Vlog 312: Steemhunt, vote bots, incentives and why they need SMT's.
I like the Steemhunt business model and I follow the project with a lot of interest.
I was checking the top 10 hunts yesterday and saw that they are rewarded by upvotes from Steemhunt.
I was wondering what the requirements are to receive an upvote from Steemhunt. (aka what do you need to do to get in the top 10).
So I went to their discord and asked.
It's pretty simple.
5 minutes after KST (korean) midnight the voting bot looks at the 'hunts' (posts) with the most payouts and upvotes accordingly.
I also noticed the same name in the top 3 yesterday.
A little digging and it was easy to find out this person use a votebot to buy some votes to get there.
A minimum investment to get a maximum ROI! Very clever!
The flaw is clear though, it's most likely that not the bests hunts are in top 10.
Of course, non of this is anybody's fault. It's a known problem.
Right now there is just not a better way to automate payouts (non moderated) based on the most popular hunts.
SMT's will go a long way in fixing this.
I talk about it more in my vlog.
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Don’t blame to bots. They will exist one way or other. Instead design your systems in such a way that tending posts are not selected based on rewards only but on
So u have so much info on the blockchain to find the content that should be ranked on top but unfortunately so far none of the site is using it.
So again don’t blame bots but innovate.
I don't blame the bots. I think the bots have their place on the blockchain.
And I also agree that innovation drives progress. This is often a little slower than most people want but I'm patient.
Personally, I think SMT's will allow a lot of people to experiment with different reward models. A lot will be learned from them when the test net is launched.
i completely agree with you that SMTs will experiment with different reward models
I think its ok getting money from voting .. I did wrong not to buy more last year :-)
Steemhunt may bring the SBD price higher as many would try to be on Steemhunt top 10 list by using vote bots.
The system is flawed. This will undermine the reviews imo and put the project in danger.
To be honest I read the post from steemhunt but I fully understand how it works. But seeing your resteem and this comment triggered me for another reaction.
Do I interpret correctly that you can basically buy the upvotes from steemhunt and make a profit on it?
I don't see this easily back in their upvotes. As they have 466 upvotes in the past week.
Their steemhunt bot votes on Hunts based on the number of upvotes (and perhaps pending payout). Sooo what do you do? Go buy a load of votes from SmartSteem or MinnowBooster, great!
Another defeat for the 'wisdom of the crowd'.
:/
How would you tackle this Asher?
Until something like GPT comes in (which I'm not sure couldn't be gamed in a similar way) I'm honestly not sure what the solution is...
They are building a team of moderators at the moment, if they decided the Top 10, maybe, but that could be a lot of work and lead to corruption.... Sigh...
Thanks for asking 😁
First I should probably say that I appreciate what these guys are doing, and the idea of air-dropping through delegations is pretty cool.
Perhaps they've arrived just a little too soon though with the curation automation and it being dependant on people's good faith.
I spoke to them in their discord about it earlier and mentioned that I think they need to curate manually for now. Even if the bots can be scripted out (not easy with MB and SS and vote sellers not on the market, creating a bunch of accounts and voting with those might be even harder to spot.
@dmania had issues like the above, but I think dtube and @utopian-io (although not perfect) with their manual reviews, and scoring in the case of @utopian-io is probably the way to go for now.
As you say, corruption in the ranks is the next issue, and so their team need to be selected well.
Perhaps a blind scoring system off-chain by the mods would be an idea. The vote bot then decides based on this how to distribute the votes.
They have the delegations now and so will probably want to act quickly, hotline to @elear and team first I think - I'm sure they will have some lessons learned to share.
All IMO, feel free to shoot - we earn crypto for it 😁
Thanks for replying! I always enjoy our little chats.
I think you might be right... it's tough... it's just the two guys and they've been bubbling along nicely for a while now, and then pretty much jumped 200k SP overnight... and they've been busy developing and bug-fixing. Manual curation requires a whole infrastructure in place, and with over a hundred entries daily, it's a big task but I think ultimately you're right... there's two many variables to account for otherwise.
I don't think MB and SS are crazy hard to figure out... (until people start masking their wallet entries or submitting from other/other accounts).
Yup. Utopian had the scripts to try to tackle bots, then they went to scoring by mods/contributors who each have a weight/rank dependant on 'skill' level. I think they are fairly happy with this approach.
Your balance is below $0.25. This is your first notification that your account is running low and should be replenished.
thanks for sharing your kind information
I would say that "guy" was born to take advantage of small opportunities, and the reality is that while he is making this (deserved or not) he is taking profits. It is not stealing if you had to work for it, if it was easy to do, everybody would have done it...
Thanks for everything! I notice your Christmas tree in the background. I recognize the top branch from last year. Is it an SEP? (someone else's problem)
lol. well spotted. Nature will solve it :)
Honestly, that’s why I have a huge respect for you and many other steemiens not using voting bots. It’s becoming platform of robots and vote buying bots. I hope steemhunt will realize there are people taking advantage of them. Just like you said “they Exist three days only”. In sport would you support steroids if it wasn’t banned? I’m not here to judge anyone, but this doesn’t feel right. But who am I to say what’s right and what’s wrong. If people keep supporting it, it means they accept it. Let this guy have those upvotes. Long therm, he is just killing his reputation in people’s mind. But that’s just me and that’s just what my opinion is.
Nothing new there then @exyle.
I like @abh12345's suggestion that he referred to in his article yesterday about how @steemstem is trying to tackle this. Pretty clever I thought! 😊
Thanks Gillian
As steemstem team are manually curating, they will be able to check for bot use and plan accordingly. I think they allow some bots, but the size of the bid is a factor.
It's not ideal here though with a bot voting the Hunts based on number of up-votes, and I think they need to look at this one sharpish!
I agree @abh12345. It's even more critical with a review site.
Reminds me a bit of Amazon. The reviews there are totally meaningless now due to manipulation by sellers.
If they don't sort it then someone else will just build a better version when SMTs are available, I would think.
oops, wrong account :)
I think steemhunt has affiliate links out to amazon for the produces Hunted that are sold on the site.
So with a bunch of bought votes promoting the 'best' Hunts and products...… I'm going to say no more :)
Blimey. That didn't take long did it? 😱 😁
What do you mean? 🤣
@zapncrap is my play account, he's friendly though - votes for lots of people!
I wonder if those votes will be removed. This was the same issue @dmania had when they started out.
@steemhunt and other projects planned in this vein really need SMTs or a method to exclude the Bid-bots.
I wrote a piece about @steemstem yesterday actually. They are using a browser add-on to help their manual curation of the #steemstem tag. I hope that other communities will follow suit whilst we wait for SMTs to arrive.
Cheers!
@exyle,
You found and discussing about very useful point! If not this might end up as the current Steemit Trending Page :D So, thanks for highlighting this issue, I hope they will find a way to solve this!
Cheers~