RE: Exploring the Practice of Self Voting & Upvote Rings.
At the end of the day, the only thing that works is self serving altruism. People are only going to do what ultimately benefits them. Should self upvoting be banned? That is a serious question which there is no solid answer. If you ban it, does that provide more incentive to game the system through voting pools and quid pro quo arrangements? We see a lot of newbies come on here with that mindset...upvote me and Ill upvote you. This goes against the nature of how it should be.
One idea is to give people a free percentage that doesnt count against their voting power...for example, say 2% or 3%....any vote of this size does not count against your VP. In return for that, if you place a certain number of these votes in a 24 hours period of time, your other votes stand as they are. Failure to do so and the rest of your votes count as double against your VP until you get it in line.
This would force the people to vote for others....and even a 1% vote form a whale is huge to a minnow.
It's an interesting theory, although what's to stop people from just using those "extra votes" on the same people day after day. Basically rewarding the bad behavior by giving them free votes to use for those "friends" or their own secondary accounts.
The problem as I see it, is the more effort you put into trying to solve the problem, the more people are going to find a way around those restrictions. In the end, you really end up penalizing the people who are trying to work within the rules of the game more than the people who are trying to go around the rules.
Keep thinking!