RE: The Trending-Page: Yes I see it too, low paying posts with MEGA self-upvoted comments inside. Shameful!
It may seem that way until you understand the reward pool. It is fixed in size and is divided based upon steem power and votes. If people up vote their own content then yes they are spending their steem power on themselves and decreasing the reward pool for every single other person in the process. So yes they can vote on themselves, and yes they can have their own little private room where they stare at their own reflection in mirrored walls and tell themselves how beautiful they are. While around them the world of steemit would wither and die. This is an intentional exaggeration yet it is what the outcome would be if everyone just said screw it, it's my steem power, and voted on themselves. It's the "I come here to listen to myself talk, and pay myself to talk" mentality. If your posts and comments are worthy the rest of us will vote on you as we see them. Likely not ALL of them, but that too would defeat the purpose. We will vote on the ones we like to say "Thank you, can we have more" and that will grow the platform. The Narcissism could kill it or at least slow/stunt it's growth.
Spot on !
Why do you not support flagging this behavior here, then ?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@inertia/those-because-over-rewarded-flags#@dwinblood/re-inertia-those-because-over-rewarded-flags-20170221t051051408z
Do you really think the flagged posts were getting those inflated payouts because of good content ?
They are the result of collusion and that's pretty close to a self-vote in my book.
I don't support collusion and gaming the system if it can be proven. It can easily become something people do way too fast and that they become "trigger" happy. Once it is done it can also turn into a permanent flag against someone, so they essentially become dead on the platform, and they will become vocal about it and perhaps leave with a lot of words which anyone who potentially reads the platform reads.
So people that were colluding or doing something and are caught need some way to redeem themselves as well.
The collusion can be actually self-vote by other accounts owned by the same person. Which I actually described in a post I wrote inspired by this post.
I recommend we not jump quickly to flagging ever and instead use it as a last resort. It does too much damage to the perception of the platform and it has and does lead to flag wars which are very bad for the platform.
I want the platform to grow. I could care less about the opinion of people about what they DISLIKE. If I go to buy any product I don't really care how many people dislike something, I care how many people actually like it.
I do like the 5 stars, 5 eggs system, which works pretty well for expressing dislike, etc without harming the product, but that is not what we have here.
However, I wrote a post about this after commenting here, my post if you WANT to read it covers my views on these things (at the moment)
seems like a lot of jealousy... unec. There are currently no whales who are only upvoting themselves and NOT upvoting others in the community. If they want to support the community and themselves, then why cry about it? after all it is their steem power to do with what they want.
No cry. It is me trying to be reasonable. Explain what it does to the platform as a whole. It certainly does nothing to encourage other content creators. It is very much like narcissism.
I actually only heard about it. There WAS one whale I saw doing this more than a month ago and the person who noticed it and myself challenged him on it. As far as I know he stopped doing it.
I am not jealous of what people make. Self voting seems like it may be a bit of that though. I simply care about steemit and making it as positive and supportive of growth as possible. This is why I've been vocal about subjective down voting. I've only been vocal against up voting when a whale that justified taking reward from people with flag because he said it was taking from the reward pool would then turn around and up vote his own comment with multiple accounts to $8 and such. That was pretty hypocritical. I know a lot of people that up vote their own posts for visibility, I actually did this when I first started here until I learned that I only have so much voting power at full power per day. So by focusing on myself I was limiting my effectiveness in voting on people making content I really wanted to see more of. For it is good content that will bring people here, and the more people that come here the more valuable your steem power will be if it is truly the money you are worried about. I am not worried about the money. So there is no jealousy from me towards ANYONE who will justify doing harm to the platform for purely selfish reasons. I'm also okay with selfishness to a certain degree. We must look out for ourselves. Yet there is a difference between selfishness and envy based greed. So is it worth the amount you can give yourself for the long term effect of actually decreasing the value of the platform overall?
It is their right, but it certainly impacts desire to invest. At about $7000.00 per penny of influence I still think the price is hugely over valued, if that is what creates value.
if the price of steem is high - your influence is higher too, your votes are worth more $$$.