#project-smackdown week 1 report
After some delay, I present to you the first weekly report for #project-smackdown.
What is #project-smackdown
Briefly, it is part of the #steem-coop group effort to challenge uncooperative voting on Steemit. The #project-smackdown part consists of publishing stats on the top comment self voters and flagging these comments up to (but no more than) their self voted value.
Currently we are just flagging the top 20 comments. We are doing this primarily as disagreement for comment self voting, believing that the "tallest poppies" are most effective to rebuke, as they have the greatest effect.
#steem-coop is also trying to come up with hard fork proposal solutions to disincentivize uncooperative voting at a blockchain systems level. See the end of this post for some links.
Summary stats
Note that all "dollar" values are in SBD, as this is the native payout unit.
I will summarize the week by comments and then by authors.
Week 1 by comments
All top 20 per day self voted comments (140 for entire week) ordered by pending payout
Small version, uncolored, without author names
This is just to get an idea of the shape of it.
Remember that each bar is a single comment.
Long version, colored
Week 1 by authors
Share ratio of author - from total comment self vote rewards of top 20 per day across the week
As pie chart
Total rewards : $1673.069
Top 10 authors (by pending payout / reward) appearing in top 20 on more than one day
In order of share ratio (see pie chart above)
Note that this chart design is my own original design 😁 One bar per day, with one segment per user (all self voted comment rewards for that day summed) and order highest rewarded user to lowest vertically decending.
The wavy area is to show the connection between days. Note that it does not obey the statistical chart area rule.
@sigizzang - week total = $331.382
@dang007 - week total = $270.991
@davidding - week total = $245.862
@mrwalt - week total = $161.851
@ramta - week total = $150.932
@greatpath - week total = $87.112
@inventor16 - week total = $76.677
@pal - week total = $49.845
@oldtimer - week total = $41.558
@craig-grant - week total = $28.598
Thoughts
A total of 12 authors appeared on in the top 20 list more than one day, so we can see that there are some authors which are self voting their comments for high rewards quite frequently.
One stand out self voter was @glitterfart who has the top self voted comment reward for the week, but did not appear any other time.
Note that @smackdown.kitty and @sadkitten attempted to counter every reward in this report. We did not have enough SP to do this but it was close in many cases.
Problem with this data and representation
A few days from the end of week 1 I started to record the top 100 self voted comments and I found this to be a more interesting picture. We saw on July 18th, the last day of week 1 that when @dayu 's comment rewards were summed from the top 100, they were more than twice the 2nd most highly rewarded author.
I think while the top 20 is useful for seeing the absolute top , the top 100 paints a more relevant picture. Next week (which actually ends in one day since I was so late with this report) will focus more on the top 100 summary stats.
#steem-coop members posts related to uncooperative voting
@transisto - Two proposed HF policy change for countering reward based abuses.
@calamus056 - Self-voting user list since HF19
@rycharde - Proposal for New Rules Regarding Self-Votes and Voting-Rings
See my blog or the tag #project-smackdown for the individual reports for the first week.
Thank you for your interest
Please continue to follow the reports and let us know what you think!
I wanted to chime in here, as I recently had something like this happen to me.
Demotruk had a good conversation with me about everything and many other users chimed in to. Though I wish they said something to me first, instead of downvoting me, I still learned a valuable lesson.
I think if at all possible, comment on the persons posts and try to teach them what they are doing is bad. Try to explain and teach them first before downvoting them.
When you just start downvoting someone into oblivion you are going to make a lot of people angry and just leave STEEM. Not all people are abusers of the system and beyond hope of changing. I think a lot just don't understand the issues they cause and they don't know about the reward pool(I didn't).
I didn't know about the reward pool. I bought .4 BTC worth of Steem, converted half into my own Steempower, and rented 8,700 Steempower for 4 weeks. My goal was to upvote myself 4 or 5 times a day and upvotes others with the rest, so I could make my investment back while helping others. The problem with that is when i did this Steem was like 1.70USD, when it went in half the only way for me to gain most of it back was to 100% upvote myself. So you can see the dilemma in this specific case, why would anyone buy Steempower if they are not allowed to upvote themselves? It is one thing to target spammers who are doing it I agree, for the most part I wouldn't say I was spamming. But I fully understand how people see things regardless.
I think in the end it is more productive to the spammer and the entire community, to see the example set. Rather than mass downvote someone into oblivion as a first resort(which should only be used for people who refuse to listen to reason).
The main thing I see getting spammed is randowhale and whaleshares stuff. It is all automated and those things are voting spam posts. People are paying Steem for an upvote bot service, when it should be a manuel vote service with rules and restrictions against spam. If I wanted to right now, I could upvote a garbage comment with randowhale or something else. That is what people are abusing right now and it will get worse as time goes on. It will get worse because all of the whales are making tons of profit from this service and their incentive is to continue. I think we should really focus there and the ramifications of upvote botting paid services.
I hope that all makes sense. I spend my time now working on helping others and trying to give good comments.
I realize it is hard to communicate emotion, so just wanted to also add I had a horrifying experience in the beginning when I saw I was being downvoted, to then having a great one afterwards with lots of helpful comments. If we can cut out the horrifying experience of mass downvoting(only use as last resort), I think people would participate more in helping to correct others harmful self voting actions.
Thank you for this candid message, I appreciate it.
First I would like to clarify that you were not flagged by any of our accounts.
Our original argument is that a down vote / flag is the message, and that it is much more effective at to the point than a comment. It "says" succinctly that there is a disagreement and creates action backing up that disagreement.
I admit though that it may not be clear why exactly a flag was made without an explanatory comment. We have been discussing adding this to our approach, which is what you are suggesting here. I also admit that comments allow other users to flag the bot and so lower it's rep, so it is also strategic.
We've been hearing the critique a lot that the bot is too indiscriminate and needs to be smarter. We're also talking about this and I think it's likely that #projectsmackdown-v2 will be coming in the next few weeks with a revised approach. I think this new approach would be less horrifying for people who don't know the system, and more horrifying for those that do and decide to continue 😼
I'm not sure how I fell aboue randowhale and whaleshare. I need to look into it more. I create a similar bot to that at @treeplanter for @kedjom-keku as a donation service to help save a forest. But whether or not these things are abuse, I think at present that they are not. However the choice is whether or not your want to support a whale further enriching themselves by renting out their SP. I'm not against business, but seeing as the distribution of SP is so skewed to the top, I would not want to personally participate in using such a service.
In the case of @treeplanter the owner is not a whale but has gotten delegated SP from dolphins and orca level SP holders.
nice i want to make me a part of ur project smack down @personz
The project is targeting less than 1% of the daily reward pool, and you are spam downvoting people for participating in the way in which they have decided they wanted to. I have seen you kill reputations of whales, including that of @davidding, who now has a -11 reputation. He had a great reputation before you fools.
The way they are voting is a way we are deciding to object to.
I do not think that it is a bad thing that @davidding 's rep is low now, it exactly reflects this disagreement. However if I could I would have the bot down vote only without the flag component, i.e. just disagree with the rewards and leave rep along. But this is not currently possible.
I guess this project is very helpful for new steemit users. I am looking forward to the full version of this. Good luck :-)
Don't fool yourself this project will not effect you or the rewards you will get. This report only proves that this is a minority problem.
50,000 steem are added to the reward pool every day, and in a week we are only talking about the top 20 taking $1600 which amounts to 0.4% of the rewards pool going to the top 20 self comment upvoters. Even if this project is successful, it is my belief, that the holders will dump their steem power in favor of other staking/dividend coins. This will ultimately yield a huge supply into the market which will lower the price for everyone. I think it is better to do as the whitepaper has used as an example, we need more crabs in the bucket rather then have crabs escape the bucket. Too much policing of the network has a deleterious effect on user retention of the whales, who take up much of the supply of the available coins for staking.
I doubt the project creators will like this comment, but I think it is important to understand the counter points to any argument in coming to a good decision.
I like your comment, I've always said that I welcome critique and other viewpoints in reaction to this project. 🙂
You have a point, what I've presented here shows the top 20 self voting rewards to be a tiny fraction of the total rewards for the reported week. We may find out that there are just a few users which self vote their comments to high reward, and it could be a small enough problem that a bot like this might be enough to disagree strongly with it while a HF may turn out to not be required. I'm still waiting to see a broader view data analysis of all self voting (for root posts and comments), not just the top, but I don't have the time at the moment to do this. (maybe @calamus056 will).
According to @penguinpablo there is 48,029.695 STEEM in the reward pool per day now (obviously you were rounding, I have no issue with this). I calculate the SBD per STEEM conversion on platform to be 1.547, so that gives us 74,301.938 SBD per day, or 520,113.566 per week. So 1673.069 SBD of that
is actually only 0.003%. So it's less than what you thought by more than a factor of 10. 😅 (if my back of the napkin calculation is correct).is 0.3% (thanks for the correction). So the figures pretty much agree.This is small indeed, I recognize that. Please don't presume that I am blinded by some crusade, this project is conducted in good faith and with the goal of finding out the true situation. We have evolved the project as we have discovered information and received feedback from users.
UPDATE: @calamus056 's research indicates that about 9% of all votes were self votes since HF 19
I will add context like this to a further report, maybe the next one, when I verify it is totally correct, and have some more context. This is not the only interesting figure, it also matters what the distribution of rewards across the user base is, how much these rewards vary from the mean and median, etc. etc.
Note also that all valuations in this report (and all our reports) are in SBD, as that is the native payout unit. I will add a correction.
I haven't analysed enough information yet for me to arrive at the conclusion that it is a minority problem, all we see from this report is the very top self rewarded comments. Today I am finishing the second week data analysis and will have a report on that very soon which will look at the top 100 self rewarded comments. As I said above I found the top 100 to show up something that the top 20 misses - authors who self vote many comments to "moderate" payout but that really adds up.
On your other point, that this might scare away whales, I don't think this is founded. I have yet to see a convincing article. You need to remember that self voting as only recently (since HF 19) become so lucrative, i.e. incentivized. The whales are not so short sighted to dump because of our little kitty (in fact we are supported by one who is taking the long view) and I believe that many are just enjoying the increase in their "return" from self voting opportunistically. There's enough noise on the platform about this issue to see that it is being considered seriously, not just by "poor me" minnows.
I believe you have an error in your math, 1673/5201135=0.0032 * 100 = 0.3%, however you are correct it is slightly lower than I had said earlier in my post.
Ah! You are correct, I'm used to dealing in a normalized range and forgot to multiply by 100! Thanks for the correction, a factor of 100 is not insignificant.
i dont mind this idea, but what if whales start down voting small fish(is it called minnows?) they dont like just to kill them off, this is a dual edged sword.