RE: Please ignore my downvotes
I have been testing and am now investigating the logs of the script paybothater.py that is meant to allow steemit users that believe pay bots are decremental to the steemit platform to use the excess voting power to counter the pay bot buisiness model. The script tries to identify payment transactions to pay bots, and then tries to counter the upvote by the pay bot. I'll be stopping this test run later today in order to move on to testing an anti-comment bot script.
Testing of this script has been paused for now. I'll be going through the logs looking for false positives.
Remember, this is just one of a series of scripts meant to allign with different people's ideas about countering reward pool abuse. Eventually it will be up to the individual users if they prefer using their excess voting powers for downvoting pay bot users, downvoting comment bot comment upvotes by page owners, downvoting self-upvoted comments, etc.
If the rules are not uniformly enfoced and everyone always downvoted equally 100% of the time I worry such system will just help the powerful fuck over minority share holders while increasing rewards value. I really don't understand how any sort of content based downvote can possibly help the platform, the platform should build people up not let malcontents interfere with others voluntarily associating in my opinion.
I will follow whatever the market decides but ceteris paribus I think the entire downvote culture and even the assumed negative value of spam very questionable. Lots of bullshit meaningless shit that isnt spam, at least spam is clear, if we want the network producing things of value that are able to be found by its audience with minimum transaction costs, seems openly accepting spam, but perhaps tweaking the math so people can openly do spam at rate x, but people who dont do spam can do so safely at rate y, and maybe punsihment of rate z or other incentives if people defect and try to pass off spam at a higher pay rate.
People assume spam and other things are bad, when it is only bad depending on what the purpose of steem and the network is. If it is to be public sphere and efficiently exchange ideas and value, then it seems doing more to protect investment backed expectations would help normalize the markets and make it so people are more confident in the network.
I hope you appreciate how much time has been cost by your valueless downvotes, and that ironically in a certain way it is the same time vampirer of spam and the things enabled by vote selling and vote trading.
The bot didn't do any "content based" downvotes. The downvotes are triggered by paid-for upvotes, not by the posts themselves. People pay money to a whale or orca owned bot that than blindly deals out a strong upvote without any quality checks on the content. The idea is that indiscriminate upvoting by paid for upvote bots is decremental to the quality of posts on steemit as it allocated a substantial chunk of the reward pool to content least diserving of an upvote. The down-vote bot aims to attenuate this effect. Rest assured, the bot won't be running with worthless votes the next time. I'm working on a new version that will only trigger for upvotes it can attenuate with exactly 10% of the worth of the triggering paid for upvote. The idea is that if enough people will run these bots on their accounts, market forces should do the rest through the leverage effect. If you have great content, than using the pay bot should get you the extra exposure that in turn should get you more votes and a provitable end result. If you use payed for vote bots to make money on crap posts, the 10% decrease in pay out might just tip the balance to making paying for an upvote unprofitable, taking away the insentive to use vote bots for crap content.
"The Medium is the Message." And the information contained in upvote bots is that people want more exposure than their organic network and their investment in community building and reciprocity have gathered. This also provides stability in the markets for SP delegation. Without vote buying, there would be way more concentrated power in the ancients and less fluidity for the best to move up. Vote buying also helps the rule makers better identify those who do not add but only take.
I still don't understand why not just accept spam/upvotes purely for value with no to little proof of brain and let that be done at a certain lower rate if they are cooperative about it. But if they try to counterfeit then punish. And then compensate anything that passes as sufficient proof of brain at a higher rate. That way at least a lot of the spam market would instantly be destroyed?
I don't understand interventions that try to go upstream of market forces instead of not being a dick.
I am not going to be making spam or anything. But I will not respond kindly to downvotes. I am actively creating free video lessons and content released public domain so anyone can use it anyway they want. Business is done on the margins, so only so much of an expected payout can before it will become unprofitable to continue doing that and just have to leave if this culture develops.
How is the time vampire of your bot testing not equally as fucked up as spam?
Why can't these rule makers focus on making a great platform rather than fucking people over?
furthermore this is likely to just push the vote buying underground? How are you going to monitor MinnowBooster or other entrepreneurs? It seems like absent some other intervention your intervention if successful is just going to drive the vote buying you dislike underground so it will be harder for you to monitor and affect than it was currently? And all the external actors that are going to have to pay higher search and transaction fees trying to use the higher priced markets due to your intervention attacking market centralization will only hurt minnows and dolphins who lack bargaining power and are likely hurt most from information asymmetries.
I humbly ask you to consider whether you intervention really has a good likelihood of affecting steem in a positive manner? I seriously don't think so, especially if it is across the board downvotes rather than only ones with insufficient proof of brain.
I just created this post asking for input on three different down-vote bots. I've made some major changes, both to the voting power strategy and to the previously indiscriminate part of the vote bot upvote attenuation. Most notably the added use of the age of the post being upvotes prompted by grumpycat's recent downvoting activity where he distinguishes between early bot aided " promotional" use of self upvotes and late bot aided "money making" self upvotes. While grumpycat uses a surrogate (the voting bot used allowing late usage) my bot will use the actual post age itself, so reducing the false positive rate to zero. Please have a look at the whole blog post to understand my project. I'm sure you will see the good these bots will do, and maybe you could even add a bot idea of yourself.
so much reading, have to edit some video and get up new content but I'll try to process more of what you are doing. Thanks for listening to me ramble. Hope the New Year has been going well for you!!