So I am posting through Utopian.io today in the hopes of getting more exposure for this post, and to get it in front of the eyes of people who can do something about the issue as I see it. Frankly, I do not know if any of the projects I am asking to make changes to their offering are open source, but they are relevant to our daily Steem experience, so I figured I would take a chance.
We've all seen the recent rash of posts regarding "Reward Pool Rape", Part of my work with 
The Issue
Auto Voting in and of itself is not really a problem. There are people that you want to follow and support, even if you miss their post. You know that they ALWAYS post good content, you trust that they will not take advantage of your generosity, so you sign up to one of the big auto voting services here on Steem and set things up. This is fine. This is an acceptable use of your Steem Power. In fact, this morning, after 4 months, I set up an Auto Vote through steemauto.com to become a "Fan" of a couple of authors I support, and to make sure I am using the SP that has been delegated to me to upvote anything that my delegators put out.
I'm still not convinced that auto voting is a good and wonderful thing. But I can get on board with it as a tool when used appropriately. I do have to say, as I set it up, I kind of got this feeling:
But I digress.
If Auto Voting is fine, what am I proposing?
The problem, as I see it, is that there are sleeping whales who set up auto vote schedules A Long Time Ago, on a Platform Far Far Away. At the time, these whales, who, lest we forget, are also human beings, probably had the same intent as you and I do. They wanted to support content creators that were putting out the best stuff.
But over the course of time, many of these people have gone dormant, no longer posting, commenting, or doing anything on the platform other than automatically voting every single piece of content put out by the people that the auto voters are programmed to take care of.
Whether those content creators are good or bad, these auto votes have continued to pour in over the course of a year and a half, and given a large share of the reward pool to the same people over and over again.
Keep in mind, the amount of reward given out on a daily basis remains the same regardless of who or how many votes are given out. If we eliminate "dead votes" and return Steem to the reward pool, we disperse the rewards over the people who are getting active votes.
Proposed Solution
To my knowledge there are three major players in the auto voting field, Streamian, Steemvoter, and Steemauto. Again, to my knowledge, Streamian is basically no longer supported, so that makes implementing a solution with that service difficult, short of shutting it down entirely. However, it seems to me that a simple fix could be put into place for all of these services that automates the process of shedding sleeping whales.
We'll call the fix - "Check Activity"
It's as simple as having the system go in and see if a user has Posted, Commented, Replied, or voted (for someone other than who they have set on auto vote) in the last 30 days. If a user has done none of these things, that user should be pinged with an "Are You There" command. This could be a wallet transfer message, an email, whatever you might prefer to use to get the person's attention. On each 24 hour cycle that the system checks and has no response it repeats the "Are You There" request. After 3 consecutive failed Are You There queries, the service temporarily shuts down the voting pattern of that user until such time as the user logs in to the service and reactivates.
It Hurts!
I know some people who are reliant on these Auto Votes to make their income, and I know a move like this would hurt some people that I would prefer not see lose that income. However, I don't think it is asking too much for auto voters to "check in" once a month to click a box that say "Yes I still want this voting to be active". And if they don't check in, then their voting rewards should be dispersed to those who are not on any big voting trails. Ultimately, this helps everyone, even though it may hurt some dolphins and orca in the beginning.
Conclusion
Look. I know this proposal is going to fall on deaf ears. Those who have the power to change these policies benefit from the very thing I am asking them to change. And those who would benefit the most from these changes do not have any power to change it. That's the circle of Steem.
What I want to do here is to point out that there is another method of reward abuse going on under our noses, that we tend to forget about. I wonder what Reward abuse fighters like 
It's something to ponder anyway. What are your thoughts? What do you think about accounts that have not logged in for months dolling out huge votes to people who post a meme? Sound off and let's talk about it!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors