"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" - The Silent Killer

in #steem-dev7 years ago (edited)

New steemians have a serious hurdle to overcome in the way of bandwidth limitations. These are in place to mitigate would-be spammers and such from flooding the platform with nonsense posts, which is a good idea. HOWEVER! The actual execution of this is not very good, especially if someone gets an account from their friend through anon.steem.network and starts their journey with 6 STEEM there is a very high chance they will run into this limit early on, and what's even worse is the more effort they're putting into their posts the more likely they are to run into this problem.


Example:
steemian A: joins and uses steemit casually, posting some spammy meme from google image every day and comments on a couple thigns, votes on a few things, etc.

steemian B: is extremely enthusiastic and starts by making a gigantic introduction post with 20 photos alongside their life story, the write giant well-thought comments, vote on a ton of things, and follow up with even more posts in the vein of 1000 word giant superposts with 15 images sources and everything else.

Who do you think is going to be hit with the bandwidth nerf bat?
Correct Answer: The enthusiastic person, the most valuable person, and the one trying the hardest to contribute. Steemian B hits the limit while the other continues to post junk.


As we know, it takes a minimum of 7 days to begin reaping rewards, so if they hit their limit in the first day or two it can severely cripple their enjoyment of the platform alongside their first impressions. The bandwidth recharges over time but if they have tiny account value the actual amount of bandwidth they are given is also very small. Making this even more dire is what happens after that 7 day period where they do in fact have some rewards coming in...

U5drrc6FGZpX5rDKLKxaBAW6zVPPktr_1680x8400.jpg

Did you know?
If you hit the bandwidth limitation:
-you cannot power up
-you cannot claim rewards
-you cannot buy STEEM with SBD
-you cannot comment or post about your issue
-you cannot upvote anyone discussing this problem
-you cannot resteem a post about this problem
-you cannot do anything, you're basically banned

You read that right. The limitation error tells you that you need to power up to use steemit, then when you try to power up, buy more STEEM with SBD, or claim a reward then the same error comes out saying you need to power up in order to do that...

And because people that are suffering from the bandwidth limitation cannot post or comment about the issue, there may be more people having this problem than anyone thinks, and the only reason you don't hear about it is they CANNOT TELL YOU that they have this problem. They are muted platform-wide and could be in a scenario where they cannot even invest money to power up.


I propose that bandwidth minimums be significantly raised by some flat value, and some other flat value be added to the act of posting/commenting unrelated to the actual size of the post, meaning new users will have more bandwidth for individual posting but spammers will also be considered as using more overall keeping the limitation roughly the same for them while allowing larger posts to be made for new users without hindering their ability to do everything else. As I said this is especially an issue for people coming in through anon.steem.network since they start with a tiny amount of STEEM.

If you have this issue and cannot post about it, please visit https://steemit.chat/channel/help and ask for assistance! This chat channel is outside the blockchain and will not be affected by your bandwidth limitation, so your problem can at least be known. If you think someone following you might have run into this problem, consider giving this a RESTEEM.

Thanks for reading, hope someone finds a good way to solve this.


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Yep ! It's really good that you post things like this. Hopefully it will attract the attention of the site developers and they can tweak it next time along with the other things that they need to fix. I guess its in Beta stage, so a work in progress.

Yea, I try to post the occasional rant about stuff I think could be improved upon, in hopes that someone notices or word gets around and things improve. The way I see it, the best QA testers in the world are elite complainer people, and the most value a beta tester can have is through finding the problems rather than praising the good things especially when everyone is already aware of the good parts, so on I go complaining about random problems I find in hopes they change ^_^

I think they're on to it, i went away for 2 weeks and noticed a few things they had changed already, so they are pretty pro-active. They also have a vested interest too, and want to see the platform succeed. Hopefully i'm right.

Steemd is being reworked now and you already can easily see your Bandwidth Remaining and Voting Power

steemd.JPG

Upvote this for others to see :)

There should be a visible bandwidth usage bar displayed on your account page along with a good description of how it works.

I agree.
Something to at least warn you are getting close to the limit would save people a lot of trouble

totally agree!!

I think that is a great idea. Maybe someone already has something like that off this platform. Or even something to describe what this means at all for technical idiots like me.

I found this post today that will give you a bunch of numbers about yourself. I asked the person to look at my profile, but when I get the answer I will need help to know what to do with it.

https://steemit.com/steem/@elautomatico/maximum-virtual-bandwith-at-0443

It looks like the post is renewed daily, so make sure you are on the current one.

So much of what happens here is unknown until you get hit by it. I upvoted everything I liked for about a day and had no idea I should limit that. Now I stay over 75% and check but in the beginning I had no idea. I see people with less than 30 reputation upvote me with less than 20% power sometimes now and try to get over there to explain it when I can.

On steemd.com bandwidth remaining is listed down on the bottom left, just under your reputation.

Thank you! So helpful. Now I can watch myself sink and swim. I just added a reward with some SP and then refreshed the steemd page and there it was! Now at least I can see where I'm at.

Do you have any recommendation for where to keep that percentage? I'm at 56% now - should I try to keep it above some range?

LOL. Now just sit back and scratch your head as the number climbs and drops while your account does nothing.

You are so right about that. At least I have something to watch now and it is very entertaining! I go from -700% to +70% and back again, and all over the place!

True but I was hit with that bandwidth problem straight off coming back after a year off and steemd says I have plenty of bandwidth. Nonsensical???

I had this happen to me last night! I work really hard on here and spend hours (no, literally most of my day) on here creating what I hope to be valuable content, commenting on quality posts and overall trying to encourage the platform and help it grow and prosper... I just got done a post that I had been writing for hours and then I got hit with this. My heart sank. What did I do wrong I wondered? I started to freak out and ran over to Discord, luckily I was told it would pass (but my OCD did not like that) I kept refreshing and saving everything until somehow it was back on. I definitely agree with you and support the fact that this needs to be fixed. I don't want people to be punished for being an active, engaged user! That's the opposite of what we need to see her! I'm hoping they change this otherwise I see problems ahead :( Thanks for sharing this and bringing attention to the issue!
XO,
H2H

You are a perfect example of why I have a problem with this bandwidth limitation.

You make such good posts and a ton of people enjoy them, but the system tracks your activity as high bandwidth usage and acts like you're a spammer, blocking you from your next post or comment while the actual spammer making low-quality micro posts with 1 sentence and some random picture from google images isn't hit by the limitation because it uses less bandwidth, so in many cases it's hitting the people that are contributing the most!

I think this needs a serious revamp to work for its intended purpose.

How did I miss this comment? Thank you so much for your kind words :)

I agree with you, I think it's definitely in need of an update that solves this. Hopefully enough people brought it up that someone caught wind of the issue and is working on it. I haven't had a problem since, but that particular day, I was highly active so I guess I have no idea if anything has changed :S

Thanks again, it makes me really happy to know that my posts are being enjoyed!
XO,
💜2💜

I think if your reputation score goes way down then this might be a good time to start putting in some more severe bandwidth limitations. The system could be gamed to screw with people but that is beyond my current solution.

The bandwidth and rate limitation features of steem are very interesting​ concepts in the real​m of "spam" and "attacks".

Because steem is weird and does not have transaction fees, the bandwith and ratelimits do an interesting job solving these problems.

In Bitcoin there is no such thing as a spam transaction: only fee paying and non-fee paying. If someone is sending a lot of transactions, but paying fees, it is not spam.

Really wonder if tx fees and the like would have been better for steem.

I had no idea this was a thing. It's certainly no way to welcome new users. It seems like the overall market of ideas should be handling the problem of spam rather than a centralized rule like this.

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

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