#project-smackdown week 4 report - last report on v1 algorithm
Week 4 report for #project-smackdown, the project reporting weekly on the top self comment voters and flagging the top 20 self voted comments every day.
From weeks 1 to 4, top 20 self voted comments has been ordered using self awarded payout value. However from week 5 I am happy to announce that we are switching to a ROI (return on investment) metric, which takes into account stake.
Our principle against self voting has not changed, however how we are measuring the worst self voting is changing from absolute value (the amount self awarded from the rewards pool) to ROI (the relative self voting behavior of the self voter). I will explain further in week 5 report, the activity of which is already underway.
Flags are made with accounts @smackdown.kitty and @sadkitten, but after this week @sadkitten is only used for spam down voting / flagging. See this post for more details.
Apologies for the lateness of this report but my time was very taken up by @sadkitten work.
Note, all "dollar" valuations in SBD, the native unit for rewards.
Also note that, as always, we are only looking at comments, not root posts.
Summary
There was a continued drop of high self voting payout for comments (comments self voted to a value of $1 or above).
We can also see an anomalous spike on the 4th August. This was due to @ned self voting a comment to 100% ! This was this comment and made on a post touting a controversial claim by @l0k1 via @benjojo. @ned self voted to 10% the previous day when he post it, changed to 100% and then changed again to cancel it on the 5th, after @smackdown.kitty, @sadkitten and also @ausbitbank flagged it, with comments asking for self vote removal. Clearly it was a visibility strategy.
So since they are comments by the big kahuna of the platform and the votes were cancelled, I think they qualify as outliers and not of interest in the report and they have been removed. See the updated summary. The total self voted comment payout is the lowest yet.
Top 20's
by total comment self vote reward
In order: @grognak, @johnsmith, @sigizzang, @surfyogi, @musicholic, @netoso, @mrwalt, @damarth, @virus707, @greatpath, @steem-buzz, @oceancoinz, @ehujra, @tommyhansen, @marco-desalto, @sneak, @danlupi, @sebastianjago, @salva82, @warjar
by average comment self vote reward
Number in brackets beside name is number of high value self voted comments.
In order: @sneak, @damarth, @sigizzang, @trevonjb, @xeroc, @musicholic, @greatpath, @cob, @helikopterben, @davebrewer, @peerplays, @johnsmith, @lonidani, @mrwalt, @virus707, @netuoso, @pfunk, @marco-desalto, @salva82, @leomichael
by extrapolated annual ROI
Note that this is not a summary of all blockchain activity, only the activity of the self voted comments valued above $1
In order: @grognak, @steem-buzz, @johnsmith, @netuoso, @warjar, @oceancoinz, @mrwalt, @sebastianjago, @chhaylin, @ehujra, @greensmile, @virus707, @marco-desalto, @surfyogi, @musicholic, @tommyhansen, @darthnava, @completelyanon, @sigizzang, @danlupi
Is that it?
I'll leave it to the reader to interpret this week. I'll leave my more detailed thoughts for the 4 week round up I'll be doing in the next few days, summarizing the first 4 weeks of #project-smackdown, looking at the trends and the accounts which are most prominent.
Previous week's reports
Thanks for your support if you give it, or the chance to show you why we do this if not. 😸
I don't know why you are downvoting the self-voting people when in the meantime the bots do the same thing. @booster @randowhale @bellyrub @discordia upvote people for money. They get paid the same money they would make upvoting themselves, so instead of upvoting themselves they drain the pool to upvote their payers. I don't see a difference with that.
I consider the pay4vote bots to be a separate thing, and I'm not convinced it is an issue (though I'm willing to listen if you have an argument).
We are doing is not invalidated because it does not solve every problem. Self voting by general users needs to be challenged and that's what we're doing here.
Pay4votes means that the votes go to the voter not to author. That's against the whole concept of steeimit to make a business of selling votes and drain the pool for your own benefit, instead of upvoting quality posts. You can see what dan wrote about this a year ago and i quoted him in my post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@emble/top-posts-on-steemit-one-year-ago-today-2-aug-14-16-top-author-payout-usd8589-to-dogcoin-creator
It's clear that steemit rewards were instituted to reward authors - not voters. The same is with curation rewards. They were established to the hard workers that find good content, not to lazyboy bots that don't do anything just voting for specific authors. And that's also addressed in dan's post. Just give a look.
You are right about that, hopefully these services will have their own ways to detect abuse perpetrated by their service and will blacklist the account that create spam content to upvote it with their service.
I just posted https://steemit.com/steemit/@emble/top-posts-on-steemit-one-year-ago-today-2-aug-14-16-top-author-payout-usd8589-to-dogcoin-creator
You can see there a quote of @dantheman exactly a year ago and you realise that dan wasn't so excited that bots upvote randomly on steem.
These bots are money making machines and do everything but advancing steemit platform.
I'm glad to see this happening @personz... appreciate the initiative. I'd like to think that simply publicizing these particular self-upvote trends might be a significant deterrent, by itself.
We have a big challenge here. I am YET to see a rewards site successfully deal with abusive rewards practices and spam... short of simply discontinuing rewards, altogether. Wouldn't it be something if Steemit-- as a community-- could be the first to say "We fought Spam-and-Scam and we WON!"
Keep it up!
Thank you! I was thinking about what you said about your experiences today actually, please write that post about it, I'm dying to hear about it. I think it would be really important for people to know how things when down on a similar platform before.
I think we have a very good chance of breaking out of the spam orbit into outer space!
EDIT
I'll look at this in the retrospective, but it isn't generally the case. There are several accounts always on these lists and they have no intention of stopping by the looks of it. However I do know of a few cases where people stopped self voting (so much) after appearing on the list and being flagged. I know of one in particular to responded mainly to flags, so while I can't speak generally with any certainty, I do not believe this project would be as successful without the flags.
After examining these charts for sometime I realized that these upvotes were not in thousands of dollars. I was puzzled why there was such a big concern about a self upvote comment? Isn't the self upvote comment more profitable for the one self upvoting than curating with the same percentage upvote? If that is the case this is an issue for algorithm of the weight of the self up vote. Maybe the self up vote could still occur but the percentage of drop of power is sharply increased to limit abuse. Of course the original goal of the platform was to encourage the upvote of others content thought to be worthy.
By flagging or downvoting a post keep in mind that sometimes this negates all of the hundreds of minnow up-votes for a user. The real designed purpose of the downvote or flag in this platform wasn't because you do not like a person's actions or in actions or even spam. It isn't about their nationality or race or religious or political beliefs. This is the slippery slope.
From The White Paper ( The Essential Constitution Of Steemit)
"Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency."
I'm not sure what the egregious offence of self up voting is? I'm not able to give myself but a penny at the current time. I do however understand that a large self up vote can make the curation amount that is paid out to others who have upvoted change...But is that in a good way or a bad way? So if someone were to self upvote a comment would that not add to the pool for all curators? Perhaps this is the solution. If you self upvote a comment the self up vote amount of the comment gets spread among all curators and thus isn't an issue. Please help me understand what I am missing? Thank you
Hahah I like the look of this cat, makes me want to give the cat a milk!!! Thanks for your good work @personz hence why I refered your work on my blog post regarding this issue
Thank you 😊
welcome
what about the cn tag and ring within the ring, bernie and other steemians keep highlighting, why you radar isn't picking up on those...why aren't you helping out folks like venuspcs who is suffering from the abuse of flagging, someone that is trying to help himself... there is to much red flags to single out people, the list goes on and on...this platform has potential but there are models that need major work...if possible could you please help venuspcs it breaks my heart to see what is happening to him, someone that has given his all in PAL discord being treated that way, something is fundamentally wrong with that not to mention other minnows reputation that are taken to zero because they are accused of spamming when someone could write two symbol in chinese and get 70+ dollars and others getting 500+ dollars with a picture and some chinese translation from original english text that could be found online...I kind of understand trying to get the appeal of having a heavy Asian community taking into account how cryptos with that sort of community are doing presently but at what cost if your smackdown post does not include them... once again I am not looking for trouble, the most I ask is at least help venuspcs, it burns me that no one seems to give a shit about that
I don't know, that's not the purpose of this project. Like I said to @emble, we can't all do all things.
I have seen members come on my newbie post that voted for themselves and that was it or voted themselves real steem and then gave me a vote that didn't show. I would just mumble, "douchebag" and move on. Then I started seeing bigger douchebags and started to get steemie under the collar. Now I keep finding all these OUTSTANDING Steemers fighting the good fight.
THANK YOU!!!
By the way, since you are looking at votes, I have a douchebag who down votes Newbies for the fun of it. I found this as my reputation seemed to drop for no reason. His name is @transisto
Funny you should mention @transisto, they are actually the person bankrolling this operation, and that of @sadkitten. What newbies were they down voting, do you have specific examples? And why do you presume it was for fun?
Without a specific example I can't know for sure, but it might have been some of the spam accounts that we've been looking at in the @sadkitten project. They are technically newbies / minnows, but really just part of a bot net.
I did not go into the accounts to look as my search was to see if it was only me or others as well. I do see problems and do very much appreciate this kind of policing. I just feel a little more time and effort should be placed before actions are taken. Otherwise it can make you look like just any other bully. I have received bullying from independent accounts and deceit from so called helpful accounts. I appreciate the enthusiasm in helping as a newbie but apparently some of these actions are made in haste.
I'm confident that @transisto is not a bully and down votes because of reasons which are well considered. I would not jump to the conclusion that it is for fun or they are targeting newbies specifically.
As you can see I am interacting with transisto in regards to this matter. I did respond to him in my story that he down voted me in and did not receive a response. I think it is because of different timezones. I am hopeful transisto will reverse the down vote, as I was not acting in a malice manor.
I went here https://steemd.com/@transisto and found he was doing it all last night, to many newbies
What post are you talking about ?
By the way, I would like to thank you for your inquiry and not just blowing me off in the assumption that I did something wrong. I hope you reevaluate your choice to down vote me.
I will get the post of mind and share it here, but I would like to know why you down vote newbies for posting tags.
From your comment, it appears as though you down voted me for tagging.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@thisisit/hi-everyone-i-just-joined-steemit#@transisto/re-thisisit-hi-everyone-i-just-joined-steemit-20170814t064836558z
When I went to your account it looks like you spent the evening looking for newbies to down vote. Why would newbies be your target. My first 2 tags were introduce yourself and introduce myself. I clearly was introducing myself to steem and was a total newbie.