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RE: Closed Beta of Smackdown Kitty begins
No, I clicked on my Steem balance, selected "Power Up", then clicked the "Advanced" button, which allows me to set another user's account where the Steem Power goes to, and sign and voila, I put his SP over 1000 so the bot would flag his self upvoted posts.
This ability to power up to other people's accounts would be a fantastic tool for teaching children money management. You could say 'your allowance for the next 13 weeks is already paid to you, but you can only take the payments out once a week'. Set and forget. It's a brilliant design.
The smart kids would not power it down, but use it to promote what they like.
That is a cool way to get a kid writing.
Indeed, and there already is a bunch of kids doing this, I remember seeing some 10 or 11 year old or something making posts here.
Man, when I was a kid, my sister would have been all over this, she was so business-like, always making contracts with people.
Myself, I didn't care as long as I could go borrow books from the library, or I had at least something I could roll down the street on, bike, skateboard. I was never a materialistic person. I am more interested in feelings, experiences and knowledge.
For the child-me, the joy of Steem, as it is today, is not about the monetary reward but in seeing my actions lead to people's lives improving.
I love that comment and feel exactly the same way. I am thrilled to see people like you who have the resources attempting to level the playing field. As it currently stands, those with great power can act with relative impunity because anyone who dares to challenge them gets smacked down with one of their 100% flags. The loss of VP is great and now the person who got smacked down has less VP to retaliate with. Basically, those with more money win, regardless of how ethical they are.
The ethical people generally self-regulate and try to play fair anyways. It is those without a conscience that seek only self-fulfillment and personal gain. It is these people that drain the award pool and try to hog it all for themselves. They ruin it for everyone else and ultimately hurt the entire platform. It is these people that need to be regulated either by coded laws that prevent abuse or other methods to remove them from the platform entirely.
I am going to have to ruminate upon this for a while, but I have been hit by a nice new shock. I love shocks, so this is fine. I had been happily, maybe even blissfully bumbling along with this project, ignorant that the steemit.com interface does not show flags visibly, unless they are strong. Which throws the whole endeavour out the window.
I don't want to be having a loss of faith moment, but I am having a loss of faith moment. I am going to have to withdraw for a while and recover myself from this.
I am tired of living in a world were being evil gives advantage. I thought I was moving fast on this and that this would give me an edge. But it looks like I am up against an adversary who already anticipated this move.
Do I want to give up. Yes, just this moment. But a moment later, it's just a minor setback. Kitty can post pretty good. Just a change in the code.
I don't have the resources to bring justice as easily as I thought, but hey, that's ok. Move on. Change the attack when you discover your target has its shields there. Slink into the shadow, and dance around it, stab it in the back.
Thankyou for your very thoughtful response :)
I'm so sorry to hear of your setback.
I wish I had all the answers to all of the world's problems, but that is an unrealistic thought. The best we can hope for is to solve one problem at a time. In this instance, we are discussing abuse of SP and until the developers of Steemit feel there is sufficient threat of killing their baby, I don't see a lot changing. The way I see it, the whales are pumping real fiat currency into their project and that is what the developers are after. They need money with which they can pay their bills and make a tidy profit for themselves. This prevents them from doing anything that will drive away the whales (at least for now). But, since the current system gives whales all the power, the whales are Gods and everyone else MUST bow to them or suffer their wrath.
If there was a way to expose those who abuse the system and have everyone else flag them, then there MIGHT be a chance to control them. This is why I believe it would take some form of governing body or committee that is outside of the potential of being flagged to do the job of policing this platform.
I can't formulate a response to this right now.
No worries. No response required. It is just my thoughts put out there for you to think about. Obviously you have more resources than I do and you know how to code and do stuff. All the things I am not able to do. I can only contribute my thoughts.
Thanks for your consideration and time.
Oh, I'm sorry, really, this discovery about the invisibility of the bot's flags has sucked the air out of my lungs.
I am no kind of accomplished coder. I simply know what computers can do, and in a small fragment, or simple algorithm, I have no problem developing robust and correct logic. But I have never been able to go much beyond putting a few of these together, before I forget what I was doing, the purpose becomes clearly folly, and the application it was going to apply to turns out to be without utility.
These kinds of moments make me just want to pick myself up, and go back to walking towards nowhere, to some place I will never find, because I have never been as happy as I was when I had no passport, walking and riding a bicycle along the road through the italian countryside.
I have been given the gift of some new understanding, and I thought I had some chance of moving upwards further, but I think I have hit the ceiling just now, and I may have exceeded my available reserves in doing this.
Poloniex has stolen 1233 of my steem, with no serious hope that they are ever going to send it back, I got the rent covered until september, but I need to find a new purpose, a new goal to walk towards. I was actually trying to get that steem into my bank account as BGN.
Do you ever look around at this blockchain world, and wonder at how it is that it is such a nest of scammers, liars and tools for the racketeers who rape this world?
I'm really having a hard time here. I am wanting to be as far away from a computer as I can possibly be right now, this is not domain I have any business being involved in.