I'm not so sure that we want to ban auto-voting. It's a great way to support people even when we're not able to be active, and it also helps individuals use their voting mana more effectively (i.e. not have it sit unused). The issue with auto-vote sniping is something that has come up, but that's as much of a problem with the rewards curve as it is with auto-voting.

Lowering the impact of auto-voting for individuals with a small circle of frequently-voted people means that systems that automate voting over a larger number of individuals gain dominance.

It means that a system like SBI, which is highly distributed, will see no penalty, while social users with five or six frequently upvoted people that they know will see a penalty. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure it's desirable.

Some questions that would definitely need to be answered:

1. How would you decide the size of the list?
2. How would people be informed of the penalties?
3. Would you make the penalty based on a post per day basis, or a vote per day basis?
4. Would this create perverse incentives?

For a start, I think that deciding how many people counts as being too frequently voted could be problematic. For instance, I follow a couple hundred people, but only a handful of them are frequently active. Some people post monthly or every other month, and some of them are legacy follows from way back when and don't post very often.

So, if we look at my auto-voting, I've got it set for probably three or four dozen people, but five or six get the lion's share of the votes because they're the most productive. I curate my auto-voting list to include people who make work I like, who I've worked with, or who I've got some other relationship with. Not all of them are equally active; some are very active, some are not.

One of the other issues that comes up is people not knowing that they're hurting themselves. This is one of the issues I see with the reward curve, but it's sort of a natural consequence of the way the system works and there's a benefit (hunting for cool things, upvoting them, and sharing them is rewarded).

In this case, you would need to make sure that every front-end notifies people about the reduction in vote value from over-voting accounts, and auto-voters could get around this easily either by just voting more (mitigating the results of the penalty), or gaming the system.

Another question here would be how to account for the penalty. For instance, if someone is offline for a while and then suddenly upvotes a bunch of content from a particular creator, do you assess a penalty then, or is it for posts based on time?

It creates a new set of rules about voting on or uploading content that people need to be familiar with. It's already better to spread out posts, which is good for most users but limits professional content creation (e.g. if a major news service were to try to set up on Hive, it would suffer a diminishing return on every article past its fourth). More disincentives to frequent chain interaction could really backfire.

I think the biggest problem with this would be that it would have the opposite desired effect. Instead of spreading out auto-votes or encouraging people to vote manually, it would make it a better option to toss massive votes on people who you know are going to have a great return. Someone who posts good content frequently but who appeals to a niche audience or isn't as established would get fewer votes because voting on them often diminishes the rewards for voters.