✴️ ABUSE ON STEEMIT... WHAT CAN WE DO? SPAM, VOTING ABUSE, REWARD POOL RAPE, DRAMA, AND FLAGS!
"Integrity is doing the right thing most of the time, it's something that no one can take from you ~ Charles Fuchs.
What's Up STACKERS!
Throughout the last few weeks, most of you have probably seen an increase of the "Action" or some of you may call it "Drama", on a few posts throughout Steemit. 🙇🏼
All the way from Spam, Voting Abuse, Reward Pool Rape, Flags etc... have been addressed by lots of the people in the community. This isn't anything new but when "Whales" get involved, it usually makes the storylines. 👨🏼💻
Usually I'm far to busy to get involved but if you love Steemit, you should care. It's pretty hard to miss this types of ause when posting and looking at content these days so let's address it a bit.
The highlights really have been focused on #RewardPoolRape, what is it you say? It's when a few authors find ways to "Game" the system to make an absurd amounts of money that people question that takes away earnings from the rest of the community. Meaning that there is only a certain amounts of rewards we all can earn that is put aside for all of us to generate on a daily bases. (I think that's how you can explain it). 🤣
There has been cases that a few "Steemians" here making around $300-$600 per blog and posting around 5-10 times a day. With SBD being so high, that's around... oh shit, bunch of cash!
Don't get me wrong, it's ok to create great posts with good content a day that makes up to $1000 but 7-10 of them a day while most people making peanuts, that nuts in my book.
To 99.9% of us, that is pretty ridiculous... regardless of how good or bad the content is, no one person deserves that as it takes away from you and me.
If we want this community to be "Great" and "Somewhat" fair to everyone, we must get involved to stop these things from happening by "letting our voices be heard" and make it aware of whats going on to the community.
Who am I to say what is right or wrong, this is a decentralized platform and the power is in each one of us to change it or let it happen. 🤷🏼♂️
So What Do We Do To Stop This From This Happening?
Who Knows? There will never be a right answer because everyone will have his or her opinion and there is no such thing as living in "Utopia" where everyone gets along holding hands singing "Kumbaya"... that's just plain reality.
However, what we can do is try to find some kind of solution.
One way is to go back and limiting peoples post to at least 4 times a day which we had last year, this won't solve the problem but it will help. By limiting everyones post to 3-4 a day, this will cut down on shitty content, spam, voting abuse, reward thieves and many other things.
People will still try to "Game" it by making more accounts but it's better than nothing. If we make it harder for people to "abuse" the system, it still will cut down the trash! 🤮
I would love to hear the community has to say on what we can do to make this place kinda fair for everyone, remember... we are decentralized which means the power is in all of us. 🌟
With that being said, what are your thoughts? Let's get some conversation going... looking forward to everyones thoughts about this.
Keep on STACKIN! 💞
For those who are interested in following my "Daily Activities" that I do in very "short form". Follow me here: @charles-fuchs.
Interesting thoughts @stackin
It's a shame that we need these conversations but that's the price of freedom I guess.
I like the idea of a maximum amount of posts a 24hr period, I'd make it two though as I'm sure it would encourage people produce better quality work and engage with others more.
I only ever post 2-3 times a week as my posts are always lengthy and ordinarily take a fair bit of research.
Sadly you're always going to get asshat spammers and those who desire to game the system however that's human nature.
Stack on bro.
Agreed, like the idea of 2-4 posts a day... this will probably cut down spam to half and rewardpoolrape, it also will make harder for people to “game” the system. Keep on STACKIN 🤑
Once that happens though, naturally the abusers will just try to hide it in upvoting of comments.. I even seen RewardPoolRapers posting constant comments, then upvoting their comments that are minutes away from the post voting age so people don't have a chance to downvote it afterwards, and they get the payouts sooner
I could propose 3 changes.
All things the platform can try out with a hardfork, lets throw reputation score in there also :)
Can you imagine how flipped Steem would be if your vote size was directly from your rep score? @Stackin would be throwing out $100 comment upvotes like candy.
At 69 rep you'd be one of the biggest votes on the block chain!
Hey now, I only do over 1000+ votes a week lol
Ha! This is true.
Limiting the posts and the same ip login should be stopped so that even you have multiple accounts, you cannot login the two accounts in the 24 hour period. And self voting should be stopped or limited.
Limiting post is a good idea but with the ip issue, people will just use a vpn lol
But not all the users know how to use it. At least we will be able to stop it to some extent.
Actually the answer is in all of us.
It is decentralized as you mention prior.
This is called trial and error.
1.- The same way your ability to vote drop after certain amount of vote, it should go down with the amount of posts and most likely rewards accumulated with that post. Something has to give. I know it has to do with bandwidth then
2.- There should be a bot on steemit after three posts with a certain amount of rewards. Again it is decentralized.
3.- Whatever ideas I bring, it will be biased to my belief system. This is human factor.
4.- There should be a break system match with steem value to curb abuser from the system. That way it is immune to all steemians and protect fairness and prosper the longevity of the community.
At the end, keep on steemit.
I think he could post as much as he wants when he would be willing to decline payouts after post 3 or 4. A post limit would make the second or third account then way more attractive.
On the other hand the whales are free to do with their stake as they see it fitting meaning upvoting him all the time or downvoting all the time.
@aggroed made a good point that in a way it is also good for steemit as you need role models so people loose their shit how much they can make here.
That is nice idea!
If the post #1 received much reward then the second post close to the first by timeframe has reduced reward.
I totally agree, people can do whatever they want with there stake... Limiting posts will kill a few birds with one stone. It will cut down people spamming the shit out of steemit with like 10-30 posts a day. lol This won't solve the problem but it can help. Who knows :)
I saw one guy just replying to comment after comment by himself, giving each comment a $25 upvote. The thread was about 100 comments deep when I last checked. So I don't know if limiting posts is going to help a great deal.
Not to mention, if we want people using apps like Steepshot the same way they'd use Instagram, then you want them to have the freedom to post 1000 selfies a day (for better or worse lol)
Right, when you visit Steemit without logging in, you see these top posts that generate a lot of income first. In that way, having those posts with high rewards helps promote the platform. Of course, it's easy to argue that there doesn't need to be 10 of them from the same person.
It's also easy to argue that it gives a false impression of how things might work for anyone else. It's the old Amway problem (the pioneers of Multi Level Marketing): you hear about the nice incomes you can make, but only 1 out of 1000 get to that point, while the other 999's efforts to get there is what puts the 1 to the top. In steemit, the minnows are making the whales rich just as much as anything the whales are doing.
Proper KYC while account creation, imposing a limit on max number of posts per day, removing the option of upvoting own posts/comments.
As for the voting, 2 whales will teamup and 100% upvote eacother instead. Its being done now without mentioning names (that will downvote everything i do)
There are always ways to play around with the system and we can't really do much about it.
I agree with all of this except the kyc, it will be too much and kill decentralization on what blockchain meant to be, thanks for the comment Bossman! 😎
Without KYC, i can just simply use all my upvotes on my fake accounts and earn more, I think we need to find a solution to avoid that.
Did you notice that SteemWorld has a new metric called CSI, which shows how much of your voting power you use to self vote vs voting others? Maybe that should be displayed by reputation. At least, it could shame some users into not self voting so much.
For real man... Its insane how much some of these system "gamers" are making... and the masses cant do anything to stop it. We need the dolphins and whales to go back to steemit circa early 2017/2016. Where quality content is TRULY rewarded. They got lost in the piles and piles of money that they have made... Thanks for the post bro. Hope all is well! STEEM ON!
Yeah, it has to be addressed by the whales... once they all get involved and lead the pack, we all can follow.
Exactly. Well said man!
It would also help if they stop advertising this as a decentralized platform. Sure, the cryptocurrency end of it might be decentralized, but people coming in won't get the fine distinction between the crypto platform and the social media platform, and so assume they've just walked into a decentralized way to spread content and get rewarded. It amounts to false or deceptive advertising.
What if we had a system where the users could downvote it for spam or poor content. If it gets enough downvotes it gets flagged. Then it can get reviewed, and if it the downvoting is deemed appropriate, then suspend that user?
It’s not enough, the voting power of them can destroy 100 dolphins and 1000’s of minnows... no one wants to get a flag war ya know 😳😀... the whales must lead the pack.
Most true whales are not necessarily spending as much time on steem it as the ambitious upstart plankton & minnows. Would delegating to content curators be a best fit solution?
It may but they tend to abuse that power over time 😒😀
Is it possible Delegate to another person for 30 days at a time? Basically Vest in another account for 30 days or 90 days. Automatically power down to the Steem Power Provider. If that is possible I think that is a good fit for the problem. This type of steem power delegation and voting for witnesses every 90 days should be incentivized by the blockchain for maximum participation.
True. Don't want that, for sure.
Sounds like we need somebody to setup a site where you can submit post URLs anonymously, someone can review it, and if it is deemed to be a shitpost, then it gets passed to some whales for flagging.
We can form alliances just the way they have formed.
Flag wars is the favorite hobby of the bored whale. ;) I´m also very concerned by the increasing number of 0 payout I´m seeing here, when scrolling through Steemit. The short term problem with this is, that motivation is at risk -how long will a new user keep on posting, when he sees that he is producing a big 0 with a blog post that took him 1 hour to write, while watching the big fish earning insane numbers for a stupid picture of their snow covered trash pin in their backyard!
I think we´ll need several processes in place, that will guarantee at least a tiny amount payout for newbies - otherwise this game will soon become dirtier than it is already...
I consider myself a principled person with some integrity but when things are this dirty I'm considering using a shadow account to play the game just to get ahead a little bit. It seems like those with real power are cashing out while the one's striving for long term sustainable quality upgrades will be the last in the deforested jungle. This whole scenario doesn't say good things about us. It's disheartening
Yeah you are all right.. Its really disapointed that we earn small... Ppl came here with big dream and efforts again and again but find nothing.. I think some reward should be for authors for their good posts from steemit other than uppvotes
Some good idea, maybe Steemit Inc can fix it or another company will find a solution. hmmm :)
It's a hard thing to fix. Much smarter minds than me have spent much larger amounts of time than me trying to resolve it. People with much more Steem power are out there counter voting it right now.. I feel like Dan might have been on the right track to fixing it, he said he wanted to make 3 changes to Steem, but ned didn't agree.. here is what Dan said in a comment one of his posts the other day, he said if these were implemented Steem would be much better "Identity validation, vote canceling, dispute resolution, bonded behavior, n2 reward curve." .. I think that's as the creator of the blockchain, he is probably most capable of seeing the flaws, but ned and Steemit own the Steem blockchain unless I'm mistaken.. they paid Dan to create it, it is theirs to do with as they please from the comments ned has made.and this is the direction him and tlsteemit inc has decided to go
He was pro whale pro inequality dev.
Dont make a cult of him.
bronevik. I am not making a cult of him.. but pretend Joe nobody said that those things would fix steemit and look at the suggestions.. Would they help? Or will what Ned and Steemit is doing help more?
Steemit would not exist without Dan L, he said himself the distribution of Steemit sucked.. It was a mistake, a lesson for him to learn from.. If you go back and dig up the posts on the POW days of steemit, it was a complete failure. The fact it still stands today should show the strength of the idea, and of the blockchain..
If a coin were to come through and say airdrop tokens in a more fair distribution, run on a better blockchain, and have better voting mechanisms in place.. Steem might be in a heap of trouble. Not that it will die, but it will become Myspace. This is just commonsense talking. No cult of Dan necessary..
Its funny when I defend steemit people say im in the cult of dan, when I dont defend Steemit's bad choices on Steemit.. Im in the cult of Dan. People outside of Steemit think Steemit is the headquarters of the cult of Dan. Here on Steemit questioning how to make it better, means your in the cult of Dan.. Unavoidably in the cult of Dan I guess
Well in order to not be in a cult change all "dan said something" to "i'm saying something because of reason and evidence".
Should help.
Well I initially started with smarter people than me have tried. So I was giving an example of a smarter person than me who tried. But I get what you are saying. Noted, and thanks for the conversation.
Yeah, that was in the past. As we are getting stats and now have the data, things on steemit can be adjusted and fixed.lets see what happens in a few months with the hardfork, thanks boss for stopping by 💪🏼🙌🏼😀💯
Too bad the new hard fork doesn't look too promising as far as fixing anything serious. One account per person and vote strength of square root n or something similar, under linear, would be nice to try out. Might even actually have a user retention length longer than a few days on average lol. Reducing the strength of repeat votes to the same accounts would go a long way in helping things along as well. There are tons of suggestions to fix voting that would be for the benefit of steemit's growth but they're not really enticing to the people who already have all the power, and why would they let that power go if they're making money right now.
Im also excited for communities coming. Should shake things up a bit.. We are still in Beta so things can get better!