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RE: Why is it possible to upvote your own post and comments?
Most of the people that I see speaking out against this are usually new and generally don't know how the system works. I would suggest reading the whitepaper to get a better grasp on how Steemit truly works. A lot of people think self-voting is stealing money from the Steemit community.
Another common disparity that I see is how people complain about this fact, but don't care that you can literally buy influence. Is that any more ethical? The designers and developers were smart. They knew these things would happen.
My stats as of this comment:
STEEM Power: 240.6 + 27.6 (delegated)
VESTs: 495,602
My stats as of this reply:
STEEM Power: 451.99 + 27.6 (delegated)
VESTs: 930,985
Hey look! I'm more powerful! Why should I be more powerful since I didn't add value?
The answer:
I did add value. I'm sure there are a couple of ways I've added value, but the most obvious one is this: I just injected money into the system. Someone, somewhere was able to take the STEEM they powered down and convert it into Bitcoin which they can then convert into USD/GBP/EUR all because I wanted to demonstrate that even something that doesn't seem valuable, is valuable.
No worries. You'll get used to it and it won't bother you :). Now, I'm going to upvote your post and all the comments on it with my new found power. 😎
I understand the value, but your "power" should be used on everything else except you. Use it to make friends and followers, to build the platform, to increase the value of your investment. If people lose faith in the project because power is linear and mostly being used to 'take' from the platform, the value of STEEM will plummet. Right?
Why should it be used on anything at all? One of the things that you can also do use your power to flag posts you think violate community standards. I did that on a post I resteemed after I realized it (allegedly) committed copyright infringement: https://steemit.com/photography/@olivia0001/humming-bird-in-rain#@joshpeterson/re-olivia0001-humming-bird-in-rain-20170905t233025847z
If you click through the link, you'll see that I also commented to make my case as to why I flagged the post so someone looking through the blockchain at my user history can see it wasn't a frivolous action.
If you're worried about spammers "scamming" the platform, again, the rate limiting mechanism of Steemit and Steem already account for that. Voting and posting power is limited per day. And because of the ability to flag content, the community is self-policing.
Kind of to reiterate @kxp's suggestion: did you read the whitepaper? I think that will help answer a lot of your questions.
Also, what brought you to Steemit? Happy to have you here. :)
Hey @gank!
Originally, I was writing a book of a response, but I decided to turn it into a post instead. Cheers, and great job with the excellent conversation in this post! :)
Steemit Self-Voting: What Is Your Opinion On It?