Part of the Utopian reward deal is that you can either have an upvote by the Utopian-io bot or by another bot. Both together is against the rules. As soon as a bot made an upvote - even if it happened on the initiative of a third party- the Utopian-io bot stays away.

The rules are clear as stated in this article about the bot

It Looks Like, Getting Votes By Multiple Bots And @Utopian-io Works After All And Seems To Be Normal After All

As you can see in the comment section of this article, the user @littleboy got himself "a minnowbooster selfgoat". Which is nice for him. The problem is that he also got an upvote by @utopian-io and @elear, which had a value of almost 8$.

A screenshot of the article from the Steemworld page of @littleboy @littleboy.

When you look on Steemworld again, when the upvotes for this specific article exactly happened, you will see that the @minnowbooster vote came two hours after the one by @utopian-io.

@minnowboster on 2p.m.

@utopian-io on 4p.m. of the same day

What Does That Mean?

1. In case the bot has a built in protection against other bots, it doesn't work.
2. If it doesn't have one, the user who clicked ok when rewarding @littleboy overlooked the upvotes by other bots.
3. And provided, the upvote was only supposed to be smaller than it would have been without upvote by another bot, that didn't really work well, too. An upvote of almost 8$ is quite something.

In effect this means that with users ignoring the rule, those who stick to it get a smaller upvote than they should. At the same moment it is possible that this user doesn't have the necessary funds to get a 3rd party upvote himself. Therefore the consequence right now is that users who ignore the rules have an advantage over those who adhere to them.

In effect, the "jealousy rule" is dysfunctional and needs to be reformed or abolished.

What Are The Consequences?

Personally I like the idea of an exclusive vote. After all, it is about rewarding something that until now has never been rewarded and the sponsors of the voting power can use their Steem Power in better ways if it is suddenly all about maximizing the payouts.

If the rule should sustain, then the bot needs some tweaking - or depending on its current setup, @minnowbooster should be put on the exclusion list. Also important is to tell contributors about the rule, so they don't break it.

It is just a guess, but another problem presumably are votes by bots after @utopian-io did his job. That's why votes should be happening as close to the deadline for payout-relevant votes as possible to prevent this behavior. Alternatively, maybe a script can help, which reduces or removes an upvote again when the vote of another bot is detected.

If the policy is that other bots only reduce the voting power of the @utopian-io upvote, I think the penalty should be a bit harsher and the upvoting power must not exceed 10%. Otherwise it still would be profitable to get an additional external bot vote.

But of course, I am not the majority. I did delegate some SP, but that is only a fraction of the entire amount. I guess, the decision about this matter should be made by the delegation big shots and I could also live with a bot that is not so jealous anymore. Depending on the complexity of the changes, this could be the better option.

I hope that was useful.

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Open Source Contribution posted via https://utopian.io

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