I'm Andrew. The guy who put together a steemit experiment that blew up in his face and costed him $570!
Hi all,
You can see the experiment for yourself here but the short of is that there was a 24-hour proposition that gave each upvoter money relative to their steem dollar contribution. Believe it or not, for most of the experiment's lifetime you could contribute as little $0.01 steem dollars and make over $10 simply by upvoting the experiment's post. And yes, some participants ended up making even more.
| Steem as a platform, to me, has always been seen as a value exchange market. Think about it: When you, the user, find something you like in the steem market there's a good chance you will give something in return for it. That's what got me thinking about what value types people might appreciate. Yes, written content & photography are a nice way to create value, but was there another way? |
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 | Didn't take all but two seconds before my cavemind lobe went, Money! all peoples love money! soo why couldn't that work? It was in that moment that I found myself setting sail to an experiment that would test the very limits of steem's market value-type tolerances (a mouthful, I know). |
| So if I was going to do this I was going to do this right and I was going to do this big. I hired a very reputable Litecoin developer & escrow trust agent @someguy123 through Bitrated.com and paid him extra for his troubles because we both knew this was not going to be a normal escrow transaction. I paid him the 1 bitcoin ($570) in advance and off on our way we went. |  |
| The post went up and the experiment was live. Upvotes started coming in and the response was overwhelmingly positive for the first 20 hours or so. Most people I reached out to about the experiment were quite happy, grateful individuals that wondered what luck has dawned upon them. Others simply enjoyed analyzing the concept. Then what, you might ask, happened after that 20-hour mark? oh boy. There's no easy way to say this but I ticked off the wrong person, by all things, through offering them an opportunity to explore an offering for free money. Before you knew it, it was as if I kicked a hornet's nest and the alarm was set off to bring in the downvote brigade. And boy did they come marching in. |  |
Suddenly I got called a scammer, the post got downvoted into oblivion as if it were a scammy plague, and in the end, all of the pending earnings absolutely zeroed out. Gee, after all that hard work my heart just sank to the floor. I swear, all it took was one refresh to see it go from gaining momentum to nothing. That story, unfortunately, did not have a happy ending. But this one might, so what did we learn?
Personally, I feel we are closer than ever before to civilized creative freedom, but yet, we still have so much work to do. I like to believe no system is perfect, especially in their nascent stages but it is always noble to strive to become one. Here's what the data feels:
Bots to varying extents can still succeed at damaging posts and their comments. Take a look at the.bot, fuck.off, the.whale, cheetah18, cheetah19, cheetah20, cheetah21, cheetah22, cheetah23, cheetah24, cheetah25, and a few more less obvious shticks.
86% of the downvotes came in within the same 1-hour span, most of which were actually a minute apart. Keep in mind that by that point the post has reached over 100 upvotes and many comments of support onchain and offchain with only 1 downvote.
There is still somewhat of a brigade mentality here that was evident in a few of the downvoters. The most evident indication was how some of those that I spoke to screamed scam but when asked didn't even realize the proposition was secured by an escrow despite it being clearly declared in the title.
Charts, because I love charts:
Finally and most importantly I believe that when you have an established proof of likeness by a portion of the community, who enjoy something legal that others in the system might not, the system should weigh the votes of the many more heavily than the votes of a few whales who can end up doing a lot of harm even if they have the best intentions in heart. Whatever the medium of value, especially in our ever-increasing digital age, where new forms of digital value are emerging every day beyond the traditional sets (video/audio/images/text), that medium deserves to have the future that the majority of those who enjoyed the contents of that post wished it to have.
but fuck me, what do I know?
:P
Thanks all for the wonderful trip, I think we have a beautiful journey to share and I can't wait to see it all unfold. Peace.
p.s. Yes, despite it all we sent the money to everyone who participated. You can see for yourself Here
p.s.s Before some start exclaiming "but buying upvotes is against the rules!" I have to take a moment and clarify that (A) although treading some fine lines I technically didn't directly purchase upvotes for a specific price, I incentivized them on-platform and more importantly (B) there intentionally aren't any site rules, platform rules, or any other kind of rule list. A quick google search for steemit rules and steem rules will show you the same. I read the whitepaper and from what I understood the design has intents but no rules, which is very important to distinguish.
@someguy123 has joined the community! Let's give him a warm welcome & take the opportunity to learn more about his career helping to build systems (Litecoin) and especially infrastructure which use the same concept (Blockchain) technology that runs steemit.
Re. buying upvotes, it doesn't matter if you buy them at a specific price. Steem can work only if people vote on other people's content because they think it's good and therefore likely to reward them indirectly if the content becomes popular. If you introduce a direct money reward for voting, people start having a vested interest saving their votes to upvote posts that give them some cash back at the expense of regular content. This creates a shortcut from voting to reward that doesn't involve finding and upvoting good content and threatens to undermine the curation mechanism. It also divests some of the daily content reward away from authors of valuable content to authors of paid-vote schemes that bring no added value to the community. The bottom line is that allowing paid votes risks undermining the whole system by reducing the incentive to produce good content and curate other people's content and therefore affect the overall quantity and quality of content on the network.
Stake holders who are familiar with the way things are working on Steem and economically rational know that allowing votes buying is a self-defeating proposition. Accordingly you can expect that there will always be consensus among stake holders to prevent vote buying and other forms of direct an indirect bribery. This is the reason why your post was downvoted very prompty after it drew the attention of larger stake holders.
I understand the instances where it does indeed divert funds from other content that add value to the network/community but that is also where I'd draw the line. In my instance it wasn't a pure sell of upvotes, I did bring value to the community by bringing a good handful of people from outside the community in, engaging those already inside, exposing people to the concepts of blockchains and bitcoin, testing the steem system, and in some ways forcing the discussion on limits and incentives.
If on the other hand I was purely buying upvotes, I get it. But I wasn't and I did it in the most responsible way that I could.
I know that recognizing/deciding whose bringing value to the community can be have quite the fine line that has some added subjectiveness to it but what I'm trying to show is that what I was doing wasn't a straight off wasteful drain on the system. Can you see where I'm coming from?
We had this conversation three times already, I'm not sure what more I can add. It doesn't matter how good your post or how helpful you are as a person: posts that contain any form of vote buying will be downvoted by stake holders because they are a threat to the model. It is pointless to make a post that will both buy votes and do something positive, it will be downvoted all the same because we just can't allow people to buy votes. In that case it's preferable to make two posts: the one with the added value content and/or where you explain your efforts to help building the community, and the one where you do another attempt at buying vote. That way we can flag and neutralize the second post without affecting the first one.
Hey Recursive, I made that comment right before talked :)
I told you I added a comment, I thought you saw it. I understand the point you are making.
To be fair, I do not believe anyone called you a scammer because it was suspected that you wouldn't pay as promised. The reason you were downvoted is that paying individuals does not bring value to the platform and some of us value the success of platform more than $10 worth of Bitcoin.
The broader motive of the "value exchange" as you call it, is to produce a positive externality in the form of valuable content which enriches not only a specific voter, but the community and platform as a whole. Paying money to voters alone does not do that, so naturally those of us with the broader view see it as a poor value for our reward fund; therefore we downvote.
Nothing wrong with doing experiments, but for experiments to be meaningful they have to accept the possibility of an unfavorable (for some) outcome, as happened here.
But it does bring people to Steemit. I wouldn't have even bothered to touch this platform if I didn't get involved as escrow. I also got a few people from the Litecoin community to join in on this.
It also taught us all that there's a serious issue with bot abuse. All it takes is someone with a few bots and they can censor any post or comment that they want.
You are misunderstanding how this works. Unlike reddit where is is indeed documented that sock puppet bot armies can censor posts by downvoting them, in Steem, stake-based voting means that such tactics are ineffective. If someone wants to take stake that he owns and turn it into a bunch of bot accounts, that does not in any way gain influence over what could have been achieved using that same stake in a single account (in fact it is very slightly weaker).
Most of the bots on Steem are harmless gnats with little stake that are doing not much of anything except trying to make a tiny reward here and there, or perhaps cause annoyance and FUD. Your posts and comments got hidden because they were flagged by a majority of the stake that voted on them, not because of bots.
I understand what you're saying but you can't underestimate the psychological value of a high flag count. I'm sure some people went, "oh look how many people flagged this" and just ticked that flag away without fully reading the post. In fact, to some extent I'm sure it did because some of my talks with people in #steemitabuse-classic demonstrated they didn't know there was an escrow involved and was the basis for their claim that they flagged me because I was preforming a scam. I totally understand your viewpoint and where you are coming from, and I can respect the intent but you can't assume others hold to the same standard.
It seems quite broken though. One guy who didn't have much voting power downvoted one of my replies (before anyone upvoted it) and it was flung off the page instantly. That shouldn't happen. This means all it takes to hide a comment/post is 1 downvote before anyone else upvotes it and very few people will see it.
570 for a valuable lesson. You did OK ;)
not 570 all 0.71 btc is on escrow account ................ https://blockchain.info/address/17RAKN5r7Hp1Nou2qQfcdjLKsjfm6sZ7Rk and he paid only 0.29 among all users and only 14k sats for me lol
It was an interesting experiment and one that I did indeed get paid for, it's a shame you had to see such negativity during the end of the experiment, but I can see why they were worried, just trying to protect their investment...
Welcome to steemit, anyway. Hope you enjoy your stay!
Haha, like I didn't tell you you will get downvoted to hell.
But hey, lesson learned and it made for an interesting post :)
Seems like you got some cool information out of this. I don't really understand the bot brigading if it was just an experiment to see if a proposed reward would lead to interactions...
I'm curious, how did you calculate the amount of BTC sent out to upvoters? Was it time sensitive? Like, first come, bigger amount? How did you deal with those who upvoted but forgot to comment; vice versa? According to the block explorer, some individuals received a much larger reward in comparison to others (who got mostly Satoshis).
I wonder what conclusions one could glean from this experiment other than, hmmm free stuff.
I used steemd.com in advanced mode to see vote details. In it you get a breakdown of each voter's weight, weight%, and rshares value. From there it is easy to copy the data into an excel, and let it calculate who gets what piece of the pie.
Hmmm I see. So who get's the remaining .71 BTC? Seems like it paid out $164 out of $570.
Hehe he can only report users xD fucking poor liar.
You realize an escrow agent with one of the higher reputations on bitrated.com was in charge of the btc distribution. The poor lad didn't get near as much as he probably should have for the headache this produced. I highly doubt he would risk his entire reputation (in this instance escrow career) for a portion of a BTC. Plus, like I said before, I verified each and every address in his excel sheet. They were all good.
Bro I'm not holding your feet to the fire or anything I was just curious. I've never used a blockchain explorer or whatever that tracking site is. Relax.
@cashbandicoot that was more of a response to btc.ctb. Sorry if I sounded overly defensive there...this guy is relentlessly posting the same without reading my response to his question
If you verified every addy tell me about this user. https://steemit.com/@newb1 and why he got 0.094 :):) I am just angry becouse i hate liar's , cheetah and other guy's know very good how trusted you are. He just lost all his reputation.
And most of money got to this alt account https://steemit.com/@newb1 and to escrow. he share only 44$ with us.(and 3 guys got 80% of this amount)
that voting was a complete waste of time, just shows unless you have tons of steem your vote is worth shit
Only been gone a few days and this blows up. This does prove in some ways that there are more people do have bitcoins on this platform than we thought. Thanx for the results of the experiment because was curious about the flags that previous post got.
Congratulations @frosty! You received a personal award!
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
Yes where you split 1 btc liar ?
And what about you'r alt account who get 0.094 haahahhahaha ?????
https://steemit.com/@newb1 Fuck you liar. Never trust this shady cunt. Downvote me more:)
If you're wondering, newb1 is a director of the Litecoin Association who decided to jump in on this. He got so much because tuck-fheman had a rather large upvote power, and they offered to donate whatever they got to the first reply to their comment (which was newb1).
You can see this isn't a scam by calculating the rshares values yourself (assuming they haven't changed).
Here's the spreadsheet with the results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wo_cjjkWelaD4zAXUv8HhN7SCDtF0ROWUGlBMdRjOl8/pubhtml
You realize an escrow agent with one of the higher reputations on bitrated.com was in charge of the btc distribution right? The poor lad didn't get near as much as he probably should have for the headache this produced. I highly doubt he would risk his entire reputation (in this instance escrow career) for a portion of a BTC. Plus, like I said before, I verified each and every address in his excel sheet. They were all good.
To answer your second question, @newb1 is someone who participated in the experiment and was supposed to be paid 0.00000620, but as you can see in the comments section tuck-fheman donated his portion to @newb1 so he got an additional 0.09404528. I don't personally know @newb1, or anyone else for that matter, who participated in the experiment. All I can say as that they all treated me nicely, before, during, and after the flames :)