SELF VOTING ISSUE AND WHY WE NEED TO MOVE ON
I think all the "self voting lists" and the entire issues is completely over-shadowing all kinds of other work we should be doing on the Steemit platform.
Things like "greeting and welcoming" thousands of new users monthly, making new contacts that can help us improve the quality of our content, and upvoting and commenting daily our favorite story tellers.
Quickly, my story:
I came to Steemit in May 2017, asked around about self-voting; everyone told me it's not a problem.
A month later, I had been demonized, with my name plastered on Witch Hunt Lists. Dozens of posts across steemit in 1 month!
I am sorry to say this community has dug a large hole, and is now filling it back in. Completely wasted effort in my opinion, over something that needs to be fixed, not by users, but the algo used in a long term way, by steem developers.
"Someone who buys SP and then selfvotes is not 'draining' anything and at best can get back a portion of what was put in. It causes no harm at all."
Investors are the ones who underwrite all of the rewards on this platform. If you are not an investor, or are only a smaller investor, you need to focus your efforts on creating inspiring content that makes investors want to give their money to you.
Whatever else they do or don't do with their money (including self-voting) is not your concern and does not harm you in any way.
Nevertheless, you do have a downvote that you can use to disagree with what you think are underserved rewards. I suggest using it."
"The idea of creating 'lists of shame' and demonizing people is divisive, creates a hostile and toxic environment attractive to no one, and serves no useful purpose.
There is no way to tell from these lists whether the content is deserving of the rewards or not. The only way to tell is by actually looking at the content, and if you think it is undeserving, downvote it."
"Your own statistics show that self-voting is awarding about 8.5% of the reward pool.
I don't find that suggestive of any problem whatsoever. It is probably a very reasonable number given that the current parameters give people 10 full power votes to make per day. Thus one is being applied to the voters' own content and nine to others' (on average, of course). Seems fine.”
Somehow, I'm not sure this will be a popular post. Applying rational logic to a popular topic doesn't always work that well. So be it.