RE: #project-smackdown begins. Kitty is now being released into the wild
Also, I will apologize for using your own words against you, even though there is no ethical reason for me to do so:
"Note, that I have had this happen almost consistently when I stop smoking. Things that I normally tolerate, I lose my patience. Turns out that's how I think when I'm not poisoning myself with natural insecticide. Consistently."
It is my true belief that you and I got started on a very wrong foot, because I caught you with a question at a bad time that you perceived as an attack.
The reality is I think we are both very concerned about spam, but your project appears to operate on the assumption that "If SELF VOTE then SPAM".
I wanted to challenge this one small aspect of your project, while still mostly supporting the anti-spam project (as I do on my own blog), and it has spiralled into me writing probably 100 paragraphs back and forth with Personz because you simply attacked and muted me.
Again, good luck with the changes you are trying to make. I would humbly suggest (and this applies to me too, so I'm trying to bow out here against my tendency to continue debate) that this discussion is probably a net negative for both of us and we would be both happier if we simply pretended neither of us existed.
I consider that a shame, since you clearly have more programming skill than I and perhaps you could have helped with spam in a more egalitarian way, starting somewhere like BookingTeam.
Whatever, good luck.
The project, which is not only elfspice project, does not operate on an assumption that selfupvoted comments are spam. There are many different parts to this and different opinions, but rather one idea is that the selfupvotes themselves are often a form of "spam" because they are used either all the time or on comments that are not of any particular quality. The votes then are not used for any particular reason other than because the user can get the money.
The reason I personally am associated with the project is that I consider the current setup to lend itself to be creating an enviroment in which it becomes more important to reward yourself money than to find and curate good comments. Of course, this is not going to be the case all the time, but we have no way of separating the objectively "good" upvotes from the objectively "bad" and since comment selfupvotes are not essential we (not actually me, as I'm not a developer) chose to go this route.
-We also know that we won't be able to stop sockpuppet accounts voting for their master etc. But I personally think that identifying and marking the largest direct selfupvoters presents the community with a clear ethical choice: Wether we want everyone (including thousands of bots) to upvote themselves no matter how much SP they have (in which case this upvote could be made default and the reward simply hidden except for in the wallet) or wether maybe we should do the opposite.
My own conclusion is that we ought to limit selfupvotes. They currently take money that could have been used to curate content and puts it to a completely different use, while at the same time making the platform look shady to many new users.
I wish sincerely that discussion will be calmer and more stable in the future. No jabs taken at anyone by stating this.