RE: @Whales, @Witnesses, We have to talk!
I'm thinking communicating better with our whales from Steemit, Inc. would be best.
Something like how when you get a comment reply, and it notifies you....
Once or twice a month, Steemit, Inc could put an alert on their GUI which needs to be read, which talks about "issues" such as this, and makes recommendations.
Socially, we're all confused on what is right and wrong. It's easy to find the obvious wrongs, but some of these services which are well intentioned do abuse the system.
For instance, maybe we need a hardfork which says, steem power delegation can't be used to upvote the same user more than once per 24 hour period. That would slow down some of the self-upvotes, and upvotes of your "other" accounts.
Do either of those resound as possible short term solutions?
The reason why this exists, is that it's a difficult problem. sigh.
Your proposed hardfork sounds interesting, but it sounds difficult to implement unfortunately.
I just made a comment over on the latest @steemitblog posting asking about the 2018 roadmap. If there is a way for every user to only self-upvote themselves or any account no more than 10 times per 7 day period that would work well.
...but I know exactly what you're saying. It would involve expanding the chain to constantly save and retrieve this data.
The only time it becomes important, is during the payout of a post or comment to do the calculation so you could nullify the votes automagically by the payout algorithm.
Perhaps this could be done by a huge account, like @ned with a bot which looks at posts "after no more votes are allowed" before payout and then does this research and adjustment.
Of course though, this is decentralized. A round table discussion by developers is necessary though to see if we could solve this in any number of different ways.
Thanks for your comment, you're right. What sounds easy, rarely is... when it comes to the decentralized and autonomous nature of the chain itself.
Banning or reducing self-upvotes sounds reasonable until you realise that an account can just create sockpuppets and upvote by proxy. Of course, with good auditing you can discover these voting rings, but it does take someone to do it in the first place. I'm keen on creating a bot that identifies this sort of stuff algorithmically and then acts on its findings.
You know about @Patrice and @steemcleaners, right? It has done exactly that for months and months. She busts her ass to find and defeat these voting rings.
I'm only vaguely aware of them. I'm looking to automate the whole process. The bot identifies vote rings via an algorithm and then down votes them.
There is a lot more too it than an algorythm can solve. Patrice has been fighting bot rings since the beginning, there is quite a process involved and human intervention often required. Bots are involved too, but its a big operation. This effort might could use your help, but its already widely known and being done pretty well by steemcleaners. They have a discord and you could go find the project witness @patrice and she might enlist your aide though.
Cheers for that. I've got a lot of projects on my plate at the moment, so I'm happy to not go and reinvent the wheel. ;) I'll try and check in with them on discord at some point.
Restrictions such as this will always be circumvent in some way or another. You can't get something out of someone by making roadblocks.
To change someone's behaviour you have to make the other legit options more attractive.
I'm sorry but I disagree. In the wider context maybe. But here we're talking about a small number of people whose behaviour probably won't change under any circumstances - more attractive alternatives or otherwise. We're stuck with them until they cash out, like it or not. But the least we can do is call them out continually for their counter-productive behaviour - a big thank you to @transisto for laying it out so clearly. I would like to think the whales, including Steemit.com, who are most vested in the platform, might take the lead here with those of us who believe this matters in support.
@freedom is effectively selling his votes, just like the dozens of bot vote selling scheme on steemit, he does it in a less conventional way which is why its more controversial but all the bots and people using them are doing the exact same thing so it's not a small number of people, it's a large percentage. Wait until we reach the mainstream, the situation with abusers is only going to get worse.
Have any ideas for other "legit options" ? I have no ideas.
The other legit option is to curate properly, unfortunately doing this will yield very little reward..increasing curation rewards would be a good start.
So essentially an abuser has to create 10 accounts (total 60SP or about $270 delegated SP and 2SP) then just spread votes amongst them.
If they have the knowledge to abuse the delegation system then they have this knowledge already.
A hard fork is not always the answer. At least not one that is trivially circumvented by the bad actors
It would definitely curb the "manual" abuser, who has 3 to 5 accounts and they manually click upvotes