Just wondering but why is the problem not deemed something that needs to be fixed with a code change rather than trying to, apparently ineffectively, police people using the same flaw/loophole that the people they're mad at are exploiting/utilising in the first place? The reason it might feel like such a difficult futile losing battle is because if your problem is you have bucket with a hole in it you don't expect to fix the leak by getting mad at the water.

Ie. The problem needs to be a blockchain based solution the same way bitcoin solved the need to trust people to not scam each other. In the same way, the way Steemit actually uses the votes needs to be significantly rethought. What Steemit decides what it considers quality and therefore rewards with higher payouts and greater visibility is based on an aspect that has absolutely nothing do with the quality or even the content of a post whatsoever. Obviously you can't be surprised when voting rewards and quality of someones content don't match when the very measure by which to decide how much a post gets rewarded is so very is so disconnected.

A post becomes LITERALLY "valuable" because of how high it's rewards are. This is the exact opposite of how you'd want it to work. How high it's rewards are should reflect the general consensus of what people think of it.

What I wonder is this, even if Hive account@haejin is upvoting himself with a lot of steem power is this really worse than someone who posts no original content, puts no thought into their posts, has no following or anyone that cares about their content, buying upvotes for them all? Is he really the example of the problem you want to use all these resources to going to war against? Because haejin's vote is still something that he ultimately paid for in terms of owning all that steem power.

Steemits rewards are generated through effectively POS mining and normally the POS rewards from your own coins are yours. If we saw the steemit rewards as effectively the steem we earned through POS mining, with steem we locked up as Steem Power, which we'd then be free to do what we wanted with it, it would dramatically change how we saw the whole matter. In this point of view everyone is grateful for people sharing and rewarding them and people aren't guilt tripped or similarly pushed into thinking they have to.

Honestly THIS the basis on which I want to see Steemit built, where you positively insensitive people to voluntarily share their POS rewards because it's more personally rewarding as well as more profitable than to keep it to yourself. The alternative is that the rewards your steem power generates is not your own and therefore to directly pay yourself those rewards is always seen as "stealing" from someone else and always needs to be put under close scrutiny to make sure people are being altruistic enough. That breeds distrust and the most destructive of emotions, resentment. Where you end up hating the people the more money (steem power) they have, but you still know you want their votes and pander to them through gritted teeth while resenting the feeling that you should even need to police them to make sure they don't steal what's rightfully everyone else's and which they deserve to have all that control over it.

You'd think by how many talk about this that those with steem power are just getting free money providing nothing. Yet you have to have all that steem in the first place and you have to have it all locked up and unable to use. It's clearly not accurate/fair to think about the rewards as being purely something that belongs to the "steemit reward pool" of which the user holding the steem power used to generate them holds no claim, as if the one who contributed all that steem played no part to play in it.

I'm confused at why Hive account@haejin specifically rather than all the posts that contain 100% 3rd party content, those that have no audience or put virtually no effort into it. I mean have you SEEN how much people get for posting MEME's?? You may think haejin's posts aren't good enough to justify such high rewards but I'm sorry it can hardly be a good example of taking advantage of vote bots that reward and litter Steemit with crap/plagiarised content. These are two separate aspects, the content itself and the way in which haejin is using the rewards. People keep carelessly talking about both as if they were the same point making for confusing mess for anyone trying to figure out what's going on. Somehow haejin has become some kind of poster child for something which he really isn't a good example of. It is regrettably doomed to backfire once people start to see the forest for the trees.

The main thing I want people to think about is to ask themselves exactly what it is they want. Just how good does the content have to be to justify upvoting yourself with such a powerful upvote? Because when people with really big followers get here and really can post any old crap and not have to buy any upvotes or upvote themselves and yet still see MASSIVE payout, and what then? You need to know what your own rules are. You need to ask yourself if that will be a big problem too. Because if it is then really you discovered that the real issue for you has really nothing whatsoever to do with self voting or vote bots since no votes or self voting need be used for you to have a big problem with it. Is someone who highly upvotes themselves NOT OK even if they objectively post quality content? What happens when Twitter-type platforms are built on Steemit where a platform which is designed for the least amount of effort can get thousands of even TENS of thousands of dollars? These are all very important questions Ive never seen anyone show any awareness of asking themselves, I just get this general vagueness that they just find it unfair.

What's so offputting about all this to people in and outside of Steemit is that it's difficult to understand the blockchain technicalities of what's going on along with trying to understand exactly what the point is with this vagueness and lack of clarity about it all. It's not clear what the rules are so it just makes people worried about using it. I mean, is buying votes considered bad? Will that get you flagged? Is self voting always bad no matter what?

If someone want to go about dealing with this in the most healthy and productive way for Steemit then they have to make sure their actions dont end up causing more of a problem for the future of the platform than the original problem they claimed they cared about.

Steemit will never be able to scale if it can't even figure this out rationally. Just imagine the political wars that will happen if people really start migrating over from places like YouTube and Reddit. At least with YouTube it's just one company deciding to censor you, whereas with Steemit a single powerful flag can totally wipe people out and Steemit has absolutely no way to deal with this for the same reason it has no way to deal with someone posting objectively crap content everyone agrees is crap receiving high rewards payouts. That's why I believe the problem with flagging to be a far worse problem.