The Bot Voting Debate - A possible solution?
There
is a lot of discussion lately about vote gaming systems including whale vote bots. It has long been a topic of discussion in fact but the success of SteemSports in particular has got writers most especially crying foul.
Well, for good reason.
But while sitting waiting for the inloophuis to open I thought of a solution. It is a general solution for bots that vote with the main account of a user, it would not stop autonomous bot accounts that the user does not manually view, but it would stop Streemian and Steemtrail working if it was implemented also.
It requires a new transaction on the blockchain for registering a user account session has been opened, and no other sessions can be opened for a period of time, say half an hour. It would not need identify the IP address or even note which witness is currently permitted to relay transactions, though it would seed the transaction to the next witness in the block schedule.
The next thing would be that every timeout period the session must be reregistered or transactions are not allowed to be posted to the blockchain.
By doing this to the RPC protocol, you would end automated voting and this is the key reason the vote games are so successful. It would not entirely end it because a person could dedicate an account to voting on them and only use another account to manually create transactions.
Regarding autonomous accounts the network could use a web service to run a captcha on the user once every few days and these accounts would be thus made much harder to operate because they would have to provide a web browser interface for the captcha. This frequency would not be obtrusive. It probably could be used to make the user log in and times it out after, say, once a day.
Afterthought
I suspect that this solution would ruffle some feathers also but really, it is not difficult to add autovoting systems to a user interface. But it would still greatly limit nonhuman activity.
Update
It again raises the question I have whether it would benefit Steem if whales could get a boost in interest without voting power, then minnow votes would affect payouts more.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
My view is that, rather than trying to shackle the bots, shackles which they sooner or later learn how to game, a long-term solution is to reward human interaction. If this does not receive $ in the short-term, although that is a pity, it is not in the final accounting important. I am convinced the long-term value of STEEM is totally dependant on the community being robust. The problem, behind the problem of the bots, is how to get rich-guys to actually read the posts. A thorny problem.
That's why I have been saying for ages a long term interest bearing non vote power contract would give other ways to interact with the economy. Steem Power incentivises bot curation. They could instead sacrifice a little potential reward for a lesser but reasonable amount. and the difference stays in vote rewards.
Disabling their bots from curating would make the "rich-guys read the posts"... They would still want to curate, but would have to pay attention to do so. That is what the curation reward is in exchange for - their attention which they don't give because they can have a bot do the work.
Well maybe. I think what I'm suggesting is that if the attention economy became more valued, in terms of non-steem reward, perhaps social standing, then the whale upvotes would follow.
I'm always logged in on at least 3 computers. Needing to log in and out just to vote would be a pain in the butt. Also it wouldn't be hard to use one IP per account to vote. I could open 24 accounts and vote with what I have right now if I wanted to.
It could work if you have the ability to assign several keys for devices. You could also then revoke just one device say if it was stolen, or otherwise compromised.
Also, I did point out that clients can have vote automation systems still. With multiple devices one can be dedicated to this. Even this key can be tied to a streemian type service on the voting subkey.
With a daily turing test it makes mass automation much harder but allows users to do whatever they want.
But this would hurt people like me where my wife and I have the same IP. The trails have helped out the new users like me, I think they are very much needed. So as to stopping the bots really I think the best bet is more active users, which would spread out the rewards more and the bots would not be profitable after enough users join.
I didn't suggest ip's at all in fact I clearly said the session is tied to accounts only. Restrictions on IP are not effective and cause problems in general. The only way IP is locked in is of the witness your client relays transactions to during a session. This stops multiple machines publishing transaction for one account.
Ah sorry I must have miss read it I sometime read to fast.
Now I get what your saying that makes sense but then things like steemvoter or steemian how would they work voting for you if you are also active?
You couldn't without multiple session keys. There is reason to have them in multiple clients and machines you have open at once. But it is part of the vote automation problem. People are doing this to chase a thin sliver of curation rewards. Whales have more interest in this because it contributes to their steem power. I think overall people are fighting over really a small pool and if you could get some extra interest but not have to vote it would make it a lot less contentious. Whales would vote less and minnows effect would be increased.
Do you think that adding more active users could also help with this as well?
I think it is the other way around. Currently whales dictate success on rewards. If whales could get some guaranteed proportion of what might have been curation rewards also the remainder would increase the pool and minnow votes would give bigger rewards.
Realistically, humans will never be able to compete with bots. That is why you need to use the trails. Without the bots you would be able to vote a lot more naturally and gain more curation rewards (if bigger fish were less active than you)
So your saying that using the voting trails you will get more curation rewards, unless the bigger fish stopped being active then individually you should do ok then? I agree with the trails as a newbie since they have voted on my posts at times and helped me that way.
No. What I'm saying is using the voting trail is just to compete with the bots. If the bots/autovoting weren't working, you wouldn't need the voting trail to compete because you would be rewarded for being more active. You could even gain greater rewards than users who have more SP than you simply because they don't spend the time online curating - and no longer have a bot to do it for them. Also, if large stake holders were to stop voting (which they wouldn't but some dolphins/orca's might) that would make your vote and your friends votes more powerful.
Ah that makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.
auto voting will always be a thing, I can't see how it wouldn't. Get a bot for yourselves! or use steem voter on your fav bloggers. If people vote not for expected reward but content... that will also help
But it should not be easy to do. It is entirely possible to put a captcha at least once a day for logging in. Apps can open browser windows to run them.
Nothing wrong with autovoting but humans should have to be more accountable.
This will never be a thriving attention economy if that is true.
But it already is.... Twitter has bots, Facebook has bots..... If your content is good people will point bots at you for reward or to support.
You already wrote post, and you not need proof that you are not bot :-)
-Before you vote, can you write some post or Turing test?
Voting power prolly should be more loosely tied to Steem Power - the ghosts of a lot of cold content (early adopter non-content?) don't deserve to maintain so much weight...
btw Newb that I am, I just discovered that posts older than about five weeks can't be commented upon anymore... Kinda sucks to miss out on a bunch of good conversations...
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The bots having an advantage over humans has caused serious problems in my opinion. We now have humans trying to compete with bots by becoming more like bots which is counterproductive.
I know there has been a lot of push back on this idea several months ago but I'm interested in getting the debate going again. The main issue I see is that there is no central authority for the "captcha's" to come from and there needs to be a way to recognise bots when they vote on the blockchain, not just on the frontend of the website.