RE: Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour
Sooo... this is sort of related... I am pretty new here and was trying to figure it all out. I was on Steemnow.com typing in usernames out of curiosity when I noticed that someone had a bunch of upvotes from usernames that sound familiar or somehow relate to that of the user being upvoted. I looked at some of these users that looked kind of suspicious to me and they were all very new accounts, all had blogged nothing...It looked super suspicious to me, like someone created a bunch of accounts to upvotes themselves. Not sure what do to with this information..I know there are no "rules" but I feel like that kind of thing sort of breaks the code of conduct, right? And, I could be totally wrong... But if I am right, what should I do with the information?? Thanks!!
There's no explicit code of conduct for voting, it is completely up to you how to vote and with which accounts. There's nothing for creating multiple accounts either, though steemit.com implies you should only have one account by disallowing new registrations to use previously used authenticated methods (i.e. phone number and email). However it is easy to create an account, you just have to pay for it yourself (check out Anon Steem).
However self voting was explicitly disincentivized in the founding plan of Steemit (which you can read here, though it's not an easy read and a bit out of date). So the idea was not to ban it but to make it not as worth while as voting for other people.
When the recent changes (known as hard fork 19) came in this incentive went on it's head for a few reasons:
Suddenly it became really attractive to vote on your own posts. Since people do what makes sense based on the evidence they have and box they are in, lots of people started doing this.
But we think this is not a good thing for the Steemit project as a whole so we're looking for solutions.
A long way to say it, but what you should do with that information, in my opinion, is talk about it like you are now and support people who are trying to do something about it.
Thank you! I really appreciate the explanation and history!!! When you get a chance, please let me know of others I can support.