I can't say as I see the evidence of self voting so much as I definitely notice the ridiculous payouts that circle jerking have risen to. Even mid-level circle jerking.

Right now there are several posts in Hot that are nothing more than 4 or 5 selfies that are at almost $100 in under an hour. This may not seem like much to anyone who has been here for a while but after having spent 5 fucking hours actually researching and writing a post today (that avoided an @cheetah upvote) that's at less than $6.00 after 4 hours, it pisses me off.

And the upvotes are from the same people, who, I've also noticed very rarely upvote comments to their posts that don't come from people in the "You Upvote Me & I'll Upvote You" club.

The problem with renaming flags as simply downvotes is that I assume my downvote would subtract a whopping 0.13 from someone's shitty circle-jerked post the same as my upvote would add 0.13.

I'm not wasting my precious votes on any of these people any more. I've wondered how to trim my feed and now I have a good place to start, I'm dropping every one of the people who:

a. appear to be engaging in this kind of exclusive vote 4 vote bullshit

and/or

b. who don't upvote comments on their own posts (unless the comments come from YV4M&IV4Y club members).

It'll take a little work to figure out who they are but I think my shitty little 0.13 vote is worth the trouble.