Overview
Self voting is something that most people agree is problematic on the Steem blockchain. However only a very small minority of people would go as far to say that there should be no self voting allowed at all, with most agreeing that a smaller proportion of votes should be directed to oneself than to others. There is no consensus on the ratio of self votes to outgoing votes, but self votes should generally be the lesser.
There is a consensus that investors should get a return on their investment, and that buying Steem (and especially powering up Steem into Steem Power) is something that should reward the investor. When expressed as self votes this motivation is in conflict with Steem's main stated purpose: to use the wisdom of the crowds to determine a value for social media posts. This is especially true in the context of a limited reward pool.
Self votes are problematic if they self award a return on investment much higher than the consensus amount, i.e. that some investors take advantage of other investors' goodwill. One of the main reasons is that this suggests to serious outside investors that Steem is a ponzi or other type of scam, and signals to malicious investors that Steem is a get rich quick scheme. It also shows existing users that the platform is not about any contribution except capital, and discourages the creation of content, development, or any other non-captial investment.
We can calculate a value which indicates this metric as the return on investment with regards to self votes and denote this value svROI. It is extrapolated to annual return from the sampled period. If we see a very large relative svROI value then we believe there is strong motivation to down vote the excessive self voters self voted posts to the value of their self vote.
@sadkitten is a bot which calculates svROI for all accounts on the Steem blockchain and counters the self voting of those accounts that take advantage of their investment at the expense of the community, to the best ability of the voting power and delegation.
Though there is a consensus about excessive self voting there is no consensus about what to do about it. This project is only one approach to deal with it and can be categorised as down voting over a disagreement of rewards. While this is an officially supported reason for down voting by Steemit it is still contentious, with many outspoken critics. However our position is that all votes are legal, all votes are valid and that the balance between mutually exclusive ideas of fairness can only be settled by a free vote when no agreement can be made.
What this bot does
@sadkitten scans every single vote made on the Steem blockchain, identifying self votes. It calculates the svROI metric and keeps track for each user. Each week a list of the top 100 self voters is compiled and for the week after that the bot attempts to counter all self votes by these 100 users. The list is ordered highest self voting to least on that list.
The bot is best effort and will make use of the available SP to the best of it's ability.
If you agree with the mission and want to support it please delegate to @sadkitten, no need to ask permission, just pitch in.