How to increase security of steemit: multiple accounts abuse.
Hello Steemit Friends,
I didn't read nothing about "multiple accounts" in Steemit Whitepaper and in Steemit Bluepaper ...so I do assume is not prohibited.
For "multiple accounts" I mean the same user who hold multiple accounts with fake name.
Don't you think that people can abuse a system if there's possibility? For example investing huge sums of money in several "fake" account and drain the rewards by upvoting his posts?
Ok, i just know the answer: YES.
There are a lot of scam account from the same user that do it daily... Some other users try to fight against this form of abuse, but this phenomenon is too broad.
In these days where SBD price is higher than usual, it's possible to see people who don't care about the Steemit community at all because they think only to a personal profit.. unaware that this behaviour might be harmful to the whole community.
For that reason, I see an urgent need to rectify this situation so as to provide to fair users the right to participate to healthy financial management. We need to take countermeasures and this is inevitable.
BUT HOW?
First step could be verifying the users by some real-name identifiers (ID - Passport...)
Second step could be charging users for creating accounts, for example not more gving a starting delegation but asking them to invest a small amount of STEEM.
This two steps both have problems; in fact verifing the users means someone must works to control documents (who will pay them?) and users can easily circumvent the rule by using the identifier from family members or friends to create multiple account.
Charging users for new account could help to eliminate multiple account created by people who don't look for profit but have different purposes (e.s. spam, contests), but if the goal is to make profits, they don't care of the cost to create extra accounts, they will be happy to pay for it if their profit will be considerably higher than costs.
So, what we can do for eliminate this problem?
We can improve our work in detecting "multiple accounts".
We have to find out the duplicated accounts and more importantly, do this regularly and automatically.
My brother worked in a security team of an important italian website and yesterday at dinner told me about some algorithms who can reduce exsisting multiple accounts and prevent from creation of new ones by 60%.
Nevertheless, he told me that some manual intervention is necessary because there are always false alarms.
It's not much, but it might be a first approach to the problem.
What's your view on that?
photo source 1
Very true. Really nothing much we can do to prevent multiple accounts. If complicate verifications are needed to register, it may deter real user doing it.
Good Points, Today itself while looking newly created posts, I came across some posts which are welcoming 2018 (There were posts with 2018 in the post image) and there were few other posts with the same content but with a guy's photos (which was also getting repeated across multiple posts).
This is exactly what I'm talking about..
Thanks @coolguy123
I agree with some type of security to prevent the accounts. However some people's multiple accounts do have value. I can't believe I said that lol but it's true. Some witnesses create another account for promotion say like minnow support project. The problem I see with sign ups having to pay is we then would be limiting the amount of sign ups to only those who truly want to invest or already have knowledge of the site. It would be hard to get someone skeptical of the site to join if they had to pay
Hi @hendrix22, you made some valid points.
I agree with you that in some case multiple accounts are necessary.
In fact as my brother told me
Regarding the "charge" for new sign up i agree with you. In any case it will not solve the problem, because as i told in the post
You're right again. Even if it cost money to start an account they would invest in there own scam
Let's think about it. If the existence of multiple accounts is not prohibited, how can you deal with this? Where the bigger problem is flooding spam. It makes more sense to deal with accounts that publish 20 or more posts per day, although this is also not prohibited. And the freedom of action on Steem is one of the main virtues. Otherwise, we are no better than Yutoub and Facebook. The question turned out without a solution ...
There is still time to change, Steemit is in beta version. I think steemit has a chance to change, but we should be the first to believe in this change.
@cranium
What you are doing is exactly what miti is talking about. creating multiple accounts to abuse the Steemit reward system...
All post take 1 second to make, get upvoted by each of the accounts and heavily abuse the busy.org upvotes. Because of members like you, busy might stop their upvote bot and people like me have to take measures when organising contests which makes them less welcoming for new members.
This kind of behavior is exactly the problem of steemit we need to find an answer for.
The way you have the freedom to create multiple accounts, other members on steemit have the freedom flag all your posts and return the earnings to the reward pool. The problem is that there is no real incentive to do this right now which allows this to happen.
This can be argued long, and as practice shows, for 1s
create a post is not realistic. To all other, I already explained that these are the accounts of my relatives. Do you think my family will vote for me?
Obviously I was using a figure of speech when talking about the 1 second to make a post. Taking it as an argument and saying a post takes more than a second to make is completely beyond the point and you know this.
As for it being the accounts of your relatives, you can't actually think that anyone would take that argument serious. You might have used their phone number to create the accounts, but they are obviously yours. I would even say if in any case they were accounts from your relatives and they were making the posts, it would still be clear abuse of the system because of the intend behind them.
You understand now that entering contests with these multiple accounts was not proper behavior. In a very similar was it's not not proper behavior to abuse the free busy upvotes by using their tag. The more 'empty' posts are being made from double accounts to get the busy upvotes, the more likely it is they will quit this service because it's getting abused and real users will be the ones that get punished for it.
In many respects you are right. And I seriously thought about stopping it. But for a moment, let's forget about me. How you can punish the user, if similar actions are not a violation of Steem rules. By the way, there are no rules at all, which makes it so unique in comparison with other social networks. Good luck to you and good.
Let's say there is a big beloved steemit poster (take @sweetsssj as example) that has a big following and puts a lot of time and effort in making good posts and earns big rewards. If I were to buy 3 million steem power and dedicate that to absolutely destroy that user by 100% downvoting every single post for no reason other that I don't like so much the posts and don't agree with the rewards. Doing this would not go against any rules on Steemit. So doing something that doesn't violate the rules on steemit does not automatically make it ok to do.
The way to solve it eventually will be to step in as a community which will always be bigger then the individuals. If that situation I describes were to happen, I'm sure the community would step in and make the posts earn even more despite the huge downvote.
Although I am was an example of this, I agree with you. Good luck to you and good.
For as far as I understand, curation on steemit gives rewards for finding underappreaciated content often leading to curation trails. If there was a similar system that rewarded people who find content that is abusing the system it could solve a lot. Part of the SP from the creators should be delegated to accounts that focus on putting part of the given rewards back to the system in a similar way utopian got SP to reward contributors.
Unfortunately it's not that easy, first there need to be clear rules of what is considered abuse and what not which is a very tricky subject. Secondly there needs to be proof. I'm sure algorithms can do an excellent job in this but similar to @cheetah there will probably also be many cases where it's unjustified.
I've been calling for a steemit constitution for some time. I've been told that SMTs could fix that. My vision for the future is that STEEM would be like Ethereum or social media specialized version of EOS. Steemit will become a proof of concept product like Bitcoin. I've written about one use case here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@vimukthi/kidsteem-a-social-media-platform-that-is-100-safe-for-kids-powered-by-smt-with-a-bit-of-inspiration-from-dash-and-dogecoin
I've recieved some rewards from @steemcleaners for reporting spam. We should expand and refine such system and before all of it, declare a clear constitution of few short pages on what gets flagged.
@miti very helpful, thanks for sharing
You're welcome.