RE: Self-Voting: Scammy Behavior, Rational ROI, or Something Else?
Why the stigma towards how investors use their Steem Power but no stigma towards how miners use their mining rigs?
Steem has a rewards budget. It's part of the social contract and stated pretty explicitly in the white paper.
The budget comes from dilution of stakeholders and doesn't exist to increase the holdings of major stakeholders. Extracting the rewards at the expense of the network undermines the premise and value of the network as a whole.
Some won't see it that way, but it's in the financial interest of the largest stakeholders to counter this behaviour.
Edit: I don't want to ban or punish all self voting. There is plenty of blatant milking going on though. It's at everyone's individual discretion where they draw the line and what's worth disputing/downvoting over.
I like that point. The "social" aspect of Steemit does imply a different understood contract between all the participants.
I would actually argue that there's a social contract in Bitcoin as well, and it's the neglect of the social contract over time which has resulted in the community becoming dysfunctional.
Well said. Without a shared, uncensored community platform for communication things can and do get toxic.
This is a subject I haven't seen yet talked about in this, but it was always something I remember posting a lot about. A great example of how counterintuitive it is, is the fact that cutting the issuance rate of new steem from 100% per annum to 9%, and within 2 months the price rapidly climbed to a valuation that more accurately reflected the growth of the platform. What it shows is that it's not how big the rewards are, that matters so much, but rather, that people see a good reason to hold it. Too much going out to rewards erodes that.
On the contrary, the empirical data has shown that when all rewards are going to the same people (which is still inflation), with little for new users, the network stagnates. When new users are getting rewards, it grows. This can be seen quite clearly in @eroche's payout distribution posts.
Exactly, almost the rate does not matter, except for the fact that it keeps the selling pressure up as users cash out their rewards. This data you speak of it seems logical to me that we should not be letting them burn their votes without them mutually supporting each other, a la minnows unite and similar campaigns. Sure, I can see how the big accounts have resources to conceal their self-upvoting but this just confirms its illegitimacy, once it is discovered. It isn't that hard to do traffic analysis to discover where the money flows back via external cryptocurrencies either.
The mutual support of users is part of how the system grows more resilient. I just want to help the newbies avoid burning their votes not helping each other increase their visibility and that sense of comradeship that it produces, which is very positive for community building.