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Because voting on something that no one else votes for results in a much smaller reward, both content reward and curation reward.

If you look at the universe of posts, some with consensus voting from many stakeholders and some with just self-voting, the ones with consensus voting will earn the predominant portion of the reward pool under a superlinear curve. Self voting will still earn something, but it isn't much. Under a linear system, self-voting earns proportionately a lot more.

Yeah but someone who wants to vote for himself is by definition not going to vote for anyone else so how does this curve encourage someone to change his behavior and stop upvoting himself? Still don't get it. Sorry

If you look at the universe of posts, some with consensus voting from many stakeholders and some with just self-voting, the ones with consensus voting will earn the predominant portion of the reward pool under a superlinear curve. Self voting will still earn something, but it isn't much. Under a linear system, self-voting earns proportionately a lot more.

Ok got you , so it reduces the vote. How is consensus voting calculated ? Wouldn't someone with intention to self upvote just create lots of sockpuppets to upvote too?

I don't really think this feature is useful to be honest as users who self vote themselves without consensus are very easy to spot and downvote.

Someone with a large stake could split up his account and upvote and get consensus no? Do you know the exact calculation formula?

No. Someone with a large stake doesn't need consensus. The idea at the time seems to have been that large stake users would police each other, and smaller stake users would have votes so weak that they couldnt abuse the system significantly on their own.

No. Someone with a large stake doesn't need consensus.

Not saying that. I'm talking about the n^2 curve formula, someone could just split his account and not be penalized as it will look like there is consensus voting.

nesting

Consensus is based on steem power, not the total number of accounts using it (which is part of the problem with n^2). So if i have 10K steem power and you have 30K steem power, your vote is worth 9 times more than mine, because you have more consensus. You don't have to split your account into 3 10K accounts to get the bonus its already there.

Then how does it prevent self voting? It looks like the feature just penalize every post that have a small weight but don't discourage self voting at all.

[nesting]

Yeah but someone who wants to vote for himself is by definition not going to vote for anyone else so how does this curve encourage someone to change his behavior and stop upvoting himself? Still don't get it. Sorry

Harm reduction

There is nothing inherently wrong with voting for yourself. In fact the system autovotes by default whenever you post! The idea is to minimize rewards for anyone who does this and doesn't get other votes.

[nesting]

How is consensus voting calculated ? Wouldn't someone with intention to self upvote just create lots of sockpuppets to upvote too?

It is stake weighted to splitting up stake changes nothing.

I don't really think this feature is useful to be honest as users who self vote themselves without consensus are very easy to spot and downvote.

Fair point, although as the system gets large there is a reasonable argument that no one is really going to invest in doing that enormous amount of work. Sites like Facebook pay teams of people dedicated to handling hardcore abuse (such as posting child porn). Adding self-voting reward abuse to the task makes it even more challenging. In Steem there is no incentive to do any of this downvoting work. It is somewhat viable now with 1000 posts/day but with millions or billions of posts per day who is going to do it?

WIth millions or billions of posts (and therefore millions and billions of users voting all the time) , the self upvoter wouldn't be able to have a significant impact on reward pool distribution, even with a linear model.. there would be too many other votes being cast.

With billions of users, assuming the whale population increased at the same rate as the rest of the population, i don't think even a whale of comparable size to the ones we have now would be able to make much of a difference by himself.

It is stake weighted

Someone with a large stake could split up his account and upvote and get consensus no? Do you know the exact calculation formula?

Fair point, although as the system gets large there is a reasonable argument that no one is really going to invest in doing that enormous amount of work. Sites like Facebook pay teams of people dedicated to handling hardcore abuse (such as posting child porn). Adding self-voting reward abuse to the task makes it even more challenging. In Steem there is no incentive to do any of this downvoting work. It is somewhat viable now with 1000 posts/day but with millions or billions of posts per day who is going to do it?

Lots of people run bitcoin full nodes to verify transaction, they have an incentive to do it because they have a stake in it and it's their best interest that the system is working properly because it increases the value of their investment.

One thing this debate has revealed to me... is that lots of people seem to think the best way to increase the value of their account... is by behaving in ways that earn them more STEEM rather than by behaving in ways that raise the price of STEEM.

This is exactly what I think people need to stop thinking in term of more steem but in term of raising the price of it.

Users will downvote content because it will make the value of their steem more valuable. Downvoting abuse, means more rewards for genuine content, which means more value in the platform.