Operation Clean Trending
This whole article takes into assumption that all bid-bot operators, delegators, or users, are all doing it for profit only, and have no intention of creating value in the network. That's what I personally believe. Bid-bots are just leveraging on the STEEM rewards mechanism to create a win-win transaction between both abusers (the bid-bot and the bidder). Nothing new, there's probably been dozens of decent articles talking about that issue recently.
The problem with the trending
Bots have been ramping up the rape against the reward pool ever since linear rewards. They have been here for a while, but they haven't had an impact like that before. The trending was usually controlled by notorious self-voters/circle-jerkers and by popular authors and the curation trails following them.
FUN FACT: At the moment of writing this article, the top 7 articles in the trending got 90%+ of their rshares from bid-bots publicly listed and advertising on steembottracker.com.
Today, bots control most of the trending, it is obvious to anyone who has been using Steem for a bit. Even the latest article from the official @steemitblog couldn't make it #1 trending (BY FAR).
The metagame has shifted, and more and more whales are delegating to bid-bots as it became a convenient and hands-free method of speculation. It gives out ROIs similar to self-voting, without having to get flagged by @berniesanders afterwards.
More and more users are also stacking bid-bot votes to reach trending. I'm not sure if they use automated tools to automatically optimise their bids through multiple bid-bots, but it surely looks like it, and it's scary to me.
Suggested solution
I totally believe that delegating to bid-bots, or even running your own, to be the best way to speculate on the STEEM blockchain. They convert upvotes to liquidity while syphoning the reward pool and there's no way even the best curator in the world can beat that when 75% needs to go to the real people who create valuable content. The ROI of running a bid-bot is probably very similar to self-voting, i.e close to 100%.
What I believe we can fix easily, is the trending. Just like how back in the past @grumpycat pushed bot owners to enforce the 'no vote after 3.5 days' rule, I believe we should add more rules to bid-bots usage through downvote-pressure, this time by punishing creators who use bots to reach into the trending. Spending 2 SBD to get some visibility in a sub-tag is kinda fair, but scammers spending 400 SBD to promote their ICOs (without the content being marked as an ad in steemit/busy/etc) is terrible for our community (they get scammed) and gives out a bad image to newcomers and potential investors.
But @heimindanger, it's a lot of work to check every post! There's too many bots to check for !?
Not anymore -> https://steemwhales.com/clean-trending/
This brand new page on my dead website SteemWhales.com will allow you to quickly track the status of the trending contents. After you enter your username, it should fetch the list of all public bid bots, the steem natural trending, and show the % of the value coming from bots in the 'Bots' column.
On top of it, all contents that you haven't already voted on, and that have more than 50% of their value coming from bid-bots, will be selected, and by clicking the big green 'Downvote the trash' button, and entering your private posting key, you will quickly use your voting power to clean up the trending.
Basically, it's a weapon for fighting abuse, and punishing users who reach trending through bid-bots stacking. Try it, it's fun. And I believe it's the best way to use your votes in the current state of the system.
End result
Disclaimer: This thing will use a lot of your voting power, at the rate of 2% per downvoted content.
Flagged for Hate speech and discrimination against public businesses on the blockchain, in favor of the black market who also operate in the same space.
Why don't you instead make great content and ask us or your friends for sponsorship if you are new instead of making false accusations?
Make sure you also tell these people that you work for d.tube and that you make 25% off of peoples content without contributing a cent to their creation. Should we act the same way? give 25% less on our upvotes to our customers who use d.tube to compensate?
Also - We SPONSOR as well as selling marketing votes for the masses and a lot of other things you seem to not have informed yourself about.
I suggest you think really long before you answer me because your answer will be forever recorded into the block of the chain you post in.
Team Booster
We give everyone a chance
We sponsor great content creators in being better
We give away 25% of our earnings to STEEM OpenSource Projects to stay alive and updated
We reinvest in STEEM to make more peoples dreams come through.
Prior to this, we upvoted absolutely everyone on the steem blockchain for about a year which indeed helped expand the userbase from what it was to what it has become.
What do you do, making one post about d.tube and another about what we do is evil?
You Sir, clueless.
So you admit you are running a business on the blockchain like DTube does?
Very interesting. Could I know more information about your legal business, such as your terms of services and your address of incorporation? I would like to send some business to business notifications.
@heimendanger, not exactly like d.tube, but absolutely we are running a business on the blockchain. I have written well read posts about that in the past.
We are incorporated in Seychelles and our offices are in Dubai and our Banks are in USA, UK and Norway. If you need to speak with me or any of my team, the best way to reach us is through http://STEEMspeak.com 24/7 on the voice-chat, but if you want to send anything written you can fill out the contact form on http://fyrstikken.com.
Our TOS are explained in the steem blogs of booster and speedvoter and we continuously develop on it to make it better and better along with 20+ other apps/smart scripts we finance through partnerships with @inertia and his company so he has enough funds to keep them up to date as we move forward.
If you are looking for sponsorship for something great, we set aside power for that and is something we can talk about later when you have calmed down some more.
Fyrst.
Lol calm down he says.
I responded to this in a comment directly to @fyrstikkens comment.
Please consider monetize me again... people like me need it more then most people on steemit.
Lasse
Well said! In personally believe voting services strengthen Steemit and Steem because they create their own economy within Steemit, making Steem the only crypto with practical applications.
You already take much more than 25% when you sell your votes to the bidders.
You remove everybody's chance when you throw in your own bid to upvote yourself.
Only less than a week ago you confessed to stealing all your Steem from @adsactly.
Also dreams come *true not through.
Voting for everybody with your stake had the same effect as voting for nobody. It was for one reason, which was to put your name in the upvote list of every post including the spam and plagiarists.
Heimindanger is a constructor. He has built apps that we needed right when we needed them. You on the other hand, only know how to be destructive. And that's the impact you will always choose to have on the world.
I'm sorry, WHAT??? Hmmm so Fyrstikken confessed to have stolen the million steem he has from adsactly? What's going on here Beanz? Are you on crack? Did you slide off the pole and hit your head? poledancing upside-down not letting enough oxygen into your brain?
And after saying that you expect anybody to take you seriously? Amazing.
why do some persons use hate words, lets be friendly here and do the needful
No, @beanz, that was me who said that to your boyfriend as a joke when he complained about getting a flag and got angry.
We have a @frontrunner guild who makes off with most of the curation rewards. Normal people benefits from that, plus our customers. We make nothing or very little of the curation rewards because we are the last one to vote.
No @beanz, voting for everyone had a great effect and your opinion is already in a hateful mood, so I wont continue arguing with you.
Had to throw that in there, wow - a foreigner made a spelling mistake according to native english speaker @beanz. Congratulations, I give you that as a win.
I am glad he is a constructor, however I am not happy with this steemwhale bureaucracy. As the gf/ex gf of the guy I flagged last week you are anyway to biased and emotional for me to take anything of what you say seriously.
Maybe @walden has something to add to it.
Heinindanger is not and was never my bf. So I fail to see your point in bringing up an ex irrelevant to this comment. And I wasn't talking about the curation rewards I was talking about the actual liquid payment for the upvote. Which takes back more than 25% of the reward from the upvote.
@beanz, it would be much more profitable to make a quick 200 self owned accounts, re-delegate and just upvote myself 10 times per day with an autonomous feeder like someone else does.
If every single vote-window was full, that would be great - but that is not reality. People, ordinary people has made great profits on @booster since it started almost a year ago and people who have or will use him for shitposting will eventually find themselves in a bankrupt situation because they spent good token promoting bad content, like your current/ex boyfriend.
I was talking about @sirlunchthehost, @beanz. Why are you acting dumb when we know you are devious ans spiteful? Me bringing him up is absolutely relevant. @jonny-clearwater and @instructor2121 and others can tell you that. Heck, you even quoted his recording from that day so please, @beanz. Don`t act a fool for me please. I know your tactics, been seeing them for a year and a half and they never really seem to work.
Why so bitter, @beanz?
I'm not playing dumb and I know who you're talking about. Again, that has nothing to do with booster, nothing to do with heimindangers app and nothing to do with you stealing from @adsactly.
I also fail to see how any of the other people you're tagging are relevant here. It's like you're trying to call for backup or something. Funny to watch.
What's really, really funny, is watching you run your mouth until you crash against a wall like a crashdummy.
You are falsely accusing people of serious shit and this is likely not going to end well for you, as you might be beginning to fathom. Why don't you try something new?
Think, then Talk
Good doggie.
peace, lets settle things amicably here@beanz and @fyrstikken
I don't know what this is all about... but I support blockchain businesses in general.
I do think that the d.tube account is controlled by people that have the same narative as people controlling youtube, @heimindanger and his crew is just as brainwashed by the illuminati as people controlling youtube, UNFORTUNATELY.... my high quality content only got a few upvotes from d.tube, then shortly after I said what I write here (which is the truth), then they "demonetized" me on d.tube, by never upvoting me again from the d-tube account, THIS HAPPENED LAST YEAR!...
I kept making quality content, almost for free...
Anyway... I do think we need to wake both @heinindanger and @fyrstikken up to anarcho capitalism and flat earth...
As for @heinindanger asking for a business address??? WHAT, why is that even important, this is blockchain technology (anarcho capitalism) not crony capitalism and statism..
I think @heimindanger did a good job in creating D.tube, still he is very brainwashed so it is not really the place for truthers, anarcho capitalists and flat earthers, that it could be, if he got rid of the brainwashing...
Lasse
How about a campaign to bring n^2 back ?
How about a campaign for allowing n^x, or even any polynomial ?
n^2 was even worse tbh. If we had to choose a hardcoded number I'd go for n^1.3 and keep iterating dichotomically
Ok.
Anything higher than n^1 is fine for me.
Where do I have to sign up ?
A reward curve which started as n^2 / exponential (thus flat), and then later changed into linear would work against self-voting as well as excessive rewards:
'Conciliation' of the reward curves?.
Or, even better, an idea of @clayop.
N2 with the whale experiment was doing the trick just fine, it forced the hard fork so that reward pool rape could become a thing.
Does that disadvantage large investors?
Only if the price doesnt rise with all the happy new users that matter in the math.
Who puts $50k into a blogging platform anyway?
If they want to speculate in amounts larger than that they need to keep their hands off of minnow rewards.
When a whale votes everybody else loses money.
Not if they flag each other.
I LOVE flagwars ;)
Thats true, they could fight abuse with their millions rather than screw the little guys out of any rewards.
Yeah this.
The real issue isn't linear voting.
It's that your voting power drains after just 10 votes a day. This site was kept clean by a number of power voters who were happy to vote 40 times a day. The power voters have gone because their voting power drains too fast, and everyone else just self-votes or buys bid-bots.
This assumption is false. We used bid bots to get exposure on the biggest news in Garden of Eden history and made it to the trending page, and unfortunately were down voted by your bot.
This is unsettling for a few reasons.
#1 We have never used bid bots to send a post to the trending page before this post, but we did here because it is the most important post we have ever made.
#2 Our important post announces the sale of our property which is a huge step towards the next phase of our humanitarian project, and we are offering the property for cryptocurrency. This is significant, and ideally the transaction will be completed in Steem! Obviously, the first real estate for Steem exchange could add great value to the network.
#3 As disclosed in every one of our posts, and more importantly as demonstrated by our actions over the last 2 years here, we are highly dedicated to the success of Steem and creating value in the network. We are extremely devoted to building a better world for ALL - and have been for close to a decade - and have appreciated and embraced Steem's revolutionary potential for furthering that cause since the day we heard about it.
#4 After reaching out to you in Steemit.chat because we feel your downvote per these justifications does not apply to our post, you did not consider these facts we respectfully brought to your attention. In fact, you told us you had not even read the post! You responded absolutely and held fast to your conclusion that the use of bid bots is abuse per se. While it might be true that many posts on trending are of poor quality and are out for profit only, to lump ALL posts together under that judgment is illogical, unreasonable, and tyrannical.
Of course you are entitled to whatever opinion you want as well as to using your voting power however you want, but with this kind of absolute judgment, mistakes have already been made - and you're likely to make more by using a bot to fight a bot.
I'm just going to go through each of your points and deconstruct this argument because it's barely manageable.
The trending section is for to find the best content on the blockchain. The absolute best content at the time and by buying the bids, you effectively kill more and more reason for people to look at trending because it's not the best content. Whilst it's good content, good content doesn't win rewards, doesn't garner real views and essentially rips the opportunity for real content to make it. You might be using it for exposure but this isn't a very good reason because it's not trending worthy and if it was, you'd have put the bids strong enough to get to hot and let the community determine it from there. You didn't. Who am I to call it not great content, well to be honest you've stated it's important but for who and what, let the community decide. You again didn't allow for that.
If it's that great value to the network, let the community decide. Do your outreach, contact people, let people decide it. You rob the community the chance to decide upon it. Next time I have to sell a car I'll just say people can buy it with Steem and start selling everything with it and then switch to Fiat right? No you want people to know about what you're doing but that's all it is. Wrong means to do so as you are killing value for people to depend on Trending as a good means of finding the best content.
Great, that is absolutely fantastic that you are looking to help and benefit the network. I think it's fair to say that we all want this as it helps the blockchain and progresses Steam in the future. I can only hope you continue to do this as I have to gain from your actions. Don't really need to repeat my issue of using the Trending as a mechanic to incorrectly advertise via buying votes.
His reasons don't apply to your post but you still benefit from the ROI or actually ROV. However my issue with your actions is that you are being immoral and not fair to other content creators who might have spent the same amount of time as you but not have the funds to buy the votes.
To conclude, I have absolutely no idea who you guys are or what you guys stand for and you won't know that of me also so that's out of the way. I however do not need to know who you are because what you are trying to defend is wrong. Your intentions might be great but because the trending operates in such a way, you are robbing everyone else the chance of deciding what the actual blockchain wants. If you feel that a whale might not see you, pay enough to get to hot and go from there but that is still unfair. How about network with people, contact whales and get to know them and find out what they feel. I mean if the cause is that great, people will upvote such content. I never seen @heimindanger having to ask people to upvote his content or buy votes for his Steem Dapp "DTube" never was needed because it was that good. People WANTED it and supported it. It was that fantastic that people just wanted to do anything. Your actions prove otherwise and it's absolutely why you had to use Trending to get leverage when something else should have been there.
If this bot is to work, ALL CONTENT must honour what is real curation and therefore we can all decide what is the best content. Does that mean Steem has to change how voting works again. I think it will but don't you dare try to say what you done is morally good for Steem because it adds to the problem. It forces more and more people to pay for exposure rather than finding the best content which is why PEOPLE USE STEEM. To find the BEST of the internet within the Steem blockchain and you robbed the community a part of that chance.
If you want to speak to me, I'll be on the DTube Discord as Coldbolt but this isn't right. I absolutely understand your good intention but ignoring how trending works, taints it badly.
Goodluck to the future.
Let's deconstruct the deconstruction.
"The trending section is for to find the best content on the blockchain."
According to whom?
So many assumptions and opinions stated as fact.
Note: You have a view of how SteemIt could develop, not "The View".
I think the trending page is more interesting and higher quality now with the voting bots. I was really tired of the "Circle Jerk" posts.
Now, I will not claim I am right and you are wrong, but your opinion is just that.
hahhaa yea bid bots are actually better than the circle jerking...
I believe in the free market, which means I believe that if someone wants to and has the ability to use bid bots then its all good.
With that being said I can also then say if someone wants to use a bot do downvote without any actual consideration/fairness as ridiculous as it is....well its still part of the free market....Whatever hahaha it is the way it is and will be the way its going to be.
Appreciate your input here though on this important topic.
SteemON!
I would be extremely confident to say that my view of Steem is pretty much bang on.
With this logic, we'd not be progressing as a human race. The quality of content in my opinion hasn't went up but stayed the same. What has happened now is we're paying our way to show our content, rather than giving a platform for finding the best content creators or bringing them over. There shouldn't be a gate to pay to have content seen but rather the content should be seen for it's value and worth.
If we're always seeking to find the best content, then the trending will grow to find such things and it'll develop. If we go about it the current state that it's in, we limit the amount of people that can create that content and therefore the chances of better content surpassing it's current self is diminished.
Therefore I am happy to state my opinion will move correctly. Fair does to yourself, I did state it as a fact but to say that bid bots is the future of Steem, is like trying to defend a house with no walls. and stomps as hands
I view SteemIt as the Firehose the other Platforms will dump into. dbooks, dlive, dtube and others are the future of the platform. I am not a fan of watching people vlog, just as you don't seem to like ads. Shrugs. It's just a point of view.
Upvoted for relevancy
Dang sorry that happened to such a good advocate of Steem.
Thank you for that, it means a lot to me/us. I don't get involved in drama so am actually only just now reading this thread.....Noted for the record.
SteemON!
I'm replacing the value of that stupid flag right now.
Steem on you incredible bastards
Fuck yea you awesome fuck!!!! hahaha
Hoping to see you soon at Eden Metamorphosis!
I plan to be heading your way in June!
ok well come early for memorial day! Have you seen our 4 day festival? Its going to be unlike anything you have ever seen I guarantee you that!
well I want to time the trip with the Austin meetup
This will be WAY cooler hahaha, but do BOTH.
This is really about a monopoly (Steemit whales) kicking out the little guys like any other big corporation, they are protecting their interests. How else do you think this self appointed gestapo account manages to get $200-$700 for his crappy posts? It's a whale club, they vote among themselves and won't let the small fish play. The only thing you can do is power down and let these scammers fall on their own weight. I can't wait to see the prosecutions!
@gardenofeden - on the plus side, ure comment here has allowed me to find you :D - more than if u had just made trending XD
followed and upvoted last post :D
they spend millions supposedly against the abuse instead of helping the little ones to come out from below.
I see the war of flags everywhere when that money could help many people in the world in countries in crisis, who join Steemit in search of rewards for their talent. Then these small fish would not have to buy Bots Bit so that nobody sees them, or worse, to do what a whale likes, to vote, they practically ask for a vote.
When I go to the trends tab, I read what I find interesting and those who publish low quality content and use Bit bots are only accelerating the pace of their failure. We all know here that it is not because you have a tendency, but because it is of quality.
Each person is free to choose what they read. It is equal to the ads that appear on YouTube every time you watch a video, you decide whether to watch it or omit the publication.
We do not all have equal tastes and what for one is a good content perhaps for another is shit. They should let people do what they like most with their money and read what they like most.
This raises a problem of subjectivity. For example, Suesa's post was very clearly not doing it for profit, but that can only be known if you knew the person. Context becomes an issue, quality and value becomes an opinion, and no investigation will reliably give you a true answer to this assumption in general.
With that in mind you inevitably end up arbitrarily flagging every post regardless of its context, and contribution to the platform. I agree with the sentiment on the whole, don't get me wrong, but a higher status of responsibility & regulation is going to be needed if it's to avoid backlash.
For example, as a curator, I don't just upvote things using our tag, nor do I upvote simply 'good' content. I have to visit their profiles and check their comments and previous posts to get a contextual picture of who they are so I know they're not just abusing the system for profit. Takes time.
What about everyone freely doing anything including downvoting, and not talking about it? Just like nobody ever asks anyone why their posts are receiving upvotes. Edit: i know this sounds like a jaded response lol
lol,.. I made a post about that once. Nobody ever posts.. "why are my posts earning this much?" Love the comment.
Subjectivity is not a "problem" it is something to be expressed with your votes. So if you think some activity is adding value to Steem then upvote it and if you think it is not adding value commensurate with its rewards (which often translates into real negative value when consider the massive growth of the blockchain that results from all this bidding and botting, which in turn is making it increasingly difficult and costly to operate and could eventually kill it), then downvote it.
Totally, I'm simply pointing out that the post is written in a way that the method doesn't take into account what the content is, its just an initiative that looks at the trending and bot situation and flags according to that, nevermind what the context is and I'm not sure that is wise without some extra regulation. because people start flag wars over this stuff and makes the platform look childish af - all on trending.
IF you think something is overvalued, then flag, but I question whether flags should be used simply based on a glance at the total price and whether a bot was used
I think that was my point anyway, I kinda forgot now.
It's amazing how touchy some people can be, just the other day I gave some little flags to a bunch of image copyrighted spammer posts and the guy just imploded:
If you are not doing it for profit, there is an option to decline rewards.
Also, your friend Suesa (which got downvoted by my page) clearly got a very large % of his visibility and rewards from the bots for this article. I can see how it's a coincidence here as he doesn't use bots usually, but nonetheless his article should never have made trending. Without bots, it would have been near the 50$ range, as most of his other articles. The 500$+ he got from the bots, I consider as abuse, and I downvote it. I would do the same to anyone else.
I agree in a perfect world we would all waste our time to see if users are real and abusing or not. However, people who have time (i.e minnows) don't have the power, and people who have the power (whales), don't have the time.
Downvoting arbitrarily based on the % of value coming from bot upvotes is the best way to select and avoid personal wars. At least with this tool, it's clear I have personally nothing against all the people I downvoted yesterday. If we started doing it selectively, egos would come in and people would take it as a personal attacks.
Reasonable opinion. While I don't necessarily agree it is the best way, or even the only solution we need, it is certainly a reasonable one at this point.
First of all, @suesa contributes - a lot - for the community and the new Steemian. This is something you cannot see or will read about with that bot you created. Completely transparent and utterly unethical, based on a gamble and some shallow calculations, leaving all possible ethical aspects OUT of it.
Second of all, she did not even buy the votes herself, she doesn't really care for that either. It was a gift from someone who follows her and he wanted to reward her for -all- the time and contribution she already pledged on and for Steemit.
Third, yes that post had a 'too high' pay-out, for a joke. I downvoted it for 2 cents, "here are my 2 cents".
Fourth, she, as a contributor to the Steemit platform is worth so much more than that single stupid post's pay-out.
Lastly, who the fuck are you to judge -like this-? Can you not see the bigger picture @heimindanger what the actual fuck you have created? You are playing with other peoples money, based on crap. If you want to remove the crap, do it manually and do it with your own judgment.
Agreed, 85% of the rewards generated by bots is way too much, especially that the post is worth 800+, she wouldn't have made near that amount without the bots. It was a cute little joke, but now it's time to get off the trending page.
I think this is beneficial and it reminds me a lot of The Whale Voting Experiment, even if I wasn't on Steem back then.
Test: You got a 5.00% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
It is a personal attack, and you are now on my shitlist.
Trying to remove responsibility for your actions from some "tool" just makes you a tool.
"If you are not doing it for profit, there is an option to decline rewards."
Great idea if you want nobody to see your post. You are fucking naive, @heimindanger
Lex if you're going to sell your account it would be nice to let the community know. For your own good mostly because whoever this guy is running your account is making a fool of you.
look who is talking...
I have to agree.
I think it's informative to consider the tools you have recently begun to use in this regard.
You have changed, sir.
Very very good points, nice to see someone really laying into this.
Well, it wasn't on profit, I agree with you on that one @mobbs but it's still a shitpost that doesn't deserve to be on Trending, it doesn't even deserve a dollar since it brings no value to the community. It's just a failed joke. It's a subjective opinion.
I know Suesa, she's doing good, but many other guys are doing good too and don't earn that much in half a year. Regardless of the quality, no post should make $800 unless it's a project update, like the ones that start with D.
Conclusion, even without taking into consideration the context we can clearly see that most of the Trending posts are overvalued and deserve flagging.
Sorry but that sounds a lot like "mob rule". When you write "it doesn't deserve a dollar since it brings no value to the community" you are implying that you are the one or among the ones who decide what brings and doesn't bring value to the community ... Who gave you that role or what makes you think you are entitles to it ? That there is only one way to define "the community" and it is obviously the way you (and those who think like you) define it ...
I guess this drama currently unfolding goes to show why anarchy cannot work - every guy with a metaphorical gun implicitly assumes that things are "right" or "wrong" according to a scale of values that he takes for granted and believes absolute, and also happens to be his scale of values ...
Also saying Suesa's post shouldn't make that much because other posts more deserving do not earn nearly as much is again a very "communist" way of looking at things (it implies "everybody should be judged and ranked according to one rule" - it basically ends up encouraging conformism and kills creativity)
Most of the Trending posts are "overvalued" - is one way of putting it that implies that there is one definition of value (and you are using it).
Paid votes using bots are a bad idea I believe but in this case the cure is worse than the disease, in my opinion
Yes, everyone is. That's why we get to vote.
Another way of seeing it is "nobody is".
I can decide what brings value to ME. But I shouldn't judge on behalf of THE COMMUNITY, nobody placed any power-of-attorney in me ! I can only talk for myself. You can only talk for yourself, you cannot suddenly decide that, because YOUR PERSONAL JUDGEMENT says that it doesn't bring value to you then it automatically means that it doesn't bring value to THE COMMUNITY.
Actually, I'm not sure you even realize the enormity of what you've written ... We get to vote FOR OURSELVES. Your vote indicate what is valuable (or not) FOR YOU! You have absolutely NO RIGHT to imagine that you speak on behalf of THE COMMUNITY.
YOU and THE COMMUNITY are distinct entities. THE COMMUNITY as a whole cannot vote. What is valuable for it results from the aggregate of individual values. If you flag something that many people upvoted it means you are challenging the judgement of the people who upvoted, you are defying them, by annihilating the effect of their vote you want to deny them the right to express their appreciation. It is extremely destructive.
In case the value comes from bots then it means you are defying and challenging the current steemit system. You can do that indeed, I too believe the current HF19 could do with some tweaking, but I think downvoting is the wrong approach. We should instead plead with whoever can do something about it to change the system.
If you want Steem to be successful then you (speaking generally, not just you personally) need to be assessing what in your opinion adds value to the community (especially the community of investors who have entrusted their capital to STEEM/SP) and what does not. And then expressing that with voting. Because otherwise there is no mechanism to ensure the investors' money being spent on rewards is actually delivering value, and instead those who value their own personal enrichment will prevail. Investors will then abandon it and it will die.
There is no 'free money' here. It all comes from investors who buy in. Unless limits are put on those who want to take that money and put it straight into their pockets, investors will turn off the lights and the party will be over.
You are wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to debate. I'm preparing a more elaborate answer that I'll publish as a standalone post because I am convinced the debate is central to the future of steem (the blockchain system)
What value does it brings to the community that it deserves to have such a humongous payout? Does it help people? Change someone's life? Does it develops the ecosystem?
The whole idea of this platform is that if the community find a post valuable enough they upvote it. If you upvote a post up to 800 with bots, 85% of the votes being bought then who is the one deciding the value? You or the community?
I have my definition of value and others have theirs, but that is the idea, if people find something valuable (whatever that means to them), they use their VP to upvote it, showing their appreciation.
For example, your post is in Trending on the tag Steem, way above mine but you bought all of your votes, and I didn't. The community upvoted my post because they found it valuable. So what does that mean, your post is of better quality because it has a bigger payout?
How's the cure worse than the disease? If someone from the community finds your post overvalued, they flag it. The rewards someone bought, go back to the reward pool and the whole community is benefiting from it one way or another.
I agree with your analysis, I think the whole idea of self-voting and bot voting is extremly misguided and said as much in the beginning. But then everybody answered : "these are the rules of this platform, if you don't like it you can go away". Ok, if these are the rules and self-voting and bots are part of the game then what people are doing is just playing the game by the rules.
I agree the game is rigged (a guy from Nairobi or Aceh has little chance to be able to buy several hundred $ worth of bot voting) but the solution is not "opininon wars" that are ultimately destructive ("I think your content is not valuable so I harm you") but rather correcting the problem from its root.
The root of the problem is the "Sybil attack" that the Steem whitepaper acknowledges as a challenge yet it brings no solution, quite the contrary it lets the reader think that it is a good thing to have a system that is vulnerable :
The flagging was not intended for "over-valued" posts - especially when the guy paid for the exposure with his money, it was intended for spam, trolling, etc.
The cure is worth than the disease because it seeds discord and calls for revenge, it generates destructive strife instead of healing and community building. It distracts from encouraging constructive contribution and channels effort and energy into destructive behaviour.
Have a look for instance at the ideas that are presented and inform this post from @lishu, especially the Ted talks he links to.
Every educator will tell you that in order to build and educate gently you need to 1. encourage desirable behaviour (obviously) and 2. ignore undesirable behaviour. Punishing should only be reserved for extreme cases.
To get back to solving Steemit abuse, I am convinced that the solution is to have true, real, provable identities.
As you hinted, the value should be indicated by the communities (plural, very important ! otherwise we go toward a mirror image of the "politically correct" that so suffocate our societies today). But you can't build communities when you don't know who you are talking about, when you cannot tell whether two accounts are of the same person or of two different persons or are bots.
This platform has no rules, and this is the beauty, the people can decide what's acceptable and what's not thus the bots don't have to be part of the game.
It's not a vulnerable system, it has no central authority that can stop bad stuff happening, but the community can decide how to operate and flagging is the only way to stop bad stuff. When I say community, I refer to the whole blockchain as a community.
The flagging was meant for whatever the individual wants to use it for. We have plenty of low-quality posts in Trending that are just overvalued, bought most of their rewards and certainly deserve some flagging.
I don't think you're right; you can't just ignore the undesirable behavior, if you see bullshit, you have to call it out. Otherwise, if you ignore it, that person doesn't learn anything and just moves on with his life thinking he did the right thing.
I don't think that's the solution, far from it. Many people want to stay anonymous because it's a matter of privacy since it's a blockchain and everything you say stays here forever. In case something happens in the future, those people don't want to have their views linked to their identities here forever.
When I write "ignore" it shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. The usage of a strong word ("ignore") is to divert the reader as strongly as possible from "punishment". I do think that some gentle remark, for instance how to improve a post so it's not bullshit anymore, is more appropriate than simply "ignore". I try to do as much when some Aceh-based steemians come begging for upvotes :-)
Then about the anonymity: it's anyone's choice but someone who chooses to be himself basically makes an implicit pledge to all the other participants: "I choose to be myself, therefore I pledge not to behave like a d*ck or a moron in order to never be ashamed of myself in the future".
One can easily imagine the reverse from someone who choose, on the contrary, to be anonymous: "I wanted to stay anonymous because I want to keep the option open of someday behaving like a complete d*ck with impunity". Maybe that was not the motivation of someone in particular but those interacting with anonymous characters have, by definition, no way to tell beforehand !
The problem with this is that some people are harmed when information sources are targeted for retribution. Anonymity is necessary for some truths to be revealed. Anonymity can be abused for the annoying of others, but is existentially important for certain content to be available.
That availability is vastly more critical than preventing trolls. Simply having a rewards mechanism almost eliminates trolling on Steemit. Losing anonymity might cost lives, or will preclude sensitive content from surfacing on Steemit because of the danger of source targeting.
Particularly as censorship and laws restricting free speech proliferate, anonymity becomes ever more important.
I also fail to see that verified identity will impact content quality, trending, or rewards pool mining substantially.
Test: You got a 40.00% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
Hi Juliàn, are you on discord by any chance ? May I contact you somewhere ? Thanks
This is not so.
Code is law. Software is little more than rules.
This is a difficult one, I agree that bots are kind of a plague in the steem ecosystem and it can really go sideways as we progress.
However, I also agree that some solutions can be worse than the disease. It will take a lot of finesse in dealing with this, and out of the box thinking.
The idea is that forces that counter themselves will result in a lot of power being used for this conflict, while forces that complement themselves build on each other and take us further. Sorry, but this subject is one for which I have no practical proposal yet. Maybe the communities should take a moral stance at least and communicate to the users that bit-bot-ing is shitty behavior that might lead to exclusion from certain groups, but this can also go sideways really quick.
In my opinion bot voting and multiple accounts shouldn't be allowed.
"One person, one account". The blockchain is powerful because it can mediate and allow real people to find consensus and built trust. If you allow fake accounts then it's all useless and we are back to FB and the rest.
How that can be implemented, I don't know.
But for as long as bots are allowed and the Steem whitepaper says, black on white "Eliminating "abuse" is not possible and shouldn't be the goal." (page 15. I disagree, but who am I?) then downvoting people because they have used the system as designed is destructive and harmful
Yep, bit-bots might be to cost of uncensorability. Personally, I would prefer a level of abuse rather than censorship or the need for identity.
But the fact we are having these discusions is the way to aproach this problem :)
Why not? If someone manages two different accounts differently, you can relate to either identity per their behaviour. If they simply have multiple accounts they manage with the same behaviour, why would you treat either account differently?
What difference does it make who is the actual meatbag behind the behaviour?
Well, the root being discussed is botvotes for profit. Thus decreasing the profitability of the botvotes by flagging is directly getting to the root of the problem.
How would that impact buying botvotes, selfvoting, or circlejerks?
I can easily see how it could prevent people from speaking forthrightly. I do not see that as a benefit.
The problem is that we cant flag it or wont. Im all for this (well with a different approach) and even i wont flag undeserving posts. Because, you know what, those that can buy their way to the top of trending frequently have the power to run me in the ground. Who cares if what i do brings value to the steem platforms. Retaliation is a sure reaction.
I propose that we look at bid bot owners and talk to them. Short term they are profiting but in long term this will destroy steemit and steem based platforms. EOS is just behind the corner waiting.
Once you get upvote bot owners to adjust their practices (yes at a cost to their profits) you will have a much healthier ecosystem. It doesnt have to be perfect but any move in the right direction is a positive step.
This will literally kill steem in the long run.
I dont care if people upvote themselves. Its their sp, their invested money but the upvote bot owners are here to blame.
When the facebook fiasco was made public i didnt blame those that abused the system, i blamed those that put the system in place. Now, Ned probably wont fix this, but we can police ourselves and those that profit from such a loophole.
Im a bot user myself. But i keep the use to the smallest of scales. Bots have their use but the abuse they allow to happen makes them have a net negative effect.
@guyfawkes4-20 we believe we are adding adding massive value to the community with a unique Steem platform (not more tools or steemit styled interfaces) and yet this system has failed us.
After a months work on a unique open source platform we get neg votes because we seek to rise above the crap posts.
Very disappointing.
There is a very simple solution to this that will eliminate the mob rule, that will effectively stop the abuse in its tracks... And thats a simple matter of having the bot owners
That way the decision if something is a justified upvote or not is completely in their hands. They still keep control of the trending pages, but guess what?! Crap content isnt going to get as much exposure anymore!Smartsteem has a 3 star rating and thats great, but thats not nearly enough to stop abuse. Even those with 3 star ratings start abusing the bot after time when they see they arent getting reprimanded. I tried to recommend this to @therealwolf but since im insignificant here it probably went by him.
I know this would be hard to implement and i dont know even how to go about that, but im sure there are people that could figure it out.
Yes... This will hurt bot owners profits and those who delegate to them but, cmon guys, this is hurting Steemit badly.. Take up some responsibility. People arent even checking the trending page anymore.
....a planktons opinion.... :D
It's not realistic in my opinion to expect people who have a life to just sit there 24/7 and review articles above a certain amount. I promoted my last post with (among others) a 50 SBD bid through smartsteem. It's a pretty long post, almost 10' reading (about 2000 words), how is the guy behind smartsteem to read all that and decide whether that post is worth 50 or 30 or 200 ? Especially when he has maybe 20 posts like that day-in day-out ?
I think bid bots shouldn't (somehow) be allowed. How to prevent that ... "is left as an exercise for the reader" ... :-)
Well you pay themfor their work. As a curie curator i couldnt tell you how many lines of text i could go through in 2 hours. Probably a 100 posts. And how many 50SBD or 100SBD bid bot payments do you think there are? Not many. You find those willing to do the work and give them a cut. Curators are payed by Curie and all Curie makes is from curation. Not a full blown business like upvote bots.
The problem is that there is no will. And wheres no will theres no action. Outside the coding im positive this could work.
I think you are being a bit pedantic with the wording. I think all value is subjective. Even money. But I can still say "overvalued". I would argue that he is not the one to determine the value of a post but rather he is one to determine the value of a post.
Whales have been flagging for disagreement of rewards for over a year now. I disagreed with flagging for that reason because it is based on aggregate earnings of a user over many other up-voters when the flagger has nothing against the post itself. I find I agree with you.
" you are implying that you are the one or among the ones who decide what brings and doesn't bring value to the community"
It is their Steem Power, it is precisely their right to use it to downvote content they don't believe brings value to the community. How is that 'mob rule'?
Yes, that's the whole idea, the individuals should be the one to decide what's valuable and what's not for them through upvoting/flagging. If the author is upvoting himself to Trending with bots, then the whole purpose of this platform is lost, but the community can still decide to flag, which is a much-needed action.
Still, I don't think that bots will ever be killed, but they can still be improved.
The bots could be killed if a superbot was created, enough delegation given to it and it began targeting all the trending/hot posts that were using vote bots. I believe Grumpycat proved this with his/her targeting that if people start losing money (in that case, bots that vote after 3.5 days) that vote buyers will modify their behavior to avoid the monetary loss.
Yes, if the people with the stick start pushing the bot owners towards change more, they would have to comply at some point.
Think "worshipping different gods" (disapproven but sometimes tolerated) versus "witch burning" in ancient times. If you use your steem power to upvote whatever shitpost you want, that's your right and freedom. When you use it to harm someone, to do (financial) violence onto someone it's not equivalent.
I am convinced downvoting should be used very, very sparingly, only when there is a manifest abuse.
I also do think having bot voting and paying for upvotes is a bad idea and should not be possible but as long as their are allowed downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...
Good then please commence downvoting regularly because there is manifest abuse on a huge scale including as described in the post. If you don't agree then that's perfectly okay, but those of us who do see it that way are going to express it with our votes.
By "abuse" I meant posts attempting to promote demonstrated scam schemes, phishing posts, child pornography or other such egregious abuses. I think it's a very, very slippery slope to start calling abuse the fact that suesa post racked up $900 or that yallapapi scored $500. I haven' t read the others in the list but I read those two and I upvoted them.
Are they worth that much ? Heck, who am I to judge ? Are Cristiano Ronaldo or Neymar Jr worth the money they are making ? In my opinion no, but again, who am I to judge ? Some people take from the same "reward pool" (the sum of all euros printed by the ECB) and directs those euros to Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr. That is the system ! If I disagree, I try to do politics to change the system. But I'm not "downvoting" Ronaldo and Neymar
When @heimindanger and others downvote @suesa's post and @yallapapi's post I feel insulted ! I feel that my very right to upvote a post is being questioned ! Do I have a right to express my liking for a post ? Because I feel that the flaggers want to deny me this right ! They want to censor my right to vote posts that I consider worthy of my votes !
You are Steem voter and that is precisely who judges. That's how this decentralized system works.
Who the hell are you to be above questioning? This is a decentralized system run by voters. Voters have to be free to disagree or it is meaningless and dysfunctional.
BTW, your right to upvote the post is not being questioned. You can do so any time you want. Others can downvote any time they want. The system adds up the votes and allocates rewards. End of story.
"downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...". Huh. That is the exact opposite of how I see it. I see buying a huge upvote to put your own post in trending as stealing from the pocket of everyone else who is posting without paying for votes. The reward pool is finite. Buying your way into trending decreases the payout going to other authors. If anything, the community coming together to flag an author who bought huge votes is stopping theft.
That is correct if someone has the monopoly of that behaviour. But when doing that is available to everyone, there is a pesky things called "game theory" and "Nash equilibriums" who stick their fingers in the spanner.
To be clearer: the fewer people buy upvotes, the bigger the incentive to be the one that cheats. The situation is not stable and evolves toward a Nash equilibrium: people start paying more and more to bots to get on trending page - it's the system that's broken and needs fixing, not the actors who are inside the system and playing by the rules. You can indeed attempt the latter but it's self-defeating if the system stays broken.
None of which changes the fact that this behavior is in fact "stealing" reward from the users who chose not to do this behavior. None of this changes the fact that buying votes to trend a post puts the lie to "proof of brain". I love how quickly "this behavior is allowed so it is okay" is forgotten when it comes to flagging. You can't have it both ways dude. If you truly think that just because other people are going to do something, and it is "allowed" by the code, that it is okay for you to engage in a behavior that is objectively bad for the long term health of the STEEM blockchain, than it is also okay for users to flag you for this behavior. I fail to see how this is hard to understand, or even debatable. Users with large stake in this platform absolutely should be flagging the crap out of any post that buys its way to trending under the current system which does not mark such posts as advertising. Failing to do so is putting nails in the coffin of their own investment.
Voting to prevent reward pool rape isn't financially harming anyone. It is voting to determine how the current reward pool is divided. An upvote is an upvote in favour of giving a post/comment a slice. A downvote is a vote that a given post should be paid less.
Not really sure what any of that has to do with religious persecution.
"Reward pool rape" needs defining. When someone with a lots of SP and consequently a lot of VP publishes obviously shitty posts every 6 hours and upvotes himself, as I believe haejin is (was?) doing, I believe that qualifies as "reward pool rape".
When a guy pays with his own money to get his post trending he's only getting back what he has put in. He pays X and the bot upvotes for a value of X. If you downvote Y he only gets back X-Y < X so you are financially harming the guy who paid the bot.
You can indeed argue that it is the bots that are doing the reward pool rape and I will agree with you. But then you should "punish" the bots, not by taking money from the guy who paid the bots (for as long as the bots are officially allowed at least).
You can argue like grumpy cat that, for instance, one shouldn't use bots for posts older than X days but, when steemit allows bots, that basically means that you are making up your own rules (on top of those of the system). You become a kind of vigilante: you take your own gun and start dispensing what you believe to be "justice" of your own accord, following whatever rules you edict.
That is what I call "mob rule". I was comparing this with a village that suddenly decides that a lady living alone is a witch and then proceeds to burn her at stake of their own accord (ok, my analogy wasn't very well formulated in the previous post, I hope now I got it a bit better)
Payouts which exceed added value to the platform, community. and stakeholders (especially the latter since they, or more accurately we, are paying 100% of the rewards).
This analogy is BS. Equating receiving smaller or no monetary payments with being lynched is absurd and offensive.
"Reward pool rape" is an unfortunate term that should probably be replaced. Rape is as bad an analogy here as you comparison of downvoting to religious persecution. Both are ridiculous appeals to emotion.
The concept behind the term, which I understand as the mechanised generations of rewards to deplete the reward pool in an industrial manner, without the reciprocal creation of good content, is however a valid problem faced by the steem system that does need addressing.
The ONLY means we have been given for addressing the issue is downvoting. It is the responsibility of SP holders to use their power to address the issue, else steem will become useless as a platform and the reward pool may as well just pay SP holders a dividend instead of rewarding content creators (because that is where bidbots are taking things if left unaddressed).
Bidbots are a scam scheme that robs the reward pool. Instead of putting the rewards in the hands of content creators, it goes mostly to maintainers of bidbots and those that lease steem power to them. By making the bots unprofitable to use, or risky to use for undeserving content, then this is literally the only way to use the free market to punish the bots. Anything else would require top down authoritarian intervention, which would pretty much defeat the point of having a decentralised system. SOMEONE has to decide what constitutes bad acting. The WHOLE POINT of the steem blockchain is that this decision making is DECENTRALISED, with power to make these decisions in the hand of INVESTORS, those that hold SP, proportional to their investment.
Steem allows bots. Steem also allows downvotes. You can't argue (sucessfully) that because one is allowed, another thing that is also allowed isn't right.
Look, it is this simple, users of bidbots are complicit dupes in a scheme that robs and reduces legitimate content creators of their rewards. It is the users, and those that lease to and build bidbots that are economically harming others. They reduce the amount of the reward pool that goes to creators (with oer 75%-85% of the reward pool going to bidbot maintainers and their SP leases). This reduces the incentive for genuine and quality content creators to participate, which in turn reduces the quality of the system, which prevents the value of STEEM increasing, which harms ALL investors.
Who, other than those with the SP to downvote these bad actors do you propose do something? Do you crave some centralised authority to come in and lay down the law? Ned? Steemit Inc? How would you have them do this without compromising the decentralised nature of the platform?
Great Projects , even crucial one's like mine don't get exposure to many eyes. Sometimes one has to make a decision whether to use bots to get their word out, or do it organically which many have pointed out as being extremely hard to do. It's not the average bot user's fault that the network has been construed to fit the agendas of the most powerful here. We're left with little option as minnows and dolphins especially. They've built these highways now man, and the majority of people are not willing to ride horse and carriages anymore. I don't know how to fix that I have to be honest. Perhaps we could propose an option in the steemit.com permissions tab to "allow" promoted content in which case each bot owner pays a percentage of it's earnings or gross delegated SP into a fund that pays each account that opts-in to view "promoted" posts? Use that SP for something good that will help people. Using it to power up in order to fight a war with bots will only cause more anguish for the innocent people caught in the crossfire. I'm not saying do nothing and it's our own right to protect ourselves from any threat, But we can launch bullets without guns too.
That's a great idea. How about the folks opting to receive promoted posts in their feed are recipients of the overage? Seems fair to me.
Sorry I'm so awful at keeping things succinct:
This is obviously your opinion - it's a subjective statement and that's my point. Your idea of value appears to be website projects that start with D.
It depends what we want from Steemit. Do we want a trending page to just be a list of steem dates and steem promotion and steem analysis and steem complaints, or do we want something 'trendy'?
If we're to have a trending page of 'trendy' posts, currently the only way to do that for the vast majority of cases is to either be a team of very skilled coders with huge delegations, or be someone with enough money for bot promotion. Right now there's just no other way.
$800 is surely excessive, but on the flip side I upvoted a single post of mine to $150 once, partly for international women's day, partly because I got flagged by some haejin goon, but that $150 post was totally invisible, I had to scroll several loading pages to get to it past all the haejin crypto jargon, posts like today's 'Double Bubble Analysis: update' and'Monthly Steemit Top 200 POWER UP List: March 2018' The post awareness of the hell women go through around the world went by comparatively silently.
Of course, mainstream adoption nis going to want to see things like inane april fools posts, travel blogs, philosophical discussions, political views, pranks, games. Natural social media material. So whether or not you personally find the post funny or clever, the fact that a high-rep individual contributing a lot to the community had some fun and somebody else got it into trending, to me, is totally fine and really one of the few good examples of bot usage.
Again, 800 could have been halved with the same effect, but much less? Back you go to obscurity, replaced by crypto steem bull patterns, 'Steem experiment: Burn post's and so on. (Actually today isn't a bad day for variety, but you get the idea)
I said that only the projects with D, the big projects that help grow this ecosystem, the ones that have countless hours of work behind them are those that deserve 800. But I didn't say that they are the only ones of value, the only ones that deserve big rewards.
The way I see it, it's straightforward, does a particular post helps the community? Does it brings any value to people? Does it help the people? Does it change something for the better? I think you see where I'm going and if the answer to some of the questions is affirmative then that post is valuable.
Now I'm asking you, what value does that post from @Suesa brings to the community that it deserve to have such a huge payout? None. Let's even say that the post reached its whole purpose of being funny but that still doesn't mean that it deserves so much since we have plenty of other posts a lot more valuable.
I feel what you mean mate, but if people didn't abuse the bots anymore there would be a lot more room for the quality, valuable posts to make it to the top. I had in the past some of my posts upvoted organically to 100-200 even 200+, and they did not reach the top because there were too many posts upvoted by bots.
The discussion is not even about that post from @Suesa but a reflection of what's going on on Trending. So yeah, the page is filled with shitposts that are outshining the quality and organic ones just because they paid for votes. The solution? Either stopping the bots (not going to happen) or flagging the posts, so the users don't abuse bots anymore (doable).
Sure, although don't see why the 'trending' page should be filled with 'helpful' stuff. It should be filled with 'trending' stuff. You don't see twitter trending tweets about twitters dev team or how they've helped speed up tweet times, you see people's every day lives and loves and adventures. That is inherently what I see as 'valuable'.
But you're right, it's not entirely about suesa, we both agree that the bot situation is a big-ass problem, and as I said, I don't even disagree with this idea, I'm all for it. I just think there should be methods to prevent arbitrary and blanket flags, something more objective than simply 'this post is shit and presumably just for profit based on my opinion'. Perhaps you are right that things over 800 bucks should be only for big projects - perhaps bots can set tiers for such things; registered projects having the highest/unlimited bid limits, everybody else capped at, say, $400.
The problem with flagging is at best it makes a temporary statement. Even all the activism on steemit made haejin's posts go from, at the peak value time, $450 down to about $400 a pop. Flagging is almost nothing more than a symbolic statement at this point until people learn to band together via powerful communities (flag-a-whale being a hopeful example of that)
Yes, I see what you mean, I think the Trending page should be filled with what the community thinks it's valuable. If they consider a post being of quality, they upvote it, if more are doing so, it reaches Trending. But the whole purpose of this platform is lost when people are using bots to get to Trending, 85% of the votes being bought.
As far as I noticed, the big projects don't use bots; they are reaching trending thanks to the support received from the community since they are doing something beneficial for everybody. But yeah, the bots need to set some more limits.
Flag-a-whale was a beautiful movement, and even if it had many people behind it, it's sad that the outcome was not the one desired.
I guess we have to wait and see what happens now. :)
I wonder if that post was posted on any other platform on the internet, would that have earned even 10$.
$10? Nah, maybe like $1-2 but Steem likes to reward shitposts. Anyway, it's sure as hell not worth $1000, the price that it had after the Steem pump.
It would be really awesome if 20 people who put real efforts on their posts, gets 50$ each instead of one post getting 1000$.
I'm powering down and dumping this whale club for good. Heck, I might even come up with a tool and big ass campaign for people to do the same, just like @heimindanger did to protect his posts while green with envy from others, it's not really about bad content is it?
See, he didn't do this out "love for Steemit", he is just protecting their monopoly on post positions and that of his big whale friends. We are not stupid, you gotta let the little fish play too once in a while or they will just just leave the pond...
Are your posts so good quality that they deserve $200 to $700 payouts? Give me a break, you use your Whale group for that, something a lot more questionable and damaging to the platform than using bots and that's the real problem with Steemit, it's a Whale Club and people will just get tired and leave...
Countdown to freedom:
@mobbs: I appreciate your more nuanced and holistic view of this debate. The "solutions" I see are often one-sided and dramatic. There's a lot of complexity to this that must be thought through.
I like how you analyzed things. Bull's eye my friend :)
She was not using bots for profit... for what then? For vissibility? XD Cmon, please!!! I understand your point of view but you are defending just that, your point of view because you do not know exactly why did she use the bots ... I am pretty sure was for profit as everybody who use the bots do.
Pd: I am complete against the use of bid-bots on the Steem blockchain for whatever reason ... that will be normally profit, even if you want to say something nice at the bottom is just that
I've said this a few times now, I didn't buy the bots. Reggaemuffin thought it'd be funny to have an April Fools joke on trending and bought the votes for it.
Personally, I'm not really a supporter of bots, but there isn't much that can be done about it. I even doubt that people will keep using this tool to keep flagging after a few weeks.
Glad to know was not you. Looks like he have a very "expensive" humor ... anyway, this shows me one more time why this bid-bots are a problem for the Steem blockchain in general.
Yes, like had happens every time some tool like that came to light. You do not get anything for flagging and also you loss VP ...
Out of curiosity, why would Suesa's post be exempt?
Regardless of context, people can decide for themselves whether the content of the post itself is worth the value it is drawing from the pool. The post must be compared to its total draw on the pool on personal judgements of value, not context.
Granted, @heimindanger should add a link to the posts in question so people can more easily read and judge for themselves but there is no way in my thinking that a shitpost should have over 1000 dollars on it.
I can't tell who is talking to whom on this post anymore, but since I know you I'll reply to you. Simply, I didn't state suesa's post should be exempt. I just pointed out that the assumption that she did it for money was incorrect. But yes the only qualm I had was that it was described as an artbitrary flagging, which is risky and controversial
They highlighted the problem didn't they? Even the large, heavily rewarded, many eyes already on accounts will use bidbots just 'for a laugh'. Nice role modelling.
For 'disagreement of reward' the content has to be judged on what it takes from the pool, paid or not. That content may not have been worth the value it would have made organically but went over 1000 even after flags. Error in judgement by reggae but saying that it wasn't her that ordered it rubs salt into the wound considering the circumstances and the one minute lockout voting which stops all minnows who support her from getting curation returns.
I agree that context might be important at times but a lot of the context in that argument was being left out of the conversation.
and yeah, the UI for long chains sucks ass.
Well, the problem @heimindanger is facing is that the posts in question are upvoted by the very non-subjective methodology you complain about his flags being flown by.
Essentially you both are in agreement that votes ought not to be based on profitability. IMHO, @heimindanger has the better argument, since his flags are only flown in response to purchased upvotes, which discourages purchasing votes.
I reckon that best forces personal and informed curation by attacking the mechanism that causes the problem directly.
I do believe an additional metric that included frequency of purchasing botvotes would better target the most egregious effectors of the problem @heimindanger intends to impact.
This would have precluded @gardenofeden's flag (if their comment here is factual) and also your contention.
This isn't a bad idea.
You're right, I basically agree with the concept on the whole, but I'm simply taking into account the reality of the likelihood of it being effective. We know from haejin that almost nobody is willing to sustain high-value flags to accounts, let alone getting $500 down to 0. There's just nobody on the platform with that kinda money and that kinda focus, and those who do care take thousands of flags to get rid of a couple of bucks.
This is not going to change any time soon and no initiative of self-policing is going to consistently cause any impact whatsoever - consider 'flagawhale', probably the largest community of flaggers for this cause that are, together, imperceptibly ineffective for the most part. Haejin still makes as much as he ever made (minus steem value) and bots users and owners will continue to profit.
The problem of bots needs to be disincentivized from the core, not from self policing.
With that in mind, blind flagging is not an effective methodology in my opinion, because nobody will want to waste their precious SP, whereas flagging based on your subjective consideration of value upon viewing a post, is something that should be an active part of the steemit culture. The rest is an inherent flaw that needs fixing by STINC somehow.
The thing is, even if we get all the current bots to agree on certain rules and regulations, it's a verbal contract and thus hardly binding, and any new bot services that prop up are going to instantly see how to take advantage, and do so. All it takes is a single millionaire to come on board and we have ourselves yet another crisis we spend weeks on battling with futility until we forget about it, until another millionaire comes on and repeat.
The rewards are paid by investors in the STEEM token. If investors are not able to generate a ROI by seelling votes they can't justify investing because of the inflation. If you scare away investor you undermine the token price.
I am not entirely sure that is mathematically accurate.
Were rewards to be distributed more widely, more people would stay. Last I checked Steemit has ~10% YOY retention rate, meaning 90% of new accounts are abandoned within the first year.
Steem tokens gain value by being used by many people. Those massive stakes mining the rewards pool aren't contributing to the price of Steem rising by broadening the market. Instead they're decreasing the rewards creators receive by profiting from voteselling, which decreases the encouragement creators receive to continue to post and receive Steem. This fails to increase the market for Steem, thereby reducing capital gains, which BTC showed last year can return far more to investors than rewards mining.
There is risk that Steem might not appreciate anyway, and the ROI from delegations and self-votes is assured. Cash is king, so that's how whales generate ROI. That's not investment, as investment depends on risk. It's profiteering.
It is noteworthy that AFAIK only Steem permits investors to generate ROI other than through price appreciation and capital gains. I believe this is depressing the price of Steem by discouraging creators such that almost all of them bail, instead of sticking to it and generating utility for the token and thus raising the price.
The whole two coin nonsense also further discourages investors from places where the trading of these (almost a requirement to retain initial investment in the recent market conditions) incurs huge tax liabilities. Just get rid of SBD and streamline the coin creation process and make holding more attractive. Most of what is being discussed here are moot points because of the crippling faults of the system that have not and will not be dealt with. Most people run the fuck away from top-heavy structures that look like pyramid schemes.
I spend a lot of time and effort maintaining a blacklist for @buildawhale even when it means I take a lot and lose the best customers.
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/2wq69g-buildawhale-blacklist-update
Almost 1,100 accounts on my blacklist, all personally research and verified by hand.
I run one of the few bots that blacklist people, and even fewer who spend 10-40+ hours a week finding and punishing spammers without funding or benefit and frequently results in retaliation and harassment.
I also run one of the few bid bots that actually have a reasonable cap to their maximum bid (50 SBD) so my bot cannot be used to abuse trending. I am not against people using bots to get to trending, I am against trash getting to trending. Spending money to get to trending (which is usually at a loss) is no different than using advertising on any other social media platform on the Internet.
While I appreciate your mission, you are vastly mistaken that the ROI of running a bid bot is close to self voting at 100%.
This is very far from the truth, on good days you might average 75% of a full vote, if you run a blacklist and stop the best customers (spammers) you make even less. When STEEM drops, you make even less.
That being said, most bot owners give off the majority of their earnings to delegators in many cases 95% of liquid rewards or more.
There is a big difference between using bid bots to promote trash to trending, and using bid bots to promote quality original content.
All bot owners need to have a disguise. Smartsteem has a star system, you have a blacklist... So what, creating a new account on the blockchain can be done in 10 seconds for 2 STEEM (or anonymously with BTC/LTC/DOGE/MORE through blocktrades), and this new account won't be in your blacklist.
I shouldn't have to explain anyway, the intro of the article explains my views perfectly
If your users can't get into trending because of your bot, you have nothing to fear, it won't get downvoted if it doesn't get into top 25 trending
It isn't a disguise, I work pretty damn hard to prevent garbage being rewarded by my bot. It's not just something I say, look at the queue of my bot and compare it to any other, you will find all the blacklisted users hammering other bots and you will see by their content why they are blacklisted.
They make a new account but they lose their votes/money they will stop. I frequently find networks with over 50 accounts and punish them all.
I'm sure many people in top 25 use my bot to get to trending, my bot didn't get them there though, and if it is garbage I will blacklist them myself if it is stolen content or a scam I'll even remove my vote.
I appreciate you putting in the effort to blacklist abusers. However do you think when there will be more people coming or even at the moment that you can do enough to stop all abuse. There is only so much you can do by hand.
In an utopia voting bots are able to stop all abusers, but that is not possible. The point with this all is that the voting bots are toxic and draining everyone's wealth from the platform.
The difference with real advertising is that using vote bots dillutes everybody's holdings and earnings. That is just in my opinion unethical.
If many people abuse the bidbots to be in trend recently, I saw a memes that was in trend, these incredible but true. The owners of bots like you should eliminate the votes to this type of publications, I know that it is not easy. your bot vote an average of 600 or 1000 daily publications and follow up is very difficult, but not impossible ...
Are you opposed to legitimate content using the bots?
Or just abusers?
I'm a user that has decided to invest in my content and pay for said advertising...but I also believe the content I'm creating deserves this investment.
I don't use these services on all my content either, just one specific project.
I'm curious where you stand on that.
(Self voted for visibility)
This is a good question, I'd like to know the answer as well! Upvoted. (I'm still not using bid bots in general . . . but one may want to reward another post that deserves it . . . or one may have an important post to share occasionally . . . and bots make those options viable and real.)
It's very hard for content creators to judge their own work imho. In my experience, some people will undervalue it, some will overvalue it, but very rarely will someone accurately define the value in his own work.
If you believe your content is way better than your average content, I believe you can boost yourself to a smaller amount, like lets say 50$. It would be enough to give a lot of visibility in the hot, and tags. If the content is truly good, the organic votes will follow and you will reach trending with less than 50% bid-bots upvotes, and my tool won't downvote you.
Nearly all posts on Steem are overvalued. They generally do not evidence significant contributions to the platform or community (with a few exceptions for posts about meaningful development efforts and/or marketing) nor do they pay their own way in generating traffic and promoting the platform. A fair value for the traffic generated by most posts would be a few dollars at best, maybe less.
Stakeholders are paying for all this and it is just a rip off, but worse, with all the botting and bidding it is weighing down the blockchain to the point where it can very easily become unusable. It is already difficult to use.
In the real world pre-crypto boom you're looking at less than a dollar per thousand views unless it's on some kind of subscription model, so yes, no posts on steemit save for maybe a handful that have ever been posted and gained traction on other social media sites qualify for this metric of actual worth per post.
If the only value that exists is monetary, you could well be right.
But society is much more than an economy, and some things far more profitable than mere financial increase. Since Steemit is a social media platform, the society is the purpose of the platform. Seriously, without folks posting there'd be no reason to have mined those massive stakes.
The ~10% retention rate is execrable for reasons, and the profitability of the token to investors doesn't only depend on marketing, development, and the percentage of the pool that can be extracted with it. Folks trading recipes, posting pics of the birds they saw at the park, and crappy memes are an integral part of society, which if Steemit is to grow and prosper is what Steemit must foster.
There is a misconception that it is content quality that creates value of a social media platform, and the truth is that it is the quality of the engagement; of the societal vigor that is generated, that is far more valuable.
The rewards mechanism is most of why Steemit's engagement is very good. Stake-weighting and the concentration of power is most of why it isn't good enough to retain more than ~10% of accounts YOY.
You can have a social community and social value without giving money away (or nearly as much). Indeed in some ways it is better. There is some psychology research suggesting that introducing monetary incentives actually substitutes for and damages social values, sometimes resulting in worse outcomes.
I can't hate you for your opinion.
I guess I'll be getting a flag from you today, as I will most definitely be using bots to advertise my project.
It would be nice to see your service actually provide a clickable link to the content, instead of simply an option to flag.
Good luck to you.
See you on trending.
You can hate anyone you want. This is America.
@AbuseReports
@Duplibot
@Spaminator
@SteemCleaners
@SteemFlagRewards
@Steemit-Abuse
BUT YOU SURE LOVE TO FLAG HUH!!!
BID BOT ABUSER!!!
I don't agree. It's not because you buy votes through bid bots that your article is worth a flag. I don't think it's a good idea because it doesn't take into account the quality of the article.
It's no different from buying ads on Facebook. By doing bid bots, it can create a demand for STEEM and SBD from outside in order to advertise.
Unless the article is bad or misleading, I wouldn't punish people who pay to get trending...because in most cases, it's not even profitable. It also gives a chance for people who would have no other way to get visibility.
Most of that stuff will solve itself when communities will come online since there will no longer be a single trending.
On Facebook, advertised content is marked as advertisement. So how about enforcing "advertisement" as the first tag for every post that has more than 50% bot upvotes and flag all the posts on trending that don't? We certainly need a way to mark ads that are pushed by bid bots, especially the scammy ones.
I don't believe you are 'giving people a chance' when you are asking them to send you their SBDs ... Sorry.
My intro explains my thoughts about people involved in the bid-bot industry, and you are not the only one concerned who commented so far.
I'm in for this. Thanks for the flag.
You used 2 bid-bots votes that are worth 75% of the value of your content. But I know where you're coming from. I'm actually thinking about boosting this article too with my SBDs
No hard feelings. I totally understand and agree. I hope more will join.
It would be great to see new faces in trend I'm bored of always seeing the same face .. and always talking the same, that leads as a consequence that nobody sees the trend section
Trending page is trash and will always be as long as there are chosen few (whales) who control the rewards against the rest who can't do much.
Unfortunately there is almost no way to make it to trending without paid votes even for whales. By the way, did you power down?
I appreciate your efforts @heimindanger.
But I do think that downvoting content based on bought votes is not the right way and will result in punishment of innocent steemians and will profit most of all the circle-jerkers and self-voters.
This will also result in people upvoting just as much to stay under the radar.
Instead of your current initiative - how about you focus on circle-jerkes like @me-tarzan
Ever since I've joined Steemit in August 2017 - that guy is posting the same complete trash content day after day multiple times a day.
While it was only 4 times a day in August 2017 - it went up to 10 times per day now.
Hello there @therealwolf, you were expected
I believe self-voting and curation trails to be a lesser evil than bid-bots.
You are largely involved in the @smartsteem bot. Congratulations on the work done by the way, you are one of the few bidbots using a different codebase. I hope more follow your ways and create different features and diversify the offer of bid-bots to users.
Hey @heimindanger - just saw the article few minutes ago.
Thank you @heimindanger! I've much respect for @dtube.
Ever since the creation of smartsteem.com - my goal was to reduce abuse and give users who create quality content a way to promote their posts.
Now, after months of running, developing and improving it - I feel that there is a limit of what smartsteem is able to to do. Part of this reason is also because many many many more bid-bots have been popping up in the last 1-3 months - of which 99% run on an open source codebase and are simply not giving any f* about stopping abuse. (afaik only buildawhale is actively blacklisting users besides smartsteem)
Even if smartsteem were to blacklist ALL spammers and restrict users who are abusing our services (by pushing posts to global trending every single day) - those users would simply go to another service.
Don't get me wrong - I will still personally blacklist all spammers and abusers I see - but there is a limit on what smartsteem can restrict as long as all other services allow it.
Nevertheless, I will brainstorm about ways to stop the hijacking of global trending spots in an excessive way.
I don't miss the times where the same 5 faces were on global trending every single day. But of course, real bid-bot abuse is just as bad.
I'd actually say that the circle-jerks are the worst thing on steemit. I checked out @me-tarzan and it was just bizarre. There are only 18 accounts with higher reputation to bring down that abomination. Most bid-bot rounds end up at a loss. So it's just payed promotion. Whether they deserve the trending page is questionable. But looking at old interviews of @ned he wanted people to buy STEEM to get into the trending page. Bid-bots are simply a market solution for the promotion feature that doesn't work.
Unless a person get lots of organic upvotes or STEEM price has a bull run, id-bot users will eventually run out of funds. circle-jerkes never run out of funds. They can only grow. I think the white-list system is the best path. But there will be other bid-bots. There are only 16 bots with a vote value over $17 If these bots can work together the level of abuse can be greatly reduced IMHO.
If you think that is a problem then please undertake an initiative to take action against it, and rally stakeholders to support your initiative as @heimindanger is doing here. One does not preclude the other and it doesn't make sense for people to argue over which is the biggest problem, when there are so many.
To be honest, I didn't expect your answer on this comment @smooth .. at all.
But you are correct - the problem with self-voters and circle-jerkers is as bad as bid-bot abuse and I shouldn't put the one of the other.
However, I don't have a solution against it. Limiting self-voting abuse is something which should be done on the blockchain level. I.e. through changing the dynamic of downvotes - e.g. making it profitable to downvote bad content.
Only problem is: this could get out of control - so we need to be careful with this.
Regarding bid-bot abuse: Smartsteem.com is already on the forefront against abuse, but there is only so much we can do there, when the rest of the services (excluding buildawhale) aren't doing anything about it.
And my understanding is that you are not per-se against voting-services, otherwise you wouldn't have delegated to upmewhale, passive and promobot.
So my question is: what change would you like to see and would you be willing to support it?