If you have been flagged by @mattockfs today and are confused about why you were flagged, please read on as I'll try to explain. This account is used as a relatively harmless test account for testing scripts with that run on the steemit API.

The set of scripts currently being tested is a set of scripts meant to allow its users to improve the fairness of the steemit reward pool distribution in a cost free way to its users. The idea is that the script will monitor its owners voting strength and only when the voting strength (nearly) hits 100%, will start using its users voting strength to do one or two votes. Look at the script as a sort of away bot.

The way steemit is set up is that people are meant to make money from producing content and from curating content. The system though leaves a few loopholes that allow people to leach on the system and claim a larger fraction of the reward pool than they would have if they played by what other people on here consider the rules. But then they do play by the rules in a way, as the system does not actually prohibit the behavior. But then as everybody can use their voting power the way they see fit, using your voting power against what you personally consider to be bad manners is also perfectly according to those last rules.

So if I were to make a comment on your post (that i don't upvote), and I then upvote my own comment at 100% of my voting power, that would be perfectly acceptable. It's my voting power, so I'll do what I feel is ethical. But then if you choose to use your voting power, because you believe I am raping the reward pool, to downvote my self-upvoted comment, that should fall under the same rules, right? But then, you probably don't want to spent your time hunting what you feel are abusers doing unethical things with their votes. And next to this, if you were to target specific people, as that would be all you had time for, things might get personal and subjective and before we know h=it we would have another flag war on our hands. So we need scripts instead. Scripts that work through simple rules and that don't target individuals but that target behaviour.

I've been working on a number of scripts that allow you to pick the type of abuse (or what you consider abuse) of the steemit ecosystem, and allocate your spare voting power to combat it.

Today's bot explored one such behavior that some people might find objectable from a reward pool perspective.

paybothater.py

this script is one of the away scripts using excess voting strength to combat behavior that some may feel unethical, and that is the use of payed-for upvote bots. The script looks for transactions directed at upvote bot and just like the upvote bot itself acts on the steemit link in that transaction but then to downvote rather than upvote. Look at it as the reverse of the @freezepeach initiative. Where @freezepeach aims to neutralize wrongful downvoting or flagging, this script, that everyone could run on their account, aims to provide what the person running the script considers a wrongful upvote. That is, the person using the service isn't upvoted because someone liked their content and upvoted it. There was no actual curation. They were upvoted because the transaction that ended up costing them some SBD.

My test run

Even though the script had very few false positives, the only false positives were resteem bot users that were not supposed to be acted uppon, and despite the low power of the actual votes (that should be less than 0.05 dolar cents, a few people got upset by the small downvotes. There were a little over a hundred downvotes, and a little over a hand full of (resteem bot user) false positives. Biggest issue seems to be that people grosely overestimate the impact of a single low powered down vote, but apart from that, that a lot of people don't get that it is a purely attenuative action, directed not at their page but at the upvote by the pay bot.

So what now? I'll leave the script in the toolbox of scripts, but I'll definetely refer to this post here as to protect potential users from the fact that flags as vote attenuation may be difficult to understand for many. So if you like the script and have ideas how I could make it better, please let me know. But if you intent to use it from your own account, please consider this target disconnect.