Short note on my involvement with @smackdown.kitty
The story
After a discussion with @l0k1 about self voting, we decided to collaborate on an experimental bot to counter these self votes in a way similar to the Whale Experiment.
I have already expressed my ambivilence towards that experiment, but basically I thought it was an interesting way to use their stake and they certainly got a conversation moving.
We really have @abit and @smooth to thank for the main change of HF 19, linear reward curves for posts and comments. It was something I was really in favor of, especially as a way for minnow to actually have a bit of collective flagging power instead of being easily overwhelmed by whales flags.
HF 19 flaw
However there is a flaw with the completely linear reward curve - a huge incentive to self vote.
This has been highlighted by several users, but here's a small selection:
- @biophil in Spam self-voting alert!
- @eroche in The Economics of Upvoting Your Own Post
- @schattenjaeger in HF19: Is This What We Want? (Spam Self Vote Galore)
With all these the comments are as interesting as the main post, worth the read.
Proposal for community based action
@l0k1 made an announcement post earlier of our intention to create a bot which will down vote self votes to negate the effect of this one vote, similarly to the whale experiment.
Note that we will not down vote accounts with SP < 1000.
Preparations are underway on the coding side and an account @smackdown.kitty has been registered. Check out @l0k1 's post here which has many more details.
The dirt on @personz
Let me explain my own previous self voting.
I used to self vote my own comments to get visibility, higher to the top of the list, and as a rule of thumb I'd do this if I got some engagement with the comment and got a thread going.
I also self voted my own posts by default, as it is the default for the steemit.com Submit a Story posting method. I honestly didn't think twice about it or really notice it before HF 19. However I really did notice it after, when after I posted there was already a few dollars on the post (when my voting power was high enough 😅).
I think this in particular is a problem, that the interface defaults to self voting. I have created an issue on GitHub for it and even made the change as a pull request (it is a super small change to the code).
I am now going to stop self voting after we have tested the bot, because we'll be testing on our own accounts 🙂
Community support
Unlike @abit and @smooth, @l0k1 and I cannot bank roll the bot with SP on our own as we are not large enough stakeholders, so this project will not go ahead without some community support.
So if you support this, let us know. I know we're going to be getting a lot of comments which criticize the project, so if you agree please speak up. Please delegate some SP to @smackdown.kitty if you can, you can always revoke it if you change your mind.
If you are against it, let's discuss it (if you know me you know I like this). I jumped on this because I do feel it is an issue and I do not think down voting / flagging is in some way wrong. It is a tool to be used for abuse. I consider this to be abuse and I want to promote this issue to the top of concerns so that we will ultimately see a systems level solution.
Potential solutions
It was pointed out on @l0k1 's post that no solutions were provided. We are just in the first steps and most of the other posts about this issue do not lay out a straightforward solution either. I think this is because it is complicated and there is a tug-of-war here between the benefits of the linear reward curve (which are truly great) and the incentive to vote on one's own posts.
I think that disabling self voting is the simplest option. Why not do it? I'm not the sharpest pencil in the pack, but I can't see a reason to not disallow it. I would really love to hear a counter to this.
That's how the steem system works. If the developers didn't want the self-upvote feature, they could have simply removed from the beginning. Creating such a bot is not a good idea, it means a few people with high steem power will start policing the rest of us. Where's the freedom in that? Besides, no matter the system, there will always be a few abusers, and it's up to the readers to decide whether an upvoted comment is good or not, and they should choose to upvote the appropriate comments with meaningful content. I upvote all my posts, nothing wrong with that, and I upvoted one of my comments because I felt it would benefit others.
Policing the steemit community is bad, I saw what happened recently with @el-mago and I felt bad for the guy. Although he made some good points, some would say his arrogance got the best of him. So please let's not spark another war with this self-voting thing.
That's not how it works. There have been 19 hard forks for a reason, to update the original idea to make it (heopfully) work better. Steem is using good software practices here and iterating after testing in the wild.
Also there is a variety of opinion on what works and what is best to implement. The devs and top witnesses need to reach a consensus on this so we can move forward together. You are too (Steemit) young to remember this but there was a huge discussion with hardfork 17 (and 18) which was very divisive.
The devs and witnesses listen to the community. If things are causing enough pain for users they will be fixed. I think self voting is one of those things and because it is not directly observable we need to make a larger effort to show it.
First and foremost, it is the freedom of every user, big and small, to use their stake as they please. We "police" each other and social norms emerge from behavior which is tacitly approve by not being flagged. In other words, if someone is acting badly it is up to other users to flag them. It is not some kind of new thing.
This is contrary to my position. I think you, and all of us, should let other people decide if the posts are deserving of rewards. I would like to see it remove at the blockchain level, so that the choice is removed entirely, but until that day the bot is designed to promote restraint in self voting to the best of our power.
Regarding @el-mago, that's the way it works. People should step in when someone is "abusing" (however they define it) and if the action against them goes too far some other people should step in. That is the independent, free balance you get here. I for one like that.
We're still considering things and will make a decision on the plan in a few days. But I see nothing here which makes me reconsider.
Addition: I just read some of the @el-mago story. Honestly I cannot support this person or their actions. It wasn't arrogance, though that will always go against you, it was the simple fact of posting unattributed content for their own gain. Regardless of your views on copyright, most people here feel that at least attribution is required and will down vote otherwise - which is their prerogative!
What? smackdown.kitty downvoted you on this comment!
Yes it did! A beta version of it has been running for two days now but only targeting me, @l0k1 and @the-ego-is-you, though gathering stats on everyone else too. I'll be shutting it down in a few hours for us to contemplate the results.
By the way you can see what see has been up to here.
But is that your only comment on my reply?!
Ah ok. Well thanks for the reply, it answered all my concerns. But as you mentioned, devs and witnesses should reach a consensus on this issue in the next hardfork. Also, just to be clear, your bot targets self-upvoted new posts or comments? There's a difference. If I spend hours writing an original post (which I do), I deserve to upvote it when I post it (it's the Steemit default setting anyways), but for comments that's another thing, it's true there are people who do nothing than that, they post a short comment and upvote themselves. Leave it up to the users to decide if they want to flag or mute them. On the other hand, perhaps the person is commenting with a very good answer that deserves more attention; if a bot steps in and automatically flags it, it would hurt those who are commenting with relevant information that benefits the rest. That's why I'm against such bots, because they're not smart enough to discriminate between good answers and bad ones. UNLESS they're called upon to do their work when there's repetitive abuse, like @cheetah and @steamcleaners. You call 911 when there's trouble, you don't let the police patrol and beat up everybody indiscriminately 24/7!
I strongly disagree that you "deserve" to upvote a post you authored. Honestly it should not be for each of us to decide the value of our work - we simply cannot and should not be put in the position of either supporting our own work completely or having the good graces to use our votes on others.
Of course we will support our work in whatever we can but that should not be at the expense of others and clearly here there is a trade off.
But in any case, the bot only targets comments (by our current plan) for exactly the reason that the steemit.com interface sets it as a default, which is quite foolish in my mind. Note that I submitted an issue highlighting this and even made the change to the code myself, though I have yet to hear anything about it from any other dev.
The bot does not care if the answer was good or bad and neither do we. All self voting is selfish. The bot will not flag with power greater than their own self vote so it will not affect the rewards other people have granted them (or the down votes on those rewards for that matter). If the answer is good it will be reflected in the votes it garners from other people. After all this is a social network. I believe that is very evident.
When you say "leave it up to the users to decide...", we are those users! The bot works as it is created to and to our instruction, I should know, I am responsible for coding it. Don't make the mistake that because @l0k1 and I are witnesses that we are in any way official enforcers of the system. We act on our own behalf and on behalf of those who vote for us.
We are not the police! We use whatever stake we have available to influence Steem towards something that we feel is the best for us all, to the best of our understanding. I reject the police analogy, we are citizens. Down votes are not violence, they are appropriate non-violent disagreement.
During elections, the candidates vote for themselves don't they? It's a perfectly legal thing to do, there's nothing selfish about that. And I think Steemit reflects this democratic idea (maybe that's one of the reasons for its success?). Besides, all users have regenerating voting power that they can spend on themselves and the others, it's not like there's a shortage of voting power.
Ok, technically you're not the police, a more appropriate analogy would be a vigilante 😉
Have you seen the storm that happened in @el-mago's case? To me it's an illustration of downvoting turning really ugly. And I'd hate to see this happen too often. Peace and love for everyone, I wish Gandhi was here to make it happen.
There might be more of a conversation about self voting in politics if (1) votes were public and, (2) the weight of a vote were multiplied by ones wealth or perhaps even tax bill as @l0k1 suggested.
On Steem we have a public vote so we are under more scrutiny for our voting habits, as we should be. And it is not one person / one vote here, votes are stake (i.e. steem power) weighted. If politicians were wealthy (ahem, Donald Trump) then their votes might eclipse many thousands or even millions of regular peoples' votes. I can't imagine that not starting a serious discussion, or happening in an parallel universe.
That the power regenerates is besides the point. The rewards pool rewards will have been distributed unfairly. Once these newly mined Steem (and SBD) are gone, they are gone.
Vigilante perhaps, but again I reject to connotation of violence. When down votes are used as a bullying tactic, okay I'll give you that, they are very negative and if someone is down voting everything you post then people need to step up to defend you. My point is that down votes, which obviously negative, are appropriate in many if not most cases. We can't ban people from saying bad things about each other, nor should we, just because it is not nice. Disagreement is something to be facilitated, and as you point out, curbed if disproportionate.
Peace and love only get us so far. Nothing makes me roll my eyes harder than the idea that if we just loved each other all our problems would go away. It is insanely naive.
I'm with you )
As I allready said before
This! Yes, the other issue is that many cases, whales are not aspiring writers, and are not hoping to better their financial situation through engagement with the platform, just simply watching it tick up points from delegating or giving a posting key to someone who has a good track record.
this is going to be interesting
grabs popcorn and follows
Test self voting my own comment at 1% 😅
And a second one