De-centralised CAPTCHA system (Part 2 of 3)
First of all before anybody jumps down my throat please read my last post on auto-voting in the attention economy.
Right now, with the curation system in place, bots of large stakeholders are being paid for their attention instead of people. Not so different from corporate social media when you look at it that way. Sure, we can argue that there are real people behind those bots, but those people are not paying the full price of their attention. Advertisers and investors don't want bots attention, they want peoples.
If pigs could fly!! Mmmmm.... Bacon wings....
image source
The Problem with CAPTCHA's
Apart from interrupting the flow of user experience it is also seemingly necessary for there to be a centralised authority for the "are you a bot or a human" question to come from. In order for bots to be challenged by the CAPTCHA, they should not have access to them or they could easily be programmed to recognise them and to answer them. This is why I have been brainstorming on the possibly impossible implementation of a de-centralised CAPTCHA system on the blockchain.
How it would work in my Wild Imagination
From every steemit account there could be a means to submit a CAPTCHA to the witnesses. Once submitted, the witnesses have to vote to approve it based on whether the challenge is too hard for humans or too easy for bots. Once approved by the majority of witnesses, the CAPTCHA becomes encrypted on the blockchain. When a steemian user or bot votes and their vote meets the criteria* that requires a CAPTCHA a randomly selected encrypted CAPTCHA appears.
*I am certainly not talking about having a CAPTCHA for every vote, but if I were to decide how frequently then it would be possible for a user to come across one once every 6 hours, but even less frequently for most users - depending on their voting habits. I say 6 hours to break the day in 4. It is unusual for people to spend all 4 quarters of the day online. One or two is far more likely. How often any particular user would have to prove they are a human is another question I plan on answering in the next post.
It should only be possible for any one account to submit one CAPTCHA at a time, to prevent the submissions being filled with spam and making the workload too much for witnesses.
The CAPTCHA's submitted by accounts could ideally be any kind of programming or simple question and answer. There could be a few options.
- answer the question in the image
This image would have a clear question within that needs to be answered. It could be a hand written word for the human user to type or it could be a picture of something very clear and specific such as a dog or a house. It could also be a hand written simple math problem. - select the squares to answer
This option would allow the submission of several images which can be selected to answer the question. E.g. Select all the images with water in them. - java-script or python
An especially useful option would be to be able to create games like the one in the video below.
Once again, I welcome other proposals to resolve this issue as people becoming more like bots to compete with bots seems to be escalating the problem. The platform has less and less visitors every day according to alexa.com.
Previously suggested solution by the developers
Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40
We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.
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Google translate not permitted.
I think that applying a captcha to curation would have the opposite effect to what you intend, reducing competition, leaving whale votes with more influence than they have now, and creating even more disaffected authors. But, decentralized captcha is a very creative idea that might well have other uses, so I commend your ingenuity.
I did a quick search and found one proposed system described here - https://grez911.github.io/captcha.html. No idea whether it's feasible to implement such a thing on the steem block chain or not.
That's brilliant thank you for digging that up :)
Very interesting idea. I hadn't heard of the concept of the "attention economy", I've got some reading to do 😅
It would be a great to have some kind of fair, anonymous captcha type system. Bots are kind of operating in a opertunistic power vacuum, people just can't compete and the API is open enough to allow for it.
On the one hand I agree with this openness, and I know appeals to a lot of people in the name of freedom and anti-regulation. However it's missing some fairness. This "fairness" is not something everyone agrees with baking into the system though, there's a kind of lively debate about this weaved through other topics.
My prediction is that this idea will not gain enough traction to be implemented, I think people like the wild west free market unregulated angle of it, and the auto voting tools seem popular enough. So it might be worth thinking of a way to implement this on top of the system.
Also as a note on captcha in general, one great feature of some captcha is doing small pieces work that AI is not yet very good at, pattern matching and such. That's a fascinating idea and it'd be cool to work it in to any system if possible. 😎 👍
By the way, I'm working on a bot myself but only really to level the playing field for everyone. More on that soon! 😋
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Jan 09. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $5.86 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 09 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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I probably should have read this earlier in the day as my brain is completely shot from the reading I've been doing. I actually do use SteemVoter but I'm pretty selective with whose on the list. But I also try to be diligent about commenting on what the bot votes on.
One thing that I think would be really cool is to have two votes lists. One counting only the upvotes and the other one where a user is listed IF they left a comment.
That would certainly help me keep track of my authentic visitors!
Isn't there a CAPCTHA that just asks the user to physically click a box? I don't think people would revolt if all they did was click a box. But I personally don't enjoy typing in letters or choosing pictures. Choosing pictures drives me nuts and should only be used for bank websites or such.