Using TrufflePig for potential abuse detection - Human curation needed - Multiple $1,000s in rewards at stakesteemCreated with Sketch.

in #steem3 years ago (edited)

High stakes human curators, please review the pending payouts for many of the authors on this list from @trufflepig: Today's Truffle Picks: Quality Steemit Posts that deserve more Rewards and Attention! (27.04.2021). A rough estimate is that there may be more than $3,000 of questionable rewards in the pipeline (and growing daily at a rate of something like $1,400 per day). See below for screencaps of pending payouts as of today.

In addition to finding overlooked quality, I'm wondering if maybe trufflepig accidentally found a reward-farming scheme?

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PIxabay license, source

A small number of the accounts that trufflepig found do look organic, but I predict that a very high proportion of the accounts on trufflepig's list will receive a sizeable upvote from a particular bid-bot in the next few days, as have previous posts by many of the same authors accounts.

I am, decidedly, not saying that someone might be running a ring of accounts and using an artificial intelligence tool like GPT3 to spin text; voting it to an unreasonable value; and then funneling the rewards off-chain to support a competing blockchain. I do have my own opinions on the matter, though.

At any rate, example screenshots are pasted below. Curators with more SP than me may wish to disagree with rewards on these and future pending payouts by these accounts. You can click the link to trufflepig's post for direct links to these accounts.

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Undoubtedly all those accounts are upmewhale, in my little stay in steemit I have seen things like abuse of power, vote farm among other things.

If you analyze https://steemit.com/trending/hive-150232 you will notice that someone is abusing its power that was granted by many users.

check out the booming01 account the biggest healing rewards come from many ghost accounts that were created by a developer.

There is a lot of abuse on the platform and that is reflected in the reward pool.

Perhaps by writing these a powerful enemy will win if that person were to read this message because what is seen with the naked eye does not need glasses.

Unfortunately, I don't speak the language(s?), so I have no idea what's going on in that community, but yeah such high rewards with so few followers certainly calls some of the payouts into question. In the end, it's something like a tragedy of the commons problem.

I think we're going to have problems with abuse until someone figures out a way to (i) automate abuse fighting; and/or (ii) make it into a sustainable business model. It's too hard of a problem to count on people to do it by hand and out of altruism.

And we have seen in the past that it's also harmful when the abuse-fighters get too aggressive, so there needs to be a process for transparency and appeal.

It might be interesting to look at it as analogous to "pollution" and see if there's a way to borrow ideas from the free market environmentalism community.

When I heard my friends talk about steemit they always named a certain bernie sandler they said that he was the black sheep of steemit and he used to retaliate against those who opposed his wrongdoing.

I think that the owners of steemit should take action on this type of act, or create a task force in charge to stop the abuse.

That capital outflow from the platform greatly influences the value of the coin.

By the way last night when I was answering you, the electricity went out because a strong electrical storm was falling, it lasted almost 8 hours without electricity.

Hi, thanks for the reply! Sorry you lost power, but I'm glad it didn't last too long.

Yeah, the account you mention really had a split-personality. The owner did a lot of good things for the platform, but also many things that I didn't agree with. I was definitely not a fan of the retaliatory actions.

You're right about the capital outflow, I think.

There have been many attempts at something like a "task force" over the years, but it's a hard problem. I do see steemit trying to support the "endingplagiarism" account, recently, so we'll see how that goes. As we see here, though, the problem of abuse extends beyond just plagiarism. Recently, I have also noticed an increase in the people who are reposting old content - from here and elsewhere. If there's too much of that, I suppose it could drive Steemit down in web/SEO rankings. There's plenty to keep the abuse-fighters occupied. ; -)

You are right, the reputation of steemit would fall a lot due to the amount of garbage that is published every day, I do not know why but most of the plagiarists come from Bangladesh or Arabic language.

How many posts do you think is created daily on steemit?

It is very difficult to analyze each of the publications although it is true that artificial intelligence bots are good at detecting plagiarism but it detects it because the users are newbies, but there are professional users who look for content in other languages they modify some phrases and it is almost done impossible to detect plagiarism.

About using the bid bots I used it to test in my third to last publication to find out if it was profitable but I think it is not, more than anything I use it because it gives me pain after I spend hours writing and researching and I see my published in zero , I have not yet found a community that supports me, at the moment I will keep looking until it motivates me to write daily.

In the case of the publications mentioned in your publication, it is evident that users are not paying for the whale's services, because I could not notice any transfer to upmewhale requesting their service that gave me to understand that these accounts are the property of the aforementioned whale .

In the Chinese community there is a bot called nutbox.mine that has created a number of new accounts and each one gives a vote of 350 $ this whale is abusing the delegations that the community is giving to support the creators of actual content.

When I see these acts it causes me to have a powerful account to give negative votes and eliminate the reward for abusers.

I've seen nutbox in the context of their defi initiative. I didn't realize they were operating their voting bot that way, though.

In the end, we mostly just have to focus on doing what we can to support our own connections with our own stake. As they say, "Don't try to boil the ocean." If you keep at it and find topics that interest you to write about, then you'll find support. It just takes time.

Thanks for the advice I will keep it in mind, when I started in steemit I started at full speed now I am taking it more calmly, By the way, what is penny4thoughts? that has given me a reward for participating in one of your publications.

penny4thoughts is an account I set up with an experimental script In order to encourage and reward genuine discussions. If someone sends beneficiary rewards from their post to penny4thoughts, then it distributes the liquid portion to any commenters who get a 100% upvote from the author. Here's a description of how it's supposed to work, from a previous comment:

For #penny4thoughts, the idea is an attempt to encourage more engagement in posts and especially in comments. It works by setting a beneficiary on the post. I normally set 36% (18% liquid and 18% powered up), but it can be any percentage - higher or lower. If a post sets a beneficiary for @penny4thoughts, here's what is supposed to happen.

1.) @penny4thoughts votes for the post
2.) At payout time, the selected percentage of author rewards get sent from the blockchain to @penny4thoughts.
3.) @penny4thoughts checks for replies that received 100% upvotes from the post's author.
4.) If there were no comments that received 100% upvotes from the post's author, the liquid rewards get sent back to the author.
5.) If there were comments that received 100% upvotes, the liquid rewards get split evenly and sent to all comment-authors who received upvotes.
6.) The non-liquid portion of the rewards stays mostly powered up, and @penny4thoughts votes with my curation bot to support other Steem content-creators.
7.) The @penny4thoughts account will continue powering down at a low rate (currently 5% APR), conceivably to fund operations and enhancements at some point in the future..

In addition to setting @penny4thoughts as a beneficiary, I also set a tag to #penny4thoughts to make the posts easy to find, but that's not required to trigger reward sharing.

At present, it's probably not very scalable, but you're welcome to try it out and let me know if you run into any troubles using it.

It is true, there is a lot of quality content that is not taken into account. As well as many people who create several accounts and thus obtain income. It is good that you consider this wake-up call.

Thanks for the reply! I definitely appreciate @trufflepig's mission of supporting unrecognized content producers. It's pretty surprising that it may also be accidentally useful for abuse fighting.

we are little fish in this immense sea! where the greatest survive. I'm glad it exists @trufflepig.

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