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RE: Operation Clean Trending
" you are implying that you are the one or among the ones who decide what brings and doesn't bring value to the community"
It is their Steem Power, it is precisely their right to use it to downvote content they don't believe brings value to the community. How is that 'mob rule'?
Yes, that's the whole idea, the individuals should be the one to decide what's valuable and what's not for them through upvoting/flagging. If the author is upvoting himself to Trending with bots, then the whole purpose of this platform is lost, but the community can still decide to flag, which is a much-needed action.
Still, I don't think that bots will ever be killed, but they can still be improved.
The bots could be killed if a superbot was created, enough delegation given to it and it began targeting all the trending/hot posts that were using vote bots. I believe Grumpycat proved this with his/her targeting that if people start losing money (in that case, bots that vote after 3.5 days) that vote buyers will modify their behavior to avoid the monetary loss.
Yes, if the people with the stick start pushing the bot owners towards change more, they would have to comply at some point.
Think "worshipping different gods" (disapproven but sometimes tolerated) versus "witch burning" in ancient times. If you use your steem power to upvote whatever shitpost you want, that's your right and freedom. When you use it to harm someone, to do (financial) violence onto someone it's not equivalent.
I am convinced downvoting should be used very, very sparingly, only when there is a manifest abuse.
I also do think having bot voting and paying for upvotes is a bad idea and should not be possible but as long as their are allowed downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...
Good then please commence downvoting regularly because there is manifest abuse on a huge scale including as described in the post. If you don't agree then that's perfectly okay, but those of us who do see it that way are going to express it with our votes.
By "abuse" I meant posts attempting to promote demonstrated scam schemes, phishing posts, child pornography or other such egregious abuses. I think it's a very, very slippery slope to start calling abuse the fact that suesa post racked up $900 or that yallapapi scored $500. I haven' t read the others in the list but I read those two and I upvoted them.
Are they worth that much ? Heck, who am I to judge ? Are Cristiano Ronaldo or Neymar Jr worth the money they are making ? In my opinion no, but again, who am I to judge ? Some people take from the same "reward pool" (the sum of all euros printed by the ECB) and directs those euros to Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr. That is the system ! If I disagree, I try to do politics to change the system. But I'm not "downvoting" Ronaldo and Neymar
When @heimindanger and others downvote @suesa's post and @yallapapi's post I feel insulted ! I feel that my very right to upvote a post is being questioned ! Do I have a right to express my liking for a post ? Because I feel that the flaggers want to deny me this right ! They want to censor my right to vote posts that I consider worthy of my votes !
You are Steem voter and that is precisely who judges. That's how this decentralized system works.
Who the hell are you to be above questioning? This is a decentralized system run by voters. Voters have to be free to disagree or it is meaningless and dysfunctional.
BTW, your right to upvote the post is not being questioned. You can do so any time you want. Others can downvote any time they want. The system adds up the votes and allocates rewards. End of story.
The power of the voters is highly centralized, and thus the system is highly centralized. All it takes is enough money to capture it. It makes no difference how many voters vote. It only matters how much money votes, in regards to rewards and witnesses.
Since the money is highly concentrated, power is highly centralized in the accounts the money is concentrated in.
Hi again, I've published a more (too?) detailed analysis why I believe using the downvote might be useful for the economics of the reward pool but detrimental overall to the Steem system
https://busy.org/@sorin.cristescu/steemit-and-the-fractal-society
You don't seem to have the slightest idea of human psychology and of sociological mechanisms. You remind me of myself 20 years ago.
If only you'd admit that you might be able to learn something and maybe be ready, with strong arguments, to change your mind, that would already be progress.
I change my mind all the time, but be aware that I do consider the economic issues facing Steem to be dire, potentially failure-inducing, so I'm willing to accept costs in other dimensions. You may be surprised to learn that at times I have been against downvoting for what I suspect (without having read yet) are many of same psychological and sociological reasons that are you. But there is a point where one must prioritize the lesser harms (and/or reducing the greater risks), and we probably just disagree about that.
I will read your post and consider your point of view. Thanks.
thank you
"downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...". Huh. That is the exact opposite of how I see it. I see buying a huge upvote to put your own post in trending as stealing from the pocket of everyone else who is posting without paying for votes. The reward pool is finite. Buying your way into trending decreases the payout going to other authors. If anything, the community coming together to flag an author who bought huge votes is stopping theft.
That is correct if someone has the monopoly of that behaviour. But when doing that is available to everyone, there is a pesky things called "game theory" and "Nash equilibriums" who stick their fingers in the spanner.
To be clearer: the fewer people buy upvotes, the bigger the incentive to be the one that cheats. The situation is not stable and evolves toward a Nash equilibrium: people start paying more and more to bots to get on trending page - it's the system that's broken and needs fixing, not the actors who are inside the system and playing by the rules. You can indeed attempt the latter but it's self-defeating if the system stays broken.
None of which changes the fact that this behavior is in fact "stealing" reward from the users who chose not to do this behavior. None of this changes the fact that buying votes to trend a post puts the lie to "proof of brain". I love how quickly "this behavior is allowed so it is okay" is forgotten when it comes to flagging. You can't have it both ways dude. If you truly think that just because other people are going to do something, and it is "allowed" by the code, that it is okay for you to engage in a behavior that is objectively bad for the long term health of the STEEM blockchain, than it is also okay for users to flag you for this behavior. I fail to see how this is hard to understand, or even debatable. Users with large stake in this platform absolutely should be flagging the crap out of any post that buys its way to trending under the current system which does not mark such posts as advertising. Failing to do so is putting nails in the coffin of their own investment.
I fail to see how you fail to see the fatal flaw in your reasoning: who and how defines "crap" ?
If you define "crap" by "anything that buys its way to trending" then you stack the deck against any talented minnow writer who basically has no way to come to anyone's attention.
Take a look for instance at my very early posts (after the "introduce yourself") I had put a bit of work in them and while I don't think they are necessarily stellar I am pretty sure they are better than $0.00 with no votes and almost no views. I just happened to be a minnow who knew nobody else on the platform and believed the "proof of brain" theory - I was naively thinking that "good content will be discovered and will well-up by itself". It didn't.
Now look at @yallapapi. I think he had produced some distinctive content that I wouldn't have seen if he hadn't bought his way to the trending page. What he writes has value, I think, and is useful. But without buying his way to trending a lot less (and I mean A LOT LESS, like in ZERO) people would have noticed him.
He uses a mechanism not only permitted but used by many others before him in order to draw attention to his posts. Nothing unusual. Are his posts "crap" ? I wouldn't say so, on the contrary, they are a really great read. So for me defining "crap" by "anything that went to trending based on paid votes" is shortsighted and wrong. Especially since the guy paid for that advertisment with his own money.
You (or @heimindanger) are free to say that @yallapapi's content is crap but that is, in my opinion, mobbing, censorship, and basically stealing and abuse, like what grumpy cat used to do.
But if you also find that his content is actually rather outstanding then it would turn out that not every paid post that trends is crap after all ... the picture is mixed and things become a lot more complicated, like in real life. Things become debatable.
So you are entitled to your opinion that "whales should be flagging the crap out of any post that buys its way to trending" but I am also entitled to mine that this will lead to only circle-jerking whales trending for any minor "contest" that they, in their magnanimity have the kindness to organize. it will basically leave no realistic avenue for isolated minnows to get spotted for the content they produce and will drive them away from the platform.
How is that good for the long-term health of the Steem blockchain ?
Voting to prevent reward pool rape isn't financially harming anyone. It is voting to determine how the current reward pool is divided. An upvote is an upvote in favour of giving a post/comment a slice. A downvote is a vote that a given post should be paid less.
Not really sure what any of that has to do with religious persecution.
"Reward pool rape" needs defining. When someone with a lots of SP and consequently a lot of VP publishes obviously shitty posts every 6 hours and upvotes himself, as I believe haejin is (was?) doing, I believe that qualifies as "reward pool rape".
When a guy pays with his own money to get his post trending he's only getting back what he has put in. He pays X and the bot upvotes for a value of X. If you downvote Y he only gets back X-Y < X so you are financially harming the guy who paid the bot.
You can indeed argue that it is the bots that are doing the reward pool rape and I will agree with you. But then you should "punish" the bots, not by taking money from the guy who paid the bots (for as long as the bots are officially allowed at least).
You can argue like grumpy cat that, for instance, one shouldn't use bots for posts older than X days but, when steemit allows bots, that basically means that you are making up your own rules (on top of those of the system). You become a kind of vigilante: you take your own gun and start dispensing what you believe to be "justice" of your own accord, following whatever rules you edict.
That is what I call "mob rule". I was comparing this with a village that suddenly decides that a lady living alone is a witch and then proceeds to burn her at stake of their own accord (ok, my analogy wasn't very well formulated in the previous post, I hope now I got it a bit better)
Payouts which exceed added value to the platform, community. and stakeholders (especially the latter since they, or more accurately we, are paying 100% of the rewards).
This analogy is BS. Equating receiving smaller or no monetary payments with being lynched is absurd and offensive.
Sorry, the analogy was indeed too extreme.
But the point remains: when you think content is good, you upvote. If you think content is not good, you don't upvote. But you don't flag, unless it's a clear abuse (scam, phishing, etc.)
Flagging posts that you think have higher reward than look ok to you means that you are questioning the judgement and defying either the people who upvoted ("you think this is good content but I think you are wrong, this is bad content") or the very system of steemit (with bots and all). If the Steemit system leads to absurd rewards because of bid bots and other abuse then the correct approach is to tackle the issues with the system, not each and every post that exploits a broken system
I personally question the judgement made explicit in page 15 of the whitepaper (see above) as I believe that even if completely eliminating abuse is never possible, it definitely MUST be an explicit goal of any sane and self-respecting society. But I'm not starting my own militia war by downvoting abusive posts. It's profoundly destructive to the very system we want to see thriving
Yes that's exactly right and people should be (and must be) skeptical of each other. In a decentralized system the answer to "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who Guards the Guards?) is "each other". Our voting decisions are all open to scrutiny and disagreement by each other. That is the only way this system can work.
I agree with that, but downvotes are also part of the system. If the system can work (at least better) with a new and better emphasis on downvotes, and new and better ways of downvoting, then everything is just fine. The goal is a system that works well, not a system that works without effective and intelligent use of downvotes to express and mediate disagreement between voters, whenever needed (not just in specific cases decided by you).
I believe this discussion is important and I like a lot that we can have it. As answered on another comment, I am preparing a standalone dedicated post on this topic.
"Reward pool rape" is an unfortunate term that should probably be replaced. Rape is as bad an analogy here as you comparison of downvoting to religious persecution. Both are ridiculous appeals to emotion.
The concept behind the term, which I understand as the mechanised generations of rewards to deplete the reward pool in an industrial manner, without the reciprocal creation of good content, is however a valid problem faced by the steem system that does need addressing.
The ONLY means we have been given for addressing the issue is downvoting. It is the responsibility of SP holders to use their power to address the issue, else steem will become useless as a platform and the reward pool may as well just pay SP holders a dividend instead of rewarding content creators (because that is where bidbots are taking things if left unaddressed).
Aside from the "ONLY means" part I agree. I proposed another approach in the other response. 1st: change the philosophy in the whitepaper - as important as the Federalist papers for the US. 2nd: change the code to at least discourage or better yet make upvoting bots impossible to exist. They are not needed, they do not serve any useful purpose.
But while these two things are not implemented, keep the system stable, as it is or else people will get discouraged and desert it, IMO
True, ONLY was a bit dramatic. We can campaign to get witnesses to vote in changes to the platform, and vote for witnesses accordingly.
good idea ! that was the whole idea behind having DPOS and witnesses - a kind of representation
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.
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?
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.