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.
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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