AbuseBoosting: Trending, Voting Services & Farming - A Diplomatic Approach
Voting Services And Trending
One of the hottest issues in town right now is the trending via voting services of posts of questionable quality, relevance or importance as well as posts in which the effort put into them is disproportional with the purchased rewards.
The voting services are a great way to allow new quality content producing users out-of-the-box access to the trending page without having to wait to be discovered by the existing curation guilds nor having to build rapport with the select network of stake holders.
While some quality content is being boosted to trending by these services that wouldn't otherwise get that visibility, it is also true that these services are being (ab)used to boost a lot of low quality content to trending that wouldnt otherwise be there either. In short, the result is that now the trending page is more severely broken than before the voting services existed, even worse than it already was.
If you were here before the voting services you might be thinking
that the trending top is looking very similar nowadays than it did then, and I agree, but the trending is not just the top 50 places in it, in the medium reward posts part of the trending spectrum, say 10-50$, the abuse of these services is much stronger, since most purchased votes fall within that range. What you see in the top 50 of trending is just the tip of the abuse iceberg.
Fixed ROI Voting Services and Farming
The most blatant and severe type of abuse within the voting service realm happens with whats called fixed ROI services, those that return a fixed profitability, as is the case with @minnowbooster and @smartmarket which have a fixed profitability of around 200%.
Since @smartsteem has a whitelist most of the abuse routes around them
and goes to MB
The sistematic exploitation of such services with pseudo-content is called farming, since a few good examples are worth their weight in gold I am talking about things like this:
https://steemit.com/@leftbank
https://steemit.com/@photofan
https://steemit.com/@lisaocampo
https://steemit.com/@paradaise
In other words, from very low effort content, to copy paste, to outright plagiarism systematically boosted to 40+. You might think those are picked examples that dont reflect the true state of affairs.
If that's the case I would invite you then to the live feed of @minnowbooster's votes: https://steemdb.com/@minnowbooster/votes
so that you can see it for yourself.
In the last 24 hours you can find this post upvoted to $53
https://steemit.com/health/@lisaocampo/the-truth-about-the-so-called-superfoods
This is a plagiarist that I already reported to @minnowbooster
here is the source for that last particular post:
https://www.thealternativedaily.com/6-superfoods-to-stop-wasting-money-on-and-what-to-buy-instead/
Plagiarism barely spun to avoid cheetah detection.
Incorporating Curation into Voting Services
The solution to the abuse of voting services is to incorporate
curation mechanisms into them that allow them to conduct their business while increasing and incentivizing the platform's quality of content. Mechanisms like whitelists, tiers and others that I will delve into in the next post on this subject.
The MinnowGrant
So, lets apply that last principle to the concrete case of MinnowBooster, the reality is that, despite their best efforts MB at this point is so permeated by abusers that if they were to blacklist them all they will end up in red ink, unable to sell the votes for all the delegations they have.
So what would be a solution that is a win-win for everyone involved?
Incorporating curation at a "grant level": A contest or application process is created to select say 50 winners of a grant for quality content creating minnows, let's call it the MinnowGrant. The grant consists of a loan of 50-100 dollars, allocated via a vote to the winner, to be used to promote their posts via MB for a certain amount of time.
The winners of the grants recirculate the main capital of such loan back to MB boosting the next post and so on, keeping only the profit and paying the loan back from the first profits. In this manner the people delegating their SP to MB get to sell their votes, the quality of content increases, is incentivized and rewarded, while farming abuse decreases, everybody wins.
Regards,
Walden.
I'm glad that people are finally talking about this. There's been some great posts from @krnel, @greer184, and @tarazkp about this lately too.
People don't want to hear it, but I think the automated nature of the bots is a massive part of the problem. If there were more humans checking what got upvoted by these services, then maybe fewer terrible posts would benefit from them. But this would effectively ruin the bitbot industry. Worse, it would make bot-owners or their employees as gatekeepers of acceptable content.
That, and the whole vote-selling SP-delegation industry drives the economy towards rent-seeking, which reduces new wealth production, reduces growth, and may be ultimately economically unsustainable.
It's almost like paying for votes is a bad idea. But no, all we get is bot-owners whining that they don't make that much from their businesses, and that code is law.
Although @walden's proposition is certainly better than the current state of affairs, I am inclined to concur with your point of view.
Bid bots impede Steem reaching it's full potential. Until the bot owners or other whales with the capability to do something about it realize that, we will never get there no matter how many band aids we put over the problem. (Blacklist, whitelist etc)
TL;DR: Stop selling votes and CURATE like you are supposed to!
Personally I think voting bots are a good thing, because they can be provide a profitable system for good content and allow quality content creators to builld their account. The problem we have now is that bots with a fixed positive roi attract abusers (a lot from 3rd world countries) with systems for upvoting shit content, making Steemit less attractive and in the long run could end up ruining those bots in the process.
I think human curation is the key part and I also believe that being a gatekeeper of quality content is the biggest responsibility bot owners have.
Of course everybody who has a soft spot for Steemit in their hearts should pitch in there, you cannot expect bot owners to go through all post manually themselves. There should be better systems for upvoted abuser content and bot owners should act on given information more thn they do now.
The quality of the content is important. Having to manually check that your bot isn't upvoting shit is time consuming, and time is SBD.
But it's more than that. The easiest way to make money now is not to write one awesome post and get organic votes, it's to write 10 crap posts, and then use the more profitable bots to upvote them. Likewise, if you have a decent amount of SP, it's much easier to generate a return on this by delegating it to a bot than to actually curate anything.
The people with the SP control who gets attention and money. When you pay a bidbot, you are 'renting' a place where you can get attention. The don't have to produce anything new, they just sit there and the money rolls in. As I've said elsewhere:
The problem is that while we can all potentially rent attention to creators by delegating to bots, if everyone does this, then nothing new will be produced, and the steem economy will implode. It's like having a housing market where everyone is trying to make money as a landlord, but there are no tenants. Something will have to give.
If all that accumulated SP is not worth anything, because all the creators are gone, then it will be the end.
Of course, the smart whales and bot-owners will be cashing out well before that happens. And SMT's and communities might help kick that economic can down the road. But one way or another, the overall pattern of what is happening here with bots needs to be curtailed.
I wish it was so. There are a lot of great posts who never get to see the light of day. For somebody who actually puts a lot of effort in making good posts, it's very frustrating to see all that work generating next to nothing. No only because of the money (time is not only SBD) but very much also because it gives them their content is not appreciated.
Voting bots can be a great asset in helping good content recognized and giving quality authors some much needed wind in their backs. In an ideal world this would indeed be in the hands of actual commited people upvoting quality content.
But this is not an ideal world and Steemit is as much a business network as it is a social network, so imo bots hold the best cards of taking this important task upon themselves.
Creators will come if you build them a profitable environment where it pays off to keep posting good stuff. If we don't fix the abuse problem we will all loose out. Whales most of all. As i said, i don't think bots are the problem but the possible solution. And for them to work properly a better curation system is essential.
I don't know if I've got your intended meaning correctly, but I assume. What you are telling is surely true and the information given accurate. What is missing in my opinion is some solution or at least some outlook for other possibilities. As I am sure that you've already thought about this, maybe you can write something about that.
Even though you flagged me you have strong points and great ideas! (New follower) I was using bidbots now just minnowbooster & smartmarket & want to quit but how do minnows breakout and find supporters fast? I commented on tons, post yet busy and maybe educated wrongly how to get noticed. My content is sort of like a log or diary of daily events so I thought I am searching for a few more fans to get a few more upvotes and that I was pulling from haejins rewards. Will try to stop promoting all together but if the investors and millions leave steeit what happens to the price? Shouldn't the haejins & circle jerks, plagiarism, spam & scammers be the #1 focus?
Even though your still flagging & bullying me you got a follower and upvoted as your my first "fuck you" reply 👌
Wow! great post walden.
Your information is right about Voting Services and Trending.
Thanks for discuss with us.Thanks for sharing.