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RE: Welcome To The Steemit That Vote Buying Hath Wrought
The way to deal with this, in my opinion, is to make it not profitable to do. Most bid-bot rounds are now returning a negative ROI, which means to earn that $6,686 in post rewards he would have had to spend more than that buying those votes.
If that's not the case and he is making money off of the purchased votes, then we need to see how we can prevent that. In my opinion vote buying isn't the problem as much as profitable vote buying.
By the way, isn't the easiest way to make this unprofitable simply blacklisting these users and unvoting all their posts with no refund?
There's literally no downside to this (save time to implement), and upside for all legitimate parties?
I guess the bots would lose a tiny sliver of curation on abuse posts, too...
Blacklisting these users is fine, but that doesn't solve anything since there will always be someone else willing to sell their vote and the spammers can easily make new accounts faster than we can catch and blacklist all of them.
So manual blacklisting is a band-aid solution to the problem. If, on the other hand, costs of vote buying go up overall (meaning it returns a negative direct ROI), then the spamming will stop naturally since it will lose money for them as they don't gain anything from the increased visibility of their posts like "good" content does.
That has been one of my goals ever since starting the bot tracker site - to bring efficiency and transparency to the vote buying market - which prevents people from profiting off of the inefficiency. It's certainly not perfect yet, but it's come a very long way from where it was 6 months ago.
Also, I personally feel that refunds should be given for users who are blacklisted. Taking their money without providing the service they are paying for is stealing plain and simple and that is not something that I do. Even if they have stolen content or done any number of other bad things, I still don't feel that gives me the right to stoop to their level and steal from them. Obviously each bot owner can make his or her own decision about how to handle that situation.
This is why I said manually blacklist and DO NOT REFUND. Not just manually black list.
"I still don't feel that gives me the right to stoop to their level and steal from them."
Equivocation. You would not be stealing. It would be in your T&C.
You'll never stop this without refusing refunds.
Then again, that would cut into profits, wouldn't it?
Call it what you will but i will not take people's money when I knowingly will not provide them a service.
Actually quite the opposite - instead of keeping their money I'm giving it back to them.
"Actually quite the opposite - instead of keeping their money I'm giving it back to them."
Deliberate misinterpretation of my argument?
Yes, and we both know that you think if you stopped refunding abusers, you would scare off money from the likes of these movie trailer posts and your bot would be less profitable per SP.
Just like the few (2?) that actually use a blacklist - SS and BAW - which make less than the rest.
You are uniquely positioned to already know the previous fact.
Let me set something straight here. There are quite a few more bots than the two you have listed that use a blacklist, some of them are quite extensive. These bots have a myriad of different tools and options at their disposal to combat spam on the platform - for example:
Where do you think all of those tools and options came from? I have spent many, many hours of my scarce available time building all of these things and many more and they are all open source and freely available for anyone to use.
On top of that I have built many other features which reduce the profitability of the bots in return for a better user experience, all of which I implement first and foremost on my own bot.
I have blacklisted @movietrailers and will continue to blacklist any accounts that are obviously engaging in plagiarism. I happen to disagree with you and some other bot owners on this one point about whether or not to refund bids from blacklisted users. I disagree with it on principle, not because i feel it will reduce the earnings to my bot (which I honestly don't think it will really have much of an effect on anyway).
We are both going after the same goals here. I literally have a significant portion of my family's savings invested in Steem and very much would like for the platform to succeed and grow. We may disagree on how best to accomplish that, but that's ok - that's life.
I think you are a great writer and I enjoy the content you post, but I expected you to be more open minded to the fact that other people can have different opinions than you on some of these topics. I take offense to the fact that you are accusing me of promoting spam and plagiarism on the platform because I am only after profits when there is significant evidence to the contrary.
If you're interested in having a constructive and respectful conversation about the topics at hand I am always open to that, otherwise the conversation ends here.
@yabapmatt always remember there is responsibility that service providers must consider...Its a self-fulfilling prophecy to expect participants to act in the best interest of the platform, taking that into account, don't expect the movie trailers to stop and your business to flourish at the expense of public eyes who would as @lexiconical alluded to would say "this is nonsense", why make the effort when I can find a random trailer, post it and make use of your service...two or three times, I let pass by but four and five it becomes a norm until it becomes a circus show...My hope is that you won't be the cheerleader of the circus show but you would take the necessary steps to address the situation
Please read my above comment and in the future I would suggest you not jump in to these conversations unless you really know what you're talking about.
What the fuck is happening in this comment?
He needs your permission to have an opinion about the abuse your services facilitate, in spite of easy solutions to stopping this abuse already implemented by @themarkymark and @therealwolf?
Shit, I better look at my witness votes.
It was a suggestion, as I said. I would also request that you do remove your witness vote for me since I don’t want support from someone so closed-minded.
Like I said, we are both on the same side here, we just have different ideas of how to go about it.
If you can’t be open to that and resort to the rude and disrepectful communication that you have displayed here then you are only contributing to the problems on this platform rather than helping.
You say you support peace abundance and liberty, but I think your replies to me having a difference of opinion show otherwise.
I agree, and wondered myself if this account was negative ROI.
The unfortunate fact is all other customers are caught in the middle.
PS - The title implied more blame on voting bots than I intended, but it sounded catchy. I wanted to argue that before all stake was sold, people would flag but no, the same economic incentive would have just been there to self-vote.
This is slightly different from what would have happened without voting bots, but probably not materially.
Most windows for a long time have been positive ROI (in many windows as much as 100% ROI), it's only recent weeks negative ROI is becoming common.
Just a friendly question... I may be naive for asking this, but its OK.. I would still like to hear your opinion on the subject.
Since the app you developed (steembottracker) is pretty much the standard today. How feasible would it be for it to have a shared blacklist? I'm no dev, which is why I ask... Maybe if the website itself would not allow bids to be "from" and "towards" certain blacklisted users.
Granted this won't fix all the problems, you've made some excellent points here outside of blacklist implementations and we also know there is always a bad actor who will find the new loophole to exploit. But maybe, just maybe it will help enough.
I'm also considering doing some public shaming myself, meaning that if a bot is preferred by scammers and spammers because the operator simply does not care, then everyone should know this and make up their mind. Maybe that would not work either and I'm showing more naivety. But hey... one can brainstorm publicly I guess.