I believe it was discussed here some time ago: https://peakd.com/hive-173737/@acidyo/re-mikezillo-rot5oj
I'm personally not a fan, I'd rather they have some way of people "requesting" votes and then curators looking into them, them spending some ecency coins for the request and then curators getting some of them in exchange for their time and curation, rather than users instantly receiving a vote in exchange for a command and curators maybe removing the vote if they catch any abuse.
It's also annoying that they're stubborn on keeping it this way and every person out there starting new projects using it as an excuse to fully attempt to abuse PoB, such as what I assume is happening with that helios project but haven't looked too deep into it.
I'm sorry, I didn't see that other discussion, although am not surprised to see you're not a fan of it. (Me either clearly.)
I didn't know that Ecency were stubborn about it though, although did get some flak for once saying I wasn't a fan of the front end. I didn't mind, although thought it was rather pretentious of the user who seemed entitled to denigrate me. I'm not surprised they're digging in their heels.
I've downvoted users in the past for continually upvoting themselves directly and through Ecency points. I'll do so again. There has to be a better way to roll it out but if they're not open to discussion then the point is moot. I'll keep handing points out to others and I know a few other people do also, which I applaud.
Interestingly. one of my posts got a boost from a user last night, a user who I had least expected to do so. I was pleasantly surprised and straight away dropped a comment in thanks, as everyone should do.
Anyway, thanks for responding despite my comment not really aligning with your post. I was taking the self-vote theme and stretching it just a little.
I'm a bit disappointed that they don't give out votes based on other things instead (or focus on it), they're a front-end so they could easily record who is using it to post, comment and maybe even curate with. Reward that. Not delegators or buyers, that will most likely always create mostly abuse rather than the small % who'll use it for good. That's what I'd hoped they'd realize and change but instead they chose to defend it and I don't really have it in me to go out of my way to explain why it's not great.
If anything then incentivize curators to check on their votes better, there's been a lot of abuse reported to us from their curation activity that could easily be avoided.
There's so many things they could be rewarding...and yet they reward people for a "heart beat". I guess they used the points thing to attract people (initially) to use it and they're fixed on that course of action despite the fact they probably don't need to any more.
Indeed and, I'm not surprised about the abuse reports. Sad really.