A Method To Combat Upvote Spam Aimed At Maximizing Curation Rewards
Have you noticed a lot of upvotes given at a tiny voting percentage landing on your posts in the last year or so? Those are automated and content agnostic votes the purpose of which is to maximize curation rewards with minimum effort. It is possible to achieve a higher level of curation efficiency by giving a large number of very small upvotes than in any other way for a couple of reasons 1) nobody bothers to front run them, and 2) if timed correctly, the early upvote penalty will not affect them as much as larger votes.
Voting that is thoughtless and content agnostic at every level is harmful to the platform. It's all too easy write a script that front runs bid bots or drops large numbers of small, early upvotes without giving any thought as to what is upvoted 24/7/365. That kind of voting is harmful because it dilutes the curation rewards available to thoughtful curators, making the entire business of Proof-of-Brain less lucrative and thus efficient and discovering quality content and rewarding it.
But there is a simple way to combat upvote spam. Make votes given with a smaller voting percentage less effective than votes with a larger voting percentage. Introduce a sub-linear curve to voting efficiency just like the effectiveness of votes now depends on the total worth of the piece of content being upvoted, being sub-linear with content values below about 20 STEEM. That way, the most effective way to use one's voting power would be to upvote a number of posts humanly possible to thoughtfully curate. That way, the advantage of automatic curation would be reduced.
I only vote manually. I think a 100% vote will not cause much harm if your vote is worth much or?
Nice to read some further info about voting and the system behind it.
What is a tiny voting percentage?
Happy day 💕
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What is a tiny voting percentage is not clear cut but something like 0.1% definitely is. We get ten 100% votes per day. If you only vote at 0.1%, then you need 10,000 votes to to use up your daily voting power. You can't judge the quality of that much content per day. And because you can't, you shouldn't earn anything by autovoting 10,000 times a day. Even 2% votes can be called tiny because you need 500 of such votes to use up all your daily voting power.
Thank you for your answer. I doubt I can read even 100 posts a day and am not autovoting except for two I believe. I check that out.
Happy day 💕
The problem is that it's not possible to stop them at the moment and with your change it also won't stop bc they then use higher vote% and split up their SP so that in the end the votes are the same
And for example a higher threshhold would hurt the minnows/planktons
Atm I am testing to prerun them with a selfvote but it has to have the right timing and vote% to be effective
That is all correct. But creating a new account burns 3 STEEM. :)
Not significantly, if at all, as their small-percentage votes fall under the dust threshold anyway if they are the only upvoters.
Yes, it's a delicate business.
Here's a successful upvote spammer:
https://steemworld.org/@karja
The upvotes cast by this user are not too small. They make up about 5% of the nearly full voting power of a large dolphin at ~42 000 SP. This user upvotes nearly 200 different accounts around the clock. Among those authors whose posts are upvoted, there are known vote farmers that are currently receiving flak from spam fighters. Nearly 200 SP earned by auto-voting blindly is nothing pleasant to look at. That's 10,000 SP earned per year.
It only costs 3 Steem if the curation farmer doesn't have enough time to wait for a new account or has not enough SP to create one himself. Karja for example can create 4 new accounts each day.
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It's true that there isn't much that can be done about when a large stakeholder is doing it.
But for the small guys the increased cost is an impediment. Let's say you have 100 SP at your disposal. Then it's a different story.
Du erhieltest aufgrund deiner LanaCharleenToken Miner ein Upvote von @sebescen81
Vielen lieben Dank für euren Support. Der Account meiner Tochter wächst und gedeiht.
About voting and curation revards.
First, thank you to @markkujantunen for starting this discussion.
Yes, I see that questions can be asked about the use of autovoting.
Problem one -
Who deserves a vote and how big it should be?
Good content should be one of the main factors. @ stef1 recently wrote a great post on that topic.
So. How to Choose Good Autors, It Can Be Difficult. Now with free downvoting some of the bad content posts will more or less disappear from Steemit?
By the way, I would be happy for information about who I should not vote for.
Problem two -
Over time, you have studied how Steemians is voting, especially from the level of dolphin and up in the system. It seems that the cration rewad is distributed very horizontally at the top of the Steemit community. Only a very small part goes down to those who are new to Steemit. Unfair or not, that's a question?
Anyway, if you want success on Steemit, good content or not, you need steempower. With only autor rewards, it takes time, maybe many years, to get a significant level. or steempower. Only way is to buy steem and power up.
So, voting manually take time, My be I should stop voting?
Thank you for replying and taking part in this conversation.
As to your question, autovoting is fine in my opinion (I do it myself). But it would be useful to pick such authors for voting whose work you know to be good. I autovote mostly authors whose posts I read anyway. It is very likely that I would've given them a vote but if that vote had been manual, it would've been timed much worse in terms of my curation rewards.
By the way @karja, I miss your photography posts. If you can find the time to make more or find the inspiration to continue, I'd love to see more.
Thank you again @markkujantunen for the discussion , I am started to check my voting list and will clean out peoples who don't wort an upvote.
Moore posts from the north coming soon.
Sincerely
Jan
Well, their vote is only rewarded if it's ratified by a bigger voter that follows them, otherwise they just waste their voting power. Some of them actually appear to be pretty good at predicting the posts that are going to be rewarded by later voters, which is exactly how the rewards are supposed to work.
If the concern is that they're being rewarded for content indifferent voting, the solution is for the people who vote later - with more substantial voting power - to start voting better... which hopefully is already starting to happen under the hf21 economics.
This is basically it, plus some other misconceptions about the value of tiny (e.g. 0.1%) votes.
With bid bots being rampant and mostly pretty dumb there were many front running strategies that made sense, including even front running the front runners.
To the extent that the later and larger votes are more intelligent and useful (and are also balanced by downvotes when they are not), the earlier votes are doing what they are supposed to do, or they don't earn (much)
(italics in the above my addition)
That's an important qualification. At this moment, however, front running anything voted with much voting power downvoted or not, makes a lot of financial sense.
@theycallmedan made an excellent post about how Trending should be populated by the best organically popular content on Steem to draw eyeballs and that bid bots and trending that buying votes to put anything to Trending should never have direct positive ROI. It should always cost money to do so. That makes sense. Promoted content (basically advertisements) should make up a distinct minority of the content in Trending for trending to have any value.
However, it is still very profitable for anyone to front run the bid bots whether or not the posts the votes are bought for make a positive ROI or not. That's because the posts would still be valuable and because predicting a large bid bot vote is very easy as all bid bot votes are preceded by a bid.
Well sure, but the real problem here is the bid bots overvaluing the content. The solution to that is downvotes which make buying votes a money-losing proposition. i.e. Downvotes -> buying votes not profitable -> people stop buying votes -> front running of people buying votes stops being profitable.
We still can't prevent people from doing it, but we can make it not profitable and even expensive and therefore not rampant.
Some improvement has been since since HF21, but things are still not perfect.
Agreed.
This already exists. Every vote has a dust vote reduction in order to discourage vote spam. Very small votes are worth less and earn less. A small to moderate stakeholder who splits into 10000 0.1% votes per day will give up a lot of their vote power, possibly all of it (on this note, also see third paragraph).
Account splitting is another issue, and no the 3 SP isn't a major obstacle because: a) empty accounts can be bought in bulk, and b) if the strategy is significantly profitable then the 3 SP is just a start up cost which would eventually be recouped anyway.
Also, many of the dust votes you see are in fact pointless. They're made at zero seconds which means they forfeit any curation rewards even if they earned any. I believe you have inferred some sort of intelligence or strategy behind them when none exists. I don't know why people are doing that, other than ignorance about how the platform works perhaps.
BTW, I added a tiny upvote to your post even though the idea is mostly if not entirely wrong, because it is good to examine such things and raise questions.
Don't believe him @markkujantunen! He had that tiny content agnostic upvote automated in an attempt to maximize his curation rewards at the expense of us honest voters! 😂😂
You're talking about the 50 rshares reduction?
Is there a store of empty accounts somewhere someone is willing to sell in bulk at a large discount? Sure, the 3 STEEM (not SP) is just a start up cost.
Of course, I'm not talking about those votes that are given at or very near zero.
You should take a look at the user @eforucom. I've been following his rewards on SteemWorld. Maybe you have tools ready at hand that allow you to look at this user's curation rewards and voting behavior from a longer time period. While his curation rewards haven't been anything to write home about very recently, I recall seeing weeks when his curation efficiency was greater than 150% prior to HF 21. Lot's of relatively small automated upvotes. Nowhere near the vote dust threshold, obviously, but quite small anyway. A lot of the curation taking place here is automated. That's not too bad if the authors are picked with some care.
I think automated and thoughtless curation, which was one of the issues raised here is not "mostly wrong". That includes things like front running bid botted crap content.
I don't know the exact amount. I remember it being described as a small vote on a small account. Whatever the number, I know it is significant because until the latest hard fork, people with small accounts did encounter the situation where they weren't permitted to vote because the deduction took the vote to zero (which was changed in the fork, unfortunately being part of the new conditions which led to one of the chain-crashing bugs).
EDIT: I looked this up, it is 50 million rshares, not 50 rshares. It corresponds to an account with about 1 SP making the typical 10 votes per day, an account with about 10 SP making 100 votes per day, etc. Massive splitting down to, say, 0.1% votes by a moderate stake account will destroy the vote power, and if you see someone/bot doing that it indicates not a successful strategy but likely a mistake.
Funny you should mention that because I have seen a literal web store where these were being sold. I don't know if this still exists, but someone wanting to milk the system can surely find a source of such accounts by asking around. I occasionally get solicited to buy them, although (note to would be solicitors:) I don't have any interest.
There is in fact, currently, limited demand for this specifically because the system is designed to avoid introducing incentives for splitting (although there are still some), and when developers do find such incentives they try to come up with ways to remove them rather than adding more.
Your post is mostly wrong in part not only because it is unlikely (or at least not well supported) that anything harmful exists, but because the suggested "fix" introduces account-splitting incentives which is contrary to an important Steem design principle.
If you: a) have better support for the idea that there is a problem worth solving other than the observation of some votes existing which are likely automated and have a nonzero return (this is fully expected and by design), and b) have a proposed solution that doesn't introduce/increase incentives for account splitting then you may be on to something. But right now, you aren't.
The community's weapon to use against are flags. Flag everything that gets too much reward!
Erm read again the post, you can't flag curation rewards away (well ok you can but it hurts the authors more than the curation spam farm bots xD)
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Du erhieltest aufgrund deiner LanaCharleenToken Miner ein Upvote von @sebescen81
Vielen lieben Dank für euren Support. Der Account meiner Tochter wächst und gedeiht.
That's not right. The early curators only make out of there are later and generally larger curators. The later and larger curators are only getting minimal curation rewards to begin with and lose out big time if there are downvotes.
On a particular post, downvotes may not be able to do much but to the extent that the entire balance of voting behavior on the platform can be changed with downvotes (cough, bidbots, cough), then curation rewards to earlier voters go away too.
I suspect not as much as we would hope for. Suppose you front run a post that was originally a $50 post that got downvoted to $30 and your vote is worth $0.02 and near-optimally timed. Your curation rewards will still be quite good.
There is nothing wrong with identifying content that isn't voted yet, has the potential to be worth $30, upvoting it early, and getting curation rewards. That's exactly what early curators are supposed to do.
I really don't understand what problem you are trying to describe.
Not even if it's bid botted crap downvoted but not enough to take it out of Trending?
Steem (or its front ends) treat promoted content (advertisements) similarly to organic content. Other platforms have slots for advertisements interspersed with eye ball catching organic/curated content.
If it is bid botted crap and only being lightly downvoted then we aren't where we want to get (yet?).
Better than before at least.
I agree about this and have said so in other threads. We generally need more vehicles for advertising including the one you described.
I have indeed noticed those dust votes that you mentioned. I can’t say that I have yet absorbed enough of the dynamics of the steem system to credibly comment on your proposed solution, but it sounds logical. Hopefully those that do understand better will pick up your idea and give it proper consideration!
I hope so, too.
I think the main point here is actually to incentivize people to curate thoughtfully. Curation rewards cannot be directly taken away like author rewards can. But if the profitability of upvote spam is reduced sufficiently, then those who engage in it may stop doing it and end up autovoting a much smaller number of authors. In that case, it is likely that the ones receiving the autovotes will be chosen better. Front running bid bots is already less profitable than it used to be because posts bid botted excessively come under heavy fire in #newsteem.
Hmm, this is interesting, never thought about it before. Will give it a resteem to potentially hear more techsavvy people's thoughts on it.
Thanks a lot!
Upvote spam sounds like an oxymoron. 😅
Maybe it sounds like it, but it isn't. Not all upvoting is a positive thing. Maybe that's because we associate "up" with "good" and "down" with "bad".
Sounds like an interesting idea. I have always seen the tiny votes but never thought someone was getting any benefit from them.
There is benefit in them if you vote enough times.
This guy https://steemworld.org/@eforucom used to make out like a bandit until HF 21 threw a banner in his works. Apparently, the oddity in the math he was making use of changed somehow. His average curation efficiency used to be north of 150% for months on end.