I’m not sure how popular this post is going to be but I’m going to publish it anyway.
I’ve thought long and hard about this and I think being able to vote for yourself or across multiple accounts you own is a serious weakness of the Steemit Platform.
Unfortunately I don’t have data on the proportion of the total reward pool made up of self-votes but I imagine the amount is significant.
In my opinion, it represents a portion of the reward pool that is allocated in a completely inefficient way with no bearing on the quality of the content, only the steem power of the account. The formula for Steemit to move forward is a fair reward structure supporting quality account across a growing community of users.
Ring-fencing a large portion of the reward pool for self-voting will in my view slow down the progression of Steemit.
In addition to slowing progress, It is also completely open to abuse. Currently, having 10k of Steem Power will afford you 5/6 dollars for a single upvote. If you just invested in Steem for this purpose alone, you could make that investment back in a year by abusing the system. I know it is possible to get downvoted but you could easily hide posts in Steemit by not having followers and giving your posts obscure tags.
I just don’t see the logic in it and I’m concerned this will damage the integrity of Steemit. I think Hard Fork 19 will actually bring more attention to this issue as more people will see the benefit (first hand) of self-voting.
Any thoughts on this, @teemsteem.
Gotta remember that steemit needs investors. Letting you promote your own content is the benefit of having pumped in some fiat.
Still voted for yourself, though... :D Wait, I can vote for my own comment, yay! :D
Don't worry, I voted for yours as well :)
I love the fact that you voted for your own post :)
That's done automatically, no?
You can take it off.
You are right! I didn't know that, actually.
Thanks!
Gonna have a look at your posts now...
Obviously, upvoting your own content is pretty lame. With some exceptions maybe.
I commented what I think of the possibility little bit lower on the comments here, I don't think it is lame at all if you spend energy and time and think your content is worth something, it just completely depends on the situation.
Agreed! It depends on the situation, indeed.
depends yeah!
Suggestion: You can upvote yourself once a day only
It makes you come out and create content; this content can be your own post or curation comment. In reality steemit is not your regular blog site.
It is meant to absorb any activity happening on it as a transaction. Hence you not only notice a upvote, but you could also potentially downvote self. Now you decide which one is more seriously damaging one 😛
Good points!
I still do not know what the real impact of HF19 will be on this matter.
But who does not agree with the possibility of giving votes in the own posts, can always vote in the posts of other people. :)
I agree that for the integrity of the system it needs to be done away with. Integrity is still a thing, right?
This is what we call the great circle jerk. It's been happening for a long time with bots and trails, and will likely continue. I think it's one of the reasons steemit is strict when creating free accounts.
one way to see this is that we are being offered a free will to act on our post, just like a conscience. we are supposed to contribute valuable content on the platform so thats why its on default to upvote your post but in a case whereby you are not sure if your post is valuable, you can choose not to
upvote it, and if you had already made a post and then after going through it over again you think its not worth an upvote, you just downvote your post.especially good for minnows like me, sometimes you come up with great and valuable content and you dont have enough followers to decide if its valuable or not, atleast being able to vote for your good content comforts you.
The new phenomenon I am finding is people being so brazen to NOT upvote, leave a comment and then upvote their comment!! I mean that's cool if you have a disagreement (I guess).. but common! It's like getting good service and then not tipping the waiter!
You can't eliminate self-votes. People will use cooperative strategies with multiple accounts to the same effect if you tried to eliminate them.
In my view they should be seen as a social faux pas, and it should be totally acceptable to downvote people who make shallow comments and upvote themselves.
Of course there are many exceptions, my main issue is with the people making blatantly shallow comments and upvoting them just to extract funds.
Good point and I can this happening by reading the comments on such posts. Cooperative voting in the absence of selfvoting would exist but I think it would act as a barrier, to an extent, by either removing or reducing the impact of selfvoting.
In doing so you eliminate the legitimate uses of self voting. Such as defending from abusive flags, or to bring attention to an issue with a post (I frequently use it to highly identity theft).
Cheers for clarifying that. I wasn't sure what the benefits were but I see where you're coming from.
I somehow didn't realize you can opt to not vote for yourself. I just assumed it does that as default.