@wang appears to be front-running my votes.
In the past day (I haven't done an exhaustive search so I'm not sure when it started), @wang has been voting for every post that I voted for. His vote has been in the same block, and in very many cases, his vote is the first in the block, and mine is the second.
It seems that the only way this could happen is that @wang is watching for my vote to be broadcast, then immediately voting when he sees my vote, and then the active witness is including his vote before it includes mine. The only other possibility is that @wang has reverse-engineered my voting algorithm. There's a chance of this, but I think it is extremely unlikely.
So here's the question: How is @wang front-running me? Why are his votes being included before mine? Is it a Steem bandwidth thing?
EDIT: As @ats-david points out in the comments, @wang is not actually front-running; it just appears that he is due to a display bug on steemd.com. If you look at the actual block data, the votes are recorded in the correct order. It's still quite impressive how quickly @wang gets his votes in.
This was brought up a week or so ago when @bacchist noticed it was happening with me - and I manually vote. A few people looked into it and determined that @wang's vote only appears to front-run due to a bug with how it's recorded on steemd. The actual block where the vote is recorded on the blockchain should still show your vote first.
Ahhhh, of course. On steemd if you look up the block itself the votes are shown in the correct order. Thanks for chiming in!
No problem.
I have the same concerns as you about the speed of his votes. I'm not sure exactly how he does it, but @bacchist mentioned that it's some sort of P2P exploit that he's taking advantage of - and as you mentioned, it certainly affects the rest of the voting trail, even with @wang's voting power near 20%.
No, it's not just you. I don't know why it happens though. How is your bot casting votes?
If you're a curator on Steemit, you gotta live with The Wang Menace. Others have tried to shake off wang without any success.
I think @wang isn't the only one who successfully front-runned some votes. Also @wang is a contributor on the platform. I'm pretty sure he's reading a lot of posts cause he's been voting on a lot of comment which is in my opinion a sign he's reading posts. Also I think he's not necessarily always voting 100% for the curation reward. I thinks some of his votes fulfill other purposes than curation rewards which I think is very interesting.
@wang is pushing the limits of Steem and is showing some opportunities for skilled dev. I'm pretty sure he's achieving this through "vote broadcast interception" as you mentioned.
All those comment votes are bot votes as well. Here, I'll upvote your post - see wang follow instantly. Note that the comment votes are usually 1% from wang. Maybe wang is reading, I don't know, but one thing's for sure, a vast majority if not all votes are bot votes.
Every vote wang makes is to maximize curation rewards. Well played to them, of course. Just shows that our reward system is broken.
I didn't knew the comment votes were bot's votes. I'm intrigued as to why he's making those votes. I don't see how these votes could help is curation.
I don't think the reward system is broken. It could most probably be bettered but that's true of everything.
Edit: when I first saw wang's vote I hadn't seen your comment and I was thinking: "this prove my point wang is reading posts."
My guess is it's a quirk of wang's fast voting bot. To keep the speed high, voting on comments has to be a "necessarily evil". However, wang smartly minimizes the impact by voting only 1% for comment votes, so it's only a negligible impact on profitability.
Hey, just thought I'd mention this: as @ats-david pointed out above, @wang is not actually front-running. It's just a display bug on steemd.com. If you look at the block itself, the votes are actually recorded in the right order.
In any case, @wang's votes do go in extremely fast, almost always being included in the same block as mine. I have several other vote-followers (@masteryoda and @roelandp are two examples), and their votes are cast seconds to minutes after mine.
Thank you very much for that valuable information. I didn't even thought to look it up.
Per the comment above by @ats-david, it turns out that @wang is not actually front-running. It's just a display bug on steemd.com. If you look at the block itself, the votes are actually recorded in the right order.
The menace for me is that I have several other accounts that my bot votes for, and I need to make sure that their votes go in before @wang's or he will eat up all my clients' curation rewards.
You can verify this on Steemstats.com - click on the Vote Inspector.
similar experience here. :) no answers though ...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@deanliu/a-little-santa-power-bestowed-on-me-by-dear-wang-and-paying-forward
I found answers! As @ats-david pointed out, it turns out that @wang is not actually front-running. It's just a display bug on steemd.com. If you look at the block itself, the votes are actually recorded in the right order.
cool! this is indeed a TIL.
The Wang bot seems to vote pretty early and for a lot of posts. You seem to be curating good posts so it's not surprising to me that the Wang bot also is targeting those posts. How would it even be possible to vote ahead of you like that?
Apparently it's not. @ats-david pointed out that @wang's vote only appears to go in before mine due to a display bug on steemd. If you look at the actual block itself, the votes are recorded in the correct order.
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Huh. Very interesting. I've been curious about this as well with all the voting trails and such that are starting. Seems stuff like this is bound to happen as Steemit grows (see high frequency trading).