Self-voting is something you are allowed to do on Hive, but should you? Hive is the wild west where anything goes, but if you want to be accepted by the greater community then you need to consider how your actions are seen. We are given downvotes for a reason. If you are acting selfishly then anyone is entitled to adjust your rewards. They may have other reasons for doing so, but that is part of the freedom we enjoy here.
The way things work is that you can give our 10 full votes each day if you want your voting power to recover fully over 24 hours. You also get 2.5 downvotes over the same period. Given that there should not be so much to downvote I think that is fair.
If you vote up your own posts and/or comments then you are reducing what you can do for others. The payoff may not be that good anyway. You will get 50% of the post rewards, but the curation rewards could be the same as what you would get if you voted for someone else.
The benefit of voting for others is that they may decide to return the favour. People do notice if you self-vote and may decide you do not need their vote. I take it into account.
We can see an example of very deliberate self-voting behaviour by the @halo and @pinkfuzz accounts. They only seem to vote for each other, with @halo having enought HP to add 18c and @pinkfuzz somewhat less. They both hold a lot of HBD too, but maybe that is to take a quick profit some time.
Their behaviour is very coordinated with votes being applied after four days. They both post photos with some being NSFW and they attract some votes from some big accounts, one of which seems to exclusively support them. It occurred to me that there is potential to reap some nice curation rewards if you get in before all these timed votes, but it depends on whether you think their behaviour should be rewarded. They do not get much real engagement on their multiple posts each day, so it just seems like a way to milk rewards.
There has been some discussion on Discord about whether these people should be downvoted, but I am in two minds about it. It is a form of 'circle jerk' (horrible term), but most of their rewards come from other accounts. It can be hard to know if they control any of those. If there is a coordinated campaign against them then they will probably complain about being bullied. It may not such a big deal if they leave, but then Hive cannot afford to drive away or deter users.
In this case I would like to see them spread their votes to others. They would not lose much and could potentially do better.
There are plenty of other people self-voting. Many small accounts will do it, but their votes are insignificant. I also see some big accounts do it, but they are generally only posting once or twice a day. It still seems unnecessary if they get substantial votes from the community.
I have not self-voted for some time. Not sure if I have done it at all on Hive, but I did a bit as I powered down on Steem to get what I could from that dying system. Previously I have resisted it even when I got downvotes from others. I get enough support from the community to make it unnecessary.
I do not think we need extra rules coded into Hive to ban self-votes. People would work around it with proxy accounts anyway. What we need is an engaged community who care about a good spread of rewards. That can include downvoting.
If you want to get more active in curating Hive abuse then look at projects such as @steemflagrewards. There is active discussion on Discord about where downvotes may be necessary, but we each decide on where we want to act.
Give a shit.
Hive five!