I haven't done one of these in a long time but I feel that this one needs to be written.
I came across an introduceyourself post the other day that was bidbot voted into Trending for ~750 dollars and was absolute nonsense. Here it is. we have come to expect this haven't we which in and of itself is sad. I flagged it as it is not worth the value. But, there is a bigger problem with it all.
Firstly, the payouts come from a common pool which means that if a post such as this has 700 dollars on it, there are many other posts that no longer have access to that 700. The pool is distributed based on stake and the bidbots have the most claim on the pool. However what this means is that when it comes to evaluation of the post and whether it deserves the value, it is the entire amount that gets considered, not just the profit part of the payout. It has to be this way because of the common pool. What this means (in my view) is that if someone buys votes past the actual value the community thinks it deserves, it should be flagged down to its rightful value. What do you think this post is worth? Here is the link again.
Okay. Now, here is the next problem.
The person has created two accounts (@onlinemoneygurug and @onlinemoneyguruu) based on another account, https://steemit.com/@moneyguruu who is some Youtuber with 300K+ followers. His guru. And, someone his guru has admited to knowing for 3 years.
Nice, he doxxed him too. All class. Anyway, this is the issue with the Youtubers who are "advertising" Steemit as a place to earn as the way they advertise brings in certain kinds of people who are either very desperate or, looking to get rich quick. The latter is the real problem because the desperate will probably realise they need to do the work and will learn and adjust so they can improve their life.
Next problem.
The average annual per-capita income in India for 2017 was ~600 US dollars. That is 600 dollars a year if you do not know what annual means. The average hourly salary is around 0.40 cents. You see why someone who is using their own bidbot'd posts to advertise Steemit is able to onboard so many when they show hundreds on their posts?
But, how many of those people who join Steem in this way are able to actually produce content that is worth 700 dollars a post? How many of them understand how the pool works, how flags work and how the community views this kind of behaviour? How many of them think that as long as they pay the money for the votes, the return is theirs?
I see that these online get-rich-quick gurus are toxic parts of the internet who prey on people who do not have the understanding or education to be able to see past the utter bullshit they purport as fact and truth. They are con artists who get wealthy off of others and when the shit hits the fan, use a disclaimer like 'I am not a professional' or 'this is advice only' to shirk the responsibility of their followers losing vast amounts of money.
Another problem.
I would be pretty damn pissed if I lost 100 dollars US or 500 as they case might be but, that can be a yearly salary in some of these countries. Do the gurus have no shame when they are advertising their plans to strike it big quick? Is it enough to say, "it is highly risky" to people who may not actually understand just how risky risky is?
Everyone has to take personal responsibility but when it comes to the complexity associated with such things as crypto markets, those people selling their advice have to take responsibility too, a disclaimer isn't good enough.
This is a post by one of the other accounts and another that @steemcleaners cleaned down to zero. They each had something like 600 dollars of bidbot votes on it. That is 2x a yearly average salary that just got wiped away.
I feel sorry for this poor bastard who has come in here ignorant of the community and the systems based on the words of a guru who claims to know how it all works. What is this poor dude gonna do now? In Finland the equivalent amount would be 70,000€ (~2 times average yearly salary) wiped away. That is my goddam mortgage on my apartment. Fuck.
What about the bidbots that voted very high and blindly on these posts without checking the content at all? Is it good enough to say it is up to the user when the users are brought in by youtube shills on what amounts to false information? Isn't there a duty of care somewhere? They call themselves businesses but they are not because, businesses come with liability and they have none. All they do is take cash for votes no matter the customer and say just like the online gurus, 'use at your own risk.'
They say it is for the community to police (not that the community has much drive to) yet, they do not take into account the content that is voted upon, they do not consider their customer at all. What kind of business doesn't consider the customer and only cares about profits? Banks and governments, usually working together. They do it legally of course because well, the legal framework is written by them so, the code allows it.
There is a lot of talk about protecting the most vulnerable in the world from the authoritarian dictators who take advantage of them yet, here we are at Steem encouraging the same behaviours. It is easy to say, don't invest anything you aren't willing to lose but the information required to understand the risks run much deeper than those words and not everyone fully comprehends them.
To the Youtube Steemit shills and your claims of onboarding... please, please, just stop as you do more harm than good to both the platform and like this guy who just lost a fortune in India, those you claim to help.
But, that is my opinion. If you think others should have a think about this too, maybe let them know because the shills aren't going to as it breaks their business model.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
well if they have posts with 700 dollar on it they would have to have around 350 dollar on it to buy the votes in the first place. I really do not believe that these are the people that would put half a years salary on it. (might be wrong though)
I would say that these are the usual circle jerks that have been going on for a while and that these are people that can afford/deserve the hit they are getting.
this is a guy that set up an account and immediately knew all the bidbots??? no, this is a 2nd account indeed and for me he knows what he is doing.
this does not seem to be some poor random guy from india that lost a years wage
He has been following his guru for 3 years supposedly and is working on the information he has learned from him so coming in, he would know enough to use bidbots because that is what is taught.
I don't think he is someone who lost a years wage either, could be some some kid with daddy's credit card but people need to understand the types of numbers that are going around be connecting them to real world circumstances.
There are totally no ethical bidbots. it takes a lot of community downvoting to erase 700 dollars. People here prefer to use their vote power to upvote their own comments rather than right a wrong
Bots are also against freedom of speech. If I speak against them then i get flagged. So I have to be silent. Most of the times I feel panic to contradict someones opinion.
Speaking out on things has likely cost me a fair bit of support but in general, Steem is pretty good for these kinds of discussions I think. Even if there are opposing views, the large accounts generally argue and then walk away.
yes! I compositely agree. I said it because I got flagged once for expressing may be due to culture difference. But I have seen many articles where hundreds of people involve in argumentative healthy discussion.
There may be but, these generally aren't it. Ethical requires at the very least sensitivity to influencing factors.
some like buildawhale maintain a blacklist but only for plagerism and scamming. None of them seem to care about people getting 1000's in votes for a shitpost
none of them care because it requires checking before payment. It is better to take payment and then let the community decide (which it doesn't have the stake to do). How many accounts does it take to knock 1000 dollars off a post? Those that would care also likely care about curating content also so it is a loss on both sides plus, they lose earning potential too.
It is not uncommon in the real world either for enterprises to let the costs of cleaning up pollution be borne by the community.
And that has worked out well for the various ecosystems...
Oh yes.
I just let the Piglet speak out on the subject; let's see if it yields some reactions. Then again, few seem to care anymore about such things.
You can force a vote reversal by giving the user a 50% refund. For @promobot, UI at http://Promovotes.com
I think putting a maximum amount on votes would work. The only bot I use is a charity bot - @treeplanter - and the maximum amount they will double is 0.1 SBD. If you send them more than that, you don't get a bigger upvote, you just donated to plant more trees. And the bot can only vote a post once. It's not going to put anyone on trending, but it's fundraising and a way for us small fish to give a special upvote extra when by ourselves we can't vote much. That kind of bot, I think is cool.
@onlinemoneygurug was created just 9 days ago, and onlinemoneyguruu 2 days ago. Both via blocktrades, which transferred hundreds of dollars worth of STEEM and SBD to the
gaccount, which transferred some touaccount.They authored the intro post and used every bid bot in town, trying to bump it up. Even after transfers the combined value of the two accounts is over three times the average annual Indian income. I don't think we need to feel bad for this person, this is cynical behavior plain and simple.
Voting against the ongoing vote, reducing the current pending payout is completely defensible. It is using #introduceyourself tagged posts with bid bots to try to engineer a positive feedback loop of external votes because of the artificially inflated exposure of trending page.
Though not insignificant, the amount transferred out of the accounts to pay for bidbots is a fraction of the pending payout of the post. It still has a long way to go just to cover the cost of the bots, but that wouldn't even be a concern of mine. That's part of the gamble of transferring hard tokens for soft up votes.
Yes but, the more it happens the more likely 'real' people will do similarly through social proof. It was more for dramatic effect, I still flagged the account.
I haven't heard it put this way. I like it.
That's an original coinage 😉
Sure, I know what you mean, it wasn't meant as counterpoint, more as layout out the case briefly of this particular guy.
It's impossible now to police shitposts. In the days of yore the community could flag bad actors and if enough people joined in could make a difference but now, with the value being in the high hundreds most flags are like pinpricks to a hippo. Grr, it's quite frustrating
That's a whole lot of money to lose when you come from a country like India. It is weird that people do not do their own research before investing into something.
I have been badly burnt in the past because I took the words of one man as the gospel and didn't do my own research. No matter how lucrative something may seem these days, I always find out as much as I can before I get involved. That is wisdom.
They call it Blind greed for a reason. Never trust someone who benefits from you taking their advice. It is not that they are wrong per se but, best get a second opinion.
Hi taraz. I personally think it is disgusting. A post as an introduce myself is lucky to get $1 and this person is walking away with god knows what but hopefully with less than what he spent on it. I am glad you flagged as we need to hand out lessons as the wrong message is being sent.
I think he will be lucky if he breaks even on it. Factor in the Steemcleaned ones on the other account and he is in a hole.
That would have cost a lot to get that amount of bids. They might have done better to keep them lower so they didn't flaunt it on trending for all to see. Had it just been valued at around $50, the chances are that it wouldn't have been noticed and looked at and people wouldn't being flagging it for being over valued crap.
So their advising guru didn't advise very well.
No, he didn't. But, it is what he does so it is to be expected.
I have flagged it as well. I wouldn't mind if it had substance, but it was a ridiculous promotion. That guru reminds me of someone we're very familiar with, if you know what I mean...
On another note, one thing that bothers me with bidbot owners, they never do any refunds because "they already paid their investors" and "it complicates the bids". If a shitpost is trending, they won't remove the vote and refund. It's a lame excuse, so they'd rather let shitposts pass through than not disappoint their delegators.
Brings in the same quality of user it seems too.
To do anything opens them up to liability which they don't want. Pay a manual curator before the bid means that if shit passes and gets flagged, the bidder complains. Letting the community decide means they have no issues as the community doesn't have the willing resources to knock all the shit into a loss and still curate.
It is just a bad misconception that must people have, they were told that in steemit you can make 1000 dollars in a post , and all they have to do is to invest some money in promoting their contents and then make it big in terms of profit. But as you said what I do frown at is how on earth can a introduce yourself post gets to the trending page of steemit. The major problem with steemit is that most posts that makes the trending page are mostly low quality post with no vital information's and also poor written skills couple with some useless dtube posts that does not last UpTo 3 minutes
Haha......I wondered about such posts many times. No proper information, shitty images an no message.
I'm not going to get into all the things that are plainly wrong in this post, I understand you are venting because things are happening that you disagree with, but I would ask instead what you would propose as solutions to some of these problems?
Just complaining doesn't really help get us anywhere. Most bot owners I know are actively looking for solutions to these problems but manually reviewing every post that is submitted for a vote is not a viable solution.
What I think is really important for everyone to understand is that these thing are not up to the bot owners and operators. It is entirely up to the large SP holders on the platform. Bot owners are completely at their mercy - without SP, there is no bot - so they call all the shots on how the bots operate.
This is not venting.
Hire people to manually review the higher bids with a non-refundable percentage if rejected but part of the vote if approved. This would force users to think a bit more for at least the higher bids and will therefore drastically reduce the bullshit that makes it to trending.
The reason owners don't want this is because it is a liability and a stamp of approval and if it ends up getting flagged, it comes back to the bidbots who approved it. So yeah, not viable because that means they need to work somewhat sustainable and take into account the greater ecosystem.
lol, that is not an excuse at all as owners and operators of bots. Sure, if you didn't do it someone else would anyway but, take some responsibility as owners, you aren't helpless bystanders. Blacklists are nonsense in a system that in 2 minutes, another account can be created.
There is so much SP held in the bidbots that no amount of community action can counteract the amount of votes they cast. They could literally only cast votes on blank posts and there is nothing that can be done.
That don't cost and can be done automatically it seems.
Trust me, it's not in bid-bots best interest either to upvote plagiarists. With those two flags to zero alone from steemcleaners, we lost quite a lot of curation-rewards.
Anyways, he got blacklisted now from Smartsteem.
Out of curiosity, why not pay a curator a small percentage of the bid on large bids before the vote? If the fee is non-refundable maybe some will think twice as their bid can be rejected at a cost.
Though some bidbots' users care about the quality of their posts, many others don't, customers of the majority of bidbots' users are not the community and have never been. Bidbots and their users are customers of each other. Give me some cash and I will give you a share of the reward pool, it is a typical win-win situation. The Posts are not even products to be rewarded for, rather means to initiate the deal, same as a phone call or an e-mail.
Let us be frank @tarazkp, this is how Steemit works. There is a reward pool that is already ripe for harvesting, Steemians with higher investments have the upper hand when it comes to reward pool distribution and they have chosen to run bidbots, or to vote for witnesses who run them.
In order to make peace with this take Steemit as new online business model rather than community-based social media.
Yep, as I have said many times '...' would be enough to vote on.
Maybe at the moment but it isn't sustainable long-term.
Exactly, if they had another option they wouldn't have to write posts at all. :) :)
If you have time, please let me know how?
just running out with my daughter so will get back to it later :)
If there is no content and bidbot only it becomes an auction site where the highest bidders win while those with stake sell their votes. The stakeholders grow faster than the distribution does, the bids keep increasing larger and larger until there is a very high bid for a very large vote and then, collapse. It ramps up until it can't survive as a system. Of course, it won't get that far because the token would crash to zero before that since it has become useless.
Oh no. This is the problem with automation of this platform. If this continues like this , someone said that only bots remain on this platform by 2020.
Some people with high reputation are bringing their relatives and friends and uplifting them without legit content. This is the problem with this platform.
Don't know when this changes. Lot of people are aware of them,but can do nothing.
The interesting thing is that if they bring in enough, everyone loses... well, except the bots. They aren't going anywhere and are now part of the ecosystem.
I have heard about it before, I don't know how can we prevent this, and the newbie user will just come here to experience, it's not a common thing to first see how it works. This is a bigger problem of the world and I don't think we can tackle it just like that.
The whole system could be redesigned to prevent it, but I don't see much attention being thrown on an otherwise working system. I don't see much improvement happening overall on Steem.
While some ideas are amazing and a lot of people are starting up their own imaginations using Steem, I think that a little support from the whales towards education ideas and integration would also be welcomed.
As far as I know SteemSTEM and others could and would be able to curate posts for value, even for paid or promoted posts. This would mean that whales could rely on other groups for content-approving and it would create a market for curators, this would make Steem change hands and it will increase the overall market.
It is clear that the system already being built is not effective, so I think that building another system on top of this one gives it a new chance.
The details of it could surely be implemented by utopian in collaboration with science groups. But will the whales be interested or not.
Why change something that already brings them money?
Yes you are right! May be founders maybe be running many bots and whales. So may be they are against doing anything.
There should be manual curation on at least the larger sized bids.
Yes and bigger groups could easily contribute to this, it's just the problem of starting such a project and the whales trust and willingness to adopt it. This requires empathy and a sense of rightfulness on their part for the ecosystem.
How can we make some whales responsible or emotionally connected to the project and stop making it solely a milking cow?
This is the winner question.
I happened to look at trending the other day and saw that post. I was amazed that it had gotten that high until I realized it had been botted up there. It immediately looked like a spam account.
As far as knocking the other posts back to 0, that really sucks for whoever owns the account. It must have taken them a long time to get that money, so that was an expensive lesson for them. It's difficult to know who to trust sometimes and if he was trusting the other guy, he seems to have chosen poorly. Still, you do have to feel a little bad for the guy.
We are not so sure, but even if they aren't the same person, this comment from Meesterboom under one of my postings may interest you:
Other comments under ...
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@moneyguruu/facebook-buying-coinbase
... also speak loudly.
We think we are being played here, and even if we're not, Moneyguruu isn't exactly the finest of Steemians either.
Having said that: those in the community who still care don't have the means to police effectively, not even together as a group, and those that do have the means, don't care and are too busy counting the income from their delegations. OK, OK, gross generalisation, but you get my drift: as things stand, there is no recourse.
This is not working and adding to the scammy image of Steemit. Delegations have turned out to be a net liability for the credibility of Steemit; let's fork them away again.
A last point: this idea by Nonameslefttouse deserves more attention.
Too many coincidences on Steem and I will give the benefit of the doubt to guilty. I think they are more connected than not.
It is on my reading list and open in a tab on my PC. I am chasing al the time at the moment. Not enough time in a day.
Take a few seconds to have a laugh:
https://steemit.com/lif/@auttommgs/re-chbartist-open-letter-to-fello-investors-20180710t081844534z
@auttommgs is a copy-paste bot that made a comment that was copied verbatim from one of cbartist's comments, and the plagiarised copy was then upvoted by chbartist who wrote the original.
What a strange world we live in.
Chbartist is a douche
We did a whole posting on him, but your four words suffice. That's funny, because I am usually quite a bit more taciturn than you are 8-).
I can’t get the page to load. Lots of people flagging it simultaneously?
The post that brought down steem...
I think there are so many comments with images it takes time to load.
Such a vast knowledge uh have provided with such great interest .thnx for sharing it.
Thank you so much for giving you such a beautiful expensive post. Thank you Sir, on behalf of me, many wishes and sincere congratulations