RE: Why I'm against Bid Bot Abuse - How to Find & Take Action Against Bid Bot Abusers
An interesting summary of (potential) bid bot abuse. Although I sometimes have an issue with accepting decisions on what a person can and can't do because there is no real way to define stricter rules globally on the blockchain which could be easily followed, I appreciate that you included a part of setting up steemlookup to find more obvious cases. Sometimes I feel there is no way to do anything with the trending page because some people are bashed that they use bid bots for visibility but many others that are liked by the community or they have a larger fan base are good doing the same.
Do you think that bid bots would be more acceptable in general if people paid, let's say, at most 3 different accounts (services)? I am aware that other people can also buy a vote for somebody else but throughout a few experiments, I saw that was never a popular thing to do.
I also liked that you included a tool for "verifying" image originality. Do you use other tools other than imgops and what features of it do you use than actually searching for the image? I'd like to add one more tool for anyone interested in searching for images for any reason. NooBox is a browser extension for Chrome and I think that you can find it helpful. I like the option to search for a selected area so you can take a screenshot online instead of doing all the edits offline and reuploading.
When you mentioned buildawhale having a blacklist, did you check or looked for similar lists at other bots? Would you possibly recommend other people using the list made by buildawhale and if so, why?
I completely get where you're coming from. It does sometimes seem as though this effort is a little bit like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble. As long as there are no structural changes to prevent this sort of abuse on the 'blockchain level' (if that's even possible), it's basically up to someone's biased opinion to check whether something is abuse or not. That's why I've purposefully chosen to highlight only the most obvious cases here, something that most Bid Bot owners agree upon (single image posts with little text).
I'm not sure if that would work, since there a very large difference in upvote value that each Bid Bot offers. If someone picks 3 services and manages to purchase the largest possible vote for each of them, they can still end up with a +$100.00 vote for what might be perceived as a low-quality post.
Imgops is currently the only tool I use to check whether an image is original. I'm one of the few people who still uses Firefox as their main browser, so NooBox isn't something I've heard about before. Might have to give it a try with Chrome Store Foxified, the ability to just take a screenshot would definitely be very useful.
Yeah, there are definitely other lists as well, I'm not sure if other bots use them though. I know that Steemcleaners uses their own list for example and Smartsteem definitely also has their own list. The reason why I only mentioned BuildaWhale's blacklist is just because @themarkymark is pretty active in the anti-abuse community, so I trust his judgment. So, yes I would actually recommend other people using their blacklist as well.
Very thoughtful and nice comment @espoem. Thanks.
Very good questions here. What I know is that @themarkymarks list is available to everyone. Many bid bot owners dont care. Most of the good ones use themarkymarks list. Most of them share information about abusers.
I use many different image tools and the abusers are getting trickier all the time. For me google image works the best.
I have nobox but it seems like it doesn't function properly with my VPN and Linux computer even inside the Chrome browser.
When it comes to bid bot abuse I rarely flag for this reason. I have but not much. One time I will flag any size bid bot vote is when it is on a comment. I don't think comment should be able to buy bid bot votes.
When someone buys multiple bid bot and its not for the intended purpose(adverstisement) its wrong. Most bid bot owners claim their services are for advertisement. That is one of the worst kinds of bid bot abuse. Most bid bot buyers are just trying to get more steem and sbd not trying to advertise.
Many of the abuse fighters are opposed to bought votes that artificially raise the rep of scammers and people who share.