My wife asked me: "What the hell are you doing?" And I answered "I have to save Steemit!" 🤣
Hi to all Steemians out there! My name is Tom and about a week ago I was fed up (and angry) with a downvote bot called @camillesteemer downvoting me with rising bot account numbers, so I started researching and blogging about it here.
I left my own little Steemit bubble and dove (maybe deeper than I wanted to) into Steemit. The past days my wife asked me: "What the hell are you doing?" And I answered "I have to save Steemit!" xD
In the last few days I met more Steemians than all of the past 3 years, that I have been here. I met an obviously very diligent and successful dude here on Steemit called @themarkymark, who seems to have been kicking @camillesteemer butt for a long time as he told me. Together with him I met @joe.public, a romantic world improver and underdog (can someone please give the man a new and unused account? 😉), I met @drutter, who really took some time to sketch the mechanics of the @camillesteemer bot in a great comment (thanks for that one man!), I met @nikv, telling me that I'm a drama queen (and yes I was ranting!), wanting to send me drama tokens. Are these tokens real? I met @reveur and @jaguar.force, kicking my butt because I am a technical zero! Both are technically very masterful and, after the egos had cooled down, gave interesting information.
I learned a lot about the platform and now I know that HF means hard fork! ROFL! I showed everybody that I am a technical zero and I learned that this platform means business! I saw transactions, 3-digit, 4-digit and even one 5-digit and I learned that there are forces here wrestling for influence and power.
3 years ago I came here, it is decentralized they said, freedom of speech they said, no censorship they said, everybody profits they said, Zuckerberg isn't here they said...
But what is really different here in comparisn to Facebook, Insta. & co.? Has anything really changed with Steemit?
@drutter compared Steemit to the real world out there in one of his comments under my article.
But wasn't the plan to be better than the world going on out there???
Peace to you all and over and out!
Tom
Yes, Drama tokens exist. How about discovering them for a new investigation project?
That sounds like a good idea @nikv. Thanks😉👌
You must own at least 10 CC to reward commenters on this post!
Please charge 10 CCs to reward your commenters.
Happy you finally understood!
It was until greed and fear made it a poor carbon copy.
Here is a post from when i lead a group that beleived.
It is my personal profile, if you still are keen into checking my wallet.
If you want to have a chat and learn about the old history we have with the Jag, join my discord server (we dont sell anything, just a bunch of Aspies plotting for a better world) the link is in the signature of my more recent posts.
Thank you🙏👍I will check it out!
It is not even liesd. 👍😄
Posted using Partiko Android
Hi Tom! Hope it’s all fine now that SteemIt no longer needs saving 😊
If you dive too deep into Steemit, it is a rabbit hole you may not get back out of. So I decided, Steemit has to make it by itself😜
Ha ha good thought! Thing settles on its own and finds itself home.
You're right on that man🙏😊Peace!
Thanks for your post, and thoughts :)
So, do you consider this issue to be resolved, or resolving? Or do you consider it to remain a problem?
Some people seem to believe that someone is already solving this problem behind the scenes, removing these accounts' power to downvote? Is that true? If so, will it stop the problem permanently?
This is an interesting view on camille by @reveur:
Regarding the bots in the botnet you might have noticed they never post.
thus reputaion will never increase as it only increases when someone with a rep higher than yours and enough SP votes your content.
They dont post to avoid that all flaggers in steemit downvote their post and therefore thay cannot loose or win reputation.
On the other hand they will by powering up the dust (0.001) tranfers grow over years so some meaningfull SP but mathematically if they received 0.001 a day (this is a tenth of a cent of steem) they will need three years (1000 days) of daily memo dust to achieve 1 SP...
It is true that steemit is delegating some small amount to them but even then they remain pretty much powerless, remember that also dust transactions (votes and the such) are mostly non taken into account, so they will need to hit you with 1000 accounts to actualy remove 0.001 rewards from your posts.
They from a witness point of view bloat the blockchain with their thousand of transactions (for the blockchain each action from an account counts as a transaction)
A tipical vote is written in the blockchain like a JSON object:
{voter: xxxx, percentage: 100, votee: yyyy
(not exactly but lose)
count the caracters and multiply by the number of votes by the number of botsand that is the amount of bites the blockchain grows due to their activity.
So still not enough for those who can do something to act... and to be honest there is not much anyone can do without breaking the blockchain principle... Steemit could in a HardFork disable the accounts but that is like the worse blockchain SIN anyone can commit, because who decides who is next.... This is a weakness of the blogging blockchain platforms where damaging users are protected by the blockchain credo.
It is technically possible to disable the accounts but then everyone will feel unsafe to have funds in case it happens to them.
He's right about the last part, and I've mentioned this too. The only obvious fix for this is for someone with authority or power to manipulate/break the settings and rules of the blockchain. This brings the question, who watches the watchers? Banning or deleting people (which has already been done on Steemit many times) is a slippery slope, and takes us far far away from decentralization, the core of our project here.
THAT is one of the big threats of this bot army, not simply that they create negativity, spam the blockchain with actions, tarnish good posts, and will eventually grow to be a bigger threat.... but that something will have to be done about them. I'm afraid of what that something might be.
I'm with you on that one! 👌
Hi @drutter, I have been talking to @jaguar.force on Discord. He will invite you and give you an update. I am technically not good enough😒
@drutter, are you on Discord? Pls give me your user.
Thanks! I'm not very good with Discord, but I'll certainly try :)
My name there is the same.
I appreciate you staying on the issue. Any new accounts in the army today?
Yes, constantly new one one's coming. @themarkymark gave me a link to github: https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables/blob/master/20191022.steemitdefenseleague.txt but I am just too dumbass to drop my list there😂
Wow man, that's quite a list. I doubt it contains every account, though. Seems like there's about 1000 and growing at this point, ugh.
By the way, I'm seeing another type of downvote account lately. Example: @fuk.themarkymark
Instead of attacking the entire platform with hundreds of tiny accounts, this is a single account, dedicated to attacking a single target.
This account DOES make posts and comments, so its targets will be able to retaliate (and already are). That means it will lose rep, and its comments will be harder to see, and it probably won't grow on its own. But it already has someone delegating 25 SP, and that could rise. Those SP can't be removed by downvoting, so in theory, downvote accounts like this can and will have a lasting effect.
I think I'll nickname this type of account "the tick". It latches on to a victim and drains it slowly.
You think it's camille?
Probably not. Why would it be?
Here's one that is: @tridimstroc
I didn't hear from jaguar.force yet.
@brigse is my latest addition to the bot army list.
I need the #1234 behind your discord name.. I think that channel is something 4u!👌😉👍
Congratulations @networkallstar, your post successfully recieved 0.53669588 TRDO from below listed TRENDO callers:
To view or trade TRDO go to steem-engine.com
Join TRDO Discord Channel or Join TRDO Web Site