Mining Steemit With a Teaspoon
As you may know, most cryptocurrencies are mined; such miners require investment in hardware and electricity in return for verifying blocks on the blockchain. Miners are paid for every block processed with coins from that cryptocurrency.
Steem is slightly different in that we have witnesses that are voted in by stakeholders (you and I) and they do the job of miners while keeping nearly all the Steem within the social media community.
However, there is another way to "mine" Steem and that is through repeated and excessive self-voting and voting-circles. There is no need to invest in hardware and there is no "useful work" done such as verifying blocks. Just keep clicking one's own posts and, even faster, self-vote on spam comments. You can even use bots to ease the pain of clicking by hand.
But Steemit is a social media platform. Do we want to turn it into a mining town, with most of us left to run a lemonade stand? The current rules allow this to happen, so if we wish to avoid going down this road we need to seek rule changes. This recent article shows how the voting power changes with every self-vote. I don't wish to repeat everything in that article, so please read it.
The best metaphor I can think of at the moment is that the proposed new rules make mining less profitable the more one does it. Think of a self-voting miner at 100% with a large spade. The next time that person votes the spade has turned into a trowel; the next time it turns into a spoon. Very quickly, the self-voter is left with mining with a teaspoon!
We cannot stop this behaviour, but mining with a teaspoon is not so profitable. At some point, the self-voting miner will go home and come back the next day to use his spade. The process continues, but it limits the amount of Steem generated outside of the social media community. That is the essence of the formulas discussed in the previous article.
Thank you for this.
Illustrating the diminishing returns on votes is something that I like to explain to new members - back when I was greeting them to make my comments quotas. :cP Many users found it useful though so I'd not be 'terribly' against the idea of a similar 'helpful' bot in future.
As you mention - abuse is rife however - and self-voting does nobody any favours.
Thanks. Although your first issue can also be resolved with a more informative dashboard.
At the moment, self-voting favours the self-voter. The data shows that this is rife and a planned strategy.
BTW a few resteems would help the discussion! This is not aimed at @pathforger but to everyone. Thanks in advance!
Absolutely. The user interface of Steemit requires a better User Interface. It would be nice if a mouse-over of the up-vote button even shows the amount of voting power reduced (and how long it'll take to regenerate for that one up-vote).
On big concern that I have about self-upvoting is that it abuses the reward pool of the post. If the first up-vote is supposed to get so-and-so amount and the first up-vote is by the poster him or herself then they may be putting some reward towards the post - but they are also stealing reward from the 2nd up-vote who would have been first.
In my opinion a simple mechanism here would be to tweak the 30 minute rule. If the up-voter is the author then a % of the upvote goes directly to the curation reward pool rather than the author him or herself. I feel that it needs more teeth though.
Ultimately we live in a situation where those with cheap content who up-vote themselves and/ or buy votes from others will almost invariably get ahead of those who post good content.
None of these measures have a 'backfire' mechanism to discourage undeserved self/ bot up-votes.
If there were then things would be more interesting.
P.S. I try to go easy on the resteems because Steemit's user interface fails to set posts apart from resteems - and so my posts would quickly get buried if I resteemed half of what I wanted to. ;cP I will resteem this though.
Thank you, and true about resteems - as part of one of my projects I find myself resteeming far more than I used to and my own articles get buried quickly.
A self-vote on a post does not count towards curation rewards. Look at any article on steemdb.com (just replace the "steemit" with "steemdb" in the URL) and all self-votes have a Weight of zero - that Weight is a measure of curation rewards for that post.
Great idea
Thanks for your support!
It's impossibile maybe, but the self-upvote idea it's good
Thanks, although I don't think it is impossible, but we shall see.
Why dont we just ban self upvotes, I didnt see an explanation of why that isnt possible. If the platform lets me do it, why cant I do it?
Because it is too easy to open another account and vote between yourself and your sock-puppet. For those who wish to profit from that mechanism, there is no real barrier at all. Hence why my proposed new rules treat voting-for-self the same way as voting-for-other. If you find a new author and wish to give 2 or 3 or 4 upvotes quickly, that can still be done, but if that creeps up to 8 or 9 or 10 then that becomes less and less profitable if those votes are purely profit-seeking.
And yet it is not difficult to highlight suspiciously high vote-exchange rates between particular users. :c) It is for this reason that it would (hopefully) be unviable to just create 100 bots and self-vote between them.
Yes, that is all doable, but what are the consequences? We can see the start of this already. Someone has to take the responsibility as "enforcer", the only current deterrent is flagging; so we could end up with a spam-war, vote-war, flag-war scenario. All of it ugly and wasteful.
I would like to see a more elegant and universal solution.
As I have said many times, such behaviour cannot be totally eradicated; it can be managed to limit damage to the whole ecosystem. Rather like governments trying to limit drug abuse (although the issues get dark very quickly, take any other "banned substance" as an example).
Yes I see what you are saying, but right now I can operate a sock-puppet and self vote as well, its a double whammy
Doesn't help doing both as would have to split SP between the two, so same income. It can be a way to remain "under the radar" but makes no difference in income.
Sure, but the sock puppet route is way harder than simply clicking the upvote button on your own post, only dedicated bad actors will do the former, whereas uneducated new users may easily do the latter. You also get newbie SP delegation on sock puppets. My point is, if the community broadly agree that self upvoting is wrong, just disable it.
Interesting and I feel we will get to a better solution with this.
I hope so - thanks a lot for your comment. I also hope that more people come and express their support.
This is an attention economy. Relegating our attention to robots belies the purpose of the community. If we're going to let robots do the voting, if we're just going vote for our own posts, we might as well turn on the TV and check out.
The purpose of the attention economy, near as I can tell, is to encourage people to interact and correspond with each other. Steemit is an attempt to promote social interaction online while reminding us to be polite, even if we can hide behind the veil of anonymity.
I'd prefer a community worthy of sharing my ideas with, than a website run by voting robots, each vying for the vote with code rather than the feelings behind the hands that type each and every character on the screen.
Thanks, the issue of bots is more complex and I would suggest a different solution. For example, the MSP bots try to aggregate support for minnows, yet it can be argued that the bots on their own still do little to foster followers and communication.
Those bots that are merely automated voting-circles would be affected by the changes I propose. As their income drops then there will be more available to spread around the human community that values the content and interactions.
This is one reason why my own MAP initiative aims to help fewer people but in a deeper way - or so I hope. I don't think MAP would work with 100 people per week being voted on; although if I get to 6 people per day that would be about 180 a month.
nice blog and knowledgeable content really nice
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