New votes getting 40+ votes in seconds
Had 2 recent posts, and as you do I was obsessively reloading page to see if they were getting any upvotes. They did, both of them got 40+ votes in a batch, both of these batches of votes came in the first 10 mins of posting.
Upon investigating further I noticed that it is not an unusual occurrence for new posts, if you have a look at the new posts you will notice a few posts with this strange voting pattern. Don't get me wrong sometimes you get a very popular post that gets these numbers but it shouldn't be happening as regularly as it is.
So what's the cause? I don't know but my theory is someone has set up multiple accounts to use in unison. And I have a few questions.
do you think this theory is correct?
If it is correct, is this exploit profitable?
Is it a problem to the steemit community?
Would analysing voting patterns catch the people doing this, and should we?
If you need to use your reddit or facebook account to sign up can everyone set up two accounts easily?
Steemit has had a problem with spammers from the beginning and it is continuously improving the site to reduce these problems. I have seen a lot of people talk about the comment spam problem but not seen this one addressed. Would love some feedback, even if it is just to point out a flaw in my arguement.
It is not profitable. It is a complete waste of time. They are voting so early on the posts that even if the post gets a large reward, the majority of their potential rewards will go to the original poster. This is why they set up the reverse auction style voting process for the first 30 minutes after a post is made.
ah I didn't realise there was a different system for the first 30 mins.
@fiveboringgames is off to the reread the whitepaper
It might not be in there. It was a decision that was later implemented. Basically if you vote immediately after a post, the author will get basically 100% of your voting reward. After 30 mins, you get all of your voting reward. In between the proportion changes linearly.
thanks found a post about it
I just had the same thing happen to my most recent post. Bots man...
This is a problem called bots
Lol, I thought it might be a person with a marco controlling 40 accounts but as they upvoted this post about the problem they are, they must be a bot.
I wonder what criteria they use this post got 40+ post before a person could of read it, but all new posts don't get that. Could it up vote posts of a certain length?
I don't know what the criteria is, what I do know is that they are annoying.
Yea you get all excited that the post you write has been appreciated, but then nope just bots
It happens with every post tagged in steemit. Does anyone have a theory on why/how this is profitable?
I can see why it'd be useful to boost your own post, but otherwise I am not seeing it
What it should really do is slowly increase. When you see a post with 40 votes in 1 minute and no money you know its a useless bot upvoting!
That's why I didn't use steemit as the main tag on my most recent post! If I get upvoted, I'd like it to be by people.
I feel your pain mate . btw if you got some time drop by in my blog :)
I thought also that I write something interesting but if bots voted me I'm disappointed. :'(
I just started posting on Steemit a few days ago and my first several posts got a few upvotes at best. The last two got 25-50 each within a few minutes just like your post described. Looking into this I agree it's designed to get upvote money by getting in early but I also wonder if it's keyword indexed or somehow focused on certain titles or categories because as I said some post it happens and some it does not. Hoping my content creates that level of interest someday but for now, thanks for this post to help me understand what's going on.
Thanks for the post!!