The change really did affect comment voting, although there are a few who 'waste' their VP rewarding comments as a way to try to boost engagement on their posts, and others.
Personally, I think that as long as there is a window, there will be 'curation rewards over content' automated voting. I still automate voting on the LEO tribe following the change to no window - I can follow the tribes curation account with being heavily penalized for following a large vote, 'late'. I can see people doing this with the base token if there was no window - following curation trails like curie, ocdb, etc.
There is a concern with regards to late self-voting though, but some of the tribes (LEO, STEM, SPORTS) have already done away with the window and at present are not suffering from late self-voting. The reasons for this are due to a) larger stakeholders knowing that self-voting is like crapping in their own kitchen and b) methods being introduced to allow more time to downvote than upvote. I worked with the SPORTS tribe after they introduced 3 days to upvote, and the full 7 days to downvote. It's not too difficult to run scripts to check who's been heavily (with stake or numbers) self-voting comments (either with same account or an alt), and having a few days after the last upvote can be cast allows time to check for 'abuse'.
Thanks as always for your work on Hive!
There will always be auto-voting as long as there are curation rewards, IMO, because not every stakeholder will want to curate. Accepting that premise, I think the proposed solution will at least direct that auto-vote towards more deserving posts.
I agree. Following a respected trail with an auto-vote knowing you wont be penalized feels more acceptable and better than the network over auto-voting an author who is known to collect decent rewards just because of the network they have. A removal of the any window could steer more to the former.