The cost of being an abuser on Steem

in #nice5 years ago

I wasn't going to give them the attention with a post, cause lately it seems that's what they want since they may have given up on anything else on the platform, but since many users are asking me in DMs and in our OCD discord what's up with the out of nowhere downvotes on their comments on mine, some other people and the team of ocd curator's posts I figured I'd give an explanation.

From my perspective when the EIP hit the worst thing someone could do is discourage users to use their downvotes on what they thought was disagreement on rewards. Of course similar to upvote curation many don't have the time to go out looking for this so they delegated or follow the votes of users or projects they trust will do a good job at it. Now out of fear of having their ROI taken away from them from all that vote-trading many started lashing out and threatening anyone who dared using their downvotes on their posts whether manually or by following a trail with retaliation downvotes. Of course the majority of users who would threaten were big SP accounts and once they started hitting back minnows 2-10x harder than they ever could no matter the content it did trigger me pretty hard. Especially considering the EIP wanted to normalize downvotes a bit more along with the name change from flags and just because some people who'd gotten too comfortable buying votes and vote-trading their content up and earning that ROI + attention didn't like seeing downvotes land on their post was not an excuse to go all out war - save that for malicious/retaliation downvotes where you believe there's ulterior motives to them than just random disagreement of rewards.

Anyway to keep this short many realized what they were doing was wrong and stopped the "attacks" and I have respect for those users, especially those who as soon as the EIP hit they changed their ways and even more so those who never went down this vote-trading path to begin with, you da real MVP's.

Now some extra stubborn users still continued down this path and at the same time attempted to post garbage content they could vote-trade even though they been busted by steemcleaners for plagiarising or were on several other blacklists because of their content. When I noticed them going after smaller users I intervened and ever since then it's been a pretty annoying bother. We gave them plenty of chances to change their ways, to not attempt to gain post rewards by literal gibberish or photos going through a filter app to be called art but stubbornness is a stubborn trait.

So to make things clear, this part here is a lie, which is probably why it was edited in so late in his rambling comment:

even though most of their comment section looked like Steem from 2017 when all those bot accounts joined that only commented with "nice post" or "good" just to get a vote, I never personally downvoted the comments left on their posts. Didn't even begin to think it since their posts almost never got any comments and when they did it was mostly this:

Yes, these were all the comments in two of his recent posts, it was hard to scroll through to find them cause they are attempting to hide their history now by spamming korean posts trying to suck up to them knowing they are a bit against downvotes and attempting to play the victim role. How resteeming random posts in korean is going to help their case is beyond me but then again they barely spoke english either while attempting to run steemit "steem schools" so what's the big difference.

So what they have resulted in doing now is downvoting anyone commentating on people that called them out on their shit and downvoted them. Here's where the beauty of the chain comes into play. Say they downvote 10 comments at 5%, all it takes for me would be to counter it with a higher percentage, then they either have their other abuser friend come in and drop another downvote or they have to re-vote which as you know costs you twice the mana cause when you unvote you don't gain that spent voting power back. Did I mention they are stubborn, though? They keep on re-voting just to get those comments "censored" as they like to call it which in turn costs them more and more downvote mana and over time more and more users from the community have noticed their shitty behavior and come to counter the malicious downvotes. There is a cap to what they can downvote in terms of their combined Steem Power and mana, since they are so stubborn to re-downvote these comments after someone counters them they are now dipping into their upvote mana to use it as downvotes which in turn costs them curation rewards (you know that thing which was the reason no downvotes happened pre-EIP and enabled garbage authors like these two to bid bot and vote-trade themselves to a high reputation).

Now of course you may say oh well curation is not much now anyway and price of Steem is low so doubt they care as long as they feel they are damaging the authors they go after. This might be true but with a higher price of Steem it is going to cost them more and more over time and the longer they keep this up the less ROI they'll be earning which is what they were attempting to game to begin with, although I'm sure their motives were elsewhere as well as to keep up the image of being successful on the chain and tricking more newcomers into joining their steem school project they started and from what I've been hearing of what goes on there it ain't pretty.

Ever since the EIP they've been malicious with their downvotes, defensive of their garbage content instead of working on improving it or just writing in their own language and building up a community and doing something that could benefit Steem and their own investment. Lie, cheat, steal, repeat. That's all they know and they probably think they are being super clever now with their new downvoting tactics to hurt authors with real engagement and comments. The beauty here is that the curve has made comments pretty unprofitable in general, so those commenting aren't doing it for an upvote and the users voting up the comments aren't getting much curation out of it either. I've personally always either replied to comments on my posts or acknowledged having read them with a small vote because I appreciate people taking the time to comment on my posts and others, this is after the years of seeing authors on autopayroll that would just come in, drop their daily posts and not give two shits about their comment section or engagements. We've seen how that has worked out for our king author on the chain that boasts about his followers while his content is uninteresting, garbage and barely anyone gives a fuck to engage in them.

Anyway, these are just some small inconveniences now, they may get bigger if these two idiots happen to win the lottery and buy a ton more steem but over time still the community banding together and countering these downvotes together as to not have the authors have to re-vote themselves and waste mana while sacrificing curation rewards will win over those few who won't grow in numbers because the majority of the platform realizes what douchebags they are no matter the lies they keep coming up with. They'll continue to waste their mana and curation rewards while their reputation score is slowly but surely going to keep dropping as they'll have a majority of the community after them until the time comes when they'll give up and decide to pack their bags and start fresh. Over time I am certain there will be more and more projects, communities and users that will weigh in and sacrifice part of their curation rewards to help counter malicious downvotes for the betterment of Steem and its decent users. Shoutout to @steemflagrewards for already having a "healing" initiative in their discord but not enough stake to keep up with it, so if you feel generous then throw them some delegation so they can cover more ground - I know I will once I am able to.

To those affected by these downvotes I just wanna say not to worry even if someone doesn't come along to counter them. Right now it's kind of a bother to manually go through them and each time they re-vote but with @howo's downvotecontrol it's going to be a breeze once we automate it. Until we go there let's give these two a few last chances to go 180 if they still want to remain relevant on this platform. The clock is ticking, communities are already here along with the mute feature, soon SMT's will come along with oracles and who knows what other features that will not tolerate these kind of abusers and allow them to participate in their reward pools and communities.

They will be officially ghosts stuck in the dark/deep web of Steem where anything they do is automated and the only ROI they're getting is from SP inflating, that sounds like a lot of fun, eh! I'm starting to like the EIP more and more lately, some situations that fix themselves I hadn't even considered to begin with, nice.

What do you think, do these downvotes deter you from writing on authors posts you'd usually drop a comment on?

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We worked on countering a few of those downvotes on others.

I'll look into developing a script that will make use of our spare VP to further assist.

It's important for us to stick together and show these flag abusers the futility of their efforts. Have you considered using beneficiary comments as a mechanism to get them to waste VP.

That was one of my favorite tricks to deal with it. They would get so mad. Lol

malicious/retaliation downvotes

I have a few of those. This was the reason I wanted to see an auto comment on down votes. Right now you can only down vote bad actors if they post or comment. With an auto down vote comment, you now have a method to down vote the down voter. The community on steem block chain can do absolutely nothing about the camillesteemer bot army other than to keep petitioning @steem to remove their delegation.

At least with these two they do have current comments and post for now that can be down voted. Steem Block Chain needs to closely look at being able to counter the "malicious/retaliation downvotes". For now it has not gotten to bad, but it can, and Steem Block Chain needs to be prepared for when it does happen.

An auto downvote comment is the only method for the community to control this type of action. Then the community can decide if the down vote was justified. Oh and they should use the phishy red text to highlight the comment and make it very visible, and also to keep it visible even when it has been down voted, (not greyed out/hidden), so that other visitors to the page can clearly see and choose if they want to down vote pile on the bad actor.

I think instead we just need to scrape the reputation score altogether, especially after the bid bot era it holds even less value than it would've have originally done. Probably simplest solution and then look for other ones on communities or a possible SMT backed rep score.

That still does nothing to allow the community to assist in controlling the bad actors, which it seems is what that part of EIP and Down votes were intended to do.

I know people seem to not care about the camille army of silent down voters, after all even after 9 months the most they can down vote is $0.010.

Now what are the larger accounts going to do when they have a silent twin pair down voting with 180,000SP and 198,000SP, and there is nothing you can do other than black list them, which wont work because once they become silent down voters, there is nothing that can be done, unless steem block chain becomes just like facebook and youtube and allow for the blanket censorship of individual via shadow banning them on all front ends.

There really is nothing wrong with the REP score now, it is much harder for people to buy a reputation, and it does provide some retaliatory down vote protection, and as the use of of the up and down votes are sorted out the Reputation score value will recover some.

Bad actors/pissed off people, angry at the perceived man, unable to accept responsibility for their action, people are going to find a way to retaliate, and retaliate they will.

Currently the only individuals that can effect their Reputation scores, that can lower their reputation are those that have a higher than 72 REP in one case and 77 REP in the other. There are only a few active accounts above that 77 REP range that actually up and down vote post, most are just curation account voters who care little for the down vote side of things.

it is much harder for people to buy a reputation

Yes, but I'm saying it's been too long of a period of vote-trading and buying that the majority of reputation of users is not based on actual genuine curation for it to matter anymore. It would just be way better to reset or strike it altogether now before the masses start coming in. Your solutions to the problems seem to be with the reputation existing in mind hence I want to point out that removing it completely would be way better. I doubt there's many curators or curation projects that are relying on the reputation score to curate, if they do it's also wrong as it should be about the content mainly and then about the users, their actual reputation on the chain and what they do for Steem etc on the side.

It's the same problem with Haejin, he's not commenting anymore nor posting so we can't bring down his reputation nor is there another account except for steemsports I think that has a higher rep to affect it properly and the cost is immense to bring it down even with the free downvotes it will take ages.

It is a problem, no doubt about that. A total removal, and the ability of small accounts to effect larger accounts is going to be a very hard sell, I can see where doing away with it would be a good thing, Perhaps we as a community need to come together and decide if there really needs to be a Social Credit Score type thing for the steem block chain. No SCS could be a selling point to many that do not favor the appearance of one person is better than another based on a superficial scoring system.

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No, please don't take rep away; it is one of the few motivations aside of pure greed...

But it goes up based on upvotes received, if there were other factors I could see it have value but it's only from that and a bit dependent on the reps of users voting (I think). I'm hoping there will be other factors (think the curation league of @abh12345) that would affect the reputation score, so I'm hopeful there will be better solutions to an improved on in the near future. steem-ua was on the right track but not great either and they pretty much abandoned the project from the looks of it, or at least it's development.

Yeah, I saw this today. Like you say, all that nonsense does is truly expose them for what they are.

Never a dull moment!

Imaging the time and energy they spend on being petty instead of doing something that would help their investment, there's all kinds of people in this world. Decentralization, eh. :D I like the new consequences to those choosing to behave like that though, Steem is going to be interesting once votes have some real power behind them with a 10-100x price increase. :)

It's the manual bit that astonishes me. If I was pissed off with this place or people here I would probably just go dormant, Iwouldn't bother logging in and voting people up or down.

And there is that. You gotta look to your potential future, investment wise!

Yeah I'm honestly surprised at the dedication, they go through their rounds many times per day even, lmao.

I was going to writ a post about this as the have been downvoting all of the comments on my posts too, and I never downvoted otheir follower comments - although I did downvote a few of theirs as I was testing the effect on reputation. However, they were already greyed out for the most part and it took nothing from them.

I figure they are trying to "scare people away" from commenting on our posts for some reason. So far, I have been healing what I can because even though I know that most of the people who comment understand the game, some don't. However, I am considering just leaving them greyed out instead to show what these kinds of people are like. Pretty piss poor and pathetic behavior, but then - this is steem :)

Honestly it probably is a better idea to just leave them be until enough is enough and everything they downvote will be auto-countered, I doubt it's actually deterring users from commenting.

This is bullish for the engage token, though. ;)

!ENGAGE 20

This is bullish for the engage token, though.

To the moon!

!ENGAGE 25

Bullish 😁

Hopefully people will continue to comment. Clearly not much was learnt at Steem School 🤦🏻‍♂️



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the entire concept of the EIP is garbage

I've had a lot of my comments downvoted lately and it was surprising, I thought we've past this Stage? In fact I was going to write a Post to ask why innocent engager are being downvoted but well seems like I have the answer, this isn't really cool at all

It's their last resort I guess to attempt to be as damaging as possible but not realizing that the majority don't really care about downvotes on comments. :)

Here it actually comes, we've been hit

Haha imagine spending your day doing this. xD

Hey @acidyo! Awesome post for a barley amateur blogger how is still very much learning what the hell is going on around here.

Where money is involved, there is always somebody lined up to take advantage of the 'System'. I have alwyas gone by the motto that you should expect to get an equal return on what you put into an 'Experience' or project or whatever. For me Steemit is about meeting people who may or may not share the same interests as me, and to get my voice out there. Share a little of me with this crazy world. I don't know a damn thing about code or blockchain, or whatever.. I just see the front end of everything and sometimes it's ridiculously unnerving and frustrating for someone like me who is not aware (ignorant) of all these concerns. I can't say I have been affected by exactly what your taking about, but have seen it here and there with those I interact with. I see the frustration first hand by reading about it, like here in your post.

Nothing much discourages my vote or my comment, because it still isn't about the rewards for me; more about interacting on a daily basis, being apart of something, and to show I recognize them as part of my life. This doesn't mean I don't care.. completely the opposite. I want to HELP because if my friends get frustrated and leave I will then be alone with my thoughts.. That's not good.. lol.

I read your post twice because for someone like me a list of what to do and not to do is better since I can't comprehend the code and automation stuff well. I read enough of your content that I feel I can trust your judgement. After I get done posting this I will head over to @steemflagrewards and drop them some delegation. I have invested a little here in steem.. not much, but maybe a small difference can be made by me if directed on how. If you think of anything else or have a "guide" sitting around, share please.. I want to be a part of the glue, not the glitter. If this makes any sense. You guys have always been good to me and working hard in the background. I want to give back or help out in a way that my inexperienced mind can. ;-)

Thanks again for the post.. for me, the more I read the more I start to understand. hehe.

See ya around :-D

I don't care at all if they downvote any of my comments or posts. I will keep doing the same as I had done, being avtive and supporting ghe community.
Thank you very much for the effort ypu put on helping steem to be a safe place for all!

klarou12 lol

Banned from sportstalksocial for abuse, not going to well if that’s the only account commentating one your stuff.

what it really comes down to is power

those that hold SP can stomp on those with less SP; although when folks group together they can use SP en masse.

So I don't think it's a dev problem in the sense of resolving the issue. it is a user issue to resolve

  • either convince flag abuser using reason and logic to stop abuse
    -or-
  • buy enough SP to vote them down (or form strong enough SP alliances to do so), or to counter the abuse

I like option 2...this is supposed to be a decentralized platform, and we cant rely on the devs to fix every abuse of the sytem (imo, it was the free flag that generated this iteration of abuse ;> )

however the system is set up, there will be those that game and abuse it. it is up to those that have the power, to decide how to remedy that for the good of the community

It looks like death throes to me