Joining in on the self voting on comments fray...

So I do think HF19 has been mostly a very positive thing. I've been noticing a trend and I know people like @schattenjaeger have noticed it as well as he wrote about it here.

I kind of noticed this off and on since the HF19 but I didn't really CLICK and say "wait a minute" until I'd had a very lengthy discussion with a pro-communist steemit community member on my decidedly anti-communist post. The typical capitalism and how it is all about consolidating wealth was trotted out several times as well as numerous other points we discussed. It was lengthy and there were numerous back and forth comments. Then I realized I saw the first comment of his up voted to like $3, and then the next comment a little less, and so forth. In the end I realized ALL of his comments had been up voted and the descending quantity seemed to be due to perhaps voting percentage declining due to use. I checked as I wondered which spectator was devoting so much of their voting power to up voting all of these comments. It turns out it was the anti-capitalist guy himself who had just been stressing the woes of capitalism and consolidating wealth. The word hypocrite went through my mind, and I did point out how he was actually doing the same type of activities he was saying were wrong. The conversation ended there. Now with the speed his votes were declining I am fairly certain my dialog was not the only place he was doing this.

That was my observation and I hadn't really decided to write anything about it as I was still thinking about it. I went on to read @schattenjaeger's post and I was also very interested @lukestokes's response. You see I know both of these guys tend to put quite a lot of thought into what they say.

I tend to be with @lukestokes that people should be able to use their power how they see fit, and it is up to the community to discourage such activities. That can even be seen as potentially using your flag to counter these self-comment voters as they are essentially intentionally draining the reward pool exclusively for themselves with little interest in fostering community growth. This a hard thing for me to do myself as I am very anti-flag except for use as a counter to spam, abuse, and plagiarism. Other people add the concept of if they believe the rewards are too high. I don't agree with that one as that leads to justification for those powerful enough to remove all rewards from topics and people they do not like or disagree with. It has happened before, and it still happens from time to time now. I've also seen powerful people down vote stuff to protect the reward pool, only to turn around and up vote their own comments before, which takes from the reward pool. Thus, I do not see reward pool as a valid reason for a flag.

Now what some of these self voting people here are doing is essentially spamming posts and writing next to nothing, or the same thing over and over again and up voting their own comments. This could constitute spam. There may be justification for ME to flag those. I am not telling any of the rest of you how to use your down votes and up votes. That is up to you. I am however, attempting to persuade you. That I will freely admit.

This is not necessarily why value of posts are declining. That is more likely due to the amount of new users and the currently decreasing value of steem on the market. There are ups and downs and this is normal. Ride them out. I believe @ats-david in @schattenjaeger's post explained it quite well and I'm going to include a screenshot of that comment here:

What he is stating there could have some huge ramifications on all of us. I do know that prior to HF19 people would keep their voting percentages relatively high, and not go voting crazy and be fine with going into the sub-50% range on their voting power.

With this current self-voting that doesn't seem to be the case. People seem content to vote their own stuff continually and drain their percentage. They are also draining the pool for their own benefit. Why? Because, they can.

Now I do see the value of being able to up vote your own comment for higher visibility, but I don't actually seeing that being very important for some time. The notification about replies helps with that.

I would advocate and EXPERIMENT where we temporarily removed the ability for people to up vote their own comments for awhile. See what happens. As with any code changes there are ways around this. All they really need to do is have a second, or third account and delegate power to it and have that up vote their comments instead. This is why most anti-flag, anti-down vote, and in this case anti-up vote own comments ultimately cannot solve the problem. There are generally work arounds to any software "solution" and sometimes they introduce new problems. So I do not expect it to stop this problem, but it does have the potential to slow it I believe.

Part of this problem comes from posts like Jerry Banfield's recent post We Double Our Steem Power Upvoting Ourselves Every 181 Days!.

First for most of us doubling our steem power in 181 days is NOT impressive. Most users don't have a lot of steem power. You can more than double your steem power just by using the platform regularly voting on people you like (other than yourself) and commenting, and posting. You should be able to increase your steem power by many magnitudes.

There is an exception to this. This is where that observation by Jerry becomes really concerning. If you already have a lot of steem power then doubling your steem power can take longer. So if the very powerful begin self voting themselves that would have some dire reward pool draining consequences.

For the rest of you. Doubling your steem power in 181 days by self voting is not impressive. You can likely do that far faster just by voting on people, commenting, and posting. For example: Let's say you have 100 steem power and you read his post. That means in 181 days you could have 200 steem power. On the flip side you could just post, comment, vote and you likely would double your power the NEXT DAY if you had a very successful post, or if not then at least within a week or two. It does depend on your activity, and how you interact with people. Yet doubling steem power is far easier for most people just by using the platform than it is by self voting all of your own stuff.

In addition, I fully expect some people will start combating this and that there will be some people that start flagging comments that are self voted. I really expect this will happen. It won't happen from me unless it is spam, plagiarism, or abuse. Abuse for me is not system abuse it is when a person is abusive to another person in an overtly obvious way. Example: Someone obviously trolling someone and not simply disagreeing.

Our little experiment here called steemit is quite beautiful. We are exploring a never before seen world. With this new world come new problems. New problems also require us to consider new solutions and not simply reach for things from the past. It is a challenge. This means it is not easy. We will have bumpy spots in our journey, but I do believe we can get through them as a community.