Simplistic ideas against self voting and vote selling lead to twisted workarounds.

2018-7-11

There is sadkitten,
A biased bot with hypocrisy embedded in its code, which did not downvote the bad whales' comment spam farms.
The workaround sadkitten:
use alternative accounts to upvote youself from.
I reveal no secret here, the abusers already do it for over a year.
there was calamus056 whom obviously had enough.
There are hypocrite bad premined whales with multiple accounts.
At least 2 of which, assuming that they are not the same one committed obvious comment spam farming, with very few doing anything against it with only little SP overall, compared to the size of the abuse.
There are hypocrite bad dolphins serving as their elected witnesses and minions.
They usually ignore reports about abuse, if acting against it may hurt their ranking in the witnesses list, which is why I only have one witness out of 30 possible, and this after voting for 0 for over a month.
There is this:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ender/elegant-solution-to-self-voting
Could be a nice idea as a concept, but is too simplistic, same as sadkitten.
The solution: the same solution against sadkitten.
Bidbots even made self voting by smaller users a waste of precious time and voting power, why even upvote yourself with alts, when there are bidbots that can give you an immediate upvote multiple times bigger than your own, and using them correctly often leaves you with no time and less need to self upvote?
In this case, HF20 offers some remedy, at least as far as my comprehension of it gets now.

I do not consider self voting as abuse, unless it is done on spam or with too little effort and thought, or when done by preminers, whom already robbed everyone else with the smallest effort.

There were also attempts like transparencybot to single out biggest bidbot users, and the workaround existed over a year before it:
collusions between orcas and dolphins of automatic mutual voting.
Not even alt accounts, but it employs bots.
When you focus on apparent self votes and on bidbots use, you focus on style over matter.

There was this
https://steemit.com/abuse/@mattockfs/a-metric-for-voting-behavior-badness
and it is so wrong that I forfeited commenting on it, but here it gets answered too.

Focus on what abuse is, not on simple cases that do not necessarily comprise of abuse.
The antisocial players will know to work around your simplistic codes, definitions and formulas, either by learning them directly, or by reverse engineering with experience.

I hope busy.org will not lose my draft like it did approximately 72 hours ago.
This thread is not the draft that I lost, and is not even an attempt at restoring it
When steemit.com logs me out, I guess busy does too, the difference is that steemit is more reliable at saving drafts.