RE: PROPOSAL - How to DEFINE and FIGHT the BAD - Create a COMMITTEE with STRONG ARM to Support Creation of a GREAT STEEMIT CULTURE
You know...there were once protocols that somewhat protected against the spamming and self-voting issue. However, they have been eliminated with the last few hard forks.
These issues of self-voting aren't an issue with the self-vote itself. Users are going to vote for themselves, whether it's with their one account or from a number of alt accounts. There's no way around that. The problem is this:
You can now allocate yourself a relatively fixed and higher amount of rewards from the reward pool with your own votes. They do not require a single corroborating vote, let alone any semblance of consensus over rewards allocation. The concept of "popularity" or "rewarding" good content is gone. It's not necessary in order for any individual to receive high payouts - and the 4x voting power compounds this problem.
What makes this worse is that spamming has become much more lucrative, even for small stakeholders who have no vested interest in Steem/Steemit. And with the 4-post reward limit/penalty already removed, it essentially guarantees that users can spam and earn as much as they possibly can...without a single interaction with another person.
Self-voting isn't the issue. Removing almost all of the abuse-mitigation protocols is. The last hard fork, in my opinion, has made this place a lot less "social" and a lot more scammy. We don't need a new brigade of police and downvoters. What we likely need is a roll back of hard fork 19 (and to revisit the 4-post penalty) and to find better solutions for the stake distribution issues and the reward algorithms. Hard fork 19 was clearly not the right answer.
Yes, it's a lot more scammy and I've noticed also, over the last few days, many of the regular posters in my feed have slowed right down. A few days I almost felt like quiting when a new user flagged a few of my posts, and one that I'd re-steemed!, for pointing out that his posts were composite copy and pastes. But is this such a big issue when the major #rewardpoolrapes go on much as before. I guess it is, because Steemit becomes a less interesting place to hang out.
With regards to specific HF points:
I wonder how much of that has to do with the price drop. We all saw what happened last fall when prices fell too low for users. They simply left...only to return when the price climbed over $1.00, then $2.00 again. I'm not sure that it had much to do with any scammy nature of the platform.
Yes. When you're exposed to scammy shit and #rewardpoolrape for so long, it definitely drains you and makes you wonder why so many people continue to believe that this is some "revolutionary" platform. It certainly has potential, but it seems that STINC doesn't care about the perception of this place and not many of the other larger stakeholders actually care to use their power to address obvious "abuses" and outright garbage content that is showcased on the landing/trending page every single day.
And I made a comment in chat last night about the "community" on Steemit...along the lines of it being mostly fake politeness and interactions for the explicit purpose of simply getting more upvoters. There isn't much "real talk" about the platform because if you step out of the sunshine and rainbows march, you will most likely see an immediate/complete loss of support, especially from those larger stakeholders. It's as if a whisper of criticism would be enough to kill the platform, so few people even want to entertain it for fear of their "investments" taking a dive.
If that's the case, this place is doomed anyway.
Exactly. And this has been pointed out to STINC many times before - to not make more than one major change to the economics/rewards at a time. They never listen. They claim that "It can't be done" or "We don't think it will be an issue to change multiple protocols." Obviously, they've been wrong...almost every time.
Voila!!!! Stay polite and let the friends vote for each other 👻
Yeah, it's a little weird how everybody seems to be on happy pills here. I'm new so it was cool at first. Now it's starting to sink in. But even on the unbearable FB, who is going to 'like' you for bashing someone else? Anyway, the free Steem is cool. Now that I've been here and kinda see how things work there is no way in hell I'd buy Steem on Polo et al.
Happy pills Yap yap! True that:)
You don't need to buy. I never did but I traded and exchanged what I made here through posting articles and curating for over one year.
The whole dynamic on the platform changed too much and it's not pleasant anymore. It's just my feeling. People even holding back voting like myself because I cannot vote as usual, without draining my voting power. I am generous as well as spontanious and don't like to do the math like so many others do. I enjoy to be generous. HF19 is not what it seemed like at first. Let's move on please?
I don't like to pay for whale votes either. It's weird even though it helps me personally to get at least a few powerful votes and all this after 1 year on steemit? Must be a joke or my content is really that bad.
I feel sorry for minnows
How can the platform keep their loyal people here ? I wonder for the first time and I have been through many Hardforks
It's a feeling shared by many other people. You are definitely not alone.
I don't know, but constantly screwing them over with bad hard forks and "experiments" isn't the answer. I can tell you that. It seems to me that each change does more to drive people away and attract spammers/scammers than actually retain the good users. And it seems like the only reason to invest in SP anymore is to upvote yourself and cash out the rewards...because interaction is pretty meaningless/unnecessary and mostly just spam, cheerleading, and fake politeness.
How revolutionary this place is!
I hear you !!!!
I would rather have 20 votes than 10 in a day.
Thank you for your comment with good insights in the matter.
I agree with you on most what you state: self-voting not being an issue, the 4x more power on a vote not what the community needed and increased the self-voting behaviour, the removal of the limit of number of post per day opening the door to lot of spam.
I however disagree with you we do not need a committee. I think we need a team of people that will address the topics that really needs to be addressed.
For instance the debates on what needs to go into the software or taken out are now quite distributed and there is no community voting done to these changes. If we want to survive as a community than at least we shall introduce a mechanism for anybody in our community to vote for the changes or not. This shall not be left to the witnesses, or to STINC, but everyone of us shall have the ability to vote for these changes.
I also think we need more collective approach on fighting the wrong. When done more collectively (through the proposed committee and strong arm) will reduce the time spend by those individuals like yourself, who try and fight the wrong, whilst it'll create more transparency community wide on what is done to fight the wrong. Such committee will have maximum exposure, especially when it gets it places in the Steemit UI.
It sounds to me like your views are quite similar to this! You may consider joining forces. However, they are considered temporary albeit necessary measures.
Thank you for pointing this out. Good to see others are creating something to fight abuse. Although my views are similar, my approach is different though. smackdown-kitty's actions are not based on community voted abuse but determined by the people behind smackdown-kitty. That is something I do not like, since other groups may start fighting against what smackdown-kitty does. We then end up in the community wars that we had to deal with in the past already. But yeh, it is good that we have more members in our community who want to do things!
I think if a large number of users can vote for something such as HF19.1 then these disparate initiative may be put to rest. It is also good to hear from those who have experienced Steemit for much longer than many on here. I wrote an allegorical piece about this process being iterative as a prelude to my longer list of ideas. Subtlety doesn't always work!
Community voting for changes shall be enabled, that is for sure something I truly believe in.
I'll give you my 0.04 for that right there. ;-)
That's a valid point! We don't need more fights like before and for sure no more experiments. I like the idea to become a community where we all have a voice and help together to make important decisions.
Oh and yes I also use @booster and @randowhale. Is this bad but what else to do!? One whole year and still struggling. I said it before that I am sorry for minnows. My only advantage is that I have followers because of more time I had on that platform.
Using these services in itself is not bad, I'm just wondering what it in the end will deliver as a net result. Last couple of days I did not test them, and I generally tested them on a post less than a day old. Indirect, using these services may also limit votes from other community members. I notice that I sometimes do not vote for a post that I kinda like because all these self vote votes where gathered. Wondering how many other Steemians act similarly.
What bothers me that everybody can use those services even for #shitposts so the concept to create quality content will vanish just like my motivation to create more interesting articles. Who cares anyways other than your loyal followers?
Hardly anyone of your followers reads your post - that is reality - vote gone down, people left, scammers came in. Quality is only on trending lol -
And that is why I tried to voice my opinion that I don't like all this self-curating what is going on right now. I see users requesting the booster service for ever single comment the make! 10s of requests to booster in less than an hour! So lets join hands and start changing the community for the good by creating all the missing things we need to have: committee, vote system for important decisions, mechanisms to get the voice of the community heard and turned into referendum like questions, implementation of whatever the community wants including the fight against abuse etc etc etc a lot of work to do, that requires humans to come of with the ideas, shape them, materialise them etc etc
For those important decision, we need to get a voting system agreed and implemented. I opt for same vote weight per account regardless of how much SP is behind. When we know the accounts that has same users behind them, block all of these account minus 1 from voting. I'm sure we can think of more stuff to make sure we will not have skewed voting.
Yeah, and it seems that they are only interested in fighting "self-upvoters," but not addressing whether or not the upvoting is actually "abusive." In a recent post, they said that they will tackle the four most "vicious self-upvotes" per day. What is "vicious" and what is the criteria/data used to identify and combat this arbitrary concept?
I think the members behind smackdown-kitty are not bad at all, but indeed, it is not clear what they want to do. Then they also had to post that something went wrong with their bot. And foremost, it is not with the community consent, and that will only start wars again. I opt for community voted fights and then 100% transparency to whatever fights are voted for. So, we shall start with some technology where we enable the community to vote for whatever we want to get a vote for. A central discussion board is required since discussing in posts will get many messages lost, it is too distributed. A central notice board is required as well. A process needs to be put in place to allow anybody who is attacked, to defend him/herself. All of this shall be one click away from the many user interfaces to Steem, starting with Steemit UI since that is the most used interface. The smackdown-kitty guys can be an execution arm flagging those that go against we as the community voted for.
I am still doing 4 post and try not to exceed
Spamming has increased at a terrifying rate, with some spammers simply copy pasting year old posts of other users ON STEEMIT, then self upvoting.
With the rate the reward pool is being lowered surely this will stop being profitable soon?
No - it will just be less profitable. But I'm sure that spammers don't care, as they don't put much time/effort into their "content" anyway and even slightly reduced returns would be good for them.
I agree, the spammers do not care, they will likely spam more. Copy/Paste posts are done less than a minute. I suppose, even bots will be created to do this.
Yes, the game theory analysis shows that such behaviour cannot be eradicated, but it can be minimised - to what extent depends on the encoded rules of the Steemit game.
Thanks, I idn't know about some of those old rules. Indeed my own article on this topic includes similar algorithms.
Popularity is still the main sink of the reward pool. Rewarding good content has gone, unfortunately, and I could be doing more to counter it, but...honestly from the 600 followers I have I think only 1-3% really read my posts. I'm not complaining because I can't read all my following fellows posts either. But it could be minimized if the 4-post penalty was revisited like you said.
@@ -980,8 +980,777 @@
eming...
+%0A%0AAnd something I just want to also add. Yes, sooner or later there is an easy bot to self-vote anyway. But it still raises the cost of doing it in that you have to have a machine running this script, you have to at least know how to install it... This is not difficult, but it also means the system is not directly facilitating it, you have to go find somewhere that is doing it. It is also a detectable behaviour.%0A%0AI am starting to lean towards the idea of simply using analytics to show people what is actually happening, and to be able to construct hypothetical scenarios that model how a parameter would change the system. If bots are involved in this, their deterministic behaviour is in itself easy to spot, and then you can use community outrage as the defence.