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RE: A Method To Combat Upvote Spam Aimed At Maximizing Curation Rewards
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.