I went through a few articles on the Steemit. The old ones (before HF21) and the new ones also. I try to get some opinion whether the vote for my own articles is bad, harmful, beneficial, immoral, neutral...or what it is?! Whatever my opinion and your opinion is, it is not forbidden, and so it should also be seen - what is not prohibited is allowed.
It should also be remembered that now the votes are not split 75/25, but 50/50. More precisely, in the ratio 45/45/10, as the block producers receive 10% of the rewards.
Let's try to summarize it:
- When you vote for your article after 5 minutes, you give 50% of your vote to the curators. But you also become a curator, so even a part of curator's reward will be yours. It depends on the strength of your vote and the time of your vote. Earlier you vote, higher your vote has the value.
- If you vote before 5 minutes, you get more % of curator's reward. But you're losing part of it also because it falls into a reward pool. This variant is not so good for other curators also, but it is advantageous for the reward pool, where those unused rewards fall into.
- If you have a smaller vote weight over the other curators of your articles, your vote is almost meaningless. At least in the sense of reducing the reward of other curators.
- When your vote weight is bigger, you remove a portion of the curator reward from other curators, on the other hand, the amount of the distributed reward will increase. In the final, it can be fifty-fifty, those who vote before you can profit from it. So if you don't want to demotivate curators of your articles, better use your vote a bit later.
- By upvoting your own articles, and especially sh-tposts or meaningless comments, you risk an unprecedented interest of some downvoting party, that arose here on Steemit after HF21. Sometimes I can see, they do a great job with some of the sh-tposts and abusers of self-voting.
Photo: Pixabay
It follows from these points that the transition reward distribution from 75/25 to 50/50 makes it more defensible to vote for the articles made by yourself. Curators are also gaining something from it, even more than before HF21.
As for voting for your own comments, you are your own author and curator there, unless no one else votes for your comment. Here is the abuse behaviour even more obvious. If you have some upvote of your comment, but it's not worth $ 0.02, you can still use services like dustbunny better than upvoting your own comment.
I use the self-votes for my own Charity posts, because I will then use the earned STEEM/SBD for charity purpose anyway, so I see no problem here. Some others can use their self-vote for a different reason and its only their choice to do so.
When I try to put all these points together, I don't think self-voting is a serious problem that should be solved from above. If someone is really abusing the system, one will most likely be punished by some downvoter. One takes the risk mentioned in point no 5.
I will be glad for your views on this topic. Do you use self-voting for your articles and comments? For what reason? Or why are you not using them?