STEEM WHISTLEBLOWER: Whale Bots Are Devaluing STEEM!
STEEM WHISTLEBLOWER: Whale Bots Are Devaluing STEEM.
This is a "Calls It As I Sees It" article and in no way should be taken as fact or fiction, merely observations.
A troubling new pattern seems to be emerging on Steemit and the need to address it in a post has finally gotten to the point of making it a reality. With what one could perhaps describe as unintentional or intentional systematic colluded voting on certain accounts producing content that in my opinion is either translated, plagiarized or poorly written. I'm not talking about simple copy and paste jobs either. These seem to look intentional. In most cases images were lifted from multiple sources with no credit given until after someone had mentioned something. We aren't talking posts that made $10 or $100 Steem Backed Dollars here... We are talking THOUSANDS.
More Troubling is the Fact That Whales are Supporting These Posts
I'd first off like to come outright and say in no way is this a witch hunt against any one user and anyone listed in this article as an example is only a suspect in my own mind and unless you agree with my point of view and raising of this whistle blowing then please do not view these users any differently. It IS entirely possible I am wrong in all of this, but until otherwise irrefutable evidence is brought forth by the users given in example here perhaps entertain the possibility of this infact happening on Steemit.
I do not wish to harm anyone's reputation here. This is a thought our community on Steemit.com is having and we need to address it before it becomes a commonplace epidemic. While I am not against whale botting their curation and automating voting from multiple accounts... I DO have a problem with high powered accounts blindly following and upvoting users either because they believe they will do well or seemingly do not understand proper article writing etiquette and refuse to not reward what could be described as "filler" material.
The tipping point for me personally was watching account @mrron make a handful of basically "fluff" articles and receive thousands in Steem Backed Dollars and Steem Power. Now by "fluff" articles I'm not meaning he wrote heartfelt tales nor featured any kitties, puppies or pets. Check out this guys posts..
What part of any of those posts is worth that type of money? Are they inspirational? Has the user given proof he's been there or even actually tasted these things and been these places? Where is the value in their content? Has the user done a verification post? Has the author given proper credits to the images used?
Before we go pumping accounts full of rewards and shares in the future of Steemit. Please consider the above.
I give a list of high value accounts below that seem to upvote this type of crap and make it seemingly acceptable to not only pollute the Steem network, but get paid handsomely as well for doing so:
@berniesanders - @steemed - @itsascam - @complexring - @kushed - @nextgencrypto - @wang - @silversteem - @steemroller - @silver - @justin - @slowwalker - @steemservices - @juneaugoldbuyer - @cyber - @nabilov - @dashpaymag - @charlieshrem
Other users that should be aware of this sort of thing and it's potential to happen:
@dan - @ned - @dantheman - @smooth - @steemit - @stellabelle - @summon @addwhalenamesincommentsofdevelopersandotherwhalesplease<3
If you made the list above do not take it as a personal attack but more of a call to action to make your own decisions rather than having code do high value decision making for you. As much as I promote coding and the automation of menial tasks as we evolve as a human species, some things like curation really shouldn't left to blindly followed rules set by numbers and code. Many of you are fans and supporters of mine and I'd like to address this with you on a public forum so we can speak about it as a community rather than discuss things privately amongst ourselves. This is what blockchain based social media is for, right?!
The users I suspect of gaming the steemit system's latest "masterpiece" you can find here: https://steemit.com/food/@mrron/desi-foods-in-karachi-to-try
Ask yourself for a moment.. What part of that post is worth over +$1000?
Now I do admit that I do at times make posts that have little value besides a doodle and a laugh. When that is the case I tag them accordingly. Certainly I see a time and a place for short little meaningless blurbs for laughs. But when we as a community start shoveling a whole crap ton of money into unverified users, with unproven and unimaginative articles, we're doing it wrong.
Please check your curation bots guys. This is getting a wee bit out of hand!
@mrron give us something to work with here.. A verification when it was hinted at rather than calling me a racist would have been a fair easier way null suspicions.. :/
User @justinlaak has taken it upon himself to flag this post and drop this gem on us:
You don't deserve the reputation you have here @justinlaak if you side with those that wish only to put in little effort. I believe that folks don't often get the recognition they deserve here on steemit.. Then I see posts with next to no meaningful content making thousands of dollars and I think to myself.... "Is this how they envisioned it when they were drawing up the white paper and coding the first versions of Steem?" Low value content being artificially inflated by poorly maintained or thought out automated curation lists is the problem here!
Bonus Journalism! User @cjclaro finds some strange votes on Steemd.com
Not sure who this badger guy is.. But I bet he's got some insight into why them posts got all pumped perhaps?
GOOD FIND @cjclaro - You are an asset to our community sir!
Badger has replied in the comments below, Turns out he is a miner!
Go upvote his comment below please. Both he and I would appreciate it!
Thank you to @dantheman for looking into the issue!
Want more info, humour and tales from @klye !?
in the top right corner.This way you get to see my new posts in your feed tab on your blog when I submit them!
Alternatively if you're a chatter rather than a reader come join me in the klye room.
This is supposed to be a free network, his lack of proving who he is has nothing to do with the fact, every article he has written has trended and do not seem worth a huge following. Doesn't look good.
It is pretty suspicious. Although I'm not going to scream foul play and jam it down people's throats I'm definitely going to raise the issue.
@kyle Thank you for posting this! I was thinking for some time now of being here - what on earth makes an article worth upvoting ? Do we actually have a set standard on what qualifies for a good post and what doesn't. However, if we do - would we still be considered anarchists? so I just went on blogging but it really is frustrating watching my posts get outdone by other post that doesn't seem to have been put much effort on. Sighs and sighs ... Oh well, they say - in every problem there's a solution. I hope they look into this and if not, we just have to keep blogging. Who knows - one day we'll strike a huge luck but if this is what the game here looks like - I wonder again, who would keep on playing.
That's remarkable to trend with every post . He must do something right
Right!? Makes me want to use other peoples food images and make up reviews on the food I didn't eat. ;)
Rofl. Hell we can make up imaginary foods and I can draw them.. We could possibly make a fortune!
yeah, go and draw imaginary food klye, you're gonna need it
Yeah man, we all can't be basement dwellers and have our mom feed us pizza pops. :D
I'm going to be reviewing the McDonalds menu at some point. It's sure to be a hit. I'll do it in an anarchic way and get the screenshots off their website.
:) that
klye is a mouth piece babe
Hahaa !! Oh well oh well ! Let's wait for the Varification post
:)
shut up hypocritical stupid fuck,
I mean, ma'me, I think you are out of your league here
exactly!!!
We both know we disagree about this idea of going after users or different kinds of content (and I may have something more to write on the latter because I really believe it is a serious obstacle for Steemit at this point) without any evidence of abuse (though still fair to downvote you really believe the rewards are excessive), but I'm still upvoting for the art.
Thanks smooth.
I'm trying not to completely burn / witchhunt @mrron - I believe he could in the future be a very valuable asset around here.. But the current way they've gone about things is no good and needs to be brought into light.
It's no good for the sole reason that you subjectively believe the content is not worth the votes.
Personally, I think it is not a good enough reason because of the subjectivity.
I see what you are both saying though. When compared with some other posts, it seems that most people would feel that those blog posts are not groundbreaking. That's not to say they don't bring value, but in the current state, people take offense if you were to flag/downvote their content. So @klye downvoting may make @mrron mad who has a high reputation now and could (I doubt he will) start flagging @klye.
Everyone is free to do as they wish when it comes to voting, I think @klye is more worried that if this is the type of content that is making thousands of dollars, more and more people will create this type of content (whether that is the intent or not, it's up to the individual user to decide this).
For me personally, if the trending feed was full of articles like those @mrron writes, I would be disappointed. There are some who spend 2 days writing and editing and receive $5 (That's not a complaint, just a reality for some) for their work and may become frustrated see this trend when it appears that it could have been written with not a great amount of editing or anything groundbreaking.
Subjectively or objectively, if there is a reasonable rationale, then that is good enough.
Always loved your art and creativity to represent things. Thanks for sharing your awesome work @klye
Cheers funnyman. I appreciate you taking the time to read my stuff.
Sadly it's not all fun and bubblegum, But I like to try and report on current things I see around me on Steem.
LMAO
While I think that anyone at all, whether gaming or putting sweat equity into producing vote winning posts, ultimately aiming to make a living out of it, is still pulling money out of the Steem market cap. The bots are the most clear example of it.
But look on the bright side. These people can't make money forever gaming the vote system. Sooner or later their costs outnumber their rewards, and then they go away, smugly proud of their raid on the Steem market cap.
At that point they are leaving more than coming, because they successfully, massively deplete the pool for rewards. You might be right for feeling a bit cut over this, because it seems contrary to the rewards system. But they will eventually quit, and the 'pump and dump via voting' process will stop being profitable, and those remaining with big vests in SP will be those who actually are here to make use of the discussion system to help foster a productive development and outreach program, in all kinds of directions, which will ultimately bring in the rewards.
Maybe there is still yet to be another wave of these robo-whales, maybe a couple more. But no marketplace is without the bears, looking to dig in, and skip out with their short sell profits.
They can't take away from the fundamental vests of people who they can't squeeze money out of.
These people will come to be the whales in a shrunken pool of Steem. These people will manually upvote genuine good content, especially when it relates to boosting the investment in the platform. Sure, this will yield a pool that will see more robo-whales show up, but if you are sure about Steem's effective mechanisms, you just hold your steem. I might even say, that it is possible that it could be my nest-egg building up slowly but surely, and in 2 years time, and this thing is still happening, probably my SP will be so big that I can cash a little out and fund non-steem related endeavours, while maintaining my position as a curator.
It's not meant to be a short term gain equation. Those who do this ultimately can only win a little bit out, and most of what they are winning, they are winning by outwitting the other big investors, of which many will also be running bots to game the vote rewards.
That money was never really in the pool in the first place. If you manage to capture a little bit of it, and you are serious about building up Steem, then you also will be able to have more power to flag these assholes later on, destroy their reputation and voting power, and diminish their malign influence.
If this was not tl;dr for you, go check out my post here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@l0k1/the-number-one-guaranteed-way-to-make-money-on-steem Understanding the dynamics of steem's everyone is both shareholder and employee model should show you that, if you really want to make money out of steem, you need to divert a bit of energy from your quality content creation, do outreach work to promote the increased understanding in the community at large about what Steem actually IS, or like me, build the utility of the platform that by itself also will boost userbase and investment.
We are all in this together and when the Robo-Whales have had their way with each other, and inadvertently powered up a lot of serious Steem faithful, the situation will start to move more and more towards a cohesive understanding of how we all can profit from this group enterprise.
This is what I have discovered using https://steemd.com/mrron
Multiple account voting for his post with very similar names. I think this has to be checked by Steemit guys upstairs!
Those are all a single account. They were mined and not obtained for free using Facebook. The person who mined them spent a lot of money mining steem power and the account names. You can think of all the accounts that you have pictured as one mini-whale account. You will see more of "us" voting in the future.
I hope you enjoy.
@badger311 Cool but be careful, accounts with low or no rep voting too often for a user can cause a post to actually drop off the feeds. I call this "malicious upvoting". It happened to @trogdor recently.
Anyways, if you want to point some of that voting power my way for this post, I'd be much obliged...
https://steemit.com/news/@williambanks/are-you-really-an-anarchist-or-anarcho-capitalist-prepare-to-be-offended
Can I ask what you saw of so much value in those posts? You have the right to vote on anything, but wondered what specifically drew you in or if this was someone you knew. Why wouldn't you have a single account though. Is it better to have multiples?
I pick topics to upvote because I think they make good topics. Pakistan is a good topic and I like to learn about it.
These accounts are multiple accounts because each account can only be represented once in the mining queue. If you have enough mining power, you may want up to 150 accounts so that you don't run out of accounts to put in the queue and waste mining power.
Ah. Cool man! Thank you for joining the conversation.
It is an honour to speak with such a dedicated miner... It did not don on me that someone would be using such a large number of accounts to upvote stuff.
I see. That makes a lot of sense since Pakistan is indeed a unique topic and should lead others to also write about it and expand knowledge of it.
You have enlightened us all thank you for taking the time to do so. I have a totally different perspective of what you are doing now.
Thank you for that comment.
Technically, having multiple accounts is not a "illegal" here in Steemit. Much like having multiple smartphones is not illegal. Furthermore, it is not a illegal to mobilize these multiple accounts to vote for a post. I just think it's unethical to vote for a post that may have been "plagiarized" and nothing to prove that it was actually the author's work. And I am not only referring to the post in question. I am referring to all posts with the same level of quality and content.
But then again, Steemit is a free community and if we think a post does not deserve the rewards it receives, we can always counter. The thing is, if we are against a whale and as minnows like us, they can just swallow us up and spew and swallow again 100x over.
If I was pulled over here in Canada and I had 20 cell phones they'd either think I was a thief or a drug dealer.
I can see from the miners stand point the benefits of having such a wild amount of accounts..!
You said it yourself...it's suspicious at the most and unethical at the very least. I think having different identities is ilegal in any country of the world.
@smooth has almost 100 different accounts (I got this number directly from him so there's no secret about it). I've jokingly "investigated" them here.
He transfers SP in a cycle, so he gets Steem daily by powering down from many of them. Yes these are the rules of the game, just don't expect zero controversy, questions and doubts.
This and many other issues are evident and not very good for the integrity of the platform. Don't expect companies or smart investors to start throwing big money over here any time soon.
you dont need 20 cell phones idiot, you just need 20 sims
...That wasn't the hypothetical that was raised though. :D
I think you're like my biggest fan or something @feminism ... No one else replies to nearly all of my posts.
Thanks for being a fan man. <3
tecnically... following
Sounds like a conspiracy to me LOL.
Interesting! @klye is this a foaming at the mouth badger?
It may very well be.. I may have to art for a closer look.
In fact it is only a plethora of friendly badgers on second viewing :)
Frothy friendly badgers.. Hawt
Good investigative work here.. We may very well be onto something.
UPVOTE ABOVE POST FOR VISIBILITY PLEASE FOLKS!
(sorry for caps, I didn't mean to yell at you... <3)
Appreciate the shoutout, @kyle. Thanks. I think one issue the Steemit guys upstairs should recognize is the unusual upvotes by an unusual set of users. This could be a serious loophole that might as well be exploited or being exploited right now. This may have been happening in the past unnoticed until it was noticed by your post. I hope we get to the bottom of this.
Is there a way we can verify what time accounts voted for his post(s)? Like what the order of votes was and at what time intervals he was upvoted by whale bots? Particularly his first post before he had any following. Cause if we saw something along the lines of no upvotes then whale comes in at exactly 30 minutes and votes him up then we have pretty good evidence of new account collusion.
user @inertia (I hope this is his tag on steemit, it's his tag on the steemspeak chat) showed me this link, which shows the order upvotes came in. But is there a way to query the blockchain to find out what time/how long after he posted the votes came in? That would be our smoking gun, to see some of these whale accounts upvote him extremely early at set increments
Click the advanced mode at the top and then you can see voting details. One whale voted after about 35 minutes (this is somewhat expected; if a whale sees a new post without much following they will almost always wait until >30 minutes in order to avoid the early-voter penalty). Several others voted 2-3 hours later.
You can use http://steemd.com I believe to check exact times and do further investigative work.
I wrote a post a while ago called hunting bots with python (and love) which seems pretty good at finding upvote bots. Useful if anyone wants to do research as it includes a link to the python code.
Worth checking out just for the cool @kyle cover art :)
Upped because you're a developer and asset to our community.
Hey @klye, though you were asleep man :) Clearly not :):)
With my pacifist attitude (and modesty :P ) I would say that going this public about the guy's posts is a bit too much but I do understand why you did it.
Nowadays, it does take a solid amount of luck to get recognized that highly and on 100% of your posts. Let me say that again: on 100% of your posts. [suspicious eyes rolling from left to right]
I would definitely like to see some comments from the whales that voted for him and pinky swear they did it from no hidden reason besides that they truly liked his posts and how it made them feel while reading them. Sadly, I don't think that will happen.
If it does though, hats off to them, and best of for the guy as he apparently has a very bright future.
If it is all luck then I'll gladly eat my own sock and shake the guys hand and publically appologize for this post..
But my gut instinct is telling me otherwise... And the real issue at hand is these whales blindly upvoting stuff.. -_-
You may have made a valid observation here. It is true that in the past before anyone got EVERY one of their posts awarded like this we usually at least saw an introduceyourself with a verification picture. Yet that could be even faked, so would it mean anything. It'd be easy to be fakes with $2000+ in SBD and 1300+ Steem Power.
If that is legit then you and I need to break down his posts and start posting crap like that. The photos were indeed nice, and knowing about other parts of the world is nice. Yet if they were just copy and paste work of someone elses with no credit, then I don't know why these posts would be so lauded compared to many that are not.
Could be just a bot gone mad. :)
Aye. The real problem here is people voting for the perceived curation rewards and not because they actually read or like the articles.. :/
Yeah for things to work well here people that have high steem power should actually be taking the time to find worthy content. Many of them are. Bots that follow people though I've seen people in the past get $1000 for a image and maybe a paragraph simply because they are followed.
A side effect is that these same people start putting out content way too fast to keep up with in some cases simply because they get a high reward on anything the post.
I also find it kind of Ironic that @berniesanders is at the top of all those posts for voter awarding money, and he is the one that dinged @dollarvigilante for writing something that @berniesanders thought too many people had written similar things before.
I even voted on at least one of those posts. I did think they were vote worthy. Yet to get $1000+ for every single post.
LMAO, Dwinblood, please, please....
I've written about this in this previous controversial post.
Wherever you agree or not for that post or user in particular, I think it's pretty clear the curation reward system is a corrupt one and nothing good comes out of that. People vote mindlessly for whatever makes them money, either via curation rewards or by voting people who attract more people (whales do this constantly). They continue to consistently disregard good or unique content. And that's what basically killing the platform right now.
If Steemit goes to 20 cents, maybe money will be taken out of the equation. But on the other hand, what's the point of it then?
0.20 cents on Steem is still >> Facebook + Twitter + whatever else combined.
Could be but you can't aim that low if you want a future for the platform. There are a lot of issues not addressed and that's why the price and user activity are free falling. That means less money to develop the system and company. I think some competition will be very good for Steemit.
I'd say the point of Steemit long term is education and betterment of mankind through helping common people become greater than they currently are by expressing themselves.
The value of Steem Backed Dollars and Steem aren't the point here really. The point is that we need to be placing our eggs in actual baskets rather than blurby fluff bits!