RE: Thoughts about authenticity on the Steem blockchain - Volume #1: Identity
I've been thinking about this a lot since my series of articles and I'll jump around your article with various thoughts...
if we're not going to lurch about in a long-running and unproductive game of "Whack-a-mole"
I've long thought that the abuse being found is exactly this. Not just the concept that it's a never ending game of trying to stop something from popping up but also that the mole that pops up is often the same mole that has already been whacked down - often an improved version.
So it feels as though abuse on the platform is inevitable and there's no knowing what difference the whack-a-mole makes.
In reply to one of the posts, @jpegg wrote:
What if you was the only real living person on Steem, watching (never sleeping) bots activity :P
Which led me to wonder, if we filtered out all of the bots, all of the plagiarism and all of the duplicate accounts, how many users would actually be left? Would it be me and a handful of others?
And then there's the question of "so what?" The creators knew that this had the potential to be a problem and perhaps unsurprisingly it is. As a community, we allow users to post utter shit every day in order to get their vote from upvu. We "allow" it because these users are seen as investors. So why don't we perceive "miners" in the same way and just accept that there are users who want to mine the currency without a meaningful contribution to the community that's behind it?
The concept of miners is normally neglected when we talk about Steemit's userbase. We have bloggers and investors. With community in mind, we know that these already conflict. When we introduce miners, the community has another conflict. And much like investors, miners need to do something to mine the STEEM coin. Not (always) in the traditional way of getting more machine processing power, but in the form of human processing power - getting people to allow them to sign up on their behalf, entering contests, etc.
As a community, do we need to simply accept that (whether we like it or not), these profiles exist and filter out their shit in the same way that we do from voting bots?
And if we do ignore it, then what is the consequence? Investors already take a huge chunk of the reward pool and that is "accepted". If miners take a larger and larger percentage of contests, genuine users will stop entering and either leave of simply run a traditional blog.
(I'm just typing thoughts as they come to me)
Are we spending too much time thinking about and trying to solve a problem which is unsolvable? In taking action, are we delaying the parasite taking over the entire system? Or do we need to accept that they already have and live on our island far away from them?
I don't know and I honestly wish that I was ignorant to it all.
This type of "investment" has been toxic to Steem as a social blockchain. The original whitepaper envisioned holding Steem Power as an incentive to improve the ecosystem. Instead many large SP holders have tended to operate like slumlords, trying to extract as much value as possible while waiting for somebody else to improve things around them. From the beginning the norm should have been "no self-votes", and delegating to a bot that votes for you based on your delegation is essentially a self-vote. Instead the norm we have is "don't piss off the big accounts".
The whitepaper also envisioned people of equivalent wealth policing each other, but that isn't really happening. So (with one exception), at the upper tiers of stakeholders, we basically have a proof-of-stake blockchain masquerading as a social media platform.
As the whitepaper said, it's still doing the work of distributing the token, so it's really not harmful to the blockchain... but, I agree that it's toxic at the social layer. The problem is, downvote wars are also toxic at the social layer, so it's almost a matter of "pick your poison".
We've talked about the self-vote phenomenon before, and that aspect doesn't really trouble me. I only see over-valued and under-valued. If we find a way to get the values right, I don't care who does the voting. Campaigns against self-voting (IMO) will just spur the creation of Sybil accounts.
As I replied to @the-gorilla, I'll have more to say about this in a future post. Hopefully next week.
Yes. It crowds out genuine effort. At the top end you have a purely inflationary high-APR DeFi chain that wants plausible deniability. And at the bottom end it's easier to churn out spam or plagiarized posts than it is to write genuinely good content (which has a high chance of getting lost in the shuffle anyway).
I think that it's a useful rule of thumb to assume that people aren't reliably good at evaluating the quality of their creative output. And humans are better at understanding bright-line rules than at making difficult judgments like what a post is worth, so I think it would be a beneficial norm to have even if it isn't 100% of the solution. I could also be on board with a norm like putting a rewards cap on posts that get auto-voted on (I think there can be good arguments for things like UBI, but it doesn't make sense for people to be making as much as the big accounts are making with upvu posts).
Sure, there's no single perfect solution. I just think the chain would work better if it had some more robust norms than "whatever big accounts can get away with".
Yeah, I agree with this. I guess the reason I don't focus on self-voting is that a very low percentage of accounts actually have enough stake to over-value their posts without help.
I agree and similar to the ease with which self-voting could be banned, I can't imagine it being difficult to make it impossible to vote for somebody who's delegated to you.
These voting bots are hugely popular and embraced by the Korean community and I don't think they'd consider using the platform in any other way. Which is the round-a-bout way of saying: "we know nothing will ever change" 🤷♂️
You're getting ahead of me here. Plagiarism/spam/AI content is probably my next post. But yeah, when I was highlighting this:
and this:
I have to say that both excerpts reminded me more of the Trending page than the situation that launched this conversation.
The blockchain has built-in ways to reward investors with interest for staking (or for holding SBDs) and with curation rewards. In principle, if we want to increase ROI for investors, it should be done by changing those parameters, not by diverting author rewards to investor/spammers at the social layer.
If we want to understand why the number of comments per block has fallen from >1 to 0.4 during the last year or two, part of it is almost certainly the bear phase of the crypto market, but I suspect that the dominance of bidbots is also a major factor.
This is why I touched on measurement in the conclusion. We really need a way to know whether we're making progress or not - and to be able to change course if we're not. On one hand, it's not possible to measure perfectly, but on the other hand I think that estimates are possible. I'll probably come back to that in a future post, too.
In addition to my other comment, this might be a useful tool with regards to measurement...
https://steemit.com/hive-151113/@steemwatcher.com/weekly-statistics-of-steemwatcher-portal-or-or-07-06-2023
I'd love to see something like that happen - where the "Savings" element took a higher proportion of the reward pool than the author rewards. I guess the downside then is that there's no incentive to power up. I've not really thought this through and my brain's refusing to operate at the moment. Stupid brain.
There are so many challenges with this, I don't know how feasible it would be. The Steem Watchers record the cases that they find but I believe the reward incentive to each watcher clouds the motivation to find more. E.g. if they receive $x for finding 6 plagiarised posts, what's the incentive for finding 50? Best to save them for the next report.
There's also the increased difficulty when people start translating content to hide their plagiarism and increasingly complex scams.
I think there was once a plan to write a bot which automatically assesses the originality of each post. @alexmove had something running when papi.mati was running the anti-plagiarism campaign. I don't know if what he developed can be repurposed as some kind of measuring tool?
If people could ever get past the terror of SBD prices being below $1 USD, doing conversions and arbitrage would be a way for investors to make money with STEEM while keeping it liquid, reducing their incentive to find "passive income" solutions that manipulate the reward pool.
Hi. @the-gorilla
Services like zeroGPT could be used to determine AI generation, as well as to determine non-uniqueness. The problem is volumes - to check ALL posts, huge volumes are needed to pay for the use of these services.
If you check selectively, then a certain structure of thoughtful checking is necessary. For now, this is the question. A small number of posts - you can check automatically. For example, selectively 1 post per month from the author (for example).
I think that's the main problem with every approach to fight abuse on Steemit. There's got to be a human element at which point scaling it up becomes a big issue.