First, I'm not a fan of flagging. I'm especially not a fan of automated flagging. And I'm especially especially not a fan of organizing an online mob to deprive stakeholders of their agency.
Second, the issue is spam, not self-voting, so you're targeting the wrong problem. Votes for low-quality content are harmful to the platform whether they're cast by self-voters, sybil-voters, a group of collaborators, bots, or random strangers. Similarly, votes for high quality content are valuable in all of those cases. If I understand the project, you will cancel out the good with the bad, when you have absolutely no basis to know which dominates, and even if it is currently tilted towards bad, the community hasn't had time to adapt to HF19 yet.
Third, I am particularly offended that @l0k1, who 3 or 4 months ago was writing posts that amounted to "F*&! Steem and its crappy code, I'm going to Dawn Network." now presumes to dictate how I should vote.
Lastly, some of the people doing the self-voting have some serious stakes in their wallets. How long do you suppose it will be 'til they launch their own bot to counter the @smackdown.kitty votes? And that bot has the edge because it will earn curation rewards.
If I could make a suggestion, I would suggest following cheetah's lead and upvoting with very-low steempower so that humans can use that vote as a signal to guide their own voting (and muting) decisions.
I'm aware of your position on bots from our previous discussions, and wouldn't expect that aspect to be attractive to you.
I disagree that there is any agency being removed, rather it is everyone's prerogative on how to use their stake and this extends to down voting / flagging. Mob is just a pejorative term for collective action.
@l0k1 made a good point in a comment earlier
If Steemit should be designed to create the incentive for high quality content to be rewarded, surely self voting should not be so incentivised as it will promote the content of those with stake, rather than the opinion of the populous.
Whether you disagree or agree with the method, what about the question of whether or not self voting is problematic. I think it is, you don't say exactly.
I think you may misremember my position on bots. I'm a big fan of bots for up-votes. My opposition to this is to the arbitrary use of the flag.
By itself, no I don't think self-voting is problematic. It only (potentially) becomes problematic when it is combined with spam (i.e. intentionally low quality content). Even then, I'm not completely sure.
I think the pairing is probably harmful, but do the self-voters hold their earnings? If so, then maybe they're driving up prices and helping the platform more than a high-quality author who dumps half their income every week. (Maybe we should start flagging authors who don't power-up 100%?) Do the self-voters dump their earnings? If so, better voters and better content should win at the long game, which is good for the platform. It might be a case of Bastiat's seen and unseen.
My apologies, I did. 😅
The market and economic argument I'm not sure about, but from what I know that is very hard to know. Something that hard to know may not be useful to consider.
I disagree, I've looked around and there are some good comments with crazy rewards from self votes. They are over valued by the commenter, which is to say that it is not matched by other voters, far far from it.
It depends what we're trying to do here I think. If the authors of posts and comments have that much of a say in valuation I feel that the intended idea of allowing quality stuff to bubble up is not achieved. However if it's to allow those with stake to gain even more interest on their stake then it works well.
True, but there are also self-voted comments that are rewarded appropriately. I go back to my initial post. There's no basis to know which dominates, and the community hasn't had time to adapt to HF19 yet, anyway.
Or maybe humility should suggest restraint of action at scale unless we have some level of confidence that there is a (long term) problem that needs to be solved. And even if there is a problem, maybe there are other solutions involving information exchange among voters that are less confrontational and disruptive than mass flagging.
Gotta run. Thanks for listening to my thoughts.
Well thanks for engaging with it here, it is highly appreciated.
It's clearly an issue, I stand by that. In my opinion it is really against the philosophy of the platform, what I've read of the intentions from the whitepaper, but the proof is in the melting pot of the community. I'm interested to hear other comments too.
Humility is always a good thing but I didn't make myself clear. When such a thing cannot conclusively be known, which the market effects are very likely to be, they are not valuable to consider.
The primary tactics of smackdown kitty are stigmatising, not actually neutralising. She will attempt to do this but unless someone delegates SP to her, she'll just be a little mosquito, leaving red marks everywhere they self vote.
Also, I've seen enough 'anecdotes' of people exploiting self voting, literally powering up, then posting rubbish, and then voting on it, dropping idiotic comments everywhere. I have been watching numerous commentators do the same thing. If the rate of new user signups continues to accelerate how long do you think it is before people who made money scamming and spamming will realise they can just throw 500 bux at this and double it easily in a year? Considering that it is likely to also go up in price at the same time...
Anyway, we'll see by this time next week how it looks. Numbers on the preliminary runs on the bot are showing between 4-15% self upvotes on comments out of the whole of transactions. If that averages about 8%, that's quite a lot. We are also going to gather the info on how much SP these have, and show people the overall demographic, alongside the leaderboard for the most self-voting users.
I have updated the post to include a short summary at the beginning of what and how I think she should smack down this behaviour. Like you are suggesting, perhaps for any user she has previously flagged, if they stop, she instead gives them a 1% upvote, and resets the counter. This way the users will notice that every one of their posts gets an upvote every time they don't self vote.
Self voting is spam, as far as the central purpose of Steem goes - rewarding content that is highly regarded. People only do it because button.
I disagree with this as a blanket statement. Yes, sometimes it is true, but often, it's not. It depends on where the vote is placed. You need to know more about the post/comment to know whether it was spam or not.
For example:
My 15 year old son, @cmp2020, has studied piano for the last 6 or 7 years, and music theory for the last year. When he posts on those topics, his self-vote is far more valuable than many other votes in conveying information to the system. Similarly, at a higher order, @lemouth is a particle physicist and @justtryme90 is a biologist. If they want to promote their own comments to the top of a discussion in their area of expertise, they should certainly be able to.
I'm sure that almost everyone on steemit has specialized knowledge on some topic or other, where their own self-vote should carry more weight than the vote of a random person who happens to see the post/comment.
I think the number of users now has led to a place where there is an audience for every niche. This argument steadily becomes more invalid.
As long as non-experts are able to vote on comments and posts of all topics, the argument will remain valid. You can't assume that all of the people voting are the ones with expertise.
Experts only rule in the world of governments. Here in the wild west, experts are rare, most people are generalists.
Not only that, there's more people who think they are experts than there actually is experts. So the argument still diminishes in validity over time.
ok. But I don't see how that's relevant. The fact that generalists exist doesn't justify silencing the experts' votes.
The comment that I responded to made a blanket statement that self-votes are always spam. I provided counterexamples demonstrating that self-votes are not always spam, and in fact, they often convey more information than votes cast by others.
This is basic logic. If a counterexample exists, then "always" is shown false. qed
Your point is valid, however, even 'experts' cannot be considered as such without their peers. Declaring something doesn't make it so. Same applies to voting.