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RE: It's Time To Call a Spade a Spade: The @blocktrades Phenomenon
I'm withholding judgment until I hear the other side. Is it possible that he just upvotes a lot of content that he thinks is good, without really knowing how to check for whether it is abuse of some kind. What is the percentage of 'abusive' content that he upvotes compared to the total number of votes he casts? Is it within a reasonable level to where he isn't deliberately doing something malicious?
If there is a real problem, I have no issue with people highlighting it, but opinion based witch-hunts can be really damaging to the person they are directed at, and the community as a whole. Generally it is not good to post things like this and imply wrongdoing unless you are 100% sure that what you are implying is true.
45 incidents is 4% of his total vote count, or one in twenty five votes assuming this is an exhaustive list. Plausibly human error or carelessness, but if there's a pattern to it, or if this is a shorter sample period, it could be harder to defend.
Someone with the time could also investigate how often the average non-whale upvotes garbage/abuse by pure chance. That would show if @blocktrades is better or worse than the average user (one would expect/hope a whale to take more care with their vote than a minnow).
In the last 24 hours, @blocktrades recorded 36 votes. If we extrapolate this number over a 60-day period, we're talking about 45 votes out of 2160. That's 2% of his votes that have gone to what turned out to be plagiarized posts over the last 60 days. When asked, those votes were removed. The other 98% of his votes are apparently acceptable curation. So why is this user being targeted for his "abusive" voting?
Again - I'm not seeing what the "abuse" is here. Unlike the posts where I have actually exposed sock puppet accounts created and upvoted by whales (which was admitted by those exposed), this is simply an attempt to throw mud at a whale who is not favored by other whales. Yes, he upvotes some plagiarized content. A lot of people do. Some even upvote sock puppets that plagiarize. Some of those people even upvoted this post. Is everyone guilty of malicious abuse? No, of course not. Prove the intent to deceive or harm the platform by scamming the system. If you cannot, then there is no "there" there.
There is no need to extrapolate one days data over the whole time period. When this post went up yesterday, @blocktrades had 1100 lifetime votes. 45/1100 =~ 4%. The argument that @walden and @nextgencrypto are making is that the errors he makes are remarkably frequent and so they are dealing with them every day. Perhaps the implicit argument is that @blocktrades is somehow also involved in the abuse, for an unknown reason or gain.
In principle there is some threshold where the frequency of votes for abuse is too much to be pure chance or carelessness. 45 incidents seems intuitively like a lot, especially if you see them every day in the chat. But ultimately nobody has established what the norm or null hypothesis we should expect is. It's entirely possible that 4% isn't unusual, just that when someone is the fourth largest whale on the platform, every little misstep you make turns into an 'incident'.
Its not an exhaustive list, its just a sample, there is a part 2 to this post in the works.
I hope part two actually proves what you're trying to claim here. I'm only seeing that upvotes were retracted once plagiarism was found. Please tell me you have more than this. If you don't, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort, regardless of who's asking you to do it.
If this post was about anyone else you would be all over it throwing a whiny shit fit like you always do but for some reason you always stick up for @blocktrades. Since you are obviously biased, your opinion is worthless.
This is nothing other than abuse like you constantly claim to be fighting, you're just blind to it for some reason in this case. People should NOT have to be following his votes just to make sure he's not voting on shit. There are reports of his voting on plagiarism in steemit.chat EVERY DAY where you claim to be fighting this type of thing.
Either that, or it is you who is biased and he has been fighting against that bias. His opinion could very well be worthwhile, I can't tell either way from what you just said.
And I am still confused; what exactly is @blocktrades doing wrong? How is he supposed to be abusing the system and how does he benefit? I don't ask that because I think he doesn't, I have no opinion either way, I would just like to know. I'm relatively new here, you see.
There is a lot of garbage he upvotes which was not retracted because I'd did not qualify as plag. Such as junk content in the form of YT video copy pasta with one sentence.
Example:
experiments-with-cesium-the-most-active-metal-on-earth#@dragonfruit/re-logic-re-dragonfruit-amazing-experiments-with-cesium-the-most-active
After I asked blocktrades why he upvoted, he ignored my comment (ignores all comments or msgs) and next day upvoted at least 3 such posts.
This behaviour incentives users to trash Steemit with more junk content. It is very bad for all Steemit community. Such content deteriorates the total quality of the content on the platform. It also frustrates users with quality content.
I have been actively fighting plagiarism, every day for steemcleaners for last 3 weeks.
No other whale has this pattern of voting.
blocktrades votes seem to be divided to:
-upvoting other whales or trending content. About 20-40% of votes
-upvoting junk content including plag. About 10-20% of votes
-other content. About 40-70%
Sure - a lot of users upvote garbage content. A lot of users also upvote plagiarized content. The problem here is determining whether or not this is intentional and malicious or if it's just bad curating habits. I'm not seeing any proof of the former, yet this feels like it is an accusatory post despite the lack of evidence.
As demonstrated in another comment, the percentage of this bad curation is fairly low. And when he is reached after plagiarism is found, he appears to unvote the posts.
You know I have no problem with calling out whales, but this post is lacking anything concrete.
@ats-david, yes, he usually unvotes when reached, the problem is, that he upvotes plagiarized content even AFTER there were left a comment about the plagiarism from Steemcleaners.
I have no problem with unintentional upvote of plagiarism and then removal of an upvote, but if therealready was a comment from Steemcleaners, or if it's garbage content... It's at the least highly irresponsible, and with power of his that's an issue.
He had some time to find and downvote this article, why doesn't he do the same with his upvotes? Sad.
However no other whale could manage to be equally effective in curation )