Self Voting - Ego Voting
Currently I will only self vote one my own posts or comments if I believe they contribute some value to our network. I wont self vote on questions or things I post to be silly.
I don't see anything wrong with voting on your own post since it is possible by default anyway and as long as you do it using your own account instead of trying to fake reputation by using sock poppet / fake identities.
I would love to hear what you / anyone think(s) about self voting.
I am a new witness with over 24 GB RAM and 1 GB/s Bandwidth.
I believe in decentralization as a method to gain truth and freedom of oppression.
My introduction will soon include ways to contact or connect with me over IPFS, Freenet, I2P, Tor, Riot and Tox
Voting for witnesses allows you to make the network stronger against manipulation by undesirable individuals. Please consider voting for me @camb as a witness. https://steemit.com/~witnesses
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"I don't see anything wrong with voting on your own post since it is possible by default anyway"
That seem a very 'political answer'.
Are you saying that, because you are allowed to do it, it's OK?
Or, because the official SteemIt web interface is set up that way, it's OK?
Or, something else?
Good point. I'm thinking since it is an obviously exploitable option we should find a healthy way to use it or otherwise try to get rid of that option.
And please notice I also said "as long as you do it using your own account instead of trying to fake reputation"
I once heard one of the devs talk about a bot army to downvote bad content. This in itself shows that devs believe that such may be needed. If we think about a film company has a movie out there. I think the only best thing outside of effecting the network by saying the network is the issue is that in this case the film company would get all its staff to downvote or flag something.
In the case of nations, we could see same thing. Their wars and games would turn to downvoting things or upvoting things.
Same can apply to companies. On facebook, companies can ask staff to upvote for things.
I think there is a wider picture and just the decentralized view of its me, forgets the main basis of organizations. Can a walmart employee go home and say positive things about walmart and so increase its reputation.
I am not downplaying or uplaying the view @camb, I just think that there is a lot bigger issues which always don't seem present when just thinking of the individual.
Another philosophical question that I have regarding decentralization and open source is whether it focuses on reducing the benefit of organizations to purely just the individual on their own and communism vs capitalism. But that is a topic for another time, but I think it is valid that these systems can make people forget the capitalistic world of having a dream and going for it, and everyone is the same confined to a specific mode of working.
Create a great day,
@kozan
If you have been in crypto for some time, you will note the governments or whoever it was who had reason to attack the network often did and to services. This is the worst thing that can happen and another route is needed. That is my view on the subject.
The funny thing with countries fighting with each other on steem with upvoting is that they both win. I don't think they could have a fight lol.
Yes. Lol, in the end they would both win because Steem would gain value.
haha yes! Solving the war problems lol
A decentralized voting network would be cool if we could be sure that identities were real humans and still anonymous. https://steemit.com/anonymous/@camb/a-decentralized-anonymous-society-and-voting
Ok. :) I did see that, but I didn't want to complicate things as the 'extra bit' just posed more questions.
I'll add another option..
Are you saying, with the questions I gave, that it is OK if you are upvoting from the account which published the post?
If you post something, and you have the option to vote for it, but you choose not to, could that not be interpreted as a lack of confidence in your own post? I don't vote on my troll posts for example ;)
So, you are saying that because it is possible on the interface, it is OK (with the proviso that it is a 'proper' post).
Have I got that right?
I said that's what I'm currently doing and I would love to hear your thoughts.
I think that being able to vote on one's own post is an essential part of SteemIt. The idea that SteemIt is based purely on altruistism is simply not true.
For example, I am not going to invest in Steem Power just for the fun of it, and I can also see others being discouraged from doing so.
People seem to forget that money IS at the center o SteemIt, however much some people try to pretend otherwise - mainly those who are already earning good money.
If the community reaches consensus in banning something, it should be done in agreement with the SteemIt developer/team and should be hard-wired into the interface. We shouldn't have all these bots running about, punishing people for doing something which many find acceptable.
An example of this is the proposed bot to flag people for voting on their own comments.
I do understand that voting on your own comments can cause problems - but bots are not the answer!
I think there is a truth in what @davidnx has said. People who use steemit are more likely to focus on the money aspect as compared with facebook, I think brings about a different motive.
Facebook users want to feel loved and that people are there. On steemit I see people put up such long posts in the hope it will bring them a good amount of money for that text but then often find that it doesn't and here is where you will find people striving to increase income. The popularity of randowhale shows this. I think it is a natural thing to do, to want more and that is where the magic of innovation and entrepreneurship happens to discover that. That system is the blockchain itself and that is how wars are solved to peace. Though not everyone thinks like that and I am sure there are altruistic people on steemit. If everyone suffers for the good of the system, I believe is a communistic philosophy not one of progress.
The key is the preservation of the blockchain not what happens in it (when you consider real time - decades).
I think that is the danger of the lynch mobs. I have seen in a different area where same thing has happened. Even the government has made reports about this other thing where it has said that it could transform the 3rd world, but by the attitude of the owners, it has made the 3rd world still stay limited while it is happily taking home multi millions of dollars while allowing a sort of slave trade happening in the 3rd world.
Keep in mind that people viewed steemit as a scam that benefited the early adopters and makers more than the rest that is coming in now.
It can be part of the problem of making people slaves or it can help create free people who are actually living free.
Overall I think this is a personal preference of how want to approach things. I think the problem becomes when people say this is how everyone is going to do it because of a personal view, because then fallen into the same problems many people who use places like payment gateways and popular ecommerce site that suddenly destroys the persons livelihood without considering the consequences. Same goes for a lot of places that hold such a huge responsibility, often it causes much problems as in the case of facebook and the need for people to break away and so we have steemit.
Could any of the actions bring far reaching harm and devastation to any one person? Could it become slavery, people earn only few hundred dollars per year working long hours that doesn't pay off, while steemit classes itself a success. Exactly what we see with one social network vs a search engines model to people, where one is a benefit and one is slavery without any remittance?
What could change the world, soon will fall into a small site if it can't cater for everyone's needs.
What is the base aspect of steemit? Content. I think that is what matters. Everything else is to bring people to the party. Does it really matter if someone upvotes their own post in the great picture of things.
In light of this, I am considering becoming a witness with the plain view that everyone is free as long as not trying to bring down the network. And if anyone has an issue with content, they can use their organization to downvote things or upvote things and others have a right to do same for preservation of their views.
Note, don't vote for me as witness, everything with that would have to be done by TAM-LBTC.
Appreciate this post, but also says the points need to consider about witnesses. I don't know the extent of what a witness can do apart from host the blockchain.
I completely agree.
For example I think its probably ok to upvote a post of yours that you believe is valuable. I would not upvote a question I posted for example.
Self-voting should have a diminishing returns aspect.
Maybe each self-vote halves in power over a 24 hour or more period.
Or, maybe you can't self-vote after you've reached a certain threshold of followers and reputation.
Those sound like reasonable ideas to me.
This can easily be countered by someone having more than one account. You just-self vote with the other account. So it's not really an option.
In that scenario, you could make sure delegated steem doesn't count towards self-votes.
So, someone can't just open a new account and use it to upvote their own stuff.
No solution will be perfect, but increasing the friction a little bit would go a long way.
The problem is that the self-voter doesn't need to delegate SP, simply using an account that is directly powered up does the trick. There is another problem that I pointed out in another comment...removing the ability to self-vote leaves you defensless against a downvote (justified or not). To avoid this the downvote option could be removed but that leaves the network open to a spam attack.
That's why I'm saying that you might as well do it with your own account since some undesirable individuals are using multiple identities to vote on their own posts. I would probably stop self voting if we could counteract that it some way.
From a game theory perspective self voting is necessary to defend against bad actors that spam flag (as long as the attacker has equal or less than equal vote power).
Self voting would not be necessary if the downvoting was not an option.
However downvoting is needed to counter a spam attack on the network especially if this is combined with self-voting...which is kind of ironic.
I agree. I think self voting can to a certain degree counteract and re-balance flags or self-votes by people using an unreasonable amount of different Steem accounts.
And I do see the irony!
Well said buddy!! It's really ego voting!!
How did you become a witness and what do you have to do, what do you get for it?
check out these posts by @someguy123
https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
and
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer
Wow you are so cool, I want to be a witness too. Could you tell me how to do that?
check out these posts by @someguy
123 https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
I'm new and have never self voted, but don't see why you wouldn't. What is a witness?
witnesses are people running servers to handle and serve the blockchain. There is more info here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer