new account. Worth under $50 SP
Minnow makes comments, makes a post, gets unnoticed since he doesn't have a lot of followers.
Minnow buys $2500 worth of STEEM and powers up his account.
Minnow creates new post, and votes up himself. While looking under the "new" feed, people notice this post is already voted well above 25 cents and wonder why. They read the post, and upvote it too.
When this happens, it encourages those tho can afford it to buy STEEM to power up. We want that..
Interesting narrative, I hadn't thought of that. Here's the clincher:
The hypothesis here is that post which are already highly valued are of greater interest. I think this could be correct but perhaps not.
In any case the bot (as it currently is configured) is only interested in comments. That's what I tried to say in the post, that I think there is broad agreement that high self vote payouts for comments is not beneficial to the platform.
Sometimes... sometimes no. I know a lot of people and bots do. If something is new, is already getting votes, chances are its curation is going to be worth spending vote power on insteads of a dead post that gains no traction.
I personally like good content. I notice a large number of curators gravitate towards posts that are already earning something.
Funny enough curators would earn more money that way, but in reality everyone goes for the trending ones and make fractions of the rewards, take away rewards from neglected authors and over-reward trending content in the process.
It's a mess currently :)
I just wrote a proposal in my latest article Curation problems (incentive, rewards and self-voting) to increase the incentive for curators and reduce or even eliminate self-voting.
I would even go as far as to distribute 10% to authors and 90% to curators.