RE: A call for delegation
[EDIT] April 10th, 2018 10:56pm UTC
Hey @doomsdaychassis thanks again for bringing this to our attention. You appear to have spotted some scamming going on that received support from Curie through a curation trail we followed. I am actively investigating to shut it down ASAP. Thanks for your service to the community! Cheers - Carl
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Hi @doomsdaychassis, So first I noticed that you had this sorted by count. These are TINY % votes, and they are coming from the @curie vote trailing a sub-community's curation team. Curie supports a number of interest and regional specific sub-community curation teams with a vote follow at a very small vote %. The most famous of these sub-communities is probably #steemstem but the entire list of sub-communities that Curie supports is published every Sunday in the "Weekly Update" on the @curie blog. Each sub-community has its own guidelines and is an independent operation (to be clear, a sub-community is not Curie, the curation is not done by Curie curators, etc.). Because of the number of these sub-communities that Curie supports, and the tiny vote % for each vote that Curie casts following the trail of the sub-community curators, sorting by vote count is beyond pointless. If you go check the @steemotion blog, you will see that these are TINY votes. E.g. in past day that account received 8 Curie votes, but the SUM TOTAL of pending payout on all 8 posts is < $3! I can't tell at a glance which sub-community this author is receiving support from, but it is obviously not a big deal in any case. The Curie vote is at such low % that the Curie vote and trail isn't even showing up in most of these posts among the list of top voters because the votes are coming in at such negligible %. The majority of the (small in the first place) payout on @steemotion's posts upvoted by Curie is not actually coming from the @curie vote and trail.
The website you are using is really not very useful at all for an account like Curie that makes a TON of votes, as the website limits results to top 250; sorting by weight is slightly more useful here (and you will see that @steemotion drops off the list if sorted by weight), but the TOP vote receiver by weight only received .61% of the Curie outgoing vote weight in the time period. A much more useful website is http://steemreports.com which will allow you to see ALL votes. Here is last 2 weeks outgoing votes from @curie:
Then why even trail the a sub-communities' curation teams? If the impact and reward is so small? I see this in different places, where one vote leads a large number of tiny, tiny upvotes. In reading about HF20, those tiny votes will just become 'dust' and be sent to null anyway. I've wondered about this for awhile, so thanks for your comment that explains part of what's going on.
The short answer is that Curie sets the follow % for the vote trail, and then it is up to the sub-community curation teams how they use their votes. Some sub-communities e.g. #steemstem are much more conscientious in parsing out their vote power, giving large enough % votes that the Curie follow vote is still meaningful. Other sub-communities have decided to spread their vote % out far and wide; the mechanics of a trailing vote necessarily mean that if you are trailing a vote at a reduced %, and the original vote is actually cast at a low % to begin with, the trailing vote is going to be tiny. The bigger point here is that each sub-community's operations are independent from Curie. Curie has set the cap for total vote % of the follow, but the sub-communities have freedom to determine how to best use it. Some of decided to opt for spreading it out to a very large # of recipients, even if that means the reward going out to each is quite small.
Thanks for the explanation.
so this guy is just gaming the vote by posting a stolen pic with one sentence under it stating that the rights belong to the photographer with out even bothering with a source?
Ah, digging farther it looks like Curie has already removed support from that author. If you visit steemd.com/@steemotion you can see that the Curie upvote (small as it was to begin with, and coming from sub-community follow, and not part of normal curie operations), has been unvoted from his posting still in payout.
how recently? because as I stated earlier he had over 300 votes from them last night if memory serves me right. I was just sitting there drinking a beer thinking " how is this mother F'er getting over a vote a day from them? " I hope they go through and check everything going on internally because as everyone knows they just droped out of the top 20 witnesses and if they keep letting this stuff slide they will keep going down. People are getting tired of the reward pool abusers and unfortunatly I think curie is aiding a lot of these abusers that have found a way to game the system while noone is looking.
Looks like votes were removed 22 hours ago. it is not possible to review and police every vote going out from the sub-communities that Curie supports; on the other hand, every large vote that curie casts as part of actual Curie operations is human reviewed twice, first by a Curie curator, and then by a Curie reviewer. I can tell you that very few, if any, accounts that are giving out large rewards in the form of upvotes have two humans reviewing each post before a large upvote goes out.
The sub-community upvotes on the other hand are not large, and are not a part of Curie curator/reviewer operations. You understand what a vote trail is right? I didn't explain that previously as I assumed it was self-explanatory, but perhaps I should have explained. When I say that the Curie vote follows the vote trail of the sub-community curation teams, that means the sub-community is the one reviewing the post and deciding to upvote it (not Curie!). Curie is supporting those sub-communities' curation efforts with a "vote trail" which means that the Curie vote will automatically be cast behind the vote of the sub-community curation team, at a reduced % of the original vote strength cast by the sub-community. We are talking very small votes there; while the total number of votes that Curie casts through sub-communities is large, as a % of total curie outgoing vote weight they are small. The votes cast by @curie after a post has been submitted by a Curie curator and reviewed by a Curie reviewer, on the other hand, are large.
As noted previously, the sub-community curation teams are not a part of Curie. Curie follows their vote trail at a small %. There are hundreds and hundreds of votes cast daily by the sub-community curation teams that Curie supports. It is not possible to review every one of these votes - the majority of the Curie votes coming in behind a sub-community curation team are < $5 votes, and most are FAR smaller than that. Curie is already running at a deficit maintaining manual review of every large vote that Curie casts through Curie curators / reviewers - it takes time to review posts. Curie lists the sub-communities and lists the Steem usernames of each sub-community's leaders on the @curie blog's weekly update - this is done precisely so that if there is an issue with a sub-community votes, it can be taken up directly with the sub-community. If an author being supported by a sub-community turns out to be plagiarizer/scammer, Curie will of course remove the upvotes (as happened here).
yes i understand a vote trail. On that note should the higher ups of curie review who they are trailing? How often do they review these things? It is tax time here in the USA so maybe it is time for curie to audit themselves on some internal level of what is going on. I realize they are huge and it will take some effort but they are going to have to sometime or else they will become a feeding trough for scammer piglets.
edit: it seems like we are trying to say the same thing except i am more pissed about what is going on here.
Well for one thing, the votes had been removed 16 hours before your comment here - so obviously it had already been caught and corrected. Two of the founders of Curie, as "high up" as there are in Curie operations, are @donkeypong and @kevinwong and they have actually removed themselves mostly from "regular" Curie activites and have dedicated their time to supporting and monitoring the sub-community teams (@donkeypong supporting/monitoring the regional specific sub-communities that receive Curie support; and @kevinwong supporting/monitoring the interest-specific sub-communities that receive Curie support). So yes, Curie higher ups are already doing exactly as you suggest.
Listen it isn't like I am not angry when a plagiarizer or spammer gets a reward. But I also have the big picture of Curie operations in mind. In past two weeks, 1729 votes outgoing from @curie and 1679 of those were to unique authors. That is 97%. The remaining 3% of authors that received multiple upvotes from @curie during that time period were largely from the sub-communities, and certainly it is not the case that all or even many of those were given to spammers/scammers/plagiarizers. The Curie vote record stands up to close inspection, and indeed, more so than any other major account I can think of. I would be interested to see what account you think is doing a better job than Curie in ensuring that outgoing votes are both spread out to a broad number of authors, and has instituted manual review of EVERY post that receives a large upvote.
it is a good start. how about going down to number 6 on the list. his name is gee-world and ironicly he is drawing a curie vote for a series of very very short posts named ............... the smart but lazy man................ i got a good laugh out of that one
i would downvote it but that is worth more than my entire vote. Maybe they should just hire me on to hunt these pricks down. Do they have any job openings for headhunters?
Yeah, I just checked that out. He's making way more money on each post than I usually get and they are definitely not up to what I have been told @curie's standards are. Good sleuthing, @doomsdaychassis.
hey thanks for looking this up, meant to get back to this this morning but got sidetracked. I am trying to figure out which sub-community this is now
this one looks like the Nigerian sub-community. I will have a chat with the leaders of that community, I honestly have no idea what their guidelines are. Just for clarity for anyone reading these comments, these "sub-communities" are independent curation communities. Not a part of Curie. Curie just follows their curation trail. I will talk to them. Thanks for bringing this forward. Cheers
Glad I could be of assistance. Thank you for hearing me out.