Here you can see how easy it is to Manipulate steemit and receive 100´s of upvotes for just a couple bucks. A lot of people already use this method to push their content maybe not in such a big dimension like i do in this article. But this post is just here to grab your attention and make you aware to only and only upvote content you really like. Take your time and dont just upvote articles that have a lot of upvotes with the hope to receive a curation reward.
I will not tell you how I did this so please dont ask. But eventually everyone can do this and the only way to prevent posts that get pushed artificial to become trending is to be aware that there are a lot foul fishes in the sea ;)
I originally flagged this post for vote buying. The author claims their intentions are to alert the community to a problem. I am going to remove my flag and let the community decide.
wow seems like some one doesnt get the point here. This article is written to present the problem not benefit from it ;)
Thank you @trodor I hope this post will make useres aware to be careful and understand that its not all Gold that shines.
Are you saying he bought the 10 upvotes? I interpreted this post as being a 'whistle-blower' type of post, i was not aware that people was buying votes, and it will definitely cross my mind when evaluating future posts.
I dont see a reason to flag/downvote this post, since the author is, in my opinion, informing the community about this type of abuse, rather than endorsing it. Issues like these demand attention, not only from the core developers, but from all of us.
The author bought the votes from @steemitmarket in order to spam the 'hot' news feed algorithm. They claim their intentions are good, so I've removed my flag, and I'll step back and let others decide.
I can only repeat my self I bought the upvotes to point out the problem not make profit from it! So it would be nice of you to remove your flag so other people can be informed about this ;)
yes i bought over 700 upvotes for the price of 0,01 steem for one upvote. @tobythecat you are correct I do this to inform the users to be careful and point out the problem
This problem has been discussed many times, most notably by @anyx. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than not caring about vote count when curators make their decision about giving a vote. Sybil attacks are difficult to stop, but unless someone invests a lot of money into the bots to make their votes actually worth something, the $ amount doesn't change. Vote count alone, IMO, doesn't mean much, other than someone who is gaming the system and not worth my attention in the future.
FYI, according to @smooth, the 'hot' algorithm is going to be updated shortly such that raw votes will no longer matter. It sounds like it is going to effectively be like the 'trending' page algorithm, but with an elapsed-time penalty.
I see this problem in a long term. The steem power these bots are holding is increasing daily today they might have not enough steem power but what happens in 2-3 years when some steem power is accumulated and the pirce of steem is not 1,5$ but maybe 10$ or 20$ or more.
Then those with larger account balances will increase at the same rate and flag all those accounts, decreasing their reputation. As @trogdor mentioned above, things are being done to help with this issue. Dan had a hardfork ready to go with his solution, but the community didn't like it, so it was rejected. Something will come up to solve this, I think. This is the beauty of game theory: new ideas always evolve to combat the existing ones.
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