Healthy society maintains good balance between greed and selfishness and need for social interaction between its members.
A post Anarchy is a Cool Idea…But can it Actually Work? from @buggedout is good example how decentralized Steemit could and should work.
I think that this quote from my comment on his post describe his point quite accurate:
Two extremes govern our behavior. On one side is greed and selfishness and on the other the need to be social and connected. In my opinion anarchy is equilibrium of this two extremes.
Let me elaborate the matter a little more in detail:
Anarchy is defined as a state of two extremes. On one side is complete disorder of society and denying of any governmental and hierarchical structures and on the other side is a state of self regulating mechanisms organizing society.
The first state causes chaos, disorder and violence, which is further exploited by dominant individuals presenting themselves as a savers of society and demanding power for themselves which lead to dictatorships.
Second state leads to the freedom limited only by rules achieved by consensus among all members of society. A common social norms provide rich interaction among people and propels this kind of society to higher and higher levels of social development states.
And what have self upvoting in common with anarchic properties of Steemit community?
Self upvoting is a tool for promoting selfishness and suddenly everyone mind only about propelling himself higher on the social state ladder, accumulating more and more wealth in form of Steem power and SBD. Greed deeply implanted in our nature is only helping accelerate this disjunctive exponential process where richer become more rich and very small percentage of all Steemians by legal rules of this platform, literally are milking reward pool.
Many from this minority are witnesses and are responsible to securing block production of Steem blockchain. which is crucial for existence of a blockchain holding all data produced by us, participants in producing content. Voting for witnesses is based on amount of Steem power each account or user have (and they have it a lot), so they can vote for themselves and stay in power indefinitely.
Our trust is put in hands of greediest and most selfish group of people and this fact is a good reason for complete derail of Steemit and Steem blockchain.
Solution of this unbalance between greed, selfishness and social interaction is providing a new mechanism to counterweight self upvoting or just abandon self upvoting, to encourage users into greater social interaction and restore a balance on the platform again.
This post is a continuation of my earlier thoughts about self upvoting started in my post Upvote Myself no More few months ago.
You are invited to present your views on this matter in comments and you are very welcome to do this.
Nice post. I mostly agree with you on self-voting and it was going to be one of the Grey Areas I wanted to discuss in my post today if I get to it. I don't think all self-voting is bad, but to me it is clearly an abused feature.
Not sure about the attack on Witnesses though. I do have some real concerns that Witnesses are in the process of morphing from a predominantly technical role to more of a new political class and ruling elite. I'm seeing some warning signs, but it's still very early in that transition. I hope I'm wrong on that.
Political will of witnesses is not to change much because they are not mainly on noble side of Steemians. The post about milking a reward pool @ (of course hidden by flagging) is a good analysis of the state on the platform and reveal some important facts and processes going on on Steemit political stage.
You are right that there is more types of self upvoting. Plankton self upvoting is pathetic and saying that support of Steemit base from wealthier classes on the platform is missing completely. This self upvoting is sad when someone upvote himself for 0.01 SBD. (nulo, nada, nothing ...) and growing hope to get somewhere.
On the other hand self upvoting for few tens or hundreds SBD (some upvotes are bigger then my entire earnings here from the very beginning) is simply evil and make average steeminan angry and sad. Another even bigger abuse is upvote bots.
One very bad effect of self upvoting is that shit posting become main stream on Steemit. We come to the fact that shit is worth of gold here which is absurd. This is not a promoting of a social network platform. When serious competition emerge, rich Steemians will collect their wealth and set sail somewhere else and masses will flee the platform to the competition. This will be dark end of this blockchain and platform. Dan L. realize that and start new project of his own and Ned S.??? I don't have a clue what he wanna do!! So we are alone here, to try to save this Steem world.
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Can witnesses vote for themselves as witnesses?
I'm not 100% sure. This is an interesting question asking for more investigation!