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RE: #project-smackdown week 2 report
Nice presentation interesting to see the top self-comment upvoters especially after seeing their comments on several of my recent posts! Self-comment upvoting in addition to the rewards also offers great self-promotion which makes it surprising I am not doing it!
It makes you look a lot cleaner the way you currently do it Jerry =)
Selfvotes, especially in cases where the vote seemed only to be cast to get the money, have always been a signifier to me of the likely psychological focus of the commenter. When someone selfupvotes, that makes me a lot less likely to vote for them unless others also voted and the comment really provided me direcly/indirectly with huge value. If everyone prioritized voting for himself rather than others, what kind of "social" network would we end up with after all?
Self-promotion has been a recent argument to keep selfvoting, as to a certain extent the promotion opportunity may be seen as adding investment value. In my opinion there's nothing dodgy about that argument, but there could be developed better ways of using this function that doesn't also give direct rewards in Steem or SBD.
However I should say that this issue is far more complex than most people realize (although I think you actually do realize much of it as I read two posts from you about selfvoting) and involves the risk of a "sybil" attack. That is, in other words, the risks associated with creating multiple accounts and, in the least bad scenario, of making a fortune through bots while slowly depreciation the value of the network. In worst case, attacking the network to strenghten a competitor. While I can't calculate how big this risk is as of today, it certainly exists.
What's worse is that trying to fix it, if not done with extreme care, could easily make it worse. So that's why I personally think the bot is a good first step to signal the problem to users and to put some psychological pressure on big upvoters, but next will have to be a much harder discussion of how to significantly block sybil attacks. This issue is so hard in fact, that @ dan used it as an argument to allow selfvotes in order to somewhat counter the use of multiple accounts.
My wish is that the community will at some point start to discuss these risks more deeply and come up with a real solution, not merely trying to push it into the future with minor tweaks - even as I of course would accept any improvement.
Love your exploration of this in depth because of the conclusion we need to keep self upvotes to limit the value of making duplicate accounts! When I started out on Steemit, I upvoted myself a lot until I realized it felt better to give for others. Self upvoting presents a great opportunity for most of us to learn that we feel better giving to others than to ourselves! Still it is so tempting to drop that upvote on myself and I appreciate you helping me remember to save my upvotes for others!
Thank you 😊 Can I ask why are you not doing it?
@personz thank you for asking because the only reason I am not doing it is that I already did do it when I first joined Steemit. With exponential rewards then, I could only get $1 a comment with my full upvote and then I realized that after blowing all my voting power on myself, I did not feel very good and better to vote for others. Kind of like sex where it is better to do it with someone else, voting on others is a lot more fun which I guess is why you do not vote yourself up as a witness?
Since then the situation has changed though and it's much more rewarding to vote on yourself than it was. I like your story because it shows this clearly. Now what we have is people going through the first step (up voting themselves) and not having the realization that it's better (and more rewarding) to vote for others. I still think we need a system level adjustment to improve this situation. That's just for new people - I think experienced members are seeing self voting as interest payments on their investment, which was never the intended purpose of voting.
I used to vote myself as a witness but I became convinced that the purpose of voting is primarily to vote for others, since a vote is necessarily evaluative and we are not qualified to judge our own work or our own suitability as witness. Until such a time as this is corrected on a system level I make the example of what I think should be the case.
As I am engaged in the controversial work of disagreeing with self voting and taking action against it, I also need to be sure that I am "practicing what I preach", which I am happy to do, it makes sense to me.
Thanks for the comment and question.