There has been some discussion regarding circle voting on Scorum of late. When I say discussion, I mean people throw the term into a conversation like a hand grenade in an isolated context. I am not a fan of sound bites and quick labelling of occurrences and people, its a complete over simplification of patterns of behaviour. I'd associate these terms loosely with those on the platform that have accused me of being racist and accused others too for simply using the flagging tool against people with a different race or skin colour, with no real discussion or underlying explanation for their accusations. They simply state this label with nothing to add to it. For example they fail to realise I have flagged people of my own skin colour and race too, probably because they don't really care about a discussion that would lead to them having to compromise.

According to such people the entire platform must therefore be racist because there are groups here based on country of origin and race only. For example we have Scorum India, Scorum Nigeria...Scorum Italia...I don't think there's anything wrong with such groups and I don't believe they are created out of racism of any malice, but if we take certain individuals accusations against me and Phil Newton then by definition they must be racist as well. The same goes for these terms "circle voting" and "circle jerking". They have no real meaning to me. If they are meant to be used to accuse people of something wrong, then the whole platform is guilty too because everybody does it. Voting for people you have a connection with is not wrong, it's human! Disagreeing and flagging people, is not wrong it's also human. Feel free to flag this post or any of my others if you don't like my writing, I won't take it too heart even if you criticise the entirety of it.

Groups Are Natural, Learn to Live in a World That Has Always Been Tribal and Always Will to Some Degree

Forming groups is a natural pattern in life so why anyone would comment on it in an "outrageous" or "abusive" context hands down is beyond me. People form groups in life period, whether that's on Scorum, another blockchain platform or in real life, all the way up to government political parties, countries and trading blocs. The idea that groups shouldn't exist and look after their own needs is expecting humans not to be humans, that's never going to happen so the question is not how we can stop this happening, it's how we can find away to encourage each "group" to start voting more across other groups rather than castrate any particular group for voting for it's own members.

No solution for this will be perfect but a little feature I would like to see from a user friendly perspective is under every users profile, I would like to see a tab that summarises a users votes over the past whatever amount of days, weeks or months. Perhaps the past week or month?

It would be nice to see the following in a table of rows and columns:

> Who the user has voted for

> How much VP/Percent they have used for each vote

> Which articles they have voted for

> How much in SP those votes were roughly worth

A separate table that shows the user's top 10 writers that they have voted for over the past week and month

This sort of data out in the open where you don't have to be technically minded in anyway to access and summarise it, would maintain total transparency and accountability on the Scorum blockchain. The percentage measure would be particularly important because whether you have 2k, 10k or 50k SP it will show your behaviour patterns on how narrow or wide spread your vote is shared. I think over a month this would be a good reflection on how open minded and fair someone is being with their vote.

It would also encourage each voter to spread their vote out a little bit more. With that little bit of extra cross voting behaviour, it could flower into a further increase as people become more engaged with new writers and each others content.

It will also expose those that are complaining about circle voting because they will be more careful about accusing others of circle voting before they have checked out their own data and behaviour.

I honestly think a lot of people won't be aware to a real degree how much they vote for the same people and how much they vote for everyone else. Everyone will have a general feeling but when it comes to real data and figures, this will be beyond most people's comprehension right now and this tool can be self serving to encourage a more diluted vote.

For me the simple solutions are the best, we don't need restrictions on how people choose to behave on the platform, it's decentralised, we just need more transparency to encourage people to check their own patterns before they start complaining about other peoples voting patterns, that includes me too!

Beyond the complaining, I do honestly think an interface with such data on will be of great benefit to how the platform works in the long term. On the positive side, if someone likes a particular writers work, they can then see where that writer is giving their vote away, this could prove a good indication of other writers that you may wish to follow and vote for.

The current follow tool alone isn't a good enough indicator of this, a follow is simply someone clicking a button once, it does not show who a writer actually likes in terms of their work and who they spend time curating and voting for. So this tool will also produce the side benefit of helping people find new quality writers more easily.

What does everyone think on this new feature request?