With HF19 being live, a huge problem that still hasn't been resolved has been amplified now. People with small accounts like me will probably finally notice it.
DISCLAIMER: this article is exclusively about a technical flaw in the system, not about psychology or sociology or anything else.
The problem
As a curator there never was and still isn't any incentive to vote on other authors! You can always make way more money on average by voting on your own content (comments), just 11 times per day. It's only a matter of time before too many people realize this and the whole system starts to suffer and the price of STEEM keeps falling down until this flaw is fixed.
Potential solutions
- Prevent self-voting, which at least makes it slightly harder to self-vote (you'll need multiple accounts then)
- Reduce rewards every time you vote on the same person
Conclusion
I think we have a major problem! You can be certain that there will always be a percentage of users that will do this, because the system allows it. That's extra downwards pressure on STEEM that constantly needs to be compensated for by new investors. And that's on top of the STEEM inflation that already needs to be overcome. Let's hope the developers come up with something soon, otherwise this might get messy!
P.S.: I hope i'm not missing something, i didn't get a lot of sleep because of HF19 ;)
[EDIT 1]
I might have a reasonable solution: the rewards should increase based on a combination of the amount of other votes and STEEM POWER that has been assigned to the content. This way if you are the only voter, the post reward doesn't increase much until more curators agree that it's content worth voting on.
[EDIT2]
The solution mentioned above doesn't work. As of now I've never heard anyone come up with a solution to self-voting.
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