RE: Payouts with zero votes? What's going on here?
There was a patch made by Steemit Inc to hide accounts that violate their Terms of Service from the front end. It also prevents these accounts from hiding content from other people.
Most of the accounts are related to @fulltimegeek and one account from @berniesanders.
The fix is designed to prevent showing massive spam that accounts like @animalcontrol and @exterminator are doing. It also prevents them from slowing down or completely breaking posts once you reach the thousands of comments in a post like @fulltimegeek is doing.
There are a few bugs and side effects though.
- First off, the accounts still show up in recent replies page.
- The accounts till affect the comment totals on posts/comments.
It also causes some weird behavior where you can see comments and posts with a positive value but no votes. This is because the votes from these accounts are not shown in the UI.
This is for all sites that use Steemit Inc's infrastructure (SteemPeak, Steemit.com, and sometimes Busy.org).
The votes are still there, they can still add and take rewards, they are just not displayed on the front end. More importantly, the content is not even forwarded to the front end, so in cases of @animalcontrol, it drastically reduces the load on posts where he is spamming.
You can see the full list of accounts banned from being displayed in front ends here
Thanks for this clarification. I do appreciate very much your exposition of this information. Do you have any more information regarding the patch and it's application you can provide?
Thanks!
It is a UI patch only, and for any front end that uses Steemit Inc's resources. This means SteemPeak automatically gets it and sometimes Busy (Busy doesn't always use Steemit Inc's nodes).
The biggest thing is it not only hides comments from users on the irredeemable list it prevents their content from even arriving at the browser. This is a very significant change, as this prevents users from being able to slow down or even kill other users posts by posting thousands of comments on their post.
After a few thousand comments, a post takes a long time to load and many times will fail completely. By preventing the comments from even hitting the browser, load times are immediate even on posts with 6,000+ spam comments (such as mine).
Accounts on this list also cannot affect the visibility of other user's content. For example, if a user flags a comment of yours to hide it and that account was on this list, they will not be able to hide your comment.
That's really all there is to it. There are a few bugs though and it isn't a complete implementation but a first pass at solving a major problem.
I am sure in time the other issues will be resolved, namely the recent_replies page and the comment counts reflecting the spam comments.
This change will help deter this behavior, unfortunately, @fulltimegeek has not only become the #1 spammer, he is also the #1 abuser as he not only posts 8,000-35,000 spam comments a day but he is upvoting them with 500,000+ Steem Power gaining uncontested rewards without sharing any curation rewards or being flagged by Steem Cleaners.
Thanks for the improved exposition on a matter that was previously opaque to me. What potential may exist for this power to be in the hands of the accounts of the affected blogs? My primary concern is that this is essentially a centralized censorship, and that rubs me incredibly raw. While I do see that it is necessary to effect some kind of preventative mechanism for this problem, I don't like that it is imposed by Stinc.
I would much prefer you, I, and every other account holder be availed this power, as it indicates that slippery slopes to censorship that pose literal existential threats to subjects of tyrannies exist on the Steem blockchain. I came here to ensure that potentially lifesaving information would not be kept from me. It would be a shame if pictures of poop made us all less free.
Please forgive my ignorance of coding realities. My only excuse is that I the time I could have spent learning to code instead was used detecting my thumbs with hammers.
No data is being removed, you can still access the spam from other front ends or even your own if you put one up.
The process is being limited to extreme cases and is not used without heavy consideration.
That would be ideal, but there is no implementation in place to make this happen. The problem is fulltimegeek is spamming more comments a day than the entire blockchain combined. A stopgap solution had to be put in place to prevent the entire site being consumed by spam.
Since this has become a problem, it's time to implement such a long term solution. The present stop gap measure has the potential to become a permanent power to censor, and that transformation of temporary measures to permanent tyranny would not be the first time such a thing had happened. The US income tax is a good example. Hell, every tax is. Instituted to deal with some issue as a stop gap, they become permanent.
I don't think this is an issue that should just be glossed over. This is a fundamental attribute of Steem, and the primary metric that imbues Steem with value to me. I can post blogs or rants anywhere and be censored. I came here so that I wouldn't be censored, and this is censorship.
Steem flirts with an existential danger to it's existence by taking such a stop gap measure without immediately and effectively preventing that from becoming a permanent tyrannical imposition. If this power remains centrally imposed, Steem will eventually lose all value to me. It will no longer have any claim to being censorship resistant, and will simply follow the lead of Fakebook, Twatter, and Goolag in being the prime censor of it's users.
This needs fixing every bit as urgently as pics of poop. Even moreso IMHO.
"...unfortunately, @fulltimegeek has not only become the #1 spammer, he is also the #1 abuser as he not only posts 8,000-35,000 spam comments a day but he is upvoting them with 500,000+ Steem Power gaining uncontested rewards..."
Wow, this is egregious. To think, I was in the process of asking for his help with java coding right as this all started to boil over.
Is there anything we could do about this at all? I'd like to see these ill-gotten rewards stay in the pool to hopefully be distributed to non-abusers.
Thanks @themarkymark! This explanation makes a lot of sense to me, and is more or less what I anticipated.