I like your comment, I've always said that I welcome critique and other viewpoints in reaction to this project. 🙂

You have a point, what I've presented here shows the top 20 self voting rewards to be a tiny fraction of the total rewards for the reported week. We may find out that there are just a few users which self vote their comments to high reward, and it could be a small enough problem that a bot like this might be enough to disagree strongly with it while a HF may turn out to not be required. I'm still waiting to see a broader view data analysis of all self voting (for root posts and comments), not just the top, but I don't have the time at the moment to do this. (maybe Hive account@calamus056 will).

According to Hive account@penguinpablo there is 48,029.695 STEEM in the reward pool per day now (obviously you were rounding, I have no issue with this). I calculate the SBD per STEEM conversion on platform to be 1.547, so that gives us 74,301.938 SBD per day, or 520,113.566 per week. So 1673.069 SBD of that is actually only 0.003%. So it's less than what you thought by more than a factor of 10. 😅 (if my back of the napkin calculation is correct). is 0.3% (thanks for the correction). So the figures pretty much agree.

This is small indeed, I recognize that. Please don't presume that I am blinded by some crusade, this project is conducted in good faith and with the goal of finding out the true situation. We have evolved the project as we have discovered information and received feedback from users.

UPDATE: Hive account@calamus056 's research indicates that about 9% of all votes were self votes since HF 19

I will add context like this to a further report, maybe the next one, when I verify it is totally correct, and have some more context. This is not the only interesting figure, it also matters what the distribution of rewards across the user base is, how much these rewards vary from the mean and median, etc. etc.

Note also that all valuations in this report (and all our reports) are in SBD, as that is the native payout unit. I will add a correction.

I haven't analysed enough information yet for me to arrive at the conclusion that it is a minority problem, all we see from this report is the very top self rewarded comments. Today I am finishing the second week data analysis and will have a report on that very soon which will look at the top 100 self rewarded comments. As I said above I found the top 100 to show up something that the top 20 misses - authors who self vote many comments to "moderate" payout but that really adds up.

On your other point, that this might scare away whales, I don't think this is founded. I have yet to see a convincing article. You need to remember that self voting as only recently (since HF 19) become so lucrative, i.e. incentivized. The whales are not so short sighted to dump because of our little kitty (in fact we are supported by one who is taking the long view) and I believe that many are just enjoying the increase in their "return" from self voting opportunistically. There's enough noise on the platform about this issue to see that it is being considered seriously, not just by "poor me" minnows.