There is no trivial way for a bot to find the most profitable posts to upvote because the curation algorithm is designed such that voting on anything is equally profitable at any given point in time. To tell the difference requires anticipating how others are going to vote which in turn requires evaluating some aspects of the post. People and perhaps some forms of AI can do this, but simple bots can not.
Self-votes are not any more profitable, there is actually no change there except: a) small payouts are penalized, which will include a lot of small self-votes in practice, and b) with cheaper downvotes it is hopefully more likely that undeserved self-votes will be downvoted (though it is not guaranteed this will happen)
But let's say there are a few popular bloggers, wouldn't that mean that people with automatically votes more and more for a few of the top bloggers to get the highest payout, even when a certain post is garbage?
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First of all, it goes linear after about 16 STEEM, so based on current prices, once the payout goes above $6, piling on more votes does not increase the payout on one such post more than another.
Second, even generating a high payout for a blogger doesn't directly benefit you as a voter, unless you are the blogger and are self-voting, which is a different issue.
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I think we will need easy-to-use tools for finding these posts and downvoting them. Without that, it's unlikely people will spend time doing this and these changes kind of need this to happen for this to actually improve things around here.
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I don't think there is any real shortcut apart from people being willing to subjectively use their downvotes on payouts that just aren't worth it to Steem to be getting paid what they are. Which very well may not happen due to a variety of reasons.
When I say self-voting (and vote selling) that is a shorthand for posters opportunistically extracting more than their contributions are worth. There are many ways for that to happen other than the obvious and literal self-voting that can be easy found by tools, including multiple accounts and sock puppets, vote trading, purchased votes, games, social engineering, etc. and this is not at all a complete list.
You're right, the time and effort (as well as why bother to get involved) factor is a major consideration.
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Know of any projects actively working on this we might support through SPS?
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Maybe my comment wasn't clear. I do not think this can be helped much by tools.
There are probably some existing apps that identify literal self votes but I don't think that is very useful and I wouldn't support much SPS funding for that. If we did build a super-duper self-vote finder, then milkers will just get more clever and the investment will have been largely wasted. There is no substitute for voting based on value, which is almost entirely subjective, or at least requires "intelligence" to assess.
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If that's the case, what value is there in making the downvote pool easier to use? If no one will use it and no tools will be built to help people use it more effectively, what's the point?
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I don't think we know that no one will use it. That is absolutely a risk to HF21 "working" but it could also turn out that people use it. For example, there has been a lot of talk about downvoting certain prominent and high level reward milkers. The potential for low-level milking is severely reduced by the convergent linear curve. We'll see whether that actually happens, though. Many have doubts, including myself (just not sure).
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