RE: Consider the power of your flag.
The reason this seems like a hard problem to solve is because some of the biggest whales do it themselves. I saw a video yesterday by Jerry Banfield* where he showed how the top earner on Steemit earns thousands by having the same 4 accounts upvote his posts and comments, just before the 7 day active period gets over so most people dont even notice
Like literally, this guy has 3 word comments with a $60 payout,upvoted by the same 4 accounts.
*Yes, i know that a lot of people believe that Jerry Banfield himself is a scammer, but this particular video of his at least looked legit, and the user in question definitely is doing very sleazy things.
So if you have someone with 72 rep doing these things, there is no reason the smaller guys would stop doing it.
I also saw jerrybanfield in one of his videos promoting the idea of self voting which i also think is doing real damage to the system.
yeah, jerrybanfield isn't any saint, and even in the video, he skirted around calling these accounts out, he was like "i'm not saying its good or bad, i'm just showing this to you"
With self-voting I have mixed feelings, there does have to be a reason to hold Steem Power, and how ever a person got it, it is theirs.
I agree it isn't good for the long-term health of the platform.
Ok, that makes sense now on why its written into the system. Well maybe it should be restricted to just posts and not comments. Or maybe have a limit based on a percentage of your SP.
You've got the Midas touch.
Absolutely amazing.
This is phenomenal!
I think, at the least, self-votes shouldn't be 100% votes. If we put the cap at say, 50%, that would mitigate this problem a bit.
Or maybe, make it so that you have to pay a fee to upvote your own content?(which is then included in the curation rewards) I mean, technically you are promoting your own content, which isn't free on any platform other than Steemit.
Great job explaining.