I was very tried and sleepy when I returned to my hotel room after a nice dinner gathering with my team in Japan. As usual, I spent the little time before going to bed in Steemit.
Exposing Steemit Voting Collusion [6 potential voting rings found]
This is title of the post, which made me become 100% awake right after reading it.
Voting rings - a term I never come across before. I can sense evil by just reading the title. That made me more interest to read the post. I would like to know more about this term and understand more about the author's position regarding it.
Sadly, there is no definition of Voting Ring in the article. The author spent majority of his post describe how he identify the voting rings reported and the algorithm he used, followed by the 6 potential voting rings found by his algorithm.
Then there are lots of comments from Steemians with majority of them are far from happy and friendly.
Frankly, up to this moment, I am still thinking voting ring is a naturally born creature under the upvoting system of Steemit or similar communities. So I don't understand why the author create this post.
I then google "Voting Ring" and studied a little bit. It took me no time to find out what exactly is a voting ring
"A voting ring is a group of people who vote for each others' submissions in an organized manner."
and it is not rare in these kind of social media. Looks like there is already system out there to deal with voting ring.
So why I still bother to type all these words?
My point is "should voting ring be avoid/punish/De-powerized in Steemit?
Looks at all the posts here, you can always find something like "Please follow me and I will follow you back", "If you like my work, follow me". Steemians are cross-following each others.
Not to mention that there are many different groups of Steemians who share similar background and interests teamed up and from some kind of clubs or teams.
With this kind of environment, it is very natural that voting rings being formed. If voting rings are such a evil thing, should they be banned from Steemit?
Or there is any certain mechanism in place here? That's why your post won't value much even though it got over 100 votes but someone's post worth hundreds or thousands by getting votes from the whales?
Can the whales/Witnesses give us minnows some insight?