Fucking genius.

Sorry, had to cut the above post short as my wife needed my attention.

The logic placed upon the self up-voting belief is spot on.

Those who do not believe in self voting seek to destroy the ability of the agent to determine the outcome of the vote.

I am sure, in democratic societies, the candidate can choose ones-self.

We seek to use our ability as we see fit.

Voting for oneself is as reckless as masturbation. Doesn't hurt you, and I receive a small fraction of satisfaction in the process.

The true haters of self up-voting practice are those who have not participated in purchasing Steem on an exchange (buying in), and as such think it is unjust.

You know what I think???

Check the vote below.

I'm selfvoting. But don't like it. It's just economically incentivised in a current system, so me and others just do what they must to get profits. And it is sad, cos longterm it's killing the platform ((

You saying:

> The really weird thing is, this person isn't going to ever realize that they could make more by voting for other people's good content.

I belive you wrong, alas. I made about hundred "smart-votes" for other's posts (voting early, predicting good content) but I got about 25% of my vote, nevertheless. Not even one "jackpot" over 100%, not one over 50% even... So it's useless to vote for others (financially) in a current system (((

Learn how to front-run.

Too complicated for me (

Hopefully someone will run the bot and offer a streemian trail to others so they don't have to run the bot.

come on inertia ive been reading your last posts from lucky luke to the atom look to this...u r so complicated i wanna punch an atom in the proton ..I mean wth is YAML?? please don't hurt me am a minnow lol

I will create streemian trail by next week!

true....

it is just plain economic isnt it?

Great post and I agree. I do my best to use my votes on quality content from others. I pride myself on also putting out quality content as well so I'm okay with a self vote.

Yes, much ado about nothing

I think it is OK. I don't vote my own post/comment usually, but that doesn't mean that everyone else will have to comply with my own personal preferences. If it is not OK then change the rule lol. Followed n upvoted

@banjo what do you think about self voting?

I don't know hannah.

For me, it's basically like @master-set is saying:

> I'm selfvoting. But don't like it. It's just economically incentivised in a current system, so me and others just do what they must to get profits.

In my ideal Steemit world, upvotes go to good quality content. In our current Steemit world, this is far from the case and it is basically just about who you know (or better yet: who knows you) and how rich you are in your Steem Power.

I wrote about it yesterday. I feel the older minnows are being left out in the cold in favor of upvoting newbies for being now. This frustrates me, because I see the amount of upvotes declining. This has led me to upvote some of my own, longer comments, to make sure I atleast earn just a little bit still. I don't particularly like it, but Steemit isn't fair anyway, so sometimes I just can't care too much anymore...

I read your post, very candid take on things.

My own opinion is that outgoing votes (i.e. for others) are going down as self votes increase. I need to make sure the data supports this but it seems to be what's happening.

That could very well be possible. Thinking about this, I auto upvote my post when publishing. This automatically happens at 100%, while I have adjusted my votes on other people's posts, to make sure I can upvote as many as I did before.

I have decreased the amount of people I vote for and I vote up my closer friends all 100%. It feels bad not supporting many people as there are so many new users.. I wish there was a solution.. but now with low rewards I think a LOT of people will go underpaid while the whales (witnesses and insiders) continue to increase voting power for themselves so they don't lose as much dollar value from price decrease as everyone else. This certainly seems the case with Steemvoter daily reward pool rape.

I agree with you fully. People can self vote if they want. It balances out

The ability to self-vote is a powerful incentive to buy and stake STEEM. I rarely hear this mentioned. Where do people think the token gets its value from?

Totally agree. If yoi couldnt self vote then the platform will lose interest as it takes people a long time to get stabalized on Steem. In my view its a posative

The genius thing about it is that if you want to influence the direction of the platform, you can buy a bigger stake than the people whose behavior you find offensive. They've basically figured out how to financially incentivize being pissed off on the internet.

voting cant be neutral its centralizing steem by users self voting instead of decentralizing by spreading it out promoting the system and increasing value.

Its bad enough the voting power dilution from voting bots and if every single user did this the reward pool would fade to nothing and well before that most users would have "exited" already.

Also self-votes look like shit from the outside looking in.

before you joined if you happened upon a page and all you seen was a user with there own post liked by themselves and other people commenting on the post and only voting the comment they authored.

what would you think of the platform...Fake

"the easiest way to get people involved in crypto is to give it away for free"

I had to laugh in disbelief when a comment I made received a compliment in reply, and the person complimenting me upvoted himself, but for me nothing. It was like he awarded himself for thanking me. Lol.

Your argument sounds a lot like 'really people do not benefit from this, but I do, in part because they do not benefit from it'

That's some community, civic spirit you got going on there. I can see how you are going to win this campaign.

[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/DQmVWjx23689ybeNVCpaEwdqqVbFwiWLR1jf2Ufi6a4EFpi/Screenshot%20from%202017-07-15%2012-16-57.png]

Of course, maybe I am reading this entirely wrong, and maybe the abstract does not represent the overarching concepts of the document, but what do you suppose this means?

> An important key to inspiring participation in any community, currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently reflects each person's contribution. Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.

I see, if you want to interpret the parts I have emphasised in italics very disingenuously, that it does not specify the party whose subjective contribution (vote) and the contribution being judged thereby, is not the same person.

The actual reason why self voting was not banned from day one, is the very flimsy argument that you can just create alts to do this, or you can buy them, so, why not just let people do it directly, since they will do it anyway.

As an experienced computer trainer, I can assure you, that in every computer system design, defaults are vitally important to facilitating beneficial and productive use of a computer system. @personz submitted a request to the steem condenser github, that the 'upvote post' checkbox should be default unchecked. Steemit, Inc, instantly made the change. This has led to a greatly reduced number of small accounts consuming their votes with their posts, meaning they get more benefit from supporting their peers and those who they are fans of.

The reasons to ban direct self voting on the chain, in the consensus logic, is a user experience reason. The moral and social and psychological factors of it looking bad 'putting tickets on yourself', as we say in australian english, is irrelevant, in the big picture, as you say. But allowing the users to exercise their power more judiciously, while reducing the cognitive load, is a very solid reason to do this.

Which position is 100% self-consistent? Let's take several iterations:

Iteration #1

• Person A - Your stake is your stake. You earned it. But there are limits.
• Person B - Your stake is your stake. You earned it. Use it any way you want.

Iteration #2

• Person A - You're doing something I disagree with and I'm going to stop you.
• Person B - You're doing something I disagree with, but it's your stake.

Iteration #3

• Person A - Stop stopping me from keeping you in-check.
• Person B - Looks like you're trying to stop me, but it's your decision.

I believe you are justified in using your stake to oppose self-voting. But I also think it fails the self-consistency test.

You forgot iteration #4

• Person A is getting rewards misappropriated out of the pool of rewards that is rightfully the collective property of all stakeholders. This pool is a collective property, in principle identical to taxation revenue (and in fact, models taxation via inflation, as used by banks to hide the cost of politicians boondoggles). Person A is also basically justifying the position to oppose this change based on claims that the Rewards Pool does not belong to somebody. This is clearly incorrect, because every holder of Steem is paying this interest rate, at a rate of 9.3% or so per year, through the dilution of their assets.

• Person B is using the power to downvote, psychological warfare techniques, marketing techniques and persuasion, logic, and sometimes completely ignoring, or demonstrating disgust in person A's interesting reaction to Person B's provocations by 'rebelling' against 'authority', projected upon person B's rationale for changing a blockchain level rule relating to allocation of rewards. Person B is also, along with many others who they have been interacting with, to consciously not press the button, just because it is there. They are consistently reporting that their conscience and self respect are improved. In stark contrast to Person A, who seems to be reacting to this habit of self-voting, as though the campaign to disable it on the blockchain is something that is being forced upon them.

The self-consistency test stands, I'm afraid. Especially because you have also not considered this as a flaw in the system, that can easily be fixed, and we are doing plenty of work analysing. I would argue that in fact, from a standpoint of a psychological and sociological analysis of the behaviours, as they relate to cognate phenomena outside of the blockchain, demonstrate that your resistance is proof of decadence and corruption, and related to childhood issues caused by being unjustly treated by trusted adult caregivers.

You will find that as you learn more about my position, that I have not neglected to think this through, in fact, possibly to the contrary, and that I have many verifiable, and corroborated well established facts that can be cited, if you like, from psycholoogy, sociology, economics and philosophy.

Wow.

"This is clearly incorrect, because every holder of Steem is paying this interest rate, at a rate of 9.3% or so per year, through the dilution of their assets."

Quote from your answer... If we are all paying our share of the interest, can't we use the stake we are paying for as we want? Why do you get to determine who I vote for with the stake you just said I pay for with my dilution?

To answer this question needs more than speculation. There is a reason why I have got a peg on my nose and I am deploying the fastest single node I know of to build behemoth database query engine for doing precisely the analysis that will give us a nice little graph showing exactly how much the majority, versus the outliers, plus exactly who that is...

You no better answer the question than I do, by your own standard.

I am uncertain why this analytical work has not been done, considering the amount of words that none other than @dan has spent discussing the topic, in relation to reward calculation formulae, and the question of how to ensure that the distribution approaches this equality, while accounting for community consensus about what is quality and what is not, since obviously the whole purpose of having a forum is null and void if you just pay out 9.3%, or whatever the momentary rate is per unit of time.

Flagged because there is no way that two paragraphs, one being mine, and one, your fallacious argument, deserve a dollar, when I can barely get that on a post I spent two hours laying out nicely, cleaning every typo I could find.

Kurt just comes along and 'swoop' a dollar. If I can identify what clearly is a circle jerk, and that clearly is, I am obliged to treat it the same way as a self vote. No matter how good it is. That was rubbish. Shame on you for playing the dirty game of vote4vote, or circle jerking, whichever it is.

It's fine. Not worried about it. Use your stake however you like. I even voted for it.

So really, people need to get over the idea that flagging is a bad thing, eitther to give, or to take it. It's like stagefright to a anyone who has not yet got up and spoken to a group of people they are afraid of being judged by. It's immature and unrealistic to expect otherwise.

Then maybe we'd make some traction at squashing the clear abuse of upvotes to self, and to repeated other users.

I think that not only the blockchain should disallow self votes, it should also add a discounnt to every time one votes for the same other account, with a decay rate similar to voting power itself.

But until we scare the shit out of the greedy bastards who started this thing up, they are gonna keep doing it for as long as they think it doesn't look like a ponzi scheme.

The mechanics of the game are set up to benefit them to the exclusion of all others but their designated helpers in their scam. These two changes would damage their ability to keep milking the pool, which is taking steem's market value, out of everyone's wallet.

I mean, c'mon, are you going to tell me that the man who did most of the design, is unaware of what a perfect linear issuance rate (x tokens per day, forever) was going to produce a drastically decelerating market value? The very same guy who also understood well enough that if it goes on, that nobody is going to want these coins?

I calculated a formula, to support my argument with @faddat early on in our first work together on Dawn, to show him that it takes over 5 years for the effective interest rate on the currency to drop to a reasnable level. To explain that, simply, year 1 is 100, year two is 50, year 3 is 25, year 4 is 12.5, year 5 is 6.25. The only way you would buy such an asset, is if you knew you could pull the majority of that new currency into your pocket. (so, obviously, that's what was intended, but it's idiotic because you will drive away new user).

I am gonna do my best to find the proof that they are exploiting it for this purpose. If only their goddamned software would not asymptotically decelerate the processing rate.

I'm patient. A lot more than I used to be, anyway.

That's the biggest problem with it. This is why @smackdown.kitty needs to get back on the job. That's directed at you, @personz. Flagging for good reasons. People just don't use it enough. Flag enough of the right people for the right reasons, and we can change the public opinion.

Some people even have said to me that flagging equates to violence!

And this problem where people are afraid to do something they find unfamiliar, this is why it's a real uphill battle to get anything to happen. You have to put people in a place where they don't feel like they have the choice to continue to be afraid to act in ways that they didn't think would benefit them. But it would benefit them enormously.

This is why I take what many consider to be an extreme position. The resistance is incredible. The complacence and inertia are extremely distressing to me. "I'm getting mine, y u wanna take it from me, y u not join the reward pool rape crowd?"

A good guardian of the community would not hesitate to change this with a good model to demonstrate it is right.

Unless they are profiting from it being wrong

So you may then understand why I am at times so despondent about this platform. It's governed by no less parasitic so-and-so's than the ones in parliament, in the corporate boardrooms, and in the central banks. Everyone is too scurred to put together the case against them, in case they get disappeared. Except without a good case against them, it's impossible to get the support to threaten them with the pillory, or worse, the gallows.

> The actual reason why self voting was not banned from day one, is the very flimsy argument that you can just create alts to do this, or you can buy them, so, why not just let people do it directly, since they will do it anyway.

Then the entire platform is flimsy (which I don't believe is true). If you want to combat sybil, you will have to invent a whole new technology: Cryptographically verifiable unique identity

I'm not saying this is impossible. But, like I said, it's a whole new technology. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote a proof to demonstrate one way or the other.

Sorta like the halting problem. It's mathematically proven that the halting problem cannot be solved. But you can set bounds to side-step the proof. So even if unique identity cannot be supported by a proof, there might be reasonable bounds.

Interesting idea and good insight. It's something I've been interested in for a while, trustless identity.

Hi @inertia, I'm a collaborator with @l0k1 AKA @elfspice on this so I'll join in a little here.

If I number you points of contention, I would say #2 (arrogance) is subjective, #4 (spam scaling prob) needs research and #5 (appearance of scam) is speculative so I won't address them.

The other two though I will:

#1 - self voting is about peer review

While it's true that the bottom line will always be we are free to use our stake as we please (I'm a strong supporter of this), for me this point questions the validity of self voting being allowed as it is post-HF 19. It's clear that self voting is more rewarding since HF 19 so this is a problem, so much so that people are overly incentivized to vote for themselves over others.

Our position on this is supported by the whitepaper and while I am not confident I can say what the "culture" of Steemit is, "peer review" is certainly something which I wish to maintain.

From the whitepaper:

> The challenge faced by Steem is deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of each contribution. In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each other’s contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.

So while we can pressure people socially to follow this, the incentives have to be there, and that's the problem that needs to be addressed. Whether you listen or not to the rationale @l0k1 makes before such a change is your business as your stake is always yours. But we are promoting the idea of a system level correction.

#3 spam adds entropy

I agree the usage of the term "entropy" here is quite opaque. It refers to Shannon's information theory, where entropy is maximum when all outcomes of an information producing machine are equally likely. So I guess he is saying that spam is self similar information, and so adds entropy, because the more of it there is the more probable the next piece of information produced on the blockchain is similar.

But this point needs to be developed and I invite @elfspice to do so.

I believe peer-review is a fine interpretation, but it's also an indirect, emergent property of the protocol, not the direct intent.

> But we are promoting the idea of a system level correction.

Does this mean you advocate some kind of on-chain policing of self-votes?

It is the intent, this is clear from the whitepaper. No it's not direct as such, as emergent properties can be planned. Look at any complex system simulation of ants for an example.

I don't know what kind of on chain policing there could be, but I would oppose anything that is not a general rule. Maybe something like @edje 's idea of a committee would be like that. It's not something that I think would work, better to realign the rules to encourage the emergent positivity and mutual benefit.

I'm not sure if you read @rycharde 's post here but I think point 13 is a really interesting idea to reduce the effectiveness of self voting and so-called "circle jerk" behavior, via incentives as opposed to policing.

Since moving onwards from focusing on the larger share of reward allocations self votes, to the situation in the Witness schedule, where a smaller share, but a constant rate for each witness during their time in any given slot, and the mutual and self-voting that does not decay, and every vote is multiplied by the stake (which is growing, rapidly, in the case of top 19s), the self voting on the forum is a sideshow, and irrelevant.

Except in that the witness situation means that, second to the founding members of the chain, who mined and mutually voted and self voted their rewards to an untouchably high level, have the power to pick and choose which of some significant proportion of the witnesses may hold their top spots, the witnesses who are beneficiaries of this racketeering, are the second largest party with influence over the rewards allocations.

Being that, as I am sure my analysis will bear out in the near future, at least one member of the founding group of steemit, inc, is the superstar of self voting (I dare someone to fish out every one of @dan's votes and prove me wrong), the hunch I have is that when I complete a comprehensive analysis of voting, witness voting, rewards payouts and transfers out to exchanger accounts, that I will discover that the amount of Steem being syphoned out by Steemit, Inc, and their gaggle of Witness Ghouls, will be far in excess of even triple the 'were we just paying the inflation out evenly) ratio, compared to stake, will be revealed.

This is more than just a bad game for newbies. This is a racket, where the founders and their collaborators, are stealing the money, via undue allocation of the rewards pool, which up until 3 months ago, was at a 50% dilution per annum, not just consuming the life and times of thousands of tiny accounts of people working hard to win a share of the rewards pool, but more importantly, of those who have ploughed in in some cases up to a million or more dollars of fiat currency or bitcoins.

I'm sure that I'm gonna get swatted at again, maybe a few choice adhoms, but I don't give a fuck anymore.

I'm looking forward to the spectacle that is going to be potentially the most epic case of a financial scam prosecution, in the history of the USA

Maybe I will even get some compensation, but I don't think so. I made plenty from my first 6 months dedicated work, and I believe that I can see a timeline for the future pathway of the steem price, over the next two months, and if my estimates are correct, my next profit, from my hard work and prescience, will be at least 4x what the last was.

And then I can finally move on, to build Dawn, to move to Siberia, to build my workshop, and the EM propulsion system and energy scavenger/magnetic battery that I have designed.

Interesting view. Do you think that the Steem price will move to zero over the next 2 months? If so, what's your mechanism for betting against it?

Not against bitcoin, but bitcoin against the dollar, not zero, but maybe even as low as $1000 or even $800. This will directly impact steem if its exchange rate does not accelerate against BTC, it will mean we fall as BTC falls. But that doesn't matter.

Even if I finish my task of assembling a giant collection of blockchain analysis, and clearly name and quantify the amount of intentional manipulation going on, look at how long it has taken for the air to fall out of the ICO racket-markets, of which barely 2, maybe, will ever amount to anything.

2-3 months is about typical for the latency of financial systems adjusting to the facts of the marketplace, mainly because the central banks put on such a spectacle, and use the government guns to suppress the information.

People will run to steem if btc plummets, giving you the acceleration upwards I mentioned, and then once the dust settles on segwit, we ride its recovery upwards as well. I may even be underestimating how high it will go before the market figures out, in a part thanks to my investigation and deduction work, that the company behind this, and the mechanisms they baked in, are designed to milk the very investors who will push the price up so high.

Hopefully I am correct in my estimation of the timeline on this, because it will be very convenient for me, in my future plans. I need at least $50k worth of industrial grade inorganic chemistry equipment to manufacture diamagnetic materials, robust resonator chambers, and hundreds of miles of high quality electromagnet windings, rare earth magnets, and probably I will also need something to build quite high strength, non-ferrous frameworks (possibly titanium).

My estimate is not based on what I want, however, but simply, the typical peak to trough ratios well known as fibonacci retracements. The next, and maybe last, peak, of the Steem price has to be at least double the previous at $4.31. Thus $8 is my guess. But it can hit other ratios above this level, thtat are progressively smaller by a fibonacci reverse sequence (the next two price levels above it would be 5 more, and then 3 more, and then 2 and then 1. Thus, all else being equal, the maximum potential for spiking is about 19.

This number 19 is coming up way too often. Did you know that in the Qur'an the number of angels who preside over hell is 19?

Thanks for the info, and good luck with your general plans. Although I rather hope you're mistaken regarding the intentions behind, and the fate of Steem and other cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, is the project initated by the NSA to prepare the ground for a centralised, single global electronic currency, which has permissions that enable the 'Authorities' to revoke your access to your funds, if you should happen to say something they don't like.

However, I believe that Satoshi was not employed by the NSA, but rather a rogue, who devised a system that solved most of the flaws in the NSA's flawed models, which by the way also inspired the recent anonymising ZKP based protocols (there is an ancient paper by the NSA dating back to the late 90s that lays it all out, in a rough, and totally preliminary architecture design).

Thus, it is my view that in fact what has been going on with Steem, is an attempt to discredit open blockchains, in favour of controlled, corporate/government blockchains. Notice how every other country is announcing blockchain systems for all kinds of things.

This is just a warmup. Steem embodies the core concepts, in a muddled, and corrupt form, of what the 100% anarchic free blockchain will look like. I am working on what I think it should be, once I'm done with playing the Adversary against the corruption I am certain exists. And possibly even, connections to Intelligence organisations.

I've considered this kind of thing myself, but in nothing like such depth. It does seem unlikely that open blockchains would have been allowed to flourish unless they were 'under control'. I'd be interested in any links you have to help confirm or refute your hypothesis, and if you write a book/paper at some stage, I'd like to read it.

Are you anonymous, or do you have a public web presence?

You can chat with me on Telegram at https://t.me/steempunk and I am about to switch to Busy.org, as I also caught out eSteem in 'minor' mischief, and chainbb also in more major, but not so mischievous mischief.

I was working on Dawn, precisely because of these suspicions, which my post-alcoholic brain-in-transition has driven me to such intensive thinking, has now got even more, substantial evidence in the form of game mechanics 'bugs' that allow this exploitation. See my recent post about the number 19 and Dan Larimer, for some somewhat crazy coincidences and semiotics, and my post about eSteem also lays out a rough sketch of the game mechanics 'flaws' and how they play out.

Dawn will not be a controllable blockchain. Whether I decide to implement it or not, really depends on opportunity and resources. I have @faddat back from the near self destruction of his life in Cambodia, who is now starting the path of eliminating the causes of his neurological/psychiatric problems, and I have good reason to believe he may a powerful future ally, when he has made progress to recovering his health.

I can't specifically point to any pro or con citations about this, I just remember one of the steem-coop guys, who is a mathematician, and deeply interested in game theory, started talking about multi-party prisoner's dilemmas. The cogs ticked over and the conclusions started to arise.

So, first port of call for you will be in looking into multi-party prisoners' dilemmas. Then look at how the witness game, the blockchain itself in its infancy, and the growing problem in the 'community' of more and more exploitative, malicious and vicious players.

Not only that, I suspect that specific accounts at steemit.chat had a hit put on them using a hacker-for-hire, and after being 'smacked down' in a particular issue report I made at the steemit github, which mind you, Issue does not mean bug in the simple sense but can also mean logic errors that lead to exploits - I have also been blocked from posting more.

After thinking even further through, I am glad now that I took down my witness, because it would have allowed the breach of my l0k1 account, if they could breach steemd, and then, the docker between them and the file containing the sensitive data.

I had a dream this morning, that someone had their fingers in my wallet and were trying to scoop coins out of it. Then it changed into my leather key-wallet. Pretty big warning, I think. Note that I had effectively restrained them, in the dream, and the last thoughts before awakening were that I had to shut these robbers down for good (the dream ones). Same as the ones outside the dream.

You really post some dark shit.. xD

Where can I read more about Dawn?

It's a work in progress, and I hope to resume work on it, you can see that I have drafted up the initial versions of the protocol specifications, and a fairly skimpy set of architecture descriptions of each component here:

https://gitlab.com/dawn-network/nexus

Which part exactly did you think was dark? I mean, I am very dark, I am not afraid to peer into the abyss. I think it's vitally important that someone is looking at these things or the creatures from that place will rise up and consume us all.

This is very interesting. My father who passed away talked about this and I always thought he was the only one who thought this way and was possibly losing his mind. Always keep a little gold on hand.

We are far from the situation where there is a compulsory, Legal Tender blockchain currency. I doubt even if they do pass such laws that it will stop the 'black market' in crypto money. All the ways to try and stop it are able to be bypassed. It's much too easy to make the traffic look like 'legal' traffic types, if you have to conceal it. Blockchain chatter is literally called 'gossip' by the way :)

I have to agree with you that Steem Inc founding members and miners have too much control over both who witnesses are and where rewards go (including presumably back to themselves, though will wait for data on that claim). I believe this happened in HF 17/18 where Ned swooped in and changed his witness votes depending on who was adopting the HF.

While it's totally fine to use your votes however, this kind of concentration of power makes the idea that Steem as a DAO a farce. @demotruk maybe you were right about the idea that voting can be corruption, at least at the highest level of stakeholding.

I have started flagging some spam comments (e.g. follow me!) and tag abuse with a small vote. Some of them may complain, but I'm trying to influence them to make Steem better for everyone. It's my choice. I did vote up my own stuff before, but have stopped now to benefit others more. I'm more concerned with building something better than making a few extra bucks

please don't hurt minnows...we need anything...a monkey a crocodile...something!! lol

I'll support minnows, but not if they spam the system.

am safe :) thank you, there are a lot of serious minnows that love to learn and grow because they love this steemit idea, yes ofcourse money are involved but is such a perfect combination between money and socializing that at the end of the day socializing wins...for me!! the others that don't value it simply dont understand it...am trying to educate minnows as I learn more...like in life education starts at home...in this case at #steemit thank you again..

Voting for yourself can make sense in some situations, most importantly as a way for you to promote your content. Could this be achieved in another better way?, the answer is yes.
Why don't we start this discussion.

In the meantime the economics of a whale upvoting their own post is a no brainer. It's a terrible way to manage an investment. You will get a much better return by promoting other content and strengthening the platform.

It is only right that if you make the investment then you should be able to reap the rewards. It is not just about time, it is money also!

As a member of the Steem Coop and Project Smackdown, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. Us members have slightly different perspectives and ways of expressing our concerns.

I often disagree with the exact terms elfspice uses, but we usually end up agreeing in the end. The problem as I see it is mostly psychological and secondly economical.

1 The user upvoting himself a lot, will often for good reasons make himself look like a douche taking large sums in reward without considering differing opinions. If he gets away with it, that makes the entire system look weak/deceptive.

2 A large stake holder voting for himself is spending a large amount of his votes on himself rather than curating more broadly. This means that he is propelling himself higher in the ecosystem. When this is done in mass, the same starts to apply to the whole system.

I don't see any and all selfvoting as bad either. But it depends on the reasons behind it, which we will have a hard time knowing unless we ourselves are the person upvoting.

You say

>Voting is not about peer review. It is about using your stake as you please.

and I agree that it's about using your stake as you please, which is what we're currently doing with the bot. However creating a social media platform that will reach wide acceptance is about creating a system that will promote community, which is in fact a matter of reviewing peers.

I don't for one second think that removing the selfvote will bring neither Steem the social network to a halt, nor Steem the 'organically' growing and selfadjusting blockchain which could be used for a number of other things. However the selfvotes themselves work against decentralization and gives bad publicity, especially because of the psychological incentive difference between giving yourself 1 cent versus giving yourself 50 dollars.

As Dan has said, voting both directions and for whoever you want is allowed by the system and expected to be. In this project we're working with the same constraints. We're using our stake and voting the way we want to vote.

In the future, what I personally want to do is get away from bots as much as possible. The bot is merely a way to influence the general outlook of Steem users and to make selfvoting less popular. Ideal would be to make a carefully thought through hardfork change down the road.

>The really weird thing is, this person isn't going to ever realize that they could make more by voting for other people's good content. You know what? I'm fine with that. Their loss.

The problem with the above argument is that we all know not all good posts ever make neither the user posting nor the user curating that much money. And even if they did, the average social media users would get left way behind the selfupvoting larger stakeholder. The system doesn't selfcorrect quite as well in this sense as many users would like to believe, even if it also isn't as bad as others think.

I just want to add one thing, that is also relevant as you mentioned @dantheman's posts about the use of downvotes. The downvote, and the flag need to be separable. It should be possible to disagree on post rewards, but not on the overall reputation of the egregious self-assignment of rewards. It should be possible to flag, and not affect rewards, if your primary goal is to send the message that the content is not just bad, but invective, inflammatory.

I believe that having a high reputation, but low SP, diminishes the effect of a downvote or upvote on the reputation of the target account. I don't know the full details of the mechanism, but I am pretty sure there needs to be an option to balance rep effect and reward diminish effect. Oh yes, for one very simple and obvious reason:

Let's say you have some spammy post that you want to flag, and you have enough rep and SP to push their whole account under zero. But they only have SP of, say, 2500, you will thereby consume all of the vote power required for this smackdown to give the reputation effect, but it only needed 2500SP of 100% voting power to erase the reward.

Or in other words, if you can alter the two parameters, two sliders, you can conserve your vote power, while inflicting a full reputation hit.

Or vice versa, to upvote with only a small reward, but a big boost in rep.

Note that 'disagreeing on post rewards' was not always listed in the flag interface, yet you cannot avoid affecting them when you use it.

> ... and I agree that it's about using your stake as you please, which is what we're currently doing with the bot.

Yep, I agree, totally. I just wonder if it passes the self-consistent test?

> The system doesn't selfcorrect quite as well in this sense as many users would like to believe, even if it also isn't as bad as others think.

I think I can agree with this as well.

The self-consistency-test seems flawed to me.

Each party is, from a technical point of view, entitled to using the blockchain or any part thereof and for purposes he wants to only insofar as the blockchain itself - the total network output, from all it's active users with varying degrees of power - allows this.

That doesn't mean that any mechanism or action recorded on it is the most ethical one or that we all have to approve all actions taking place within the network. In fact the system was built so that users could disagree within it and also actively petition to change it, precisely because there was an understanding that individuals had to make the moral decissions and that the economics of the individuals making them would have to drive the developement of the network.

The blockchain itself is not private property of any one person, but merely influenced by many members of the social network surrounding it. This should be understood by all participators. So in order to work against the parts we disagree with, we use all means at our disposal that don't include physically harming the property of others while attempting to explain our reasoning.

if there was a way to check self-voting and encourage communal rewards distribution, more people will register for steemit and before you know it, everybody will be happy. i know of someone who is giving up on steemit because she feels she is not be encouraged in this community. we neeed to look for a way to stop, or minimize self-voting.
thanks for this great work @inertia

Another lesson learned, But anyway It's like so many fish in the sea and so many content being thrown in the feeds every single minutes and it's kinda hard to catch up. I've come across a lot of underrated post with a very little up vote and instead of doing self voting, why don't we appreciate people for the time they've spent on creating it? I agree with @authori5ed that there has to be a way to minimize self voting so everything can be distributed fairly. For me, I've still got a lot to learn and this post caught my attention.

Nice post! Lots of logical fallacies concerning self voting.

I agree 100%!

The people have to stop crying and work to earn more SP.

This people that cries is the same one that defends the socialism, Fidel Castro, etc.

Upvoted and resteemed!

This post received a 2.6% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @rtdcs! For more information, click here!

Thank you. This topic is everywhere in my feed, and I'm in the minority of folks who realize that people can do what they want with their assets, and that self-voting holds less value than actually engaging for most users.

I've found a touch of humor in the fact that some of the people complaining about the self-upvoting used a vote-buying bot to self-upvote their article about self -upvoting by proxy.

> I've found a touch of humor in the fact that some of the people complaining about the self-upvoting used a vote-buying bot to self-upvote their article about self -upvoting by proxy.

Love it! You get my 2 cents for that comment (100% upvote). I won't use a bot to upvote myself despite I could make more by doing so.

I'll give you my 3 cents for managing to have a sense of humor on the internet!

I like toast 🍞

Thank-you! Every cent counts.

I like your opinion on this issue.)

Catch-22?

Steem ned move daily active user i'm referring steem to my frends and followers to sing up but the sing up its taking mor than 1 week to verify new user

I love the time then the upvote had 100% power now it's just only 0.5/1% what's happened

@inertia. I agree on selfvoting for minnows but the end of the day it is nuetral

Thanks for your clear presentation of the subject - looks like the system can't be beat by self voting - good news.

Great article. I couldn't agree more. Upvoted with 100% & following.

Somehow the vows of bots, it encourages creators of content, and I believe in free choice, nothing against. There is a greater division of votes, that contributes.
Already the self-vote, I have been in favor since the person invested, maybe someone who got votes to get where it arrived would be a little unfair to vote for himself, because here one depends on the other. But I do not condemn this act. The choice of what to do is for every Steemians. Every thought is different from the other, no one is the same, and nobody thinks the same to anyone. People are free to do what they want, but that platform's actions have downvote-type consequences.

Great post, I totally agree and have been saying these same things. Its really not a problem and if it were we can fix it by simply not interacting with, sharing or voting for these accounts who don't care about anyone but them self. They won't ever achieve much anyways.
We can create the kind of economy and community that we want with our attention. Getting all angry doesn't help anyone.

There is a LOT to digest and understand here, saved for further review.
upvote & resteem

I came to Steemit for the freedom it offered. Now all of a sudden people want to tell certain individuals what they should or shouldn't do with thier votes.
If people are abusing the system then fine it should be addressed however if they are within the rules no one has the right to interfere.
Freedom guys! Isn't that why we're here?

What can I say other than yes it's your vote and your power, Just like the real world. I don't self-vote, but that might be different if it was a significantly powerful vote. I might set a limit on the payout, say $50 a post, and if others didn't vote it to that level by day7, I might top it up? hard to say till i reach that stage of the game. But still my choice.
After my limit is reached would I slap someone who regularly gets $100's for every post but still claims to need their self-vote too? I just might. But would rather use my power for positive things. But still my choice.
Lining your own pockets or sacrificing coin to spread it more thinly around the platform. The big dilemma for some, easy choice for others - It's all public here and the people as a whole will decide what they do with their power in the end. Just like we decide which stores to shop at based on the same principals.
Well there is my 2, no 3 cents worth LOL
Cheers

@inertia
I believe you are right on in your assertions.

I enjoy seeing so many people spin so much CPU power on this issue; I definitely shows there IS NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER.

I agree with Dan, so sad to see so much time wasted on this stupid fucking argument. But those that persist, I see it as a character defect mostly. Arrogance, and then the list continues on from there...

Thanks for the discussion @inertia.

I searched for a #Facebook alternative, and found it in Steemit.
+ I think #ZuckSucks
+ He has made a fortune off other's creative.
+ He has the power to promote or censor whatever he pleases...
+ Zuck is a bully.

✋ Don't be like Zuck!!!

It might appear that
those who want to tell others how to use their assets
have the same mindset as Zuck. ???
+ Your opinion does not matter.
+ You must abide by the rules I randomly make up.
+ I am smarter than you, so I get to make the rules.

C'mon man
(I did not just assume your identity.
It's just a saying...
OK? We good?)
+ You're complaining about a victimless crime when it comes to a minnow upvoting their own posts and comments.
+ The swish of their tail is not going to cause a tidal wave on the other side of the world...
(an analogy to the story of a butterfly flapping it's wings causing a hurricane...
but, of course, you picked right up on that, right?
DuckDuckGo it if you've never read that story...)
+ I'm am very new here and do not claim to have a handle on how everything works,
+ so please correct me if I'm wrong,
+ But, where the vote is placed makes no difference in the big scheme of things.
+ Doesn't a vote for another person dilute the payout exactly the same as a self vote?
+ If my hypothesis is correct, then the only person who can complain is the person I did not vote for, so I could vote for myself.
+ I affected no one else's payout.
+ If you are complaining about my vote, you must be ASSuming my vote would have gone to you.
+ I wasn't going to vote for you, so how about you just shut your piehole?

Please don't think I'm actually talking about YOU...
the person reading this comment...
I'm not even talking about the person?s? @inertia is responding to.
I'm talking about the mindset pointed out in the original post.

In defense of the whales.
+ If my above hypothesis is correct, then there is no right or wrong way for them to use their power.
+ I've seen a lot of posts saying
if only the whales would...
+ How about you not try to tell the whales what to do?
+ How about you become a whale and use your assets as you think best?
+ Now I have read a couple of stories regarding whales that made me go "hmm, that's strange."
+ But, I realized I was only hearing one side of the story...

One last rhetorical question to those who think they should use their power to bully others into their way of thinking.
1) Who died and made you Sheriff?

Let government = rules, laws, whatever you want to call them
+ More government is NOT the answer.
+ More government is the problem!!!
+ Ronald Reagan

self voting is safe way to earn