RE: Introducing Smackdown Kitty
I think you may misremember my position on bots. I'm a big fan of bots for up-votes. My opposition to this is to the arbitrary use of the flag.
By itself, no I don't think self-voting is problematic. It only (potentially) becomes problematic when it is combined with spam (i.e. intentionally low quality content). Even then, I'm not completely sure.
I think the pairing is probably harmful, but do the self-voters hold their earnings? If so, then maybe they're driving up prices and helping the platform more than a high-quality author who dumps half their income every week. (Maybe we should start flagging authors who don't power-up 100%?) Do the self-voters dump their earnings? If so, better voters and better content should win at the long game, which is good for the platform. It might be a case of Bastiat's seen and unseen.
My apologies, I did. 😅
The market and economic argument I'm not sure about, but from what I know that is very hard to know. Something that hard to know may not be useful to consider.
I disagree, I've looked around and there are some good comments with crazy rewards from self votes. They are over valued by the commenter, which is to say that it is not matched by other voters, far far from it.
It depends what we're trying to do here I think. If the authors of posts and comments have that much of a say in valuation I feel that the intended idea of allowing quality stuff to bubble up is not achieved. However if it's to allow those with stake to gain even more interest on their stake then it works well.
True, but there are also self-voted comments that are rewarded appropriately. I go back to my initial post. There's no basis to know which dominates, and the community hasn't had time to adapt to HF19 yet, anyway.
Or maybe humility should suggest restraint of action at scale unless we have some level of confidence that there is a (long term) problem that needs to be solved. And even if there is a problem, maybe there are other solutions involving information exchange among voters that are less confrontational and disruptive than mass flagging.
Gotta run. Thanks for listening to my thoughts.
Well thanks for engaging with it here, it is highly appreciated.
It's clearly an issue, I stand by that. In my opinion it is really against the philosophy of the platform, what I've read of the intentions from the whitepaper, but the proof is in the melting pot of the community. I'm interested to hear other comments too.
Humility is always a good thing but I didn't make myself clear. When such a thing cannot conclusively be known, which the market effects are very likely to be, they are not valuable to consider.
The primary tactics of smackdown kitty are stigmatising, not actually neutralising. She will attempt to do this but unless someone delegates SP to her, she'll just be a little mosquito, leaving red marks everywhere they self vote.
Also, I've seen enough 'anecdotes' of people exploiting self voting, literally powering up, then posting rubbish, and then voting on it, dropping idiotic comments everywhere. I have been watching numerous commentators do the same thing. If the rate of new user signups continues to accelerate how long do you think it is before people who made money scamming and spamming will realise they can just throw 500 bux at this and double it easily in a year? Considering that it is likely to also go up in price at the same time...
Anyway, we'll see by this time next week how it looks. Numbers on the preliminary runs on the bot are showing between 4-15% self upvotes on comments out of the whole of transactions. If that averages about 8%, that's quite a lot. We are also going to gather the info on how much SP these have, and show people the overall demographic, alongside the leaderboard for the most self-voting users.