A little update on the pull request (change to code) I made recently and talked about in my witness update.
It has been accepted!
This change will become part of Condensor, AKA steemit.com, and will set that little up vote check box to "off" by default instead of "on".
The change should come into effect soon when they push code changes to the production servers. I also closed the ticket I opened related to this as it is now solved.
It must be the smallest code change on record, just changing the letters "true" to "false 😂 But meaningful beyond that.
This is part of #project-smackdown, the initiative 
- Change the default steemit.com self voting behavior when submitting a post - DONE!
- With
flag self voted comments with a 1%, incrementing for each self vote recorded up to but no more than negating the self vote
- Publishing some kind of self votes report, most likely ranked by highest total value of self votes in a period (probably a week)
- Engaging the community to promote the idea of voluntary refusal to self vote
- And ultimately a hard fork change removing self voting as an option from the Steem blockchain
Change of plan and reflection
HOWEVER there is to be a change of plans specifically regarding point 2 above, the flagging bot.
We ran a test where only the three above mentioned users were flagged and the bot performed well after some teething problems were fixed. But we noticed that small value flags do not show prominently up on the steemit.com interface. This goes for the others too except eSteem, which obliterates the comment if the flag has moderate value.
As we don't want to flag a lot of comments hard (and it's not practical to either) we feel it would not be effective.
As a revised idea what do you think of this: flagging the top rewarded comments every day, let's say the top 4 or so, depending on how much delegated SP we have at any one time. In the end of things the most broad agreement we had was over so-called "abuse" of self voting, where authors are able to reward themselves sometimes hundreds of dollars worth from their comment.
To be clear, it's not that these comments may not be deserving of rewards. However we feel it is widely held, we certainly do, that these rewards should be awarded by peers, not the commenter.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who as engaged with us in discussion about this. As you can see we engage with you too, take it on board, run tests and revise our plans. This is no different and is not set in stone.
Steem Cooperative
This is broadly under the banner of the Steem Cooperative ( #steem-coop ) a group of likeminded users experimenting and trying to make tools and discussion to benefit Steemit in the Co-op style, for common benefit. Join us on steemit.chat in channel # steem-coop-general.
I have started making a tool to allow us to easily make posts which share rewards between members which is an ultra simplified version of my Team Work app idea from a few months ago. I realized there is no easy front end interface to shared rewards yet so I'm working on one simply called Rewards Share app.
It doesn't work yet but I'm hoping to have a beta release in a few days. 🤓 👍
