One of the changes that came about with the last STEEM Hard Fork was the introduction of a pool of free downvotes to help counter disagreements about reward distribution (mostly caused by bid bots). In general, under the #newsteem banner, it appears to have made the bid-bot model unviable as most of the bot owners have turned their hand to curation instead (although, the success and quality of that curation is a bit up for debate at times...).
However, I would say that the main driver for this change was the change to the 50/50 model for author and curation shares of a post payout. This creates a much larger incentive to curate if you have a large SP stake rather than to take payments for a service that can't return short term ROI for a bidder.
The campaign to reduce the effectiveness of the bidbot model was led by @ocd and @acidyo (amongst others), and it was characterised by the proportionate downvoting of bot boosted posts to reduce the ROI to 0% rather than to create a loss for the bidders. This was in line with the reasoning that bidding was NOT for short term ROI gain but for promotion and visibility.
The key point here was the concept of proportionate downvoting. On STEEM, the power of the large accounts is such that their votes are disproportionately effective on most other accounts that are smaller. If you are hitting at your own size, then it can be absorbed via a self-vote or if you have a shield of voters around you. You just eat the downvote and move on...
However, if you are a smaller, then you are likely to get swamped unless you happen to have a few friendly large benefactors protecting you (which most of us don't, and this is NOT a sustainable solution for mass onboarding of the public). It is even trickier if you don't want to get embroiled in a flag war... and you just don't retaliate (aka, being a nice person and not escalating...).
Now, I get to the point of my post...
One of the nicer ways for a small to mid level account (like mine...) to support others in a long term sense is the Steem Basic Income program (SBI). By sending 1 STEEM to sponsor a different account, I am essentially locking up that STEEM away from the open market to provide long-term support to another account that is likely to be smaller than me.
This is done as a gift, knowing that I essentially forfeit 50% of the benefits of the sponsorship... whilst knowing that I am providing an ongoing gift to the sponsored account rather than a single one time sugar hit of a big vote (2 cents... ha ha...) or an injection of 1 STEEM. This is a long term view to supporting accounts, that works in sympathy with the curation projects of #newsteem, however, long-term projects are notoriously difficult to enact in this modern attention challenged age....
Unlike the bid-bots of old... SBI is a terrible ROI... but that said, it is a gift of support. ROI is the bane of STEEM and cryptocurrencies in general, as novice "investors" think that this is the most important metric of any asset! In fact, it is a measure that is useful... but not in the short term way that most "investors" have come to think of it!
I would argue that SBI is actually the more effective model for the public onboarding of users... whilst curation projects are great, the idea of receiving a big vote for one thing and then not for another can be a bit of a roller-coaster for new users and quite confusing.... the steady support of SBI from people who are interested in supporting you long term is a steadier way of growing... slow... but steady.
SBI has been shown to be ethical (blacklisting and removing abusers), trustworthy and honest in it's dealings.... and this was present before it was fashionable to show these traits openly in the #newsteem ecosystem.
I sponsor people via @pifc (Pay it Forward Curation) and @abh12345 (Engagement League) as well as two weekly contests (a game called Guess the Word and a different more open ended question post). It is part of of my way of returning back to others in the same way that I was helped...
However, there have been some who disagree with this SBI model of sustainable long-term support in a gifting manner of sponsorship. This is STEEM, people can do what they want (this may not be sustainable...)... there is one account that has settled one a proportionate downvoting response... I disagree, but am happy with that outcome, but it is a price that I'm willing to pay in order to gift to another person.
However, there is another account that is hitting much much harder in a disproportionate response... this highlights the problem with the STEEM chain. There is no response that I can make if they are unwilling to listen... I can't (and won't retaliate)... I have no shield of big account friends and the SBI community is by definition a collection of small accounts.
So, it highlights the problem that an account that is large has no stake risk in attacking smaller accounts disproportionately whilst the little accounts, even when banding together, can not stand up for themselves. I would argue that this is not a favourable outcome for the long term survival of STEEM.
There needs to be some stake risk for some actions on STEEM, voting and downvoting can be cast at the moment with no care for consequences (I have another post about that...), this creates a situation where there is no inherent risk for anti-social behaviour. Now, in an ideal world, people would be just good and there would be no need for any moderating risk... let's just say that the world is not perfect...
There is also the divide that some of us are attached to our blogs and posts (like me...) and care if they are attacked... whilst there are others who have little attachment to their posts and use their accounts like money pots, and don't care if they are attacked. This is an obvious weakness of asymmetry that means that downvotes are much more effective against those who care... aka, the builders!
So, I am floating the idea... that some actions on STEEM need to have some SP based stake risk... in the same way that other chains have penalties for producing bad blocks or bad consensus calculations....
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The way I describe SBI is as a vote subscription service. Exactly like bidbots, there is no proof of brain. Similar to bidbots, you are buying votes, except you are just paying now for future votes. The main difference is with a bidbot, you get some, they get the rest. With SBI you get some and someone you named (perhaps your alt) gets the rest. It's vote-buying, it's just a less toxic form of vote-buying. SBI wasn't the only honest vote-buying service that would blacklist and ban really bad users either, OCDB only allowed whitelisted users to vote and quite a few would remove votes of abusers with enough pressure.
That said, I like SBI. I agree it is good for onboarding new users. However, I do wish that they would create their own token and payout in that. If you cannot create your own token for such a service, in the end of the day it is a tax on the platform. In other words, SBI is taxing everyone who doesn't use SBI. We didn't vote for it.
Still, I think it is a good tax. If it was put to a poll on the SPS/@steem.dao, it would probably beat the return proposal or any no easily. I don't know too many people who are actually against it. Most people are only against the actions of certain individuals abusing it who are banned. I say this as someone who wrote a post that helped SBI adapt to a post EIP hard fork consensus.
Less related to SBI, personally, I think the current solution of just using your downvotes how you want is most fair. I have more SP than some because I acquired it one way or another. It's proof of stake, the more you have the more influence you have. This works exactly the same regardless of the account. Just like SBI, there is no brain involved in having more or less.
If a project is using its upvotes or downvotes in a way you don't like, stop associating with it, or downvote it. Or if it doesn't produce content, downvote whoever or whatever it supports. This is a fundamental part of Steem which would need to be changed after a whole lot of discussion I argue is currently unnecessary. I'd save it and potential solutions including removing all rewards and paying out in SMTs, or worse some sort of centralized authority, for another rant.
One thing I don't personally like is auto downvote or downvote trails or delegating to anyone who downvotes. Unlike upvoting, I like to be in full control of my downvotes and know exactly who I am downvoting case by case and why. Call it a bias, but I think most people here share that bias. Getting random upvotes feels nice. Getting random downvotes sucks. We don't need bad feelings. That said, I don't think most decent (1000SP+) downvotes are random.
Indeed sometimes the steem ocean does feel like a toxic place. I am fairly used to getting the 10% downvotes which do take 0% away from the value of the post. But yesterday things did change. I did get a 100% downvote from a so called curator account, taking away 20% of the value of my post. I do think that when placing a downvote, the downvoter should be forced to add an explanation for the downvote. Only this measure would decrease the number of downvotes by a lot.
While receiving a downvote is bad enough, it is just worse when you don't know why you have been downvoted.
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I'm completely agree with you, @fullcoverbetting . The same I say, because something like that happened to me yesterday. It feels as if they want to sabotage your work and progress just because of the fact you post different than them, and that's horrible by experience :(
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Yes, the little ones are annoying but mean nothing... I've picked up more than a few of the large ones now....
It is weird that the best way to try and convince someone is by downvoting... no discussion no terms... lucky we don't conduct ourselves like this off the internet!
Here's one of my recent efforts to speak reasonably on the subject of abusive downvotes,
https://steemit.com/steemit/@logiczombie/q5cex8
It is a nice effort on your part to try and bring calm...
However, I do agree with the downvoting in this case... perhaps not so much on the continued downvoting... but I wasn't there and I don't understand the whole situation and history.
If name-calling is a downvotable offense, then there's basically no guiding principle.
Which is fine, I guess, if that's the consensus (simply add it to the list of rules).
Just don't try to pretend that there's a difference between "name-calling" and "libel".
And some sort of warning would seem to be in order before stomping a newb down to (0) rep.
If you believe that all ad hominem attacks should be downvoted, I can actually agree with you on that.
However, the "problem" here is that only SOME ad hominem attacks seem to be WORTHY of downvoting and that "standard" seems to be HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE AND SELF-SERVING.
From your own quote,
So If I suggest that you're holding a particular viewpoint because you're paid by an interested party, that's an ad hominem attack.
If I suggest that your viewpoint is invalid (wholesale) because you're a moron, or some other derogatory term (like child molester), that's an ad hominem attack.
It really doesn't matter if the ad hominem attack is "true" or not. It's still an ad hominem attack if it's aimed at the person or their character or their motives (the mind reader fallacy is another common example) instead of at the LOGICAL STRUCTURE or COHERENCE of their argument.
An ad hominem attack is often in service of a rush-to-disqualify a debate partner.
Defamation and slander and libel are synonymous with ad hominem attack.
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I've been a huge advocate of downvotes, but I stopped using most of mine due to some of outrageous downvotes of the large accounts and trails.
Most of us will handle a downvote or two with dignity and class, but when one group decides another is bad and has a huge amount of voting power, I was turned off quickly.
I also think that SBI was a great project and I think it is clear anytime you look at Trending that curation isn't about quality, so I have no idea what the puritans are fussing about some projects like SBI that does good work and helps with retention is.
I've always felt that the biggest Steem stakeholders often conduct themselves in ways that reflect very poorly on the Steem community as a whole. Giving them more downvoting and destructive power was bound to end badly.
The "I can do whatever I want with my stake" power-play mentality should be replaced with a "I will use my stake to nurture and support the community, especially newcomers and smaller accounts with original content".
Some whales have been supportive since Steem inception since 2016, but in-fighting has always been way too prominent on this platform. I hope this improves, but until then personally I'm pretty passive here.
The thing is that we didn't give them more power, they gave it to themselves. The largest accounts provided the most support for the EIP.
That is the weakness of a Stakebased system. (DPOS) One of the most difficult elements of decentralization is the big decisions are not made by the most qualified or educated, or with the most experience the decisions are made by those with Stake.
The largest Stakesholder mined the most in the early days. Which also is not a skill set I would necessarily equate with building a social media site. :)
Sometimes understanding HOW something works is better than deciding how it should work.
In my opinion many of the whales could care less about the social network and it shows.
I am currently only a minnow, but what kind of social network do you (and some other people) talking about? Where is the social side? The majority of the Steem blockchain users are selfish and greedy. They focus only about their own blog posts, and they do not care other people's blog posts. There are ~ 30 000 posts made every day, but the average number of comments is only around 3. And most of these comments are bot and/or spam-like comments. Nowadays the real human interaction is rare on the Steem blockchain. If the majority of the Steem blockchain users are selfish and greedy, then why do they except any different action from the whales?
Good point. That's why I say if you want engagement, engage.
Sometimes there are shades of right and wrong ..
like I want you to find my content and upvote me... That's not a good idea, it isn't likely to happen.
Also wrong, I'm going to ignore everyone else, but I want to be successful.
We want decentralization, but we also want to cry to authority when we don't like what is happening...
Pick one. :) Good comment
Thank you for being reasonable.
I stopped to but started using them on intro abuse some account above rep 53 make 6 or 7 of them than I use my downvotes instantly
I have mixed feelings about downvotes... There is a case for them, but I think that there is a problem with them being consequence free. Like all things, no risk of consequences leads to some odd behaviours... For instance, if you can crash a world economy (GFC) through consequence free actions and still be rich... Why not do it?
Proportionate downvoting is useful to signal disagreement... But what is chump change for one is a huge hit for another. It takes some level of wisdom to understand that instead of mashing 100%
SBI does well with long term support, and this is a model that is great for retention (the weakness of Steem). The curation projects are great, but having sugar hit means you need more of them...
Agree. I still don’t know why people labeled themselves as some sort of “Steemit Police” Who cares if someone is using a tag several times instead of one time? Who are we to downvote zero quality posts? Do we create more valuable and quality content ourselves? Just have fun posting bogs and comments and just don’t always look at what others are doing. There is never consensus about what is quality and what is not. You post blogs to ventilate your opinion which you like others to read in my opinion. Live and let live
I would agree fully with you if it weren't for the fact that STEEM is supposed to have value. If certain behaviours were not discouraged, we would find the chain completely overrun with bot accounts which would drain the value of STEEM to zero. If someone could run a million accounts and pick up a few cents on them daily... well, this would be a disaster.
I wasn’t talking about bots.
They're vigilante mobs. Steem is a libertarian utopia. If you want "law and order" you have to make it yourself (through consensus building).
What do you think about perhaps requiring an active post as a prerequisite for downvoting (or voting in general). If you have no active posts (less than 7 days old), then you are frozen out of the whole upvote/downvote game.
If comments were counted as posts it would be ok with me.
Yes, the goal is to simply have the downvoters put some "skin in the game". A comment or reply is able to be downvoted (or upvoted), so that would "expose" them to their own "law of the jungle" standard.
(I thought I had replied to this...)...
I'm afraid that if you have an active post but you just don't care about it... then it isn't really a consequence. There is no loss, as nothing is staked that you actually care about!
It does expose you to downvotes from higher-rep accounts. There are some accounts that level-up to (45) or so and then erase all their posts and comments, power-up a few thousand steem-power and then go around power stomping smaller accounts with IMPUNITY. This seems to be a problem.
It would not be that bad making one comment every week would it?
Well its a social media platform, so maybe it would provide proof of engagement?
Why would it be a negative in your eyes ?
It would expose them to retaliation.
If I'm bullet-proof, I can shoot down anyone I wish with impunity.
If I'm bullet-vulnerable, I'll probably be slightly more careful who I shoot down, in order to mitigate potential retribution.
Do you think it's better to have accounts like bloom, who do nothing but downvote?
And since they never post, they can act with impunity?
Let's just say, hypothetically, that the Chinese Censorship Brigade decided they wanted to create an account (or buy an existing account) with (a relatively small) 2 million steem-power and start obliterating any accounts they didn't like (anything not written in Chinese).
And since this account makes zero posts, they cannot be downvoted themselves.
Would you consider that a "problem" or would you stand by your, "downvotes are freespeech" credo?
Thanks for telling me what I think. Please explain WHY you think that. What's the "problem" with requiring an active post (or comment) as a prerequisite for upvoting/downvoting?
Accounts with high-rep can downvote anyone with lower rep than them below (0) which automatically hides all their posts and comments and breaks any links to their posts and comments.
If a rogue account had an active post, at least there would be a chance that a higher-rep account could take action to reduce their rep, thus mitigating the amount of damage they could wreak by reducing the number of accounts they could de facto censor wholesale.
Yes, even if they were ranked below (0) they could still wipe out rewards on individual posts and or comments, but they couldn't wipe out ENTIRE ACCOUNTS.
Getting downvoted by an account with lower rep than you does not affect your rep.
Getting downvoted by an account with higher rep than you KILLS your rep.
By forcing an active post, the downvoters could potentially be downvoted by a higher-rep account, and thus lose their rep, which would take away their ability to KILL other people's rep.
thank you for posting this.
i think this is such an important topic and here’s my biggest issue with it all.
SBI’s biggest ROI is retention.
People feel welcomed. Appreciated. And like they are valued on Steem from getting regular upvotes via SBI.
This is why SBI is so important. It’s ability to make people feel welcomed on the blockchain. Because as we can see, it can be a vicious place when folks don’t agree.
I hope more big players get behind and support SBI and what it does for user retention.
That is right. The biggest ROI is the fact that someone somewhere thought enough to give another a gift. This sharing, supporting and gifting (despite the current negative hit) is something that is not common in the get rich crypto world... It isn't that common in the regular financial world... And look where that has taken us...
If we want to emulate the old money way of doing things... Then SBI is the wrong way and in the wrong place. If we want a different and better way, then SBI can be part of that solution.
There are things that aren't measured in immediate economic terms, but do actually produce huge economic benefits... And as much as I like the boost from a curation account, that is more like the old trickle down model of decredited economic fairy tales if it the only way.
SBI and curation work hand in hand and are two aspects of making this chain work.
I have not made one downvote. I started getting a downvote here, a downvote there, but when I've looked up who downvoted, it's always been a rep. 25 acct. doing it, which I figure belongs to someone with a different acct. and they're just downvoting for whatever reason.
For me, I can only think it must be that I say something they don't like. I personally see nothing positive in promoting downvoting regardless of the talk suggesting that it's good and does good things.
I don't know, but I think the way it is now, it's just something else for abusers to latch onto just so they can be assholes.
Those little ones don't make a difference one way or another.. they don't hurt rep and the power behind them is minute. They are just bots harassing everyone to get worked up... or to confuse the topic between those little downvotes and the really huge ones that get doled out to "influence" opinion.
However, my real gripe is about the wisdom (or lack of...) to employ proportionate tactics...
Bengy, this is probably one of the most sane and sanguine analyses I have seen about SBI, downvotes and bidbots. I am one of those accounts that took a beating because of having invested SBI so I cashed in. Although I still get downvotes, they have no value. Similarly, I don't understand what precipitates them - and the accounts concerned are just serial downvoters. No posts, no upvotes. Just downvotes.
What do you think about perhaps requiring an active post as a prerequisite for downvoting (or voting in general). If you have no active posts (less than 7 days old), then you are frozen out of the whole upvote/downvote game.
I like that idea. I wonder if the powers that be, would.
Thanks, I'll keep trying to get their attention.
I think this is still flawed... you can make a post that you have no "attachment" to... and gain the right of entry to up and downvote... and still have no consequence, because people would attack something that you have hold no intrinsic value in.
... or you gain most from "curation", then the loss of a tiny amount of author rewards is just not going to matter one way or another!
Rewards would be incidental, but your rep would potentially be destroyed if you were just being a jerk.
Yes, but Rep is not really a measure of anything here. High rep doesn't mean that much in terms of "trustworthiness" neither does life rep. More importantly, it has no on chain effect.
So in essence, it is not really something that is important to people that would otherwise be anti social anyway!
Being able to force all posts and comments to be hidden if someone's rep dips below (0) is generally considered significant. There are large accounts with high rep that have cashed-out due to downvote harassment (metarzan and fyrestikken and probably others I'm not personally aware of).
Big downvotes will cause people to rage-quit.
Yes, the little ones are annoying but don't mean anything. It is the big ones that are a problem. They try to convince by being aggressive... It is the internet way of doing things!
Sigh! Nope it's just the bullying way of doing things. I agree.
Mobster Ethics.
I sold all my sbi shares as it I see it as some kind of bid bot service, except you get the returns over a long period rather than in one post.
I'm not downvoting anyone who uses it yet though as I believe it's helped with onboarding and retaining users but it's a grey area. I've seen posts that have blatant plagiarism being upvoted by sbi and I'll start downvoting if I see things like this happening. Also seems sbi just upvotes blindly regardless of length or quality of post - have also seen 20 word "shit posts" get more from sbi than others who have written much more in depth...
Jury's out
Yes, there are people that game the system. But @josephsavage will remove those accounts from @steembasicincome if you let him know. Like the rest of Steem, it is hard for them to cover the whole ground!
After all, I see notable curation projects get it wrong as well in the same way, but it doesn't mean that the whole project is terrible! Downvoting the bad posts is logical and rational, attacking the project and sponsors is not so much..
PS, for the shit posts, that would be a useful case for downvoting... Hitting the sponsors is not really the way forward on that problem!
Pps, also there is the idea of the giving.. The long term support is good for retention.
Let's face it, auto upvotes on author accounts should be stopped completely and only allowed for curation trails that are manually curating and have guidelines/vetting in place - otherwise we'll just go round and round in circles (jerking, lol).
It does seem to be a case where "curating" now is just auto upvote at between 3-5 minutes for max rewards.
Pre HF 21, SBI was a valuable tool and I still think the intentions are great but I agree with what abitcoinskeptic said 100% really.
Rewards should be given in tokens now with sbi rather than steem which would still facilitate the idea of giving/supporting. There are many other ways of doing it around here now since EIP.
Let's face it, that is not possible technically. Not without losing most of the humans too.
Surely just by disabling the feature to auto upvote someone is easy enough to do? No losing of humans needed
How do you see if a click is done by a human or by a script?
I'm not sure that disabling auto votes is possible... after all, how can you know what is an auto vote, a human vote or a human curated trail vote? They look the same essentially... the infrastructure for the auto votes and trails are not integral to STEEM... but are hosted off chain.
Human curating is decent... but also prone to problems of siloing and unfortunately is a system that is weak to corruption as well (PS: not saying that there is... just that the system is susceptible to it). I have seen chats where curators for some projects have talked about quid pro quo "curating" of each other's posts... and also some discussions where people have failed to understand why the concept of conflict of interests is a problem. Of course, this is not every curator... but I only point out that it is good system, but still has it's faults... but I wouldn't burn an entire curator project because of it...
I'm not sure how the tokens side would work... but the main problem is that if there is no economic case for the token it is magic internet money that will trend to zero... tokens based on STEEM derive their value through their utility on STEEM.
The only way would be to have a comment left by the person voting. Similar to the way people want to have reasons for downvotes, reasons for upvotes?
Thing is, if there aren't strict guidelines to follow then we end up in this situation we're in now where there are grey areas everywhere.
And you could easily say the same thing about any money really. It's derived on its value perceived by the sum of those that use it.
I'm sure the debate will go on but we'd be here for a long time.
Still, nice bit of green across the markets hey
Yeah... green is nice! Although, I've been toying around with the idea of dumping a token that just saw a single day 200% run... on the other hand, it just isn't worth my time either! Play the long game...
As for the commenting... even that isn't really assured. You have seen all the automated comments right?
Money is slightly different as it exists and is the principal token on it's own ecosystem. Something similar would be the fact that most currencies need to be denominated and exchanged via the medium of the global reserve, USD. Thus, a tinpot country can issue it's own fiat money... but if people prefer USD then it is game over!
Another more similar idea is the relationship between the ERC-20 tokens and the native ETH tokens...
Anyway, these chats are much more interesting and productive than the complaints in the original post. There is a chance for accommodation and compromise to grow a better ecosystem... rather than roll over and die or I'm not happy!
I think that would depend on how much you'd get for the effort or if it's only going to buy you a Mars bar 😁
Yep and those do my crust in as well. But it's something that's just going to be part and parcel of the digital era seeing as, what, 60%-70% of all Internet is Bots anyway...rise of the machines.
Even USD isn't really backed by anything. It used to be an IOU for gold deposited in the banks but that went pear shaped in the 70s. Now it really is a piece of paper with a number written on it.
So in a way, I guess BTC acts like the situation you just described but for all digital crypto currencies (almost).
This platform is about engagement really. I measure that as comments and interaction with the post created rather than number of votes or STU received. For me, those are bonuses to the comments. Guess it really depends on what the goals are of each individual.
Think we've seen a lot of people leave because they arent willing to compromise
PS: I just thought of something about the guidelines idea... even in the area of law... where there are pretty well defined and strict guidelines, there are gray areas. Only in Mathematics are there no gray areas (even then...)... even in Theoretical Physics, there is still some.
Guidelines are good... but there is always gray!
I think we can sum all of this up with..."humans" 😁
Well said!! I feel the same way. I am one of those 'nice' people that doesn't want to downvote due to 'causing negative behavior.' Anytime I have downvoted (which has been for legitmate reasons) I have been retaliated against. I am sorry but an appics post with just a picture should not be getting a $15.00 payout. I understand that a larger portion of upvotes are from the communities and trails that one is involved with. As much is it my right to downvote as I see fit, it is as much as someone's right to downvote on a whim. Not having a SP at stake for downvoting is a mistake. It should absolutely affect your VP.
As you know and many don't I am one of the judges for @pifc Pay It Forward Curation Contest. I have been involved with since the day it started. It takes time and energy to create these posts as many of us know. We do this because it is one the best ways to support the community. This is where #newsteem has been wonderful. Getting a bit more for curation helps immensely and rewards you a bit more for the work. Using SBI is by far the best option.
This says it all. Using SBI as a reward you are investing in someone. Granted it may take some time to equal, however it will end up giving much more in the long term. I think of it as starting a savings account for someone. You put $1 in. It collects interest, you add more and get more interest. Over time that $1 will become more (I know very simplistic) That is where I fail to understand why someone would have such a vendetta against this process. I am guessing because they didn't think of it first? They were caught abusing the system?
Bidbots to me are the bane of Steem. Yet who am I to tell someone how to invest their money? If that is what floats your boat then have at it. The one thing I have noticed and I don't know if it is related or not, but the value of Steem has dropped significantly during this time zero tolerance of bidbots.
I was advocating a SP stake... so there would be stake risk, not just a drop in Voting Power... but you would also have to back with some actual SP/Steem. This is in keeping with other consensus protocols that employ a loss of stake for bad behaviour (bad or rogue block production).
I'm not sure that it was only related to that... but if it was, there would be only certain types of accounts that would have been selling... and those are ones that we could do without!
There used to be a cost to downvoting in that it ate into your voting power, so few people downvoted. Now you get some for free and can use them if you like. Most people still don't downvote. I do because I can find plenty of people just leeching Steem for almost zero effort or engagement. I am less fussed about SBI these days. It pays me cents, but I have bought shares for lots of people. Many of them are inactive now, but I still get the votes. I am not getting flagged for using it that I know of recently, but then I stopped delegating to them. I can use my SP elsewhere to do more good and I don't care if I make less in the process.
I have to say that even the cost to your voting power is in practice a zero cost. There is the lost opportunity for the curation rewards that would have otherwise taken place... but the resource is regenerating anyway, and for a large account, the lost opportunity is worth the damage that you can cause...
The flagging has settled on people who sponsor shares... I guess the tactic is to choke the new shares, then move onto the recipients of the votes and then onwards from there. I'm not sure, but it does appear to be a tactical move to slowly target various holders and not the whole system at once.
The only solution is some kind of 'heeling' account.
NB SBI actually has one of the best ROIs on the platform, it's not 50% like some of those BOTs were, but it's getting on for 20%, which beats the 11-12% you can get from @dlease.
For a healing account, you need big friends... Sadly, we don't have them.
The SBI ROI is achieved over a very very long time period, this making it a good incentive to stay and help build Steem. This is contrast to the Bid bot ROI which was short term and encouraged very short term maximisation behaviour.
Likewise, with the leases, you know directly who you are sponsoring.. Making it a conscious decision, rather than the abstracted ROI of a lease. In the same way that ethical stocks are a conscious choice rather than the profit at all costs mentality that genealogy prevails.
If we rally around @freezepeach, (by delegating even a token amount of steem) we have a chance to build-a-champion for ourselves.
Yes... but then who controls @freezepeach... after all, I don't agree with healing every downvote either. I just want there to be risk or consequence for actions... consequence free actions have never been a good idea in any situation! It might work on an individual level... but it doesn't work for groups.
I have been running freezepeach for over 2 years now. The main purpose is the nullify flags, not reward people, when the flags are for difference of opinion. There are quite a few exemptions that aren't considered, i.e. plagiarism, spam, vote buying, and more.
Hi, thanks for the clarification, I'm afraid that I just don't know enough about your project!
Anyway, despite the fact that you would do good work in nullifying flags for difference of opinion... it really isn't the sort of thing that should have to be done by "good" accounts.
After all, you can heal the effects of the downvote... but there is still no real disincentive or consequence for a poorly thought out vote/downvote. So, the lack of consequence leads to a lack of care in performing these actions. Some accounts might do it strategically or with precision to help influence, others might think the best form of influence is a sledgehammer.
Of course, different sizes of accounts can weather the effects of some votes... but there is a limit to what is possible. This sort of system isn't really the sort of thing that would be scalable if widespread adoption is the aim.
Whilst you personally (and via @freezepeach) may be able to keep up with some degree of levelling out manually or automatically, I would hazard the guess that you would struggle if this network scaled up dramatically?
We have some cool automated tools at our disposal, and while nobody will ever be able to stop another's actions on this decentralized platform, what @freezepeach does is take the wind out of their sails. When they see all their efforts are in vein, and they recognize they're wasting their power, they usually stop.
Right now we aren't ready for 1 million users, but if such a thing were to occur, development and procedures could be optimized to rise to the occasion.
Well at this point it's "better than nothing", I'm just trying to "stop the bleeding" so to speak.
I've been trying to encourage people to delegate some small token support (1 steem-power) to freezepeach, which you can take back at any time, all of freezepeach's actions are 100% transparent so if they suddenly go rogue, it's simple enough to retract your support.
They currently only have about 4,000 steem-power, and they're competing with abusive accounts that have 12,000+ steem-power.
It seems like it would be nice to boost them up to 100,000 steem-power or more (like @ curangel), then we'd at least have someone to call on when we see accounts getting pounded into the dust for no good reason.
People keep telling me this is the "wild west", so we need to build our own "lone ranger" if we want anything vaguely resembling "justice".
There's only one account I know of DVing with 200K SP, a vote-trail with 100s of SBI users would go some way to countering that at least.
Don't forget that's really only 40K SP worth of downvotes.
Unless there's more people who do so?
There are two. One is okay (proportional) , the other is not... It is hard to motivate and co-ordinate 100s of disparate people... Plus it isn't something that scales if we want mass adoption!
@freezepeach tries to help mitigate abusive downvotes, but they only have about 4,000 steem-power.
100% THIS.
Yes... but that requires wisdom and the ability to think things beyond the initial irritation.
Or some rigorously defined, quantifiable set of logically coherent rules.
That would also be handy...
Well, you start by identifying your primary AXIOMS, and then cobble together some Uniform Standards of Evidence (USOE). And then you're 99.999% done.
i really hate professional downvoters
Yes... but my problem is more with the system not being really ready for a scaling up... we see the problems, but at the moment it is sort of working okay due to the good personal intentions of a few large accounts... this is not the way to build out an autonomous network.
I don't understand much about it, but I think people like you who are interested in talking about what's going on are what we need on the platform.
I'm going to read your poster carefully to learn.
It is a pity that more people aren't being involved... it is hard to speak up when you are scared!
Very controversial topic. I hope something is done in the near future to stop abuse and benefit small accounts
Yes... the current rules around it are sort of working due to the good intentions of a few large accounts... however, that is just luck... it isn't really a good way to scale up a network... by relying on a few "good" people to counter the bad ones!
I fully agree with your assessment. I don't know what the solution is, but I know I'm not abandoning my support of SBI just because some butthurt jerks wanna downvote me and my SoCal community for it. In fact it just makes me wanna support it MORE!! lol.
Yes... this is really the critical point of difference between this and vote-buying and circle voting. In those other situations, the motivator is immediate ROI and profit.... so, when that is threatened... everyone jumps ship.
For SBI, it is the gifting that is primary motivator... and so when the hurt comes, we accept it and keep giving. ROI is not the primary motivation.... still, that doesn't mean that we can't get scared and intimidated though.
Well, I cannot give you as good a response as abitcoinskeptic did. What I can say, however, is that requiring someone to "put skin in the game," so to speak, is a great way to de-incentivise poor public behaviour. Upvotes and Downvotes are really the same thing, anyway, just on opposite sides of the 0; they require the same resources to perform.
Yes... and at the moment, you do see the lack of skin in the game from both sides of the coin. There is careless upvoting and careless downvoting... both enabled by the lack of risk and cost. Consequence free actions are a moral hazard in all sectors of society...
Good information @bengy. I do find those random downvotes a nuisance, in fact they make one feel horrible when you have worked to created what you feel is meaningful content.
Yes, the little ones are a nuisance... but in the end hold little power. People are going to troll... and it is best to just ignore it!
Anyway, the system is such that the status quo does have issues... but they are relatively contained due to the existence of "good" accounts that would step in if it got out of hand... however, like any governance system... hopes and wishes are not a great way to build a scalable system.
I have never provided a negative vote to any account. Despite receiving spam comments, I don't take them into account. Despite that, I have been punished with some negative votes even though I have never bought SBI.
Most of the time it just easier to ignore trolls and spammers... likewise with the downvotes that don't have any power behind them. It is a touch harder to ignore the big ones though... and therein lies the problem... unless you have a big friend to "heal" the damage... then there is really no consequence and you just take the hit.
This is not something that can scale well... as the "good" guys can't be everywhere... and it can be hard to drop into a situation and know what the complexity is behind it all... thus, there needs to be some way of making actions have consequence.
Thanks for this article.
You are a voice ...
Thank you... we all have ideas on how to try to improve a decent but flawed system... it is naive to think that it is perfect as it is!
All that I can say here is this!
Who in their right mind would downvote a charity?
Charities need all of the help that they can get, be it from SBI, ABC, XYZ, or whoever.
Just doesn't make sense to me and it never will!
The problem is that there is no consequence or risk for taking a particular action... (upvoting included...). This is not an idea that works well with groups of people... after all, if there is no consequence for a particular behaviour... what stops people from doing it... especially if there is no risk to existing stake or anything like that?
Agreed with you my friend, something needs to change here methinks.
#steemit should be a site that welcomes new comers and not chase them away.
Blessings!
I have been doing charity work for 20 years now my friend and if I don't know what charity means by now, then I will never know Lol.
No my friend I never said SBI is a charity.
What I said is that we @papilloncharity is a registered charity and I don't know why people would want to downvote us.
We are not fighting with anyone or downvoting anyone, as our focus is on our work, which is helping the poor.
I am sorry for the misunderstanding, as I only cannot understand why people would downvote us as a charity.
Blessings!
I guess you mean the @mkkkk... account?
I have a lot of SBI's and that account no longer downvotes me as I don't delegate to SBI anymore. That is his beef, not bought SBI's but using delegation to have more SBI's and gain bigger votes.
I can see his reasoning to some extent. Are you getting DV's from this account and you don't delegate to SBI?
They are downvoting anyone who sponsors a SBI, at least that was the last goalpost. Mmk, I have less a problem with... It is clear 5% per SBI sponsored. I don't like it... But okay...
There is another who hits hard (100%)and with no particular open reasoning.
I have been hit at full power by this one a few days ago because I rewarded a supportive action with SBI, it was as painful as working hard all day long for a charity and get a penalty and blame at the end of the day...these are not behaviours that make any people want to come or to stay...are we blind to that ? Do we want to recreate the same judgmental society everywhere, ..seriously ? 😉
It is a bit much... and the fact that we still keep giving regardless of the consequences is testament to the fact that it is the gift that is the primary motivator. After all, if it was pure immediate ROI (like bid bots and circle votes) then everyone would have jumped ship immediately...
Still, it is the ability to downvote without any responsibility that is really not a scalable thing... if it gets out of hand, then a few good accounts might step in... but that is not the sort of thing that you should build a network around!
I sold all my SBI and that account is still downvoting me.
Yes, I agree with the assessment of the problem. Few people seem to be willing to acknowledge the problem the last hard fork presented. No repercussions against abuse of downvote power is a broken feature. Smart downvoters often create separate accounts for downvoting only, with no comments or posts of their own to interact with.
Rather than put their stake at risk, I think a more reasonable solution would be to put their downvotes at risk. There should be a mechanic to partially silence/weaken annoying downvoters temporarily by casting a counteractive downvote. Perhaps by a feature allowing people to go to the abusive profile and downvote to remove their allotment of daily downvotes. It would require an equal amount of stake to totally silence/weaken the staked downvotes of an abuser.
Not sure if this would work. It might renew the power of bidbots, undoing the "solution" of the last hardfork that beat bidbots. I will support any direction steem wants to head that better protects the legevity of active/honest/quality at authors. At the moment, I think disproportionate downvote power is one of the biggest obstacles for new users.
Remember, downvote communities are forming that downvote and reward eachother for profit when a member flags and reports a "crime". We rely on the good judgement of these members to flag fairly, and to refrain from flagging excessively for greedy profit. Eventually anyone with enough collective community power can enforce their own downvote rules without any repercussions. Diversity of thoughts on steem eventually becomes nonexistent.
This does sound like an interesting notion. The idea that a community could band together to reduce the effects of a errant downvoter is a good idea. After all, it is the sort of banding together that shows that a greater group of people think that that sort of behaviour is more anti-social and counter to the good value of STEEM.
However, like you said, it is a solution with probably unintended consequences... like every change to every system...
Yes disproportionate downvoting is a real problem. Perhaps there should be something to restrict the power to accounts of the same size... that way, if people want to play downvote wars, they can... and stay in the same weight class. Perhaps a certain proportion of the downvote (depending on the relative account sizes) is free, and then the rest would have to be "funded".
Agreed... everything that I suggested would have unintended consequences... glaring obvious depends on the perspective.....
However, it would be incredibly naive to think that the status quo doesn't also have some unintended consequences as well... things sort of work as they are, but is that due to a stable situation and inventives that can scale up (which I believe that you think?) or is it due to the fact that at the moment we are tiny and the effects of good actors can match the bad as it is all relatively easy to keep track of (as I think...).
I'm not against downvoting as a concept and I'm not advocating a flag police either. However, I do believe the mere principle of no consequence actions is not really something that should exist in an adult society (or even a child one!).
No, I think good stake can win... as long as it always remains "good"... however, this is like having a benevolent dictator... it is good, until it is bad. I don't think there should be more rules or anything like that as such... I think that there should be a risk and consequence for actions like upvoting and downvoting... instead of free (rc doesn't count, as that is essentially unlimited), as freedom from cost and consequences has not played out well in the financial sectors of modern times! Crash the economy, who goes to jail? Who gets bailed out? Who loses their jobs? Who gets the golden handshake? We don't want to re-create the idea of consequence free hazards... or do we?
Um, I think you've confused my suggestion with someone else's. I agreed with them about it being an interesting idea but one that I didn't think would work due to the points that you also said. However, I answered so many replies I might well have accidentally agreed to the wrong thing by accident. Anyway, my position on requiring a post of comment to upvote or downvote is exactly the end as yours.
My suggestion was that up/down voting gave some sort of cost... Perhaps proportional to the amount of vests that would be allocated. However, this would mean that downvotes cost disproportionately more as there would not be any 'anti-curation' rewards. But I think that these actions shouldn't be effectively cost free.
Edit: Yup, definitely my fault! Apologies. I had answered without making myself clear. I think I had made those points (same as yours) in a different thread... Somewhere.
Balanced points raised in both content and comments, down-voting may have a place for people who constantly abuse if/when used wisely, this should not be allowed to be entered into the blockchain without good reason with a comment to the perpetrator.
Ad-hoc down voting should never be allowed this is just my opinion.
Yes... down voting is a really useful tool... however at the moment, only some accounts employ the vision and wisdom to employ it as a useful tool, rather than a sledgehammer for all occasions!
I spent a couple of hours yesterday going through those I followed over the past 3 years, start clearing out dead wood. Obtaining realistic figures is never how many it is quality, sometimes downvote with comment may go a long way to assisting some to adjust their thought on how to use the platform.
... yes, not a problem unless you are the unfortunate ant!
Anyway, although the out of context statistic is interesting... what is it based upon? Is it weighted by stake or number... the outgoing and incoming accounts... all these little details are a bit important. A 0.5% of all downvotes by itself is the sort of thing is most beloved of marketers and politicians!
It sounds good, but vague numbers is a great way of hiding detail.
Thanks, I will see if I can find further details, or if anyone has published anything more recently. However, I do still hold that it is nigh on impossible for an account to defend against a committed downvoter (of significant stake, not the little bot ones..). The only way is to weather it out and hope that others find it worthwhile to help (out even notice...).
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So now I know those downvotes I get from time to time are because of SBI shares.
All the abuse prevention measures implemented on STEEM are based on the rewards system, so they only apply to creators (writers, witnesses, dApp founders, etc.)
Investors are immune to that measures. They can use their STEEM POWER without any penalties. If they try to get the best ROI, they can just upvote @sbd-potato articles to get big curation rewards while the author reward will be burned, and proportionately downvote random articles to modify the pool reward even more in their favour. Bidbots may be dead but there are other methods for exploiting STEEM economy.
Your idea of adding mechanics to reduce SP is a double edge sword, because it may increase even more the abuse of big downvoters. In my opinion, the problem is that SP should not be the only factor involved in STEEM governance and rewards distribution. 1000 upvotes from different accounts should worth more than 1 upvote for an account with the same SP value. However, it must be done in a way that prevents creation of massive networks of bots accounts. Maybe a 2.0 reputation algorithm?
You can find the community announcement on Discord :) and it has also been shared on our FB Page and Twitter feed.
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