@Whales, @Witnesses, We have to talk!
When I invested and got involved in Steem it was because there was rules that were meant to enable Steem to achieve a valuable level of content discovery and rules insuring that people with SteemPower act responsibly (3 months vesting time / Reward curve)
These days it seems like most of the whales don't care to police the other whales that allow for opportunistic actors to circumvent the 3 month rule.
Modus operandi:
- Beg a greedy whale for delegation via a memo in a micro-payment.
- pay ~50 SBD,
- Receive ~100k SP delegation
- Spam and upvote your own posts.
- ... Profit
Now get ready for the large scale operation:
http://www.steemreports.com/delegation-info/?account=freedom
http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=%40elizabeth302&days=14
This is the kind of posts being "promoted" by @elizabeth302
Hint: They're not being promoted, votes are done just before 6.5 day as to go unnoticed.
https://steemit.com/trump/@elizabeth302/melania-trump-wears-gucci-cheongsam-china-state-dinner
Wow! Such money, no views ? Much abuse!
Are we made fun of by @Freedom ?
How infuriating is that empty content book GIF posted under every of @elizabeth302 posts?
Or the kind of post being "promoted" by @askquestion
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@askquestion/daily-cryptocurrency-report-bitcoin-ethereum-steem-bitcoin-cash-or-11-13-2017
(they are just static prices from BTC, BCH and STEEM, and ETH.) with 40$ for 10 views.
Big Thanks to @steemreports for providing tools to uncover these schemes so easily.
http://www.steemreports.com
Witnesseses and Whales, we need to seriously discuss a HF to fix Steem's content discovery incentive rules. The few good whales are tired of spending SP/money to make up for a broken system and the users are tired of operating within an unfair system.
Let's not rely on Steemit Inc. for a fork, they seems fully focused on communities and SMT at the moment.
@transisto i am just surprised to see i am mentioned in this post and sad to know i buy upvote from elizebeth302 only on my post to boost my bost what terms i broke ?please tell me i daily doing one post and selling all my votes and helping my friends and this act let me recover my fees daily for freedom i did nothing wrong and my account does not belong to any other delegation i have only 1 account the other accounts are my friends i can give their facebook link this is not good for blaming someone if they are exchanging votes?
I believe the idea behind Steemit is to vote on quality content and publishers for the betterment of the community, not game the system collectively. No hard feelings. Just my thoughts.
And I believe you are right @cryptocowgirl !
Same here. Thought the same thing.
Do you know who owns @freedom? How did you get to buy vote from @freedom?
I am new to Steemit, but just want to know whether it's good to buy vote? Can we trust anyone? I don't think that it's a good idea to buy votes.
@dhimanyog - many of the rules that apply in real life apply to steemit, such as being nice to other people and also 'buyers beware' when it comes to any transactions. I guess the answer to whether buying votes is a good idea or not can be answered by whether it is something that you would want the majority of the people to be doing here...
Good question!!!
and everyone who get delegations are paying for it so they need to recover something from selfupvotes ! otherwise what will be the profit of taking sp ? Indeed when some of the well known got that SP they were enjoying because they got SP in low price and now blamming others !
I do not know whats wrong with them we belong to poor family and freedom gives us opportunity if they are against selling votes then why markymark and nextgencrypto selling their whales if they are against self click they should contact to steem team to Eng self voting option we have to pay daily fees to freedom and we are trying to pay it with some selling and some with own pocket if they think we should not sell vote they pay our fees for delegation we wont do it again
You should put some commas in your paragraph there.
Yes bro u r right
Those who pay for delegations just to profit are gaming the system. The "spirit" of the platform, as explained by the original steem whitepaper, speaks of creating algorithms that would prevent gaming the system.
When buying SP, you're kind of expected to use it altruistically. It's not so YOU can earn more money, it's so you can GIVE more money, by voting on content that you deem valuable.
There's a big misunderstanding about the idea of "there are no rules here". Just because the system doesn't prevent one from doing something, doesn't make it any less rude.
And yes, self-upvoting by whales is a huge problem too, but that's not what this post is about.
looks like people are jealous because freedom has undelegated there so called VIP BUSINESS OF SELLING UPVOTES and now they dont want others to do it ! lol ! now they will downvote as there is no freedom of speech here !
Agree if there is no vote selling then first the one who was using since 5 to 6 months should get punished and they wont get punished because they are just blamming others !
That would be randowhale who belongs to the evangelist going around flagging everybody who uses the services that competed with his own.
agreed ! they will flag you and me for speaking the truth
punctuation?
Your telling is really good .but some one said this is cheating but i am agree with you
@lays you are right. Every stemian have freedom to sell or buy votes and upvote theirs own post or similar account. because if more than one account that is not spam. They want to make more work. blaming others it is not good. This is my personal thoughts. i do not want to heart anyone.
This is very interesting @transisto. I did a post the other day on @freedom, also looking at the data, but in a very different way.
I had noticed that @freedom had removed delegation to paid upvote services, but I did not look at how delegation was being use by the new people freedom delegated too. I noticed that @spaminator and utopian-io were on the list, which are worthy projects.
You might be interested in having a read of my post
https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/unmasking-freedom-what-the-data-can-tell-us-steemit-business-intelligence
Removed from two, added to another. Then added to a lot of spammers.
@utopian-IO is very worthy, not a single self-upvote, and the bot's code even penalizes posts promoted via booster bots for self-upvoting purposes.
I've been watching but not posting about the re-delegation, because I wanted a slice for myself - although not to self vote or offer a pay for vote service i should add!
Great detective work.
The trick is coming to consensus and agreement on what should be done about it. There are many different opinions on the motivational psychology and game theory aspects in play here, and it's not at all clear what the most ideal system is. Things will always be exploited, and those who care will always have to stay ahead of the arms race to do something about it.
There was once an idea (which got rejected) to allow some users to negate other users. Maybe we need something like this to stop abuse? Maybe a downvote bot we can easily use and more readily-accessible reports about payouts on posts with low view counts?
Yes, more open access for whales to countering bots would go a long way. It's one thing to be expensing SP to fight abuse it's another to spend so much time clicking little flags manually. @personz has done something great but it's still not convenient enough for non-tech savvy people to use.
So it turn out that @freedom might be more about money than freedom after all and thus something like @free-doom might have been more appropriate. Interestingly a lot of clues seems to point to Steemit Inc as being the possible owner of @freedom, not that these clues prove this but strongly suggest so.
I had noticed @freedom delegating his SP to some vote sellers earlier this week. I'd say this is a huge issue.
I was in favor of Dan's idea from the very beginning and I'm still am.
I also think that a none linear reward curve would benefit Steem. It might seems conterintuitive to think that none linear reward could help on this matter but in the long run I think it would.
None linear reward incentives people not to split their votes and SP. It also create a strong incentive for people not to sell their Steem. The price of Steem should in theory increase as the number of users increase and even more so if reward curve is greater than linear.
All of this incentivize people to empower one another more directly with votes creating more meaningful connections overtime as opposed to the current situation where people are incentivize to lease their SP as much as possible.
Dan has shared very valuable insights on the subject in his post "Evil Whales", more precisely under the title "The value of Consensus" and "Curation Reward".
Maybe a sigmoid function as suggested by @twinner might be interesting as it would make self-upvotes less attractive but at the same time would prevent the incredible high rewards for some trending posts which resulted from the n^2 curve.
Yeah I was looking into that @freedom account a week or so ago and I agree with you. It must be an in-house owned account. If not directly owned by the high ups it was given access to exist and feed from the beginning by the high ups.
SMTs have no hope of ever becoming mainstream when this crap exists. What do they think, that people are going to blindly throw money in and not exercise due diligence. Some might yeah... but a fool and their money are easily parted.
Anyone or any entity looking to invest in steem will not proceed when there are issues such as these. The players that do proceed will simply follow the same greed routine. Thus destroy the system even more. Ned needs a good rubber chicken slap to the face.. Wake the fuck up @ned.
First I advocate against the use of violence whenever possible even of the written form thus my opposition to any slap to anyone at this point.
I didn't say @freedom was owned by Steemit Inc but I tend to think so for the reasons mentions in @paulag's post.
The fact that the Steem are concentrated into the hands a small group of people is known and must be consider by all investors. Highly concentrated coins are a negative point when investing but other positive point can make up. Current investors who think this Steem is too risky are selling.
Come on man don't read so deep into that there. I do not advocate violence either, and what I said was more figuratively. Which is why I added the 'rubber chicken' as I was aware that just saying "ned needs a slap to the face" IS harsh in words, even if used figuratively.
It's baffling how they let these things slide. There is clear corruption. If the exploits only exist at the member level, it's bad and needs fixing. If there is a direct link to Steem employees and founders, then... something like that will bring the house down eventually.
I mostly agree to what you said.
It's hyperbole, dog.
HardF***k 19 , yeah that really did a lot of good right?
Interesting connections @teamsteem
a lot of people talk off the cuff and don't seem to realize that much like "The WIzard of Oz" there is a lot of bullshit behind the curtains
Hardfork 19 has made a huge mess in my opinion. It was better before it, but i wasn't as savvy back then, so I could be wrong. Sure seems like the "issues" have escalated to subscriptions since then though.
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.
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
What about a discord chat where users can post plagiarism/low quality posts/socs > mods will review and delete false reports and give a comment on the post > whales downvote the post > if mods made a mistake then user will appeal in the chat > higher mods will check it
What do you think? We can also make bots to route whale downvotes. I mean, discord bots.
What @transisto described above does not involve plagiarism. We have SteemCleaners handling that well already and they have channels where you can file reports. That hasn't been the main area of abuse for a long time now, largely because there is community consensus that something like SC is needed and worthy of support. What he's talking about in this post is spamming and sockpuppetry, which have been much harder to address. There's never been any clear consensus about whether/where to draw a line on the latter.
You nailed it exactly with this:
Without a clear consensus, it's not possible to program blockchain-level solutions or to even build bot-solutions. In many ways, we also have to consider cultural differences in opinion on what constitutes abuse, spam, and "valuable" comments and posts. There's a lot to figure out with regards to clear community-driven norms which stake holders and new users alike will support.
We don't have to define what is or isn't abuse to get a fix into the blockchain. We can have solutions that make it easier to counter abuse while still allowing it to be 100% down to subjective stakeholder opinion.
Consensus can't be built if we don't talk about it. Would join a discord chat for whales and senior users if I made one?
Nicely said. Maybe it's time to draw the line.
we need to have a community forum to discuss these matters, and we need consensus. all of the major players need to come to an agreement, not that we all need to agree about what we believe, but we all need to come to an agreement about how to proceed, as a community!
two thumbs up
I updated the comment. And all plagiarists can't be handled by SC. I recently outed one with 200$ payout, a lot of that from your SP and Neds SP.
Before that, I outed another with 70 per post. There is also a zerohedge copy pasta account that keeps on doing what it does best. It gets huge payouts.
It needs to be done on a protocol level, not bots. Bots just consume bandwidth, and it's an endless arms race with the advantage to abusers. Having negation at the protocol level reduces the cost of policing while still allowing accountability for those who engage in policing.
Another good suggestion!
Nail on the head right here.
What are your thoughts on the issue Dan created which ultimately got rejected?
This post isn't about countering flags, dumbass...
I was originally against the idea (well, to be fair, I don't think anyone had much time to fully think about the idea. It was proposed and on track to be implemented so quickly that I think the backlash against not knowing what the outcome would be, was what shot it down in the first place.)
I still think there needs to be a better way, fundamentally. Right now, regardless of implementing that design or not, it costs opportunity to fight abuse, and it leads to a tragedy of the commons (being more short term beneficial to upvote oneself rather than downvote abuse, or if that design is implemented, being more short term beneficial to keep your SP rather than lose it to cancel someone else).
The biggest problem with that design is that it assumes the targeted account only ever acts in bad faith -- you nullify ALL their actions even if some might be "good".
Sadly, I don't know a better solution. The only one I can think of to remove the opportunity cost is having separate voting power pools for upvotes and downvotes, so it doesn't "cost" to downvote (since you have, e.g., 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes per day to use).
Hi.......Help me.. your group my join me pl...
The first thing to do is getting the whales together in a discord chat where we can talk about it. If some whales do something bad, we can just do a harkfork and separate the spammy steem into a new better steem. We would need devs for that though. If we can convince enough devs to defect then bingo, freedom's SP will be worth 10x less.
Do you think that it will take such a drastic step to counter this? I agree it needs to be discussed but don't expect the whales in question to involve themselves in the discussion - at least with our knowledge.
Back to 50/50 curation/poster rewards. Make it more lucrative to skillfully curate than to self upvote/sell votes.
This is something that I recently posted about (creating a downvote bot to target these self-vote rings). It's on the backburner for the time being, but it's something I will eventually get going.
It's also important to keep some perspective, I think. The sums involved (i.e. proportions of the total reward pool) are tiny, as far as I can tell. It's why I shuffled my anti-vote-farming bot project down my to-do list.
I completely agree with you @transisto, this platform has great potential because of the community and the basis of operation. We just need to make it that little more user friendly and have it so the bots and scammers have less power. In the literal and figurative sense.
This is a really important topic. You should consider attending this Saturday's "Steem Growth Form" to discuss it. Details here: https://steemit.com/steemitgrowthforum/@aggroed/announcement-steemit-growth-forum-saturday-november-18th-11am-nyc-time-1600-utc-held-virtually-on-mspwaves-radio-within-the
Upvoted and thanks for introducing this item for discussion. There are pros and cons to more regulation versus maintaining the freedom (little 'f') that we have now. It's unfortunate some choose short term greed over long term health of the platform, but I also understand that SP holders want to make a return on their investment.
Hopefully, moderated communities will curb these tendencies somewhat, and maybe a higher price will encourage people to use their Steem for more active investments to develop this ecosystem, though these problems always will exist on here at some level if we let them. I agree with @lukestokes that achieving consensus on this will be difficult, but it's definitely worth discussing.
As a holder of SP you are free to do what you want with your stake. If @freedom wants to delegate power to these folks thats on @freedom to decide. Your stake is your stake. If you want to allocate those rewards to others or even yourself for various reasons that choice is yours. As a stake holder in the STEEM blockchain by holding SP this earns you that right. You need to see the bigger picture here. In my opinion Steem is about much more than finding "good content" / just social media. Dont mix up Steem the blockchain and Steemit.com @transisto. Steemit.com is what needs some work with content discovery. I agree Steemit.com should update its content discovery rules. I agree with that. The trending and hot tab do need some work. With all that said, I believe this blockchain is going to really change the world brother. It has the potential to change everything, literally. The way people work, live and interact. If you watch Elon Musk we are going to be moving into a much different world in the coming years. Many will be without jobs...the concept of work I imagine will start to change. I believe we are at the front lines of something new. Time will tell.
❤️
I'm very glad to see this positivity alive and well. I greatly appreciate the support you've given myself and @sirlunchthehost over the past year or so. Seriously, it keeps my spirits up when things seem to be falling apart to know that there is appreciation for our contributions and efforts to build this network. You (and @transisto too) would be very welcome to join our new discord server for the voices of the underground. We have a growing community there of critical thinkers who really want to see this network succeed.
nods
good @thejohalfiles
upvote me plllllllllllllzzzzzzz :(
wow!!!
That's some deep insight you shared about work @thejohalfiles
This is true for sure.
I don't think that there will be a lot of manual work done by humans in a few decades. Dangerous jobs like firefighters are probably all done by robost - Just one example! But what will we do with all the workless?
On the other hand, we are gonna have to deal with new problems. What will those be? And how will we be able to deal with them?
As you said,
My idea to solve both spam and vote buying is to encourage those like @blocktrades and @minnowbooster, even @berniesanders if he needs a new direction, to change their business model. Instead, delegate to trusted curation teams like OCD, Steemstem, steemiteducation, some of the country-based ones and so forth, who will then do the quality curating with that SP, thus boosting the minnows and reducing spam ability/incentive
To get an ROI, they could offer a premium where any user can send a small payment to prioritize viewing of their posts (but not guaranteeing an upvote). There are enough people in these teams to cover most tags and can always recruit more.
Convincing a few whales would be a far easier solution than changing the framework of steemit via hardforks and the like, and they'd still profit if done right
I’m really glad you brought this subject to light and are exposing it . It’s not fair to the ones that are actually taking the time to research and create inspiring and educational content that me and a lot of others gain knowledge from .
What bugs the hell out of me most is the terrible message being sent out to new steemians - all that matters is the cash. No problem with these guys making money but to shit in the bed we all lay in - sad, sad indeed.
Us older steemians are disheartened as well, many great content creators have powered down and left.
I'm thinking once we get past these growing pains, things will smooth out. But yes, it's unfortunate some have left. However, once the value of Steem begins to increase, I'm hoping they will return and that they've held onto their STEEM to share in any potential benefit that comes with a climb in STEEM value.
I hope so, I miss my friends @brain-rhodes, although I am trying to make new friends all the time. The people that joined steemit at the same time I did, we bonded and they feel close to my heart.
It is Very sad , No doubt about that . It’s not a good look for the present or future of the economy , especially from the eyes of new Steemians .