MinnowBooster : Abuse Cases Defined
Hey there, @techblogger here with an important announcement about policy changes in regard to abuse cases with @minnowbooster. We would like to restate our committment to making Steem the best blockchain ever created and our sincere desire to assist the Steem community in every way possible. So, with that in mind we would like to formally announce that we will be closing loopholes that have allowed some users to abuse our system, upvoting posts that are either plagiarised or too short to be considered valuable contributions.
As of today we will be taking new measures to eliminate inappropriate use of our service. Abusers be warned, a new policy is being put in place and if you continue to upvote content that violates our TOS, we will be removing your upvote and declining a refund payout.
What constitutes abuse of @minnowbooster?
Using multiple accounts to post duplicate content and purchasing MB upvotes for all of them.
Upvoting posts with MB that are written in a copy / paste style.
[Edit] Using a MB vote for very short or repetitive content. Length is subjective, but 150 words is a good safe guideline, however original art, photography, video and animations will be exempt from the 150 word guideline.
Please use discretion in upvoting posts, using a small MB upvote for short content may be okay under some circumstances but think about the content you are upvoting and decide based on the criteria we have laid out.
What is @minnowbooster's new policy in dealing with abuse?
Users who violate our TOS regarding upvotes will face the following consequences:
1.) Your post will be unvoted by Minnowbooster
2.) You will not receive a refund for the original upvote.
It is our hope that this new policy will eliminate abuse of @minnowbooster and create a more fair and logical enviornment for Steem community members to thrive and prosper. Together we will continue to make Steem a viable alternative to other social networking sites and a world-class blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Thanks for your understanding and support. We also welcome any helpul feedback to assist us in defining our abuse parameters or just to generally improve our service. Tips and reports of abuse content are welcome to be submitted in our abuse channel on our Discord Server
What can MINNOWBOOSTER do for you?!
| What? | Currency | Advantages |
|---|---|---|
| Buy upvote | SBD | Earn an instant return |
| Lease SP from market | STEEM | Increase your vote strength and curation rewards |
| Delegate SP to market | STEEM POWER | Earn daily STEEM dividends |
| Invest STEEM in MinnowBooster | STEEM | Earn daily SBD dividends |
| Delegate SP to MinnowBooster | STEEM POWER | Earn daily SBD dividends |
| Sell your vote to MinnowBooster | VOTING POWER | Earn SBD share of sells |
CURRENT PARAMETERS:
| Parameter | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum Upvote | 0.01 SBD | Minimum SBD you can send |
| Upvote comments? | No | |
| Profit at 100% VP | 3 times | Check VP at steemnow.com |
| Daily Limit | 10.0 SBD | Maximum you can send in 24h |
| Weekly Limit | 25.0 SBD | 7 day maximum |
| Minimum SP Lease | 1 STEEM | |
| 1-3 Week Lease | 1 STEEM/75 SP | Price per week/Lease size |
| 4-24 week Lease | 1 STEEM/150 SP | Price per week/Lease size |
Provide us with feedback
We are happy to hear your feedback about where we can improve.
Join our Discord chat
Get support and connect with us and other Minnowbooster fans!
We are always looking to improve @minnowbooster and try to keep you up-to-date whenever something changes. If you have any suggestions about what we should change or add to @minnowbooster, then please write us a comment :)
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Missed the BuildTeam announcement? Here's all the juicy details.
Video Tutorials
MinnowBooster Tutorial #1: Delegating SP to MinnowBooster
MinnowBooster Tutorial #2: Powering up STEEM to MinnowBooster
MinnowBooster Tutorial #3: Upvoting Posts with MinnowBooster
MinnowBooster Tutorial #4: Leasing Delegated Steem Power with MinnowBooster
MinnowBooster Tutorial #5: Delegating Steem Power to the Market
And last but not least, here's our cute little footer made by the most epic @ryivhnn! Yes, there are cute little minnows floating around!
Minnowbooster is a @buildteam project by @thecryptodrive (witness) @cryptomancer and @reggaemuffin (witness)
Visit our flashy new website minnowbooster.net!
This is a @steemvoter subscription payment post. Thank you to Steemvoter customers for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to the Steemvoter.com bot service. @steemvoter is proudly a @buildteam subsidiary and sister project to @steemsports and @minnowbooster.
Finally! This is great. I might consider re-delegating power to MB again, now that it's more likely to help promote GOOD content, not just game the system. Those who claim that content under 150 words can't be surrounded with 150 words of text are welcome to contact me on Discord. I am a content writer by trade. There's NOTHING that can't be described in 150 or more.
I don't know if this is technically possible, but perhaps embeds can be counted in those 150 words toward content volume, in favor of graphic and audio artists.
Keep up the good work!!!
A painting, music or well taken photograph does not mean to be consists of words. They are mean to be complementary of collection of words and wordless expression. Even 1000 words of ramble does not mean it is a GOOD content. For those, who are not native writer of English, that is another case of barrier.
The whole thing is subjective, not objective. The MB can judge a work to be abusive and contact users for explanations. If user can convince the merit of the work does not require certain amount of words (e.g. 150 words), it should be compliant enough.
I just wrote a lengthy rant on the subject of content quality definition. :)
This is awesome! Wow!
Should you consider delegating to MB again, then try out our new sell vote feature.
And should you actually help users write text for their artwork please let me know and support your work :) tip! 10
Sell vote feature? Uhm... This might be a good time to say I returned to steemit last week after a year's absence. And I am not as technical as most here. On a scale of 1 to 10, my understanding of crypto and steem technobabble is around 4.
As for helping fellow steemians: hell yeah! Like I wrote - gimme a holler on Discord. I hang out on The Writers Block and Steemit Talk and am always happy to help.
Despite all, I still have faith in this platform and will gladly apply my skills to making it better. I can't code so delegated 1000SP to utopian.io for those who can. What can I do? I can write, optimize app store pages, edit, proof and give harsh critique. I also know too much about online marketing. Anyone working on making steemit better is welcome to take advantage of my professional skillset.
How about you contact me on discord? I'll be back in two hours and then we can see if and how minnowbooster can support your offer :)
For the sell your vote feature, that is like delegation but we use your account to vote, so you get the curation rewards. I can tell you more about it when you come to discord :)
I am always on Discord, just sometimes AFK. Because work, sleep and sex cannot be done while chatting. Trust me, I've tried.
What is your handle? I can't find it in the minnowboosteer discord :)
Pro-tip: You have to clone yourself, I tried that and while exhausting it worked.
Hang on, let me check what I am doing wrong.
Cloning? Yes please!!! I have 3 significant others (BF, GF and husband), a job and chronic fatigue. I need, like, 7 more of me.
cool!- I thought me and g/f were the only ones..
You might like some posts of mine (not the recent ones, a little older)followed.
Hi @techslut! @reggaemuffin is sending you 10.0 SBD tip and @tipU upvote
:)
From @reggaemuffin : If You Like What I Do, Vote Me For Witness :)<3
A picture is worth a thousand words. ;-)
I think they did it due to the intense pressue and criticism they received recently.
There was almost no pressure. Maybe a few people complained, but not many and none who cared to hep improve the situation.
We wanted to combat abuse a long time ago. We implemented limits when keeping it open and unprofitable would be best for us. And the blacklist and changed TOS was our first step into content moderation. We worked on it for a long time and noticed defining what abuse is, is actually not so trivial. And we think our whitelist will help combat abuse even more and allow us to push good content that deserves the spot in trending.
We listen to suggestions. And many suggestions we heard got implemented one way or another. The best way to put pressure on us is to start a discussion ;)
My posts usually don't consist of 150 words, but are a great contribution to the community. Will they be unvoted or not because of quality content with selfmade pictures?
Is the unvoting done manually, or does the bot unvote every post with less than 150?
I am worried that this change will block out a lot of good content creators...
You are right, man!
Although I'm all for stopping real abuse of the MB, does this mean my content (1 post/day with 10 selected meme's) will violate the new TOS?
I would suggest you credit where you found the memes. Memes are a gray area and as such pretty hard to police. I don't think you will be in violation of the new TOS and we will warn you should that change. No malicious intent means we can talk with the user first and we will try to always talk first.
Smart initiative! Goodluck!
hello @minnowbooster
You are doing a great job to keep the community going.
It is a pity most people misused MB due to their mindset of just making it big in the community without considering how to contribute to the community, thereby the use MB for those contents that are not worthy of rewarding.
I support this measure 100%.
Thank you! That is exactly the way we feel. We hope this measure will work and we will need the community support to find all abuse that is happening :)
How do you "Sell your vote to MinnowBooster"?
Welcome to censorship! — What is abuse? What is hate speech? What is tolerable? What is political correctness? Today this here - and tomorrow? Is any post without 150 words worth to be paid? Will you have a commission proofing all posts under 150 words? Will you really have a discussion about those posts? — There is no doubt about such boosters itself, because they earn a lot of money and the owners know how to protect it . — Who posses the money determines the rules. — The little Steemit user has to be in the hamster´s wheel getting money for good less. — The only abuse for me is to duplicate posts. O.k. That´s easy to handle. No discussion needed. — Thanks for reading.
Defining what abuse is is not easy. But we try. We already revised the 150 words rule as it is subjektive.
Just be aware that abusers who will be flagged anyway will be unvoted first to save Steemcleaners their voting power. You are welcome to help us in working out this process.
@quincho you've invoked a slippery slope argument. A slippery slope argument can be defeated two ways: denying the slope and saying where the slipperiness stops.
The slope denial: It's not censorship because the content is still there on the blockchain. Certain platforms will take downvotes and low reputation into consideration when they decide what to users. To claim that's censorship you'd have to make the claim that any kind of filtering is also censorship; a feed that shows only people I follow! Why that's, censoring everybody they don't follow! Yes, the people who follow make a conscious decision to follow, but they also make a conscious decision to use a particular steem interface.
If you want a version of steem that conforms to your own views on filtering then go ahead and download the code and tweak away. When you make that, I'm not convinced you'll like the creation.
The stop: Assuming I accept the slope exists, then here is how I distinguish where I personally "stop" sliding.
Posts that are self-upvote-rings are reward pool abuse in my eyes. I'm extremely reticent to opinion-flag though I have once opinion-flagged an extremely racist cartoon that provided zero context for its opinion.
I tend to agree with you that if we went around opinion flagging for mere disagreement then steem would become a much much worse place. Though, you are correct, largely it's the money that determines the "social rules" that operate here. Seems pretty libertarian live-and-let-live for the most part.
That is great to know! Thank you for the updated policy. It is important to the Steemit community that we as the community itself regulate poor use of Steemit and services like @minnowbooster.
God Speed Brethren.
"Using a MB vote for very short content (under 150 words)."
I think this is bad idea because there is people who took time to make art, music or video and put their work in post and do not need to write much.
For other abuses I agree.
It is not hard to write a few words. If you post a video without any text to it, that is bad. If you write why you did it, what you learned while doing it etc. Then that could be enough. It all depends on the context.
That (art, well taken photography, video) is double the work (editing, thinking of shot, preparation etc., forget about art made of hours of work), in some cases triple/xxx work. A picture/art (quality picture off course) is better than thousand words, a video is better than thousand pictures (i.e. interestingly, videos are made of spoken words and pictures/frames). This is quite absurd to force someone to write 150 words if the content is appropriate and medium is different (e.g. consider Youtube). I would request @minnowbooster to consider these forms of works to be relieved from their TOS.
For blogs that is quite appropriate.
I think this depends on context and if the art is made by you and provably so. We are currently discussing this and will get back to it in a bit.
There will always have to be some discretion involved in the definition of abuse. Votes are subjective proof of work, and the abuse of votes is also subjective. An objective definition will always have some corner cases that allow things that are abusive in spirit and disallow things that are not abusive in spirit.
I very much appreciate that you guys are taking responsibility for your large voting power though. For me it is all about responsibility, even when a vote is sold (I delegate my SP out for a price, but I try to do that responsibly as well).
Definitely. It will always have corner cases and discussion.
We can only say: If your content is really good then you will most likely not have a problem. And if your content is on the edge of being good, then maybe you can improve?
We listen to all feedback and want to include the community in this :)
150 words is more than a 'few'. Better to consider lowering the number required.
Ich finde, ein paar Worte zu Bildern oder Videos zu schreiben ist doch nicht schwer und 150 Wörter nich viel. Vor allem betrachtet man Kunst/Bilder doch mit ganz anderen Augen, wenn dazu etwas geschrieben steht. Wo sind sie aufgenommen, was sollen sie aussagen, welche Idee steckte dahinter, dies und das genauso abzulichten....
Danke schön, genau meine Meinung! Ich habe nochmal nachgerechnet und bei einem Post von mir selber gemerkt, dass der nur 110 Wörter hat und sich schon sehr lang anfühlte, also kann es sein dass 50 odeer 75 Wörter in manchen Fällen ausreichen, wenn die Qualität stimmt.
Ger or Aus? :)
Ger :)
You disappointed me :P ...and I already thought we are neighbours :D
Is that better?
thank you, friends!