Short note on my involvement with @smackdown.kitty

The story

After a discussion with @l0k1 about self voting, we decided to collaborate on an experimental bot to counter these self votes in a way similar to the Whale Experiment.

I have already expressed my ambivilence towards that experiment, but basically I thought it was an interesting way to use their stake and they certainly got a conversation moving.

We really have @abit and @smooth to thank for the main change of HF 19, linear reward curves for posts and comments. It was something I was really in favor of, especially as a way for minnow to actually have a bit of collective flagging power instead of being easily overwhelmed by whales flags.

HF 19 flaw

However there is a flaw with the completely linear reward curve - a huge incentive to self vote.

This has been highlighted by several users, but here's a small selection:

With all these the comments are as interesting as the main post, worth the read.

Proposal for community based action

@l0k1 made an announcement post earlier of our intention to create a bot which will down vote self votes to negate the effect of this one vote, similarly to the whale experiment.

Note that we will not down vote accounts with SP < 1000.

Preparations are underway on the coding side and an account @smackdown.kitty has been registered. Check out @l0k1 's post here which has many more details.

The dirt on @personz

Let me explain my own previous self voting.

I used to self vote my own comments to get visibility, higher to the top of the list, and as a rule of thumb I'd do this if I got some engagement with the comment and got a thread going.

I also self voted my own posts by default, as it is the default for the steemit.com Submit a Story posting method. I honestly didn't think twice about it or really notice it before HF 19. However I really did notice it after, when after I posted there was already a few dollars on the post (when my voting power was high enough 😅).

I think this in particular is a problem, that the interface defaults to self voting. I have created an issue on GitHub for it and even made the change as a pull request (it is a super small change to the code).

I am now going to stop self voting after we have tested the bot, because we'll be testing on our own accounts 🙂

Community support

Unlike @abit and @smooth, @l0k1 and I cannot bank roll the bot with SP on our own as we are not large enough stakeholders, so this project will not go ahead without some community support.

So if you support this, let us know. I know we're going to be getting a lot of comments which criticize the project, so if you agree please speak up. Please delegate some SP to @smackdown.kitty if you can, you can always revoke it if you change your mind.

If you are against it, let's discuss it (if you know me you know I like this). I jumped on this because I do feel it is an issue and I do not think down voting / flagging is in some way wrong. It is a tool to be used for abuse. I consider this to be abuse and I want to promote this issue to the top of concerns so that we will ultimately see a systems level solution.

Potential solutions

It was pointed out on @l0k1 's post that no solutions were provided. We are just in the first steps and most of the other posts about this issue do not lay out a straightforward solution either. I think this is because it is complicated and there is a tug-of-war here between the benefits of the linear reward curve (which are truly great) and the incentive to vote on one's own posts.

I think that disabling self voting is the simplest option. Why not do it? I'm not the sharpest pencil in the pack, but I can't see a reason to not disallow it. I would really love to hear a counter to this.