Thank you 😊  Can I ask why are you not doing it?

It makes you look a lot cleaner the way you currently do it Jerry =)

Selfvotes, especially in cases where the vote seemed only to be cast to get the money, have always been a signifier to me of the likely psychological focus of the commenter. When someone selfupvotes, that makes me a lot less likely to vote for them unless others also voted and the comment really provided me direcly/indirectly with huge value. If everyone prioritized voting for himself rather than others, what kind of "social" network would we end up with after all?

Self-promotion has been a recent argument to keep selfvoting, as to a certain extent the promotion opportunity may be seen as adding investment value. In my opinion there's nothing dodgy about that argument, but there could be developed better ways of using this function that doesn't also give direct rewards in Steem or SBD.

However I should say that this issue is far more complex than most people realize (although I think you actually do realize much of it as I read two posts from you about selfvoting) and involves the risk of a "sybil" attack. That is, in other words, the risks associated with creating multiple accounts and, in the least bad scenario, of making a fortune through bots while slowly depreciation the value of the network. In worst case, attacking the network to strenghten a competitor. While I can't calculate how big this risk is as of today, it certainly exists. 

What's worse is that trying to fix it, if not done with extreme care, could easily make it worse. So that's why I personally think the bot is a good first step to signal the problem to users and to put some psychological pressure on big upvoters, but next will have to be a much harder discussion of how to significantly block sybil attacks. This issue is so hard in fact, that @ dan used it as an argument to _allow_ selfvotes in order to somewhat counter the use of multiple accounts.

My wish is that the community will at some point start to discuss these risks more deeply and come up with a real solution, not merely trying to push it into the future with minor tweaks - even as I of course would accept any improvement.

I don't think there is a PHP API but I'm not sure about that. I use the JavaScript library [Steem-JS](https://github.com/steemit/steem-js).

This post received a 4.1% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @wolo!  For more information, [click here](https://steemit.com/steemit/@randowhale/randowhale-is-now-only-1-steem-sbd-per-vote-spread-the-news)!

Thanks for the support!

Good to hear from you l0k1 :) The project has changed internally a couple times since you left, but continues to work it's way forward.

Thanks @l0k1!

Thank you @stellabelle, that means a lot, glad you agree it's important.

Just to be clear though, there is no information here which says that any of these authors up vote all of their comments.

Thank you for reading 🙂

We're looking at starting a #project-smackdown sub project looking at this stuff. If it materializes you'll see it here 😎

I read [your post](https://steemit.com/bot/@fiveboringgames/an-idea-for-a-bot-to-help-combat-the-comment-spam) a couple of weeks ago about self voting comment spam, and it's close to our idea here, as I said at the time.

Self up voting comments for exposure is something a lot of people do, and feel entitled to do. We've discussed it a lot at the Coop and I still side with the idea that large self up votes, even if used for comment exposure on a long thread, are not something I can stand behind. At the end of the day, these end up being rewards for the commenter which have been self assigned. Whatever way you cut it, it is not behavior I want to reward.

Of course that's just my opinion though, and I run this bot (with the help of others) to that end. I would not like to think that you blinding follow this just because I don't like it! Rather if you do refrain from self voting that it is the result of your own _self_ thoughts on the matter 🙂

The bottom line is that voting for others needs to be more rewarded by the system than voting for ourselves. We cannot simply appeal to altruism as some (maybe a lot) will always take advantage of that situation.

Thank you 😊  I don't yet know if it is a prime factor. I only have the computing power (and time) to scan for the top self voted comments at this time. I'd really like to see a deeper data analysis and I hope to do it soon in collaboration with some others in the #steem-coop.

What I do know is that much of these top self voting rewards are so far above what the vast majority of users actually are rewarded that it is an important issue for the shape of the platform. Are we going to say that we stand by this? Or will we oppose it?

No, it only orders comments by pending payout (the amount the self vote is worth at time of vote) and the top 20 comments by this order are flagged. So the bot makes no distinction how often you do it, just if it is of significant value.

The report is on the greater statistics gathered.

We are talking about a phase 2 which would take more information into account, more information on this coming when we have discussed further. It's not as simple though, and some of the strength of the current approach is that it is very clear why and how comments which are flagged are chosen, and it is largely non subjective.

Yes it really is. The code is [here](https://github.com/thrize/self-voter-flagger). flags are made using either @smackdown.kitty or @sadkitten accounts.

You were flagged [exactly once](https://steemd.com/tx/71d1080386f5aae5351a105176d92313a5542edc) as you were 16th highest pending payout from self vote comment for the 24th July, at $6.939. As you know, the bot flags the top 20 per day.

I've been very clear about the methodology used.

I agree with you completely that it should be system code change. We are not intending to run this forever. Perhaps the solution is some kind of bot (though I really hope not) but yes, we are campaigning for a hard fork change.