How many CAPTCHA's are too many CAPTCHA's? (Part 3 of 3)
The problem : Many people who spend time on the platform voting for content that they read and paid attention to, are not making as much curation rewards as people (with the same amount of SP) who set up an autovote bot and get their votes in at the right time without ever reading the content. In other words people are incentivised to use bots to do their curation for them which is having an impact on user engagement.
The solution : It might not even be possible but click here to read my idea of how it could be implemented. You might not like it...
But lets discuss how it could be made as painless as possible.
I want to make it very clear that I am not talking about having a CAPTCHA for every vote. Personally I would propose it would be possible for a user to come across one once every 6 hours, but even less frequently for most users. This means that a voting bot could be prevented from further voting at most 4 times daily, and as soon as the person behind the bot manually answers a CAPTCHA that bot could go back to work for at least another 6 hours. A human on the other hand would more than likely only come across one at most twice daily, since humans don't generally spend all 4 quarters of the day online.
Now lets consider what kind of criteria would an upvote have to have for a CAPTCHA to appear. We could use the rShares of a post to determine the need to prove if a voter is a human or a bot. For example, if after you vote on a post there is still less than 1TRS then this kind of vote would never require a CAPTCHA to verify. But if your vote brought the rShares above that number then you may be required to answer a CAPTCHA if the user has voted this way 10 times in the past 6 hours. Ideally, you would be more likely to come across a CAPTCHA the more rShares there is on the post when you vote for it.
source
This would mean that you would be more likely to come across these CAPTCHA's if your vote is large enough to immediately bring the reward for a post above a large amount of rShares. My reasoning for this is because it is those who have the largest vote who are the most incentivised to use automation to gain the most from their curation. Furthermore, it is their use of curation that incentivises everybody with a smaller vote to automate their own votes in order to compete.
So bringing a post over 1TRS would require a CAPTCHA under 2 conditions
- if this is the 10th time in the last 6 hours that your vote brought a post above 1TRS
- if you have not proven yourself to be human with a CAPTCHA within the past 6 hours
Similarly, you could meet a CAPTCHA
- after 8 times bringing a post over 11TRS
- after 6 times bringing a post over 21 TRS
- after 5 times bringing a post over 31TRS
- after 4 times bringing a post over 41TRS
I would love to hear your thoughts on this idea. Once again I don't even know that it would be possible on the blockchain but I do see the incentivisation to autovote as an issue. The greatest content creators love to have their content genuinely appreciated by people who consume it. This is why I think people should be encouraged to engage when curating.
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Native speakers only.
Google translate not permitted.
It is simply unrealistic to think people will not use bots. Life is never that black or white.
If you want to encourage people to engage manually then you have to give them some incentive to do that.
Everyone is very busy nowadays so you need to make it worth their while.
One way to do that is to get people engaging through commenting and the recent changes that the team announced should go some way towards doing that.
I don't see the point in trying to come up with bot blocking methods because no matter what you do someone will come up with a way to get round it which will create another level of inequality.
Further it may drive people away from the platform if they are time poor.
That's not what this would do, so not what this is about.
That's what this is about.
That assumes that people are using bots because of curation rewards. I would suggest that is a false assumption.
Further why would you be using Captchas if you don't want to get rid of bots? That makes no sense in the first place.
I agree with this statement. For instance, myself (just to pick an example I know), use a bot to automatically upvote people I trust, follow and like (and always before the 30 minute mark). Usually, I am reading their post, but on a second stage. On top of that, I manually curate many posts (actually a good half of my curation is manual). As a result, this also allows me to vote all over the day, which is better to get my voting power rather high all day long. I cannot believe I am the only one acting that way.
I would prefer trying to find a 'solution' (is there really any problem with automatic curation?) in the reverse way: anyone who is manually curate get something back. This being said, I cannot think about the 'what' and 'how'.
Did you read the post ? The purpose would be to give humans a better chance at competing with bots. The captchas would be so infrequent that they wouldn't disable the bots and the incentives are for both curation rewards and distributing author rewards to your preferred authors - the bots have the advantage of both since they don't require living like people do.
I did read the post.
That in itself is nonsensical.
To be frank you might have better luck with a more pleasant tone. You asked for opinions but it seems you don't want to hear anything that doesn't 100% agree with you.
Good luck with that.
You read my tone to be that way. I'm trying not to read yours that way but it comes across equally unpleasant. Please don't think my explaining myself for a second time is unpleasant. If you could read it again I'd like to know what would make you say that.
You don't see sense in it so I'm trying to explain it. A person would be required to answer a captcha to re enable the auto curation. This means auto voting can still occur if a human is awake and also manually curating. Whatever tone you think I have, it was never intended.
Also as you can see there are 3 other commenters who didn't 100% agree with me either... I'm a bit taken aback by your accusation...
Suggesting that someone has not read your post is pretty insulting in my book.
Further you are assuming that I don't understand what you are saying. I think you are not understanding what I am saying.
The fact that "auto-curation" is being re-enabled implies that it is was disabled. I also take it you mean "bot" when you say auto curation. How is that not anti-bot?
Even if that is not your intention the end result is that it will be. It is not that I don't understand what you are saying it is more the case that I don't think that will help.
If I am using a bot I want it to get on and do what I have set it to do because it saves me time. I can't be there all day to look after it and fill in a CAPTCHA every x number of votes. That defeats the whole purpose.
An incentive that makes it more attractive to curate manually should not penalise those that don't. Why - because they may be the same people at different times of the day.
Anyway I doubt we are going to agree on this so I will just leave it there.
I agree that strategic bot upvoting is not a positive thing for Steemit. I have upvoted this post after about 2 minutes and I'm sure I won't get more than .01 reward but a bot account will shower upvotes at 30 mins and take rewards away from the readers. Not a good result.
My suggestion is to randomise that perfect time to upvote so it makes it harder to game the curation rewards system by using vote bots.
Interesting idea. Anything that could level out the playing field between the bots and the humans would be great.
Never heard this suggested, but it makes sense. I like it.
Because i post and blog most often at work I have 8 hrs to curate and blog on my own and I enjoy it ! I have never used a bot , and dont even know how to get a bot anyways 9r how to set them up it sounds complicated ! Lol ! Plus im asumeing you have to pay for this bot ! Haha ! I would be inclined to get a bot though for when i sleep or on a part time basis . 👍🤔😉
Although I am not 100% sure this will solve the problem or could be implemented on the blockchain (perhaps more on the interface), it is food for thought. Anything to improve curation rewards and curation engagement is a plus in my opinion.
I dont understand anyone voting without reading the content first. I think maybe a timer before they vote again enough time to read a post. I can't get my head around bots..
I strongly dislike captcha and it would hinder my Steemit experience. It would discourage me from participating.
1 CAPTCHA is too many. Expressed anti bot ideas may also be anti human. Understand people see bots and bot voting is a problem. So how may we better define the (actual) problem and solution?
Perhaps a different payout time or structure that may not be so easily cracked by bots or rather humans that design the bots. Maybe we can think towards an idea that will better share STEEM with bots and humans to reward both unique voting styles as neither should be discriminated against.
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Jan 12. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $6.58 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 12 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Captcha cannot be implemented on blockchain level, and bots do not need steemit to vote on posts.
Please read part 2. I'm talking about if it could be decentralised through the blockchain
I just finished reading it. I really appreciate that you are trying to find a solution for auto-voting problem, but I think CAPTCHA is basically bad idea. Why?
One captcha is already to many
IMO we should remove the incentive for bots. Voting should not be paid.
I am hoping they will at least do that for comments if they are to have a separate pool