Due to feedback, there is further revisions in how @smackdown.kitty will operate, added just below the introductory paragraphs.
All feedback is welcome, as we want to have as much support from the community as possible with this, so we want to do this the right way.
I just want to drop a link in here from a post which I think shows the evidence that my hunch that self-voting is going to be detrimental to rewards in the long run here: https://steemit.com/circlejerk/@aggroed/autovorotic-asphyxiation-the-mega-circle-jerk-is-choking-out-itself-through-the-rewards-pool
I,
like many other veterans here have been watching the unfolding scenario with the change in rewards distribution from Hard Fork 19, that is seeing a lot of, especially medium to high level SP account holders upvoting every single one of their own comments.
Now, I am more than happy to admit that I was fully in support of The Experiment which was run by @smooth and @abit that was instrumental in leading to this change, because I felt that this lack of any substantial rewards from upvotes on their posts was an impediment to adoption by new users, who were finding it extremely frustrating, too much to continue.
These were bad times, the price was endlessly (but decelerating in its trajectory) going down, eventually to bottom out around $0.07. A lot of people just quit after a while, and the incentive that was provided by the Steem Guild by upvoting heavily new users was not sufficient to bridge this.
Now, we don't want to make it so easy that the effort is meaningless either.
TL;DR
- Self voting provides no information about quality, only peers can be judges, and an individual is not their own peer
- Self voting resembles arrogance and conceit socially. In Australia we would say 'to put tickets on yourself'
- Because self voting diverts rewards from the pool without adding information, these votes are essentially Spam in terms of entropy
- Self voting is an incentive to fill up the blockchain with intentionally meaningless posts and comments, and is an ongoing and escalating extra cost for those who run the network (witnesses)
- To the outside world, it is another thing to point a finger at Steem and declare it is a scam
After some thought about how to set the trigger on her flag/downvote, I am considering, for reasons of expedience and to take a slowly slowly approach, that perhaps @smackdown kitty will keep a little database of how many times each user votes for themselves, and rather than attempt to fully neutralise it, she will start at 1% downvote, and every time she increments the counter on an accounnt's record of self voting, she will vote this much. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
By taking a more gentle approach, I suppose she is more of a kitty, but this is a girl kitty, the more you try to get her excited the more her claws come out, She doesn't really want to pay fighty games, if you change your policy, you'll stop seeing red flags on self voted posts.
For reasons of it being default on every new account to self-upvote original posts, we are seriously considering making her flag/downvote comments with upvotes, and not touching the original posts.
Please advance your counterarguments, statements of support, and opinions about how we should do this, since after all, it will almost entirely depend on you how strongly we want to push back against this growing problem.
The justification for creating this bot:
Steem's central goal is the promotion of quality content
What is the metric this used to determine quality?
It is the votes coming from other members of the community towards a post. Really, to vote on your own post is redundant, and it was the central reason for the prior reward curve, as clearly explained in the White Paper.
Of course, I want to point out at that point, that there was no such impediment for those with upper echelon Steem Power stakes, except that because their voting power being the predominant selection influence, many people rightly complained that Steem's trending pages really just reflected the opinions of a very small segment of the population.
Now, I just want to point out, that even if self-voting was banned in the consensus of the network, that you can simply bypass it by putting your steem power in one account, and vote on the account you post on. So self voting cannot be stopped, ultimately.
But everyone knows that the average person thinks they deserve some arbitrary amount which is not necessarily the opinion of others. The self votes do not contribute towards the formation of a network wide consensus about quality, which is a central objective of Steem's design. The steep rewards curve was designed to prevent this for the majority of users, but it unfortunately is an absolute fact, that for those who could, no obstacle would have stopped them doing this.
A part of the purpose of flattening the rewards curve was to allow more new steem to be distributed to smaller SP accounts.
I am sure that people have more than a few times done investigations into the records of certain whale accounts and found disturbing links between their account and some other little account, which likely was their own. The majority of people find this kind of behaviour unseemly and ultimately, the total pool of available rewards is cut into significantly to the detriment of the majority of users.
The primary justification for @smackdown.kitty - to mitigate abusive behaviour, and keep the Signal to Noise ratio low
As mentioned above, ultimately through sock puppet accounts, and the commensurate extra effort required can be used to bypass any hypothetical ban on self voting, it is not the objective of this campaign to address that which cannot be resolved.
Anyone who bothered to read this post carefully will now know that they can vote for themselves in this way, but the barrier for entry has been raised above the level of the sort of person who does not read this post. Furthermore, for many people it is enough difficulty to open one account, let alone open another.
However, anyone who has spent any time at all in https://steemit.chat would know, there is a great number of people who don't think for one second about grasping, and don't give a damn what it looks like, and the thing that concerns me, and others who I have talked to about this with, is that we do not want to have a situation where a massive number of new users come here just to post arbitrary, though 'unique' (to dodge @cheetah) content, simply in order to have something to pin a vote for their own post upon.
Also note that essentially, @cheetah was really the first precursor to the Experiment, because it does exactly the same thing: it automatically flagged, at first, and then it posted warnings, in order to mitigate abusive behaviour with people earning rewards on other people's content. When the behaviour continued, this was escalated to automatic flagging, to deter the offender.
However, instead of doing this, and opening @smackdown.kitty to counterattacks, she is not going to post anything. We considered this but it is too easy for this to be done. No, you can just hurl your barbs at me and whoever else delegates power to her instead, if you are that passionate about 'fighting this injustice'.
This is not about whether you think your post is good or not. If you did not think your post was good, why did you post it?
If you don't think your post (or comment) was any good, then why do you vote for it? Easy to answer that: because you knew you would give yourself some amount of rewards. This is a very bad incentive and we want to disincentivise this behaviour.
The problem is, it's really not a measure of anything. My chief concern is that, as it stands, not many people who are new realise they can do this, although they automatically vote for their own posts, and this is the default in the interface.
So, @smackdown.kitty is here to burst this bubble
Unlike The Experiment, which was done in a time where was no Steem Power delegation, and thanks to the experiment, the Hard Fork 19 change means that running a bot to counter upvotes for the purpose of the experiment can be done by anyone, and the playing field is level, if enough people agree to pool their SP into an account for this kind of purpose, through the revocable process of delegation, this kind of action can be done.
The most likely situation will be that a lot of people who agree with this will contribute relatively small amounts. I am planning on delegating at least 150 Steem Power to @smackdown.kitty. Really, if this will have any effect at all, it will also be a significant portion of the community who care enough to learn how to delegate their Steem Power (which is a good thing to learn how to do anyway) and for them to forego the voting power it would have granted them, with a 1 week delay before they can have it return to their account.
So anyone who is interested in supporting this campaign, and we will need a lot of support, can use the Steem Power delegation function. You can read about how to use it here, if you are interested:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@liberosist/a-brief-guide-to-delegating-steem-power
First of all, she is not going to counter-vote any post from a user with a total steem power, including delegation, of under 1000 SP. The reason for this is that probably the majority of new users are in this bracket, the majority of new users have some sense of social etiquette. The ones who might cause a problem, with small stakes are not causing as big a problem in the dilution of the data being generated that justifies the payment of anything at all.
Increasingly, I am seeing more and more users, who have precisely above 1000 SP, who have been here for a while, and, quite often, they are just doing it, because they can, the button is there, and the number is pleasingly expanded when that button is pushed. This is a pretty clear incentive and as I point out, it is contributing nothing to the collective evaluation of quality.
When you challenge people about it, the instinctive response is defensive, and I believe this is because it is immediately interpreted as being a condemnation of the character of someone. Well, in some sections of society, sexually molesting children is normal, and they also instinctively respond defensively about this behaviour, because even though they like this activity, and its results, the same cannot be said for those whose innocence is being destroyed.
I am not saying self voting is like this, but if you think trumpeting yourself is great, then why do people interpret words like 'Conceit' and 'Arrogance' as being perjorative? This is why the kitty is called @smackdown.kitty. She is here to get rid of this and stop it from growing to be a problem, in the interim while the community and Steemit, Inc. determine the consensus on this.
The subject of self voting has always been a concern to people, but in the past this was directed at Whales only. Now, Orcas, Dolphins and Minnows, and even Newbies are doing it.
Why was it not ok for Whales to do it, but now it's ok for everyone?
The main reason why this was not an issue before was simply that Whales aren't desperate to earn a few bux while doing something that is socially unacceptable. They weren't accountable to anyone else anyway, but some of them did care about their reputation.
A whale, @smooth, who stuck his neck on the chopping block, in order to win you, yes you all, from the dust up to the dolphin, equal standing according to your stake in the system. He and @abit copped a lot of flak over this, and I fully expect that I'm going to be attacked through this with flags, but I'm not afraid of flags, and neither is anyone who is happy to be publicly associated with this campaign.
@berniesanders once flagged me, taking a $200 reward down to $5, and my reputation from about 35 to 10.
It was humiliating, and disappointing, but, while I still stand by my opinion that BS is quite an unlikeable character (and @r4ken is another notorious whale), the point in relating this anecdote is to say, that I don't care if I end up with a reputation like bernie's over this. And I suspect that he will delegate to @smackdown.kitty when he is satisfied that she does what we say she does, as will other people who may choose to proxy their involvement through alt accounts that are not known to be associated with them.
Secondary to the promoting of Steem's primary goal of promoting and paying for community determined quality, is the load on the network of a lot of meaningless transactions
The extra load of self-voting purely to win rewards, on the rate of acceleration of the growth of the data in the blockchain, and the essentially spammy vote transactions, and - the main thing we are doing this to prevent - spammy posts and comments, this has an impact on witnesses. Not in the short term, but in the long term, if the amount of data on the blockchain increases, and requires witness servers to be upgraded, which is also going to involve a lot of work migrating as well, will raise the cost of running a witness.
While the top 19 would be in no serious position with a 150Gb+ blockchain to deal with, as they get paid pretty good, this would again lead to a situation where the backups start to turn off because they can't make enough. The backups are there in case the top 19 fail, and whoever is in position 21 moves into the main schedule. If I had to accommodate this much data on my backup witness, I would not be able to continue to run it after a few months.
@smackdown.kitty's operational parameters:
@smackdown.kitty is coded, based on the same principle as The Experiment, to only weight its downvotes (aka flags) to the exact extent of the upvote upon a post by the poster themselves.
@smackdown.kitty will not touch any account with under 1000 steem power, because this would be unfair, and repulsive to the new users, who we are not at all trying to get rid of, just to not give the incentive to new users who power up their new account just to self vote stuff they spent about 5 seconds dreaming up.
@smackdown.kitty will downvote as hard as she can, but unless she has more SP than the self voter delegated to her, she will only reduce the reward given to larger stakeholders. She will also likely consume her vote power quite quickly in all of this, but if sufficient support is given in the form of delegated SP, she should be able to at least provide what is the key goal here: to show people how the distribution goes when this self-voted rewards is taken out of the equation. At least, the majority of it, and we may consider waiting until we are sure we have enough pledged or delegated SP for her to be able to take on even whales.
updated additions
@smackdown.kitty will use an Sqlite database to keep a tally of how many times she sees and flags self-votes, and each subsequent upvote will increase the percentage of the downvote. Each subsequent, non-self voted post will get a 1% upvote, but if self-voting resumes, the count continues as before.
@smackdown.kitty will generate a database, and once a day, either I or @personz will post the list of the current top 50 self voters in an automatic, payout declined post, so that there is naming and shaming.
Final Notes
This is a pre-announcement. We are not going to let this little badass out on you all until we have tested it thoroughly on our own accounts, as the initial promoters and operators of @smackdown.kitty Note that I have not yet given her an avatar or explanation yet, but this is coming tomorrow, and myself and my colleague, who is also a witness, and is also concerned both about the dilution of quality, rewards and the acceleration of the load on witnesses, we will be first testing her on ourselves, just to make sure she does nothing unexpected.
This is a controversial enough act on my part, to do this, as it is. We want to be completely transparent about this. I will be also ensuring that the bot's code produces a log that provides sufficient information to explain what it is doing, and this log will be made available for anyone to see on a web server.
We have thought through this long enough to be confident that we want to risk the ire of the community by doing this, but we are giving good advance warning, it is likely to be at least 3-4 days before she will be let out of the kitty carrier where she is bursting our intentionally made bubbles, and out there to set about giving a bit of smackdown to the conceited, the complacently corrupted.
By the way, to everyone who comments on my posts and then upvotes their comments, I don't like it, and as I said in response to the first one I saw: 'You just saved me the effort of voting up your somewhat insightful comment', after clicking vote out of habit, and then checking who made the other vote, and then I revoked my upvote.
This post is 100% payout declined because we are not doing this for our own benefit, but for the platform as a whole, and especially those who feel the proper glare of shame for doing it, once the corrupt nature of it becomes clear to them. I used to mostly upvote my own posts, and it's a default setting. But it is not cool, I have stopped completely, and this thing needs a @smackdown.kitty, before a flood of new users sees this as a way to make a lot of money with a new kind of spam.
"The main reason why this was not an issue before was simply that Whales aren't desperate to earn a few bux while doing something that is socially unacceptable. They weren't accountable to anyone else anyway, but some of them did care about their reputation."
This is a strange statement because, If I remember correctly, they were already making lots of money because of the way rewards were distributed.
So, can someone tell me why people will invest in Steem Power?
Final note:
It should be up to SteemIt to change the system rather than employing a 'BullyBot'. What if you BullyBotters then decide to change something else. I mean, you do realize that many users have invested in Steem Power and may rely on the income it generates. They can't just pull their money out, because powering down takes such a long time.
Imaginary headlines,
"I put my money in and then they changed the rules. I couldn't get my money out."
"I followed the rules, but they hounded me out"
"They have a bot that bullies people"
"They can all vote for their circle of friends, but if you vote for yourself within the rules, they go crazy and set a bot on you"
People invest in Steem Power because they believe that Steem provides a desirable social function as well as an equitable distribution system for newly issued cryptocurrency.
You are committing a logical fallacy in your question asking why people invest in steem power, as though the only mechanism for distribution is self voting. If you are that much of a bore nobody votes on you, why should the network bear the cost of your spammy self votes and give you money for giving nothing to nobody? The logical fallacy is called False Dichotomy. This is almost the favourite tool of political rhetoric. It is also an attempt to intimidate the querant and assumes they are stupid and don't realise the list of options has omissions.
The thing about not being able to get money out is a non sequitur because we are not targeting accounts with under 1000SP, both because they are mostly new, struggling accounts, and the proportional impact on rewards will be greater (though still miniscule). The votes it gives are absolute minimum and only will rise as an account continues the comment self upvoting. And lastly, it won't flag original posts because this is a default in the user interface and would be unnecessarily confusing. Self voting takes a specific conscious effort to do, and we are aiming to break that habit, and show people how it feels to not lick their balls.
Everyone votes for their friends, usually because they like what they friends do. Usually this is why people become friends.
EDIT: Not only that, but a secondary, positive feature, is that if you have previously self voted comments, and then stop, in a random time period from 2-8 hours, your non-self-voted comments will be upvoted at 1%. This may seem a trifling amount, but the economics of managing the bot's voting power mean that once we get through to a person, we want to at least show them gratitude by incrementing the vote count, even if it does not mean very much, and it saves the bot vote power because every subsequent upvote you make will increase the proportion up to the limit at which it neutralises your reward.
And the bot will not forget your past behaviour, or the level at which you decided to stop, because maybe you arbitrarily vote your comments up. This also accounts for those who don't upvote every comment they make, perhaps because they aren't entirely greedy. To reset it to zero would open up the possibility of gaming our bot, which we will not allow.
The upvotes she gives will continue indefinitely until the bot is decommissioned.
If you are wondering about whether a mass of people with your mistaken ideas about what we are trying to achieve here will attempt to spam up the chain with self votes, then you also, as a collective, will show that you care more about keeping your ability to divert rewards away from those who vote for others, than the community as a whole, which will then invalidate your argument.
And some day in the distant future, when we have full AI bots, people will be able to automate the investigation process to locate sockpuppet accounts. I have been working on simple rule systems for this, but they require intelligence to find sufficient links between the activities of an individual engaging in this activity. It is on my agenda for development of my distributed network architecture design, which I started to do intensively when I went on a holiday from Steem after I got tired of struggling with getting Steemit, Inc to make the HF 19 change. My planned media monetisation system requires this, after the network scales up, and I intend to work on this in parallel with my work as a Witness on Steem, because I, like many others, consider Steemit, Inc. to be an absentee landlord, and just as Dan Larimer has expressed when talking about how he moved on from BTS to Steem, and then to EOS, it was his intention that at some point the community would become the arbiters of who would be developing it, and develop a community governance system to make it more responsive, by opening it up wider, and monetising the code production itself, directly.
"Everyone votes for their friends, usually because they like what they friends do. Usually this is why people become friends."
It troubles me that you are not aware of the problem of voting circles - people who band together to vote each other up. There have been enough articles and comments about it here on SteemIt.
I am fully aware of the circle jerk, and in fact, HF19 was made because of people's bubbling rage against this injustice. Because of the architecture of an open, distributed system like Steem, with no moderators, and the difficulty of identifying sock puppets, there is no intention to address this issue because it is outside of the scope.
It is completely natural for people to cluster into affinity groups, and indeed, the necessary corollary of this, of the conflict between different groups, is precisely what is taking place between you and me now. Both dynamics have their place in the process of developing a community, and establishing the rules and customs in that community.
So, maybe now I can follow your track of thinking and say you were misleading in your answer about friends naturally voting up each other because you didn't mention it.
I didn't think it was necessary to repeat myself. In the original post above, I pretty much lay out everything, if you read it right through. In fact, there has not been an argument or point that I am aware that I didn't already address in the original post that you have raised.
That's a dare, on my part, for you to find a hole in my logic. I want you to do it because I don't want my logic to be faulty. The pushback against this idea means that I have also plenty of self doubt but as I continue to develop the complex of reasons why this is the right way to look at it. Some people have indeed already hurled ad hominem attacks against me, and anyone who wantonly does this does not deserve a civilised debate: they deserve to be ignored.
"People invest in Steem Power because they believe that Steem provides a desirable social function as well as an equitable distribution system for newly issued cryptocurrency."
This simply isn't true.
As I said in my other, reply on the other thread, why haven't those commentators, and, I am sure, some here, invested in Steem Power. A good number of those complaining about altruism and what is polite simply don't invest. It's very easy for them to talk about how people should vote. How altruistic are they being?
"You are committing a logical fallacy in your question asking why people invest in steem power, as though the only mechanism for distribution is self voting."
No. You are simply introducing something that I never said. Look at the paragraph above and answer it.
"If you are that much of a bore nobody votes on you, why should the network bear the cost of your spammy self votes and give you money for giving nothing to nobody? The logical fallacy is called False Dichotomy. This is almost the favourite tool of political rhetoric. It is also an attempt to intimidate the querant and assumes they are stupid and don't realise the list of options has omissions."
I never addressed anything of the sort. If this is the best you can do in forming your argument against what I actually said?
I made some valid points. I think it is a failure on your part that you did not address them.
You ask the question, why do people invest in steem power, and my answers don't fit your narrative. So you claim that therefore my point is invalid.
If you are really driving at the unspoken question, which is 'how do the people with low self esteem and talent earn money on steem' the answer is, they don't. There is a million other ways such a person can make a living honestly that do not require them to spam up a community blockchain with empty, vapid upvotes on their own, vapid, empty comments.
Also note, and I am not sure if it was Ned who coined the name, but the word Steem is shortened also from Esteem, which means 'to value something'. Excessive self esteem is called arrogance and conceit.
"If you are really driving at the unspoken question, which is 'how do the people with low self esteem and talent earn money on steem' the answer is, they don't. There is a million other ways such a person can make a living honestly that do not require them to spam up a community blockchain with empty, vapid upvotes on their own, vapid, empty comments."
No I wasn't driving at that question. Why would I?
"Also note, and I am not sure if it was Ned who coined the name, but the word Steem is shortened also from Esteem, which means 'to value something'. Excessive self esteem is called arrogance and conceit."
Are you name calling? Just because I dare to question?
You would not want to admit that is the case but why else would you cast self upvoting as so vital to the platform and the distribution if that was not implied?
Demonstrating that a person's blind spot towards an aspect of a debate resembles bad behaviour most certainly does not constitute an Ad Hominem fallacy.
I admire your desire to continue trying to find a way through my wall of reasons, don't stop, please. I am not trolling you in this statement, at all, this is why I have not made any such explicit declarations.
You know, I could be wrong on a very critical point. I don't see it yet, and this is not the first debate I have had about this with people, as you can imagine. I would like you to keep looking as long as you feel dissatisfied with my answers, and probe me as much as you like. Of course if you were to start using Ad Hominems I would simply stop replying.
This is a collaborative process of truth discovery, vitally important to the progress of our species.
"You would not want to admit that is the case but why else would you cast self upvoting as so vital to the platform and the distribution if that was not implied?"
I said that it should be in the rules of SteemIt rather than having a bot.
" You know, I could be wrong on a very critical point. I don't see it yet, and this is not the first debate I have had about this with people, as you can imagine."
You do realize that it is about a matter of opinion and not a matter of right and wrong.
As I said to you in the other thread, Good Night (or day)!
" Excessive self esteem is called arrogance and conceit."
How do you decide what is excessive (and why are you the decider?)
I notice @l0k1 has not got to this comment yet - I am in full agreement with you there @lexiconical :)
I have decided it is best to not poke the bear (kitty) anymore, in this case. ;)
Well, I never called out your use of voting power on your personal account. But, taking it to the level of creating flagging bots and looking for delegated SP (I assume from others) takes you out of your own voting power and into being some sort of community policeman.
I never suggested you were outside your rights with self-voting.
I wouldn't have a problem with you self-voting your own posted content from your own alt account, it's still your SP. Same with resteems, etc. You are just trying to relocate followers, no issue there.
My main points remains you are not stopping voting from alt accounts, so functionally, you do nothing to stop self-voting except catch the egregious and those who don't care. They will still do it, and if your bot every slows them down, they will just create another account.
This is like trying to make karma matter on Reddit - a pointless endeavor that will only "catch" the bottom 10% of least savvy "abusers".
Frankly, I think this is borderline totally wasted effort when things like BookingTeam.com spamming trending is happening every single day.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
@l0k1 I didn't know about @smackdown kitty at all when I posted my opinion and community post on self voting.
https://steemit.com/community/@ilyastarar/self-voting-is-killing-the-community-aspect-of-steemit-let-s-stop-it
But someone introduced me to the kitty in the comments. I stopped self voting even on posts. I haven't self voted on comments at all I guess.
Please keep doing this! I would appreciate if yu read my post and leave a comment. I know you'll love it!
Upvoted your comment 100% because you support the campaign, and followed because you you get it :)
Thank you so much. You are so kind. I wish you all the success and I will support this campaign in many ways. Thanks again!
I just want to say here that I am firmly opposed to this project. I believe that you have chosen to take it upon yourselves to be the up-vote police of Steemit, and I do not believe that this is your right. You disagree with self upvoting, that is fine and IS your right. What ISN'T your right is to punish those who use this system in accord and abidance by the rules that are set in place within it. In my opinion smackdown kitty will be an abuse of the flagging system, as it will punish behavior that is not intended to be punished. Furthermore I believe that you are being disingenuous by intentionally not posting in kitty's page, deliberately in order to avoid her being flagged to death. You know that this bot will be unpopular, you know that a significant portion of the community will not agree with it, so you are shielding it from the inevitable backlash it will face.
I believe that you are trying to force your opinion of what is moral and immoral onto this community, and I don't accept your proselytizing to me or anyone else that utilizing an ability I have earned through my investment and hard work is now morally wrong because you disagree with it.
I know this opinion will not be popular here, but I need to say it. As a note, I did upvote a few of my comments when the hardfork came out, because I wanted to, but I don't currently. I DO upvote every single one of the posts that I put up here, because I work really hard at making them, because they are ALL completely original content that I have created, and because I have absolutely ZERO problem with self promotion if this system allows it. I upvote my posts because I believe that my content is worth something, and it is my right to upvote ANY content that I believe is worth my upvote. I don't care if your bot goes after spammers, and pointless comment self upvoters, because that's not me, and I don't abuse this system. I do care if your kitty grows up to start attacking those who choose to throw one single vote at themselves when they finish a post that they worked hard to create.
I don't want any of this to sound aggressive or to be misinterpreted as a threat in any way, and that is not my intention. I have absolutely no intention of flagging, downvoting or in any way actively opposing or attempting to disrupt your kitty, in fact I don't know if I have ever flagged a post in my life, and I have never taken the time to voice my opinion in this manner before, but I truly abhor vigilantism, and that is what I see in this project. I also abhor name and shaming, I think it is pathetic, petty and dangerous. It leads to dog piling and group attacks, and more often than not ends up completely ruining those that it desires merely to shame into following the dogma of those that utilize it.
I truly do believe in this place, and I want to help make it better and improve it so I would love to have a discussion with you about it if you are interested in discussing further, you may even sway my opinion, but for now I just needed to make it clear that I am not for this bot.
With all due respect and sincerity sir, I object.
It is your right to disagree, and express that on my post discussions, and I find it interesting as a contra #project-smackdown you need to say that you don't think your view is popular.
The bot account will be posting daily statistics, under the title "The Daily Kitty: Statistics from the Catabase" which will list the top 50 self-comment-upvoters, as well as the overall statistics of the distribution of self-upvoting in roughly the standard dust-minnow-dolphin-orca-whale categories.
The flags the bot gives make next to no difference to rewards, except that as time goes on the percentage will rise until it hits 100% - this makes me think of a factor that I need to discuss with @personz about the escalation process, that it will automatically scale if more SP than the current 1200SP she has been delegated is added on top.
It's a shame you don't want to try and fuck with the bot, because that would be fun. I might even dip my toes into coding with node.js if the playing gets interesting. It shouldn't be intimidating if your position really is that strong in your own mind.
I am not interested in dogma either. Dogma means ignoring the natural laws and fighting people for questioning it. I am not fighting anyone here, I am playing. You would not believe what incredible satisfaction I am getting from starting this.
"I find it interesting as a contra #project-smackdown you need to say that you don't think your view is popular."
I said I know my view won't be popular "here" as in the context of this post and the ones who upvoted it.
"The flags the bot gives make next to no difference to rewards, except that as time goes on the percentage will rise until it hits 100%"
To me this is the equivalent of someone slapping me just a little bit harder every time I tell them that I disagree with them, and eventually the make a fist. Why not just make a fist from the very get go? Or better yet, use the book of steem according to you to thump them with?
"It shouldn't be intimidating if your position really is that strong in your own mind."
I don't think I ever said that I was intimidated?
"Dogma means ignoring the natural laws and fighting people for questioning it"
A dogma is a set of guiding principals or tenets that a group adheres to, usually having to do with morals or faith, and usually in fear of punishment. I believe you are trying to force what you believe to be virtuous principals onto those who don't agree with your viewpoint, and if they disagree or run counter to your principals, you will use your bot to punish them. You say you are playing, and you are finding incredible satisfaction in it, but I don't view being punished by someone who has a different opinion than me as playing, and I doubt many will.
If the idea that self-aggrandizement and conceit are positive attributes and behaviour in a person is your position, then sure. Self-vote away.
Meanwhile, in the real world of every type of science and knowledge, no claims originating from the inventor of an idea about its effects can be accepted as useful theory to develop a technology from.
There is a lot of bad people in the world, and one of the things that is common amongst all evil is the key characteristic of Psychopathy - Narcissism.
At this point I expect the barb that I am being egotistical by saying that I know better than you.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but in the real world there is this thing called 'facts'. These facts do not depend on your, or my, or anyone's opinions. I am not interested in representing opinions about anything without a way to show that there may be, or is FACTS backing up my viewpoint. If I don't think I have a logical foundation to what I am saying, I will tell you.
Yes, what I say, about myself, is as meaningless as a self vote.
Let that sink in for a while.
Oh, and by the way, I don't fear punishment. I fear not understanding the rules of the system I am interacting with.
Go outside and find a 2 foot drop, close your eyes, and step over it. Do you want to live your life in fear that you cannot see the ground in front of you? There is an easy solution. Doubt yourself.
I doubt myself almost at least 20 times a day. I depend on this to make sure I am checking up on the world around me. I have fallen into a blissful state of satisfaction too many times and then smashed my head on something, literally, more times than I can remember. I probably smack my head jumping up without looking first, at least once a week, at certain times, I remember days when I just didn't seem to be able to avoid smashing into the sharpest possible corners that I could have.
I take no insult in any expression of doubt about my capacities. You don't know me, or very much of my history. I doubt everything, until I see at least 3 things that are coherent with the initial suspicion. But I also don't wait for 100% certainty. I don't believe it is possible to be that confident. I act, at the moment that my gut, and my mind, are telling me that the ground is shifting. I get better at this the longer I live.
But don't take my word for it. Test me. I invite it.
I never said that the idea that self-aggrandizement and conceit are positive attributes, but that is obviously contrary to your moral stance, good for you.
I never claimed to know anything about science, knowledge, evil or bad people, psychopathy or narcissism, but again, if you do, good for you.
I don't care about what facts you have learned in whatever books you have read, I doubt you have taken the time to research every argument about every fact in every book you have ever read. Your egotism doesn't come from thinking you know more than me, it comes from thinking that you, and your facts, are correct.
I don't think what you say, about yourself, is as meaningless as a self vote, I think it has much much less meaning, let that sink in for a while.
I don't care what you do or do not fear, I care about other people trying to force their viewpoint (whether it is based on facts or not) onto a person who disagrees.
I don't know what all that stuff about stepping off of curbs with your eyes closed and constantly bashing your head into things has to do with anything that I have said, but I think it's stupid and reckless to not look before you leap, and I don't think it fits in with your apparent affinity for facts. I don't live my life in fear, and I don't doubt myself. I don't care what you think is possible or how you act according to your gut and mind, but I'm glad you are getting better at it.
I don't understand what you mean by asking me to test you.
7 paragraphs denying everything.
Good, at least you are not certain. But you should at least understand that you have to act, the clock ticks, and the resources slowly drain away.
It is reckless to leap before you look. It took me almost 40 years to learn that lesson. But it is foolish to stand still when the wind is blowing to favour after the pressure drops and your opportunity has come.
Sure sure, let me know if I'm wrong about, or denying anything else, after all it only took you 40 years to learn that it is reckless to leap before you look. I'll be waiting 100 years in the future, let me know when you figure this one out, but don't bother letting me know about all the doubting and insecurity in between.
"no claims originating from the inventor of an idea about its effects can be accepted as useful theory to develop a technology from."
On what possible basis, and with what evidence, can you make this claim? It sounds ludicrous. It would literally call for ignoring Einstein on E=mc^2.
Wow, I guess you are so defensive because your position is so weak?
You admit yourself that you made an error by eliminating a word that totally changes your meaning and argument and I'm the troll for pointing this out civilly?
ROFL. No wonder you want a bot to "smack" other people with. Must be easy to debate when you call everyone else a troll when they point out your errors, make sure you put the word "logic" in every post 6 times so you must be using it, and then just mute people when you get defensive.
By the way, most snake oil salesmen aren't really known for being inventors, they are hucksters. This should be pretty obvious.
Good attempt trying to claim the logical high ground though. Pathetic though it may be, it's a nice shot at optics, in a Machiavellian-intellectual-dishonesty sort of way.
You, sir, are the troll. Or a biased idealogue.
Why don't you get back to "drawing so much satisfaction" from creating flagging bots to control people's behavior? That's a totally healthy, totally non-statist activity to focus your efforts on.
PS - This: "...what rock you have been living under if you never heard the term 'Snake Oil Salesman'."* is called a strawman fallacy (we'll set aside the ad hominem for now). I never said it, nor did I imply it. If you're such a champion expert of logic (we know you are, cause you used the word like 5 times, right?) you must know this? So you just argue intellectually dishonestly on purpose?
https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/1548070688/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1499417573&sr=8-2&keywords=the+prince
I think you'll like it:
"The Prince has the general theme of accepting that the aims of princes—such as glory and survival—can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends."
"self-aggrandizement and conceit" such as deciding that people who don't use SteemIt the way you want them to use it deserve "your" punishment? And then to go and create a bot to automate this punishment based on a set of rules you devised, outside of the rules of the system?
You've appointed yourself judge, jury, and executioner mate... leaves no room to talk about others participating in self-aggrandizing and conceited behavior.
hey, i left that project as soon as a whale joined to fund it, and this whale couldn't believe that Dan was self upvoting to promote his jibber jabber. I'd seen it long before that but nobody I talked to remembered it. Doesn't mean it didn't happen and the fact it repeated says a lot.
So in fact, I did no judging, jurying or execution, it was other people.
And who exactly is qualified anyway? I think it should be a community thing. But that's not possible because of the distorted stakes of the whales who got their stake by mining before anyone knew there was a steem at all.
The most vicious vigilantes on this platform are actually @ned, @dan, @berniesanders, and others whose accounts you will be able to identify by being created before april last year.
Yet you punish without consensus. Have you polled with your bot to see percent of users overall who selfvote vs those who don't? Shouldn't majority rules if you wish it to be community based?
"You would not believe what incredible satisfaction I am getting from starting this."
This is a scary comment. This is the kind of thing I expect from a SJW meddling in their chosen identity politics block.
I guess we know what part of your motivation appears to be now - the thrill of controlling other's behavior via coercive measures.
Just confirming I am indeed collaborating on this 🙂
Wait... you're part of a bot that punishes people for making what you deem as "meaningless votes" because their self-votes and don't actually indicate any value in the posts, and you're also the one who created a bot, available on github for anyone, that autovotes based only on a set of criteria, not on the actual value of a post?
And you don't see the hypocrisy here?
Well those are l0k1's words, the meaninglessness of the votes isn't my main contention. For me it is against the purpose of the platform as a social platform. Self voting is just getting a return on your investment, not voting for the best content. The original intent of the platform as captured in the whitepaper is pretty explicit about this.
The main reason I created the vote bot was to give people the option of competing with more skilled users who were already doing this secretly / as closed source at the time I made it. I created it to allow you to be able to model your own voting preferences if you choose to. There is also a planned feature which will allow you to run it as a reading list service so you can get the benefit of the automatic filtering algorithm without autovoting.
But I do take your point that auto votes can be considered to be a bad thing because the content is not read. While some people can do it, all people should be able to. I would probably support a feature which restricted bot access to the blockchain but currently there is no way to do this.
But meanwhile your promoting automated return on your investment actions with one hand, and punishing manual ones with the other.
Outgoing votes are always about more than self reward. Self votes only self rewarding.
You're my second witness vote. Good to see this initiative. Love and support.
Thanks @shaishav! But I notice you voted for @personz, however my witness is at account @personzzz so if you want to support please vote for @personzzz 🙂
Good of you to point that out. Will do. Just curious, why a different profile for witness?
Done. Changed the vote to your witness profile. You go guys!
I see more and more people posting replies just to upvote themselves.
Take em down, Smackdown
Yes, it's been a trend. Quality content is suffering.
Even with quality content, they are still replying so they can upvote themselves and not upvote the article.
This is where things go wrong. Selfishness is dangerous for the platform.
Thats where its heading.
Respect
Мandatory resteem
Cheers
Every time I post, I notice an automatic up-vote from myself. It's only 0.01 cents, but still, I am not doing this; a bot is! Will @smackdown.kitty smack down this bot?
This is the one last thing I have been considering, since the interface makes the posts self-upvoted by default. This is purely a user interface issue and could be changed by Steemit with one tiny little change to Condenser (the steemit.com web interface), to set that checkbox from ticked by default to unticked.
For this reason, I am thinking that we will constrain her to act upon self-upvoted comments, and these are the most egregious, anyway.
If we can indeed keep it to comments only, that would be even better.
Yes, this is a firm commitment. It would be unreasonable when the interface defaults to this. Comments, on the other hand, take extra deliberate effort to upvote.
This is standard on a site such as Steemit.com, but not on say Busy.org
Will smackdown.kitty work on comments only, or main postings as well?
Because it is not going to target what are most likely new users (under 1000SP) probably both. There is plenty of people who don't self vote their posts, and I remember that @berniesanders barbed me with that in the heated exchange that I initiated with him that led to my being flagged. If those who approve of it form a consensus that it should not hit original posts, then we will follow the will of the people on this. Except the ones who don't want it at all.
I think it is a bit strange to punish behaviour that is the default in the interface. Other than that, no big deal, even though I do upvote my own posts, and I intend to keep doing that. I hardly ever upvote my own comments though, only occasionally to get some comments in the right order or to counteract a flag.
I had been thinking that the default was a problem. I made an issue for it and pull request to change this.
No big deal maybe, but what do you think of the stated issues though? Self appraisal, reward and bandwidth usage?
I'm still thinking about it.
There is a rather large class of people for whom self-upvoting their main posts is the only way to see any return, what with curating being rather slack for many. I also do it for the little bit of extra money and, as a remote second reason, to give myself a pat on the back. Because I can.
I don't really mind self-upvoting, tbh, I mind repetitive self-upvoting of spammy comments. Repetitive, self-upvoted main postings are very visible to everyone, but dito comments are far less easily noticed.
As a solution to self-upvoting spammy comments, I don't think this will work, as the people who do such things are in all probability the same people who will circumvent it by using an extra account or extending the scope of existing circle jerks. That means you can't solve the problem without judging the spamminess of comments and the voting going on. A bot can give an indication something is amiss, but in the end this requires human judgment.
For the purpose of Steemit, I am just a user, and not interested in bandwidth considerations. Get things to work the way you want them, and then fix the bandwidth problems, if any.
Edit: I like experiments, and I would even like to see how this plays out, as long as the bot owners have the good grace to kill the bot when things don't go as intended and the perceived problem isn't solved.
This has only been true for a handful of days so the way you've described it here is not really true.
It's precisely the "because I can" angle that the bot is designed to challenge. I get you, it's the incentive and why not? But I feel it's negative over all. We're highlighting an area that requires a systems level change.
In addition, I like experiments so much, that you can use me as a test subject. I will still be upvoting my own main postings, so that should give you something to work with.
As I said in the edit, I would love to see this play out. I also believe the real offenders will circumvent your solution within hours.
I experience and hear differently.
Also, to say that we should have self upvotes because some people don't want to or can't produce a post worth voting on, doesn't mean we should leave it as it is. Do we make able bodied people use wheelchairs to make wheelies feel better? I think genuinely disabled people find this insulting.
As described in the updated section above, smackdown kitty will be giving upvotes to any user it previously flagged due to self voting. The upvote will only be small, maybe 1%, but it will be another number to the user's comments. Yes, every one of their comments not self-upvoted. And if they resume, the counter continues upwards.
First, I'm not a fan of flagging. I'm especially not a fan of automated flagging. And I'm especially especially not a fan of organizing an online mob to deprive stakeholders of their agency.
Second, the issue is spam, not self-voting, so you're targeting the wrong problem. Votes for low-quality content are harmful to the platform whether they're cast by self-voters, sybil-voters, a group of collaborators, bots, or random strangers. Similarly, votes for high quality content are valuable in all of those cases. If I understand the project, you will cancel out the good with the bad, when you have absolutely no basis to know which dominates, and even if it is currently tilted towards bad, the community hasn't had time to adapt to HF19 yet.
Third, I am particularly offended that @l0k1, who 3 or 4 months ago was writing posts that amounted to "F*&! Steem and its crappy code, I'm going to Dawn Network." now presumes to dictate how I should vote.
Lastly, some of the people doing the self-voting have some serious stakes in their wallets. How long do you suppose it will be 'til they launch their own bot to counter the @smackdown.kitty votes? And that bot has the edge because it will earn curation rewards.
If I could make a suggestion, I would suggest following cheetah's lead and upvoting with very-low steempower so that humans can use that vote as a signal to guide their own voting (and muting) decisions.
I'm aware of your position on bots from our previous discussions, and wouldn't expect that aspect to be attractive to you.
I disagree that there is any agency being removed, rather it is everyone's prerogative on how to use their stake and this extends to down voting / flagging. Mob is just a pejorative term for collective action.
@l0k1 made a good point in a comment earlier
If Steemit should be designed to create the incentive for high quality content to be rewarded, surely self voting should not be so incentivised as it will promote the content of those with stake, rather than the opinion of the populous.
Whether you disagree or agree with the method, what about the question of whether or not self voting is problematic. I think it is, you don't say exactly.
I think you may misremember my position on bots. I'm a big fan of bots for up-votes. My opposition to this is to the arbitrary use of the flag.
By itself, no I don't think self-voting is problematic. It only (potentially) becomes problematic when it is combined with spam (i.e. intentionally low quality content). Even then, I'm not completely sure.
I think the pairing is probably harmful, but do the self-voters hold their earnings? If so, then maybe they're driving up prices and helping the platform more than a high-quality author who dumps half their income every week. (Maybe we should start flagging authors who don't power-up 100%?) Do the self-voters dump their earnings? If so, better voters and better content should win at the long game, which is good for the platform. It might be a case of Bastiat's seen and unseen.
I have updated the post to include a short summary at the beginning of what and how I think she should smack down this behaviour. Like you are suggesting, perhaps for any user she has previously flagged, if they stop, she instead gives them a 1% upvote, and resets the counter. This way the users will notice that every one of their posts gets an upvote every time they don't self vote.
Self voting is spam, as far as the central purpose of Steem goes - rewarding content that is highly regarded. People only do it because button.
I disagree with this as a blanket statement. Yes, sometimes it is true, but often, it's not. It depends on where the vote is placed. You need to know more about the post/comment to know whether it was spam or not.
For example:
My 15 year old son, @cmp2020, has studied piano for the last 6 or 7 years, and music theory for the last year. When he posts on those topics, his self-vote is far more valuable than many other votes in conveying information to the system. Similarly, at a higher order, @lemouth is a particle physicist and @justtryme90 is a biologist. If they want to promote their own comments to the top of a discussion in their area of expertise, they should certainly be able to.
I'm sure that almost everyone on steemit has specialized knowledge on some topic or other, where their own self-vote should carry more weight than the vote of a random person who happens to see the post/comment.
I have revised this, we are going to leave the original posts alone, and only mark the comments with very low powered flags, that will slowly escalate linearly with each subsequent self vote by a user.
Sheesh, you're up early 8-).
I think that way of operating will get the most support from the community, as it operates more precisely where the annoyance is.
Can't be your test subject anymore then though, as I don't upvote my comments. I will if you want me to, though.
The kitty is ready, and we have the first draft of the code and today I'll be revising it. Kitty will also generate 'hall of shame' lists of the top 50 self voters every day and I'll be posting it with payout declined. But we are not letting the cat out of the bag until we have tested it on ourselves and whoever wants to - message me (@l0k1) or @personz in the chat to get added to the test list.
Yes, I wake up at about 30 minutes before dawn, every day, my apartmennt has an east facing window and from 7am to about 11am I can sit at my computer, and get direct sun exposure, and yes, I am doing this every day. For my health. I am resetting my body's circadian clocks with this and earthing, to suppress EMF interference with the sensing of the Schumann resonance, which is natures reference clock, and which all living things evolved to depend upon. Biological processes are complex trees of dependent sequences and when they are out of sync, you get sick. It's the number one cause of modern illness.
I agree it would be better to not punish self upvoted posts for the time being, but keep in mind that there are different user interfaces and not all behave the same.
I may add a point about self voting on posts. Since the upvote option is already checked when we format and publish posts, it can be left unchanged mistakenly as well.
Flagging something done in innocence will not be a good option I think. Additionally, even if people self vote on their new posts, how many posts does an average user post? Let's say it's 3 per day (though it will be far less in most cases). Now even if 3 votes are cast on self posts, there are still 7 full votes remaining. Problem occurs when those 7 votes are also given to self via comments.
I started using Steemit on 6 June, 2017 and since then I have commented more than 800 times and posted hardly 40 times. Comments are 20 times more frequent. If I self vote comments, it will be a disaster. The point is, people can do dozens of comments everyday. If they self vote on comments, it is a big problem because (i) it's intentional and (ii) it consumes all their votes and they do not contribute to the community.
My suggestion would be to focus on comment based self voting and may be look out for users who self upvote 100 % of their posts.
Regards,
Ilyas
Fortunately, I, @personz and @the-ego-is-you already discussed this, and between me and @personz, we decided that since the interface defaults to self voting posts, that we would not touch original posts. It would be confusing. For the same reason kitty will not touch under 1000SP accounts, at all. It is only this level and above where you start to see the unsightly large self rewards for a few paragraphs of commentary.
If we succeed in having direct self votes banned in the network consensus, this function and button will be removed.
Yes, you also clearly grasp the disproportionate count of posts versus comments. It is not just an issue of simply too much to look at, it is also so many little targets to pin upvotes to. HF19 rolls around, and that's what people start doing. The comments are a bigger overall problem because they allow users to unroll a lot more of their voting power on their own stuff.
Thanks for the update. I am glad you people are already concerned and looking for the best possible way out.
About the 1000 SP limit, I have a reservation. I have about 164 SP right now and it would take quite some time to reach the 1000 mark.
The folks that I brought to Steemit are still in the single of double figures of SP right now. Now, my point is; there's so much time left for us to reach 1000 SP. Is it ok for us to self vote? It shouldn't be in my opinion because 1-1000 SP is where HABITS are formed and if wrong habits are formed, they will be very difficult to remove.
From a community grooming point of view, I think it would be nice to bring the limit a bit down if possible to include maximum number of people. It would surely increase the work and I am not sure where my suggestion stands when viewed holistically keeping all concerns in consideration. I just wanted to express my opinion though.
Regards,
Ilyas
Self vote away. And remember that the kitten only flags with 1%, and only for 1000+ accounts. We have to wait until tomorrow when we can delegate the needed and necessary SP to her as she cannot operate without around 1000SP!
No, we can't do it to newbies because they don't understand the interface yet, and steemit, inc made the downvote look very menacing. Probably a very large majority of new users barely even know how to use a bitcoin wallet, and this is an intentional design of Steem - that it be approachable to people coming from places like Facebook. Anyone who signed up before The Experiment, which led to HF19, will have a much more blunted emotional response to flags, especially with how it has turned out to be beneficial. And not just, of course, now they can assign themselves substantial rewards, but that they are receiving them in their post rewards as well, even not counting the default upvote.
The default self upvote is 100%, by the way, and I just want to thank you again for helping me realise this. This is also very detrimental to minnows, who lose one of their limited number votes per day to this, before their voting power falls below 20%.
The process of this information propagating to new users is diminished in part due to the fact they are unfamiliar with everything, and there is the issue of the lack of chat integration with the blockchain accounts as well. If there was a trollbox on every page like many exchanges, this information would rapidly infect new users. As it stands, it does not.
This is also why as I progress with my distributed system architecture design and implementation, it is directly the 5th layer of my architecture above the fundamentals, the consensus, the accounts, and cluster membership components, which you can read about here: https://gitlab.com/dawn-network/nexus
In other words, I am making a blockchain type system for user messaging, that ties to an account managemennt system, network consensus and peer discovery process, it will be the 4th element developed, built on the first three, and with this system, it will be possible for all of the Steem interfaces (steemit.com, busy.org, chainbb, and eSteem) to have an integrated, serverless messaging system, which will assist in uniting the community more strongly.
Thank you again for the detailed reply. All my queries are clear. The 100 % default vote is a burden as it drains the voting power. I had discussions about it with some people and I think more people are concerned about this limitation as well.
That's the beauty of it. People own Steemit and show their concern. I love that!
Trollbox is a good idea for steemit.com btw 🤔
Too much to read and no concise summary. Are you basically saying that you would soon reduce the incentive for people to upvote their own comment? I thought Steemit was a decentralized autonomous platform, even Facebook allows users to like their own comment - how come the decentralized, autonomous, Blockchain-based Steemit social network is going to be restricting its users from promoting their own stuff?
I have added a summary now, and some ideas about how to make her action more gentle, and to switch to upvoting for any user she has previously flagged if they stop doing it. It will only be a 1% up vote but it will look good on their posts.
If it was just promotion it wouldn't be a problem, it's the self rewarding and ultimately self appraisal that is the issue.
There's also the promote button for exactly this purpose!
How about allow self upvotes on comments but but rewarding anything for that? This articles is not very defintitive on what measure @smackdown.kitty would take to address the "problem".
Also, people are used to promoting comments since it attracts others to do same - giving the comment a capitalist instrument: if your comment is worth is them promote it or let other promote it.
Basically no one's comment may be better than another person comment. Comments are simply opinions, if my comment/opinion is not good and I upvote myself, I would end up being the only one to do so, eventually the best comment might win.
Also about pardoning high power users who upvote themselves simply because they may have a "sense of social etiquette" is not a fair assessment. Its the new users after after all who need to gain something from the network, other wise you would limit new users while allowing existing users to engaged in the self enriching scheme you are try to address.
Maybe you're unaware of the potential scale of self reward here though. Look at this reward for self voting, and on through the thread.
This is a fair point. I usually advocated not quite linear rewards, but not quite squared, so a non-integer power between the two might have been better.
But a more radical solution may be required. I would like to hear brighter minds discuss this, but perhaps disabling self voting at the blockchain level is an option.
I think completely flat rewards is a good thing, and I am a big believer in continuity - I don't want to see this new reward scheme rolled back because the previous situation was unacceptable, by so badly excluding new users from seeing any reasonable rewards. Automatically the old scheme was prejudicial against new users. As a veteran I can say that it wasn't until I was over 1000SP that it started to look decent. Now, it's too high, if people 100% upvote their own. And this is taking away from what they can upvote to others also.
Indeed, disabling self votes entirely seems to make the most sense
Perhaps in a world where you can't create a new account and transfer to it in 3 seconds, with the same level of technical skill required to create your initial account in the first place?
I am editing the head post to put the TL;DR summary. I am considering some options and I will make them into comments in a subsequent thread to get votes for how to do it exactly.
There is now a more concise summary and the strategy has been refined to be more gentle while retaining it's provocativeness.
As a noobie - I just read this post and it went ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM over my head... in 2 simple sentences - can you please summarize what you're trying to accomplish with this post @l0k1
To discover the community consensus about the topic of self-voting in a way that gets a lot of attention by being provocative with very low powered red flags using a cute bot.
Now officially two sentences :)
Boom! Thank you. :)
Now, I am going to start decorating my @smackdown.kitty :)
Let me know in the future if there's anything I can do to help! Onward and upward....
More practical solution woul be not to decline payout, but rather use it to fund the kitty
True. But if she posts, she will get flagged, probably, and then the shitlist would disappear from most people's threads. On the other hand, if it attracts big votes on the reports, maybe it will balance. We will consider this, I can't see why to not do it.
The only thing I can see is when she sees former, logged self-upvoters posts, she will store somewhere this change, and check back periodically and give a 1% upvote to new posts from former self-voters. If she gets flagged heavily, she will influence their reputation less, and diminish the non-monetary part of the reward for changing behaviour.
I am unsure exactly what is the correct way to give kitty a purr/head-butt-face-kiss part to her behaviour, but I want her to, it's never right to only use negative incentives.
Perhaps it would be good to also add to the shitlist post, maybe even before, 'former self voters now not self voting post count of un-self-voted', 'Most Reformed Self Voters'.
"I am unsure exactly what is the correct way to give kitty a purr/head-butt-face-kiss part to her behaviour, but I want her to, it's never right to only use negative incentives." Reading thru all this and now I am wondering if you are in my office watching my cat Mr Dream doing this to me ;-)
This sounds like a good project over all.
Automation on steemit worries me though since it will inevitably be used by governments and corporations to flag or upvote things that are against or align with their agendas.
When the large social media personalities arrive, they'll have no problems dominating the earnings, self-voting or not.
When all your social relations arrive, the majority of voting will likely be guided by familial/tribal obligations.
By punishing the ability to self-vote, it removes, perhaps, the most powerful incentive for minnows not to cash out every penny they earn.
Having said that, I'm eager to see how your pet project unfolds!
She ain't touchin minnows. They are the future of the platform. However, the ability to self vote - @personz preliminary data gathered from the bot he is building (the kitty) shows that the majority of self votes are in fact high SP accounts!
The need to do something about this problem is pressing, because it is going to slow down adoption. We need the slider in condenser for all accounts, and we need 128kb blocks. Now. Neither are on-chain, no hardfork is required. One requires the witnesses to change their parameters, the other requires a tiny change in the code for steemit.com.
Familial voting is really not going to be a problem, but mostly people vote by affinity. The internet gives a sense of isolation that counters a lot of traditional obligations.
I am not an idol worshiper so I don't give a damn about celebrities or familial obligations or any of this shit. I use this expression extremely pointedly, also. A lot of people don't realise what a bunch of fetishists they are. Worshiping the nation, worshiping the ancestors, worshiping the relatives, worshiping the celebrities. It makes me sick.
I don't worship nobody but only wherever this entire universe came from. Everthing else is my Peer.
Resteemit to share it to others....
Resteemed.
Great post keep sharing.
This is exactly the sort of comment that I have been seeing many self upvotes, though some users at least put a bit more effort into it. Not that there is something wrong with 'thanks' but would you self-upvote 100% on a comment like this?
Pretty different discussion from whether you would self-vote an actual post that contributes, potentially a multi-paragraph one, wouldn't you say?
Your point, however, is well-taken. IF, and only if, Smackdown Kitty restrained itself to...I dunno, under 5 word replies?...could I get behind it as doing no harm.
You know...the hippoCATic oath. I think the kitty needs one.
That might well have been clever enough to get my last few comments against this idea ignored...
@l0k1 as a new member-I joined last month, I just saw this post now and agree 100% with your concept. I read the little civil war between you and the first commentor and understand his view point but after thinking about it, I agree with you because self comment votes (which many minnows do ) is not good to the system. I am following you now in order to stay in touch and send in my support.-Lets stay in touch.
"For reasons of it being default on every new account to self-upvote original posts, we are seriously considering making her flag/downvote comments with upvotes, and not touching the original posts."
Did you ever think that perhaps this was intentional, on the part of those behind this platform, and that they considered self voting something that SHOULD be done, when VP allows?
Seems sort of arrogant to build a bot specifically to punish people for this action, when the designers of the system not only don't prevent it... but encourage it.
I generally find those who self-appoint themselves as their brother's keepers much more problematic than those who just self promote themselves.
yeah, says you while you judge. You are a hypocrite.
Also, notice how you arrogantly claim that the designers are beyond reproach? Really, how long have you been here to have any concept of their capacity for good judgement?
It's their platform mate... Don't like the way they made it, make your own. Which you have, and are trying to pull away their base from what I can see in your posts.
Do you allow your house guests to come in and rearrange your furniture, punish your other guests, and repaint the walls?
As for being a hypocrite... Have I flagged you for it? Have I built a bot to chase you around punishing you? No. There's our difference. We're all allowed to have our opinions of each other, even to voice them. But to dole out automated punishment... Quite fascist of you. You should move to America, I hear Trump is hiring, lol.
Hey, I'm new to d.tube. I was wondering whether the smackdown affects the vote or the money. I'm not quite sure... I love to thumb up my own comments. I don't care about the money really for thumbing myself. It's more for therapeutic and self-love reasons. Also, does it affect liking your own videos afterwards? I'm just trying to see if I can actually use self-vote strategically (ex: making your comments more visible to others) or are you trying to eradicate such behavior completely (if so, does it affect videos)? Actually, I'm trying to know whether it has overall a negative effect or just a neutral one at the end of the day. Cheers.