In the post today about the new Steem whitepaper (yea!), there was a conversation between @ats-david and @ned regarding voting abuse. @ned suggested @ats-david take his concerns up with the witnesses, so I wanted to share my views and open a discussion. This is not the first time voting abuse has been discussed, and I'm sure it will not be the last. It is an important discussion to have though, and IMO - one to keep having.

Abusive-Self-Voting vs. Voting for Yourself

I would like to clarify one thing that does cause a lot of confusion. There is a difference between upvoting your own posts/comments, and abusive-self-voting. It is not wrong to vote for yourself. If you created a good post/comment, then why wouldn't you vote for it? It becomes a problem when you are voting more for it because it is yourself. If you wouldn't upvote someone else's post/blog (with the same content) for more than 10 cents, but because you wrote it, it is suddenly worth $5 - then that is a problem. Do you see the difference?

Here is what the (new) whitepaper has to say about voting abuse (pages 14 and 15):

Ok, that is obviously a lot to take in. I'd like to break it down and highlight a few areas that IMO are very key.

1. Those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy .... Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves.
2. Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders.
3. Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
4. The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

These are my take-aways:

1. There really is a responsibility for the large stakeholders to use their power responsibly, and vote in ways that they feel is in the best long-term interest of the platform. They need to see themselves as stewards of the platform. If abusive self-voting over-runs the platform, users will lose their faith in the system, and the value of the token will go down.
2. The primary tool to counter abusive self-voting is to downvote.
3. There is always going to be some abuse. We should not try to stop it completely. As long as it doesn't become an issue to the point where it is harming the community, then it is within reasonable limits. (If it does start to become a serious issue, see #2.)
4. Rather than going to great lengths to completely stop abuse, we should try to focus on bringing in more users, and increasing the value of the token. (Let's not fight over pieces of a little pie, let's make the pie bigger so everyone gets a larger slice.)

Changing Linear Rewards

There have been a lot of people calling for a change back to non-linear rewards, and see that as the solution to our problem. I want to present an alternate view, which is that we should stick with linear rewards. The reason that abusive self-voting is a problem under linear rewards is because users with a small to medium sized stake are able to influence rewards, and some are using that influence for selfish reasons. If you take away the ability for abusive self-voting to give significant rewards without a pile-on of other voters, then you are also taking away the "regular users" ability to influence rewards. Any shift away from linear rewards is a shift back towards only the major stake holders having influence/power.

I would like to propose a few ways that we can handle this:

1. Every Steemian chooses for themselves how they want to use their stake. For those people who want to chose to use theirs purely for the purpose of increasing their own personal rewards (or those of their friends, sock-puppets, etc.) they need to ask themselves if this is their vision of how the platform is going to scale to the masses. Do we want a community where millions of users can join us and have a chance to earn a share of crypto by contributing to the platform/community, or do we want it to be a community where the only way to get ahead is to buy your way in or know someone with a lot of stake?
2. The people in the community who want to combat abusive self-voting should organize. In the same way that there is Curie for finding good content, and SteemCleaners for fighting plagiarism / abuse, there should be a well known group specifically for targeting the worst cases of self-voting abuse. There should also be easy ways for people in the community to contribute by sharing links they discover, or delegating SP to an anti-self-voting-abuse account. (I encourage those who are already organizing around this to promote what they are doing in the comments below.)
3. The community should monitor the amount of rewards going to self-voting abuse. The last I heard, it was around 10% of the rewards pool. While this is still somewhat high, that does mean that the other 90% is still there for the rest of the community to earn through participation in the platform. As much as possible (without completely ignoring the problem) try to focus on the 90% and ways we can use it to grow the platform.

I know this is a long post, but I want to conclude with two final thoughts:

The Steemit dev team is building us the platform to use, but it is ultimately up to the community how we use it. We can continue to make requests over changes that we want, but unless/until they are made, we have to work with what we've got. I think the platform that we have is already amazing, and from what I understand there are some pretty cool things still yet to come. (I am very excited for communities!!)

As far as abuse is concerned, we as a community need to decide how to handle it. There will likely be a general consensus around 'etiquette' of what is 'right' and 'wrong' but at the end of the day, it will be up to each individual to decide what they want to do with their stake. It is really up to you. Hopefully enough of us make the decision to do what we feel is best for the long-term success of the platform.