Self-Voting is such a sensitive subject to talk about because everybody’s doing it from minnows to whales including the dolphins, but some issues need to be addressed.
From my point of view, Steem is built more on the philosophy Give, and you shall receive thus your SP should mostly be used for the good of the community not as an ROI generator but I’ll get more into that later.
I’ve seen this everywhere on the platform, and it breaks my heart to know that some people are upvoting themselves 100%, sometimes that worth even more than $1, on a one-line comment when other people are barely making that on a valuable post.
An idea would be to disable the function of voting on comments entirely but I feel like voting on the comments from a post is a healthy habit as long as the commenter provides value through that comment. I’ve seen people getting $5 on a “Nice post” comment, and that is not the type of behavior that should be promoted.
Maybe disable the function of self-voting on comments would be the solution but that’s not always good since sometimes upvoting your comment is a needed action. Either because maybe you are saying something of value and you want the author to see your comment or because you’re caught up in a flag war with someone, and you don’t want them to make your comments “disappear.”
There are not that many valid reasons why someone would self-vote their comment, most of the people are doing it just for ROI and from my point of view is a destructive behavior since they are taking that money from the reward pool, money that could’ve been redistributed to someone more worthy.
This is a whole other topic to talk about since it’s a lot more sensitive than the voting on the comments which is more or less abuse since most of the people don’t provide any value through that comment.
For most of the people this is not a form of abuse because they are providing value through their post so self-voting it for exposure either if they have SP or not is not a malicious action. The issue is addressed to those that have some power but are not providing any value.
This is also a sensitive subject because a lot of people are posting updates for their projects and are voting them and in my opinion that is a good thing because this way they can reward themselves for the work put in those projects.
But the real problem is when someone has power and they self-vote themselves for shitty content. I’ve seen people giving themselves $10 on every post, five times per day on shitty market updates. For fuck sake, if I want to look at the price of the top 10 coins I can access coinmarketcap myself, I don’t need to see your screenshot.
The idea is that if you have money invested in SP or you have earned delegation you have every right to upvote yourself since those are your money. If you also upvote other people based on the principle Give and you shall receive it’s even better.
Collusion is the nice term used by @Transisto, but I will call it circlejerking. There’s a thin line between circlejerking and supporting a friend, but if you look at it with the right kind of eyes, you will see it.
For an exchange of votes between two Steemians to be circlejerking, collusion there has to be met a particular pattern. If both of the individuals upvote each other the exact value in SBD even if one has more SP, and they are doing it a specific number of times every day, then it is collusion. This can be considered self-voting but let me explain it further.
Let’s say that Bob has a vote of $10, and Jon one of $5. Bob is making two posts per day that Jon is upvoting at 100% every time. But Jon is creating a lot more posts per day, and Bob is upvoting only one at 100% per day, or maybe two at 50% then it is collusion because a pattern like this cannot be a pure coincidence.
Self-Voting is a vast subject, and since this is a decentralized platform, it cannot be stopped only by flagging maybe. But this is not abuse unless the Steemian is self-voting himself huge figures, is providing no value and has no other projects.
In the end, I have nothing against self-voting blog posts that are at least decent since they are your money and I’m totally against self-voting comments most of the time.
This subject is too big for me to cover it in only one post, and I don't want to create a TLDR, but the way you see the matter is mostly subjective because the value is something subjective.
Also, if you want to check out my other Sunday Purge posts from the series feel free to give them a read at the links below.
The Sunday Purgem #1 - Spammers - Plagiarists - Cireclejerks
The Sunday Purge #2: The solution to spamming and vote buying - Manual Curation?
The Sunday Purge #3: Is Flagging the Solution to Abuse?
