RE: Operation Clean Trending
Bidbots are a scam scheme that robs the reward pool. Instead of putting the rewards in the hands of content creators, it goes mostly to maintainers of bidbots and those that lease steem power to them. By making the bots unprofitable to use, or risky to use for undeserving content, then this is literally the only way to use the free market to punish the bots. Anything else would require top down authoritarian intervention, which would pretty much defeat the point of having a decentralised system. SOMEONE has to decide what constitutes bad acting. The WHOLE POINT of the steem blockchain is that this decision making is DECENTRALISED, with power to make these decisions in the hand of INVESTORS, those that hold SP, proportional to their investment.
Steem allows bots. Steem also allows downvotes. You can't argue (sucessfully) that because one is allowed, another thing that is also allowed isn't right.
Look, it is this simple, users of bidbots are complicit dupes in a scheme that robs and reduces legitimate content creators of their rewards. It is the users, and those that lease to and build bidbots that are economically harming others. They reduce the amount of the reward pool that goes to creators (with oer 75%-85% of the reward pool going to bidbot maintainers and their SP leases). This reduces the incentive for genuine and quality content creators to participate, which in turn reduces the quality of the system, which prevents the value of STEEM increasing, which harms ALL investors.
Who, other than those with the SP to downvote these bad actors do you propose do something? Do you crave some centralised authority to come in and lay down the law? Ned? Steemit Inc? How would you have them do this without compromising the decentralised nature of the platform?
Those 37 accounts, out of upwards of a million accounts that have been opened on Steemit, wield the vast majority of VP, and thus power is centralized in those accounts, and not decentralized at all.
Almost all of that stake held by those 37 accounts was mined and not purchased for fiat, I believe.
True, but that is a whole other issue, and not one easily addressed. Steem is still relatively decentralised compared to facebook, twitter or reddit.
I have given this thought, and reckon it's not a separate issue at all, but the very heart of the issue.
First, the supposition that those competent and fortunate enough to be able to mine Steem during the attempt to avoid US regulations during it's inception are investors is ludicrous. Those folks that simply mined and held on didn't invest in the sense investment generally has meaning.
This establishes that their motivations and experience are different from actual investors, who depend on capital gains for their ROI. Speculators, traders, and profiteers are other things entirely. the whales on Steemit are practically universally not investors.
Since they aren't investors, and aren't intent on capital gains for their ROI, they seek ROI by other means, and those means have become bidbots. This is the root of the point of this post OP has made.
This is what profiteering looks like, and as is usual, profiteering is a short term gambit, that almost always sucks all value from the source of profits before moving along with the essential value and leaving the shriveled husk of the endeavor abandoned in their wake.
I see but little sign that whales as a group have any intention to grow Steemit into a platform nominal to provide the substantial capital gains investors would be intent on. Such ROI would dwarf the meager returns rewards pool mining provides. The means of guiding Steemit to generate such returns in unfamiliar to them, as they are not seasoned investors, nor even actually investors at all.
They do what they know, and that is mine.
That is not a separate issue, and is the issue at hand.
Other than moving to an alternative platform, perhaps one based on EOS, I don't see any particular solution other than perhaps attempting to make the bidbots unprofitable to use. Hurt their scheme by hurting its customers.
It's being done. It won't be enough.
The real fly in the soup is stake-weighting, which will precipitate profiteering without fail. Even on Steemit v.2 that @dan is building. Given his sentiments, I expect stake-weighting to feature on his new platform.
Before there were bots, there was circle-jerking, and self-votes. Actually, there have always been bots, but it's a veritable infestation now. Much worse than before.
Dealing with stake-weighting may solve the bot problem.
A cure worse than the disease, according to some. I disagree, but I'm not very avaricious.
In my opinion Steem shouldn't allow bots, I think they poison the well. Downvotes are a good tool, if used with clear guidance, according to a set of rules, specifically as a defense mechanism against clear abuse. I want to argue (my deep belief) that using downvotes to rank the perceived value of a post that is not an obvious abuse (scam, phishing, etc.), even without bid bots, is a very slippery slope of destruction.
I mostly agree with your argument about bidbots and their users but punishing the users is a bit like saying "all German soldiers in WW II were complicit in a horrible thing so they should all be killed". Ok, maybe my analogy is a bit extreme, but I hope it won't detract you from the message: it's the system that needs to be fixed! Punishing the victims of the system because they participate in the system is ill advised.
Yes, IMO Ned and Steemit who have coded this blockchain system based on a manifesto called the steem whitepaper should
Ammend that manifesto, most notably by changing page 15 to read "Eliminating abuse is not possible yet it should always be the explicit goal of the platform" (unlike the current version which implicitly condones abuse by saying "shouldn't be the goal"
Implementing new rules in the code to make bidbots at worst unprofitable for those who would try to run one, at best downright impossible
Frankly decentralization is great but if I have to choose between a completely 100% decentralized platform that is a complete jungle and a platform that is not 100% decentralized but is safe to use and has structure, I take the latter every day.
The first and probably main attraction point of Steemit is the rewards. If they become completely unpredictable because any passing whale might feel that your content is not good enough, the platform will die ...
You know what's worse than getting $0.01 for a post that took 2 hours to write ? It's seeing it valued at $5.00 today and then at $0.01 the next day because some random whale thought it "not good enough" for $5.00
I would see a centralised solution as a last resort if we can't build the tools to make a decentralised system work. This does mean a certain responsiveness.
There are ways @steemit could intervene without compromising the decentralisation of the blockchain itself. Firstly, the main problem is they way their 'trending' algorithm works. If the use of bidbots excluded a post from appearing in 'Trending' pages, this would go some way to solving the problem. Steemit Inc could do this for their own site. @busy could do it for theirs, if they wanted to. I am beginning to think they should.
Buying votes and self-voting are promotion, and posts with either belong in Promoted, rather than Trending.
Neither are curation, and no curation rewards should inure to either.
Only people have any capacity to judge value of a post, and curation rewards should be limited to human curation.
Agreed about 'Promotion', I have said as much elsewhere. Also your point about neither being curation.
The difficulty is in how would the platform add a feature to distinguish between bots and humans? Who has the authority to determine the difference, and how do we ensure that authority is not abused?
AI has not attained competence to pass the void-comp test yet, and fairly simple automated means of verifying humanity are extant. Captchas, 2FA, etc. These require no central authority that isn't already necessary to have keys, nor any additional layers of complexity on the blockchain.
Just add one to the module that verifies keys. Should be easy. If Yahoo! can do it, I am sure @ned can do it better.
Yahoo is centralised. The various sites that access the steem blockchain do so via a stateless API. Same API used by bots. Doing a captcha would mean doing so for every comment, every like, every share...
How can the system circumvent that without a massive rethink about how the API works?
The system requires no rethink. Each of the transactions that occurs requires the system verify the authorization of the transactor, the key used. This simply needs to have an additional authorization metric for votes added to it, a captcha, 2FA, whatever is chosen to mitigate non-human actors on the blockchain.
It would dramatically impact Steemit users, who would have to solve the captcha, or reply to a txt, every time they vote. It would also dramatically reduce the number of bots, and make bots unable to vote unless they were able to solve captchas, or reply to txts appropriately. Those are very expensive features to add to bots, and few bots would be able to undertake them.
Further, those mechanisms bots used to surmount the secondary authorization validation may also be attackable, allowing them to be eliminated as well, with additional features.
It requires no further centralization or great changes in how the blockchain operates, simply adding an additional verification module to the one that operates now. It requires human intervention to authorize votes by the voters.
Unless this is done, Steemit, perhaps Steem itself, may lose all value to people, outside of the ability to mine rewards. Investors should carefully consider how that will impact their holdings. I have no doubt they are, and presently the bots are increasing their holdings.
Once the tipping point is reached, there may be no way to recover Steemit or Steem utility to people, and investors will lose what holdings they cannot extract in time to capture nominal value through exchanging Steem for other media. Stinc will be far more vulnerable to this than individual investors, as Myspace shows.
Presently Stinc is practically servile to whales, as a matter of necessity. In this matter, the interests of Stinc and the whales are not aligned, and Stinc may need to unilaterally act to preserve it's market, even over the objections of that market. Each whale also has common interests with the others, but also points of divergence from the group, concerning their own increase relative to the group, for example.
If I have misunderstood anything regarding the implementation of botproofing mechansims, please do make every effort to enable me to understand. I am not intent on any particular means of reducing bot competition with people. I just am certain it needs to stop.
Thanks!
If I had to solve a captcha or enact a 2FA just to vote, I would not just stop voting, I would leave the platform, as it will have turned into a horrendous nightmare of a user interface. I really don't think what you are proposing sounds like a workable solution.
If anything, it would create a situation where the cleverest bot writers would gain a significant monopoly (perhaps attaching the 2fa to an automated sms responder, or the captcha to a web faucet), whilst simultaneously drastically reducing the number of votes from actual humans.
It would also create significant centralisation of user interfaces, by introducing significant barriers to interface designers, be they web interfaces like busy, dtube or utopian, or mobile apps like esteem. Chainbb has already called it quits, how many more projects would collapse if such a significant barrier to entry was introduced?
One thing that bothers me as well is the pandering to whales (a lot like in the real world). If a whale posts something, anything, every plankton in the pond rushes to upvote because they know the post will get huge rewards regardless of its quality. It becomes self-fulfilling as most whales are friends, having been around for long while and to a certain extent upvote each other.
I'm less bothered by the fact that "trending" shows posts that have been upvoted by bots, it's a bit like advertising. If you believe your post is really good, what means do you have to show it to people ? You have "promoted" but there you waste your money. And then you have the bots and trending and you mostly recoup your money.
Now if you bring to trend a shitty post maybe there should be a parallel mechanism to gather opinion, that would be less directly linked to money.
For instance an additional "like" or something. You pay for advertising and I am grateful to @yallapapi and @suesa they did so because otherwise I woldn't have discovered their very nice posts. But people could also indicate that they didn't appreciate your post, without linking that to the rewards, at least in the beginning. Regardless of how much @suesa post made (I don't think $800 is fair but it's not outrageous either. It's not $15 000), we could have a parallel signalling: I enjoyed / didn't enjoy that post.
With this information, we could afterwards implement a more fine grained mechanism to discourage shitty posts somehow.
The key message is: the system needs to be made more sensitive, fine-grained, accomodate more varied inputs, not just monetary rewards. Communities is probably going in the right direction
It is precisely the advertising aspect that bothers me. If all the posts in Trending paid to be there, what makes Trending different from Promoted? I saw another comment that suggested all bidbot posts should be listed in Promoted rather than trending for that very reason. One could argue that self voted posts be moved there for similar reasons. Other than 'New', all the tabs are really just showing posts that paid to be there.
Indeed ... could be the right thing to do - move bid-bot upvoted posts to Promoted ...
There is also a difference between bidbots (as they currently work) and advertising. When you pay for an advertisement, you have no guaranteed return, no-one is obligated to buy your product. There is an element of risk. Bidbots should also have no guaranteed return. However, if we refuse to downvote them, then we are basically allowing them to force us, as a community, to purchase their content (via the reward pool).
It is precisely the lack of risk inherent in them that means they are scamming everyone else. This is why I do not see a problem in them being downvoted. Introducing that element of risk will make people more cautious in using them, especially for low quality content.