The Hivewatchers & Spaminator Operational Proposal for the Period 2024-2026

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THE DATA

Since the start of the successful funding of Hivewatchers' proposal in August 2020, we have accepted 18218 reports of which 16843 reports have been accepted as valid abuse which falls within the scope of Hivewatchers' work.
We have helped to return Tens of thousands of Hive Dollars to the reward pool from these abusive posts.

• 7753 reports for Plagiarism
• 205 reports for Identity Theft/Deception
• 1571 reports for Photography/Art/Image Plagiarism
• 1393 reports for Copy & Paste
• 4747 reports for Spam (AI-generated content or Post Recycling)
• 888 reports for Unverified Identity
• 195 reports for the category "Other Abuse"

During this period, we have also verified the identity of 687 users and have given them @hivebuzz verification badges.

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The breakdown of downvotes since 1st August 2022:

ADM

• Number of downvotes: 16091
• VP: 244892.91%

Spaminator

• Number of downvotes: 243078
• VP: 54206.94%

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THE HIVEWATCHERS

Hivewatchers provide consistent and scope-based anti-abuse services to the Hive ecosystem. Our prime focus is fighting fraud directed at the Hive Ecosystem and its communities.

Fraud includes any form of deliberately misleading activity or deception aimed toward monetization or other malicious goals.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Fraud can be defined as:

1a: DECEIT, TRICKERY
specifically: intentional perversion of truth to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
was accused of credit card fraud
b: an act of deceiving or misrepresenting: TRICK
automobile insurance frauds
2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be: IMPOSTOR
He claimed to be a licensed psychologist, but he turned out to be a fraud.
also: one who defrauds: CHEAT
b: one that is not what it seems or is represented to be
The UFO picture was proved to be a fraud.

Concerning Hive, Fraud refers to any and more of the following:

• Identity theft
• Identity deception
• Plagiarism (text, image, art)
• AI-generated content
• Malicious deception
• Phishing/malware links
• Reward pool abuse

What are Hivewatchers?

The Hivewatchers project first and foremost aims to fight the fraud and the exploitation of the Hive Ecosystem. Users who engage in one of the above activities get a comment on their posts. The comment usually links to the original source of the content they have presented as their own. The comment offers a very succinct educational point.

Users who engage in identity theft or identity deception are immediately added to the ban list (also known as a blacklist). This is because, in identity-related cases, there is always an innocent victim who may have severe personal consequences if the perpetrator isn't stopped.

Users who either refuse to acknowledge that fraud is wrong or continue to carry on with it, eventually get added to the list as well. That time varies depending on multiple factors.

For many users who ask to come to talk to us, it is the only time they get to chat with other Hive members. Often, they have been victimized by those who have scammed or misled them and asked for help. Many stay in touch long after their appeal is up or questions are answered.

The Hivewatchers rely on the community to locate instances of fraud and report them. Community members submit their reports anonymously on our website at http://hivewatchers.com and, should their reports be accepted as valid and correct, receive a small payment of appreciation. We manually check every report to make sure it is within our scope and is accurate. The comments from Hivewatchers are all manually published (although they are templated for consistency).

Background

Hivewatchers were originally Steemcleaners. The project was started in 2016 by @Anyx who, as a PhD student, was troubled by all the plagiarism and fraud he saw on Steem. He created @cheetah, a hands-off similar content bot, and then formed Steemcleaners. Many people have joined in along the way and have spent time in the role of a Steemcleaner. Those of us who are part of Hivewatchers now are not the founding members and cannot speak of the project's full history as some of it is beyond our knowledge.

When the Steem blockchain was lost during the hostile takeover that gave birth to the Hive ecosystem, Hivewatchers was born.

Infrastructure

The Hivewatchers service is more complex and robust than it looks. This section is here for general information and is not related to this proposal.

http://hivewatchers.com is a ruby site hosted alone on a VPS. It has a bridge that allows it to post directly to the Hive chain.

Additional servers and scripts exist for Spaminator but are not related to this proposal.

Risks

You may guess that fighting fraud is not always popular. We have gotten every type of threat and form of harassment. Most users are good people and the educational part of Hivewatchers is perfect for them. However, organized scammers are different. They enter the ecosystem with a clear intent to exploit, scam, deceive, and steal and they create approaches that can rival some corporate business plans to do so. When caught, they fight tooth and nail and resort to everything under the sun. Being a member of Hivewatchers is a thankless and dangerous job.

Proposal

Type of Proposal: Hive service, non-tech operational, and labour costs
Technology: Partial OS

Time and Commitment

Hivewatchers is a part-time job at best, a full-time job during peak times. Complex investigations, particularly ones involving multiple victims and accounts, can take days. Helping users can take anywhere from a minute to an hour per person. Assisting another project can take an hour or over a day. Processing reports always takes hours. Maintaining the infrastructure takes time. It all adds up.

There are 3 members:
@guiltyparties
@hivewatcher
@nuttin

Project Maturity

Phase 1: Establishment

The project is 8 and a half years old and this phase has long been completed.

Phase 2: Technical Maturity

The Hivewatchers reporting frontend platform, backend processing platform, list servers, and all supporting technology have already been funded, paid for, and donated by the team.

Phase 3: Evolution and Ongoing Operations

Hivewatchers must continue to operate as normal while completing this phase. Included in this phase (but excluded from the above funding request) are:

• Investigation work hours

• Liaison hours

• Server, script, bot, and site upgrades

• Related servers

• New Frontend and Backend development

• This proposal is to fund the ongoing operations only. All additional task hours or costs will be donated out of pocket by the Hivewatchers team.

• If unfunded.
  If unfunded, the service may explore alternatives for funding.

We are aware that many organized, malicious scammers are eagerly waiting for Hivewatchers to lose funding. We will never let anything prevent us from stopping an identity thief, among others.

Final Thoughts

Hivewatchers have been around for years in different forms and are always evolving. We appreciate your support, feedback, criticism, and collaboration. Thank you for considering our funding proposal.

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SPAMINATOR

Spaminator is an anti-abuse and anti-exploitation project designed to warn the community about abusive accounts.

• 2 domain names (Hivewatchers and Spaminator, keeping them together for the sake of simplicity)
• The servers that host the bots and API
• Maintenance of infrastructure and misc costs such as IP address(es) (including Hivewatchers infrastructure)

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NEW FRONTEND AND BACK END

We are currently hiring a skilled developer to create a new Hivewatchers website. The existing site, coded in Ruby, has been plagued by persistent issues leading to frequent downtime, attributed to a variety of errors.

To address these issues comprehensively, a decision has been made to construct an entirely new back-end infrastructure. At the same time, the front end will undergo a complete overhaul to improve user-friendliness and provide an improved user experience.

We plan to incorporate additional APIs into our website, introducing features like Transaction Search and Blacklist Search tools to improve functionality.

Here is a glimpse of new responsive website designs:

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Thank you for all the support from the community that has been given to us throughout all these years.

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Approve The Proposal with Hivesigner

Approve The Proposal with PeakD

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Addendum

Hivewatchers and Spaminator are both scope-based projects. It is the official policy of both these projects that they are to focus on their respective scopes and not deviate from said scopes.

It is the policy of Hivewatchers and Spaminator that at no time is the account used selectively outside of its scope for personal or political-related ends. All content and subjects are treated equally under the Hivewatchers and Spaminator frameworks and their treatment is further restricted by the technical limitations set as part of the bot algorithms and the front and back-ends.

In extreme cases such as terrorism, murder, child pornography/exploitation, and similar situations of grave consequence will the accounts be used outside of their main scope. Those are extremely rare and in the entire history of these projects, only a couple of times this was required.

The personal opinions of team members are not subject to regulation but may not be uttered on our professional project accounts. Where errors occur, we thank all community members for letting us know and will correct them.

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Images by thepeakstudio.