We all know that the global trending page is broken.
@heimindanger, recently made a post where he explained his view of how the trending page is broken.
He then tried to rally stake-holders to downvote/flag trending posts which were promoted with several bid-bots / promotion services.
While I understand the reason, I don't believe that the way is effective and good enough. Not all promoted posts deserve to be downvoted!
My opinion is: we should stop those users from buying votes in the first place - instead of using our own votingpower to counter these votes.
Since I run and develop Smartsteem.com - I'm in charge of a big stakeholder bid-bot & promotion service and I'm open to hear your feedback of what needs to change and possible solutions!
Additionally, I'm also willing to fund and work together with services which aim to solve promotion-abuse (e.g. global blacklist etc.)
How about we actually address the real problem: the blockchain protocols that created the current shit show?
HF17 (post reward penalty and 7-day payout), HF18 (delegation), and HF19 (linear rewards and 4x upvote) stripped away most of the mitigation/protections that were in place for identifying and dealing with spam and other abuse. Combined with a reduction in SP requirements for bandwidth, this place has gone full block-spamming with no accountability...and has actually made it lucrative.
Continually trying to treat what are symptoms of the disease rather than curing the disease itself is futile. If nobody wants to acknowledge or address the actual problems with the blockchain protocols that have created this mess, then there’s no point debating the useless “fixes” that people keep proposing.
We all know the problems. Very few people, if anyone at all, is identifying the source. I think maybe it’s time to stop kowtowing to STINC and the incompetent witnesses that do whatever STINC proposes. This blockchain and the culture here is currently f***ed. Don’t you think it’s time to reconsider its direction?
Korean pumps won’t last forever. At some point, people will need to grow a spine and actually DO something about the vast incompetence and ignorance of those in “leadership” roles who control the direction of Steem.
Linear rewards are fundamentally flawed. I pointed this out many times. Here's one. I'll possibly make a whole post about it.
I don't necessarily agree with everything else you said but I do agree with this.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward#@teamsteem/re-steemitblog-steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward-20180221t053905349z
Linear rewards still aren't the root of the problem. It's like banning guns, to prevent crime. It doesn't matter much if you're killed with a knife instead of a gun.
The actual root of the problem is failing to incentivize societal virtues other than financial. Stake-weighting is the mechanism that subsumes all other societal virtues to financial holdings. This is the source of almost all societal ills, and not merely Steemit's trending page.
Jesus attacked the moneylenders for this reason.
It's still the reason.
I'd happily give my votes/attention to anyone who can help people see the world as I see it so that their content can reach a wider audience and gain more acceptance or resistance.
Under the current system, it seems the people who will end up with the most Steem will be those who create 10 posts with the help of a bot and upvote those 10 posts leaving everyone at a disadvantage.
The power of the people come from what people put their attention on. This is where the power/value of Steem stem from.
Hard to tell someone to let go of the easy money, they will lose their witness spot to the next guy willing to scam the pay to play setup.
LOL you crazy.. speaking things that make so much sense in a place where nonsense is the standard.
I agree, it's really important for humanity to start getting a blockchain social media right, it's even getting critical now.
I only recently joined, composed 2 posts that were not looked at by anybody, felt like a waste of energy. Wondering what i'm doing wrong and thinking about tipping a bot - how else will people even start to notice the contribution?
You have failed to realize that screaming into a void gains no attention. I've been here almost a year now, and for the most part 3/4 of my rewards come from comments, rather than my posts. I do post, but engaging in discussions is the actual point of social media, not content creation.
It isn't the quality of posts that most matters, but the quality of engagement. Making a post is akin to starting a conversation. Commenting is joining in. Usually the conversations I join are more profound than those I start ;)
Until you have a large following spending a lot of effort making posts isn't going to generate substantial financial rewards. Jumping on the bots doesn't produce useful engagement, and thus isn't much point, at least to me. I've never bothered, because I'm not here to make money, but to escape censorship and propaganda infesting other platforms.
If your only purpose here is to gain financial rewards, go mine some crypto instead of mining the rewards pool here intended to reward creators and incentivize Steemit society. Your question indicates otherwise, despite interest in rewards.
Seek out content that aligns with your interests and comment cogently when you have insight to offer, and you will grow a community that is interested in what you have to say. Then your posts will be seen by your followers, rather than no one. Except for appearing in new, which is chaos, only your followers see your posts in their feed--unless you pay for botvotes, which doesn't get you any attention from me, cuz I'd rather wander aimlessly through new than be annoyed by the panderers in trending.
Build an audience through participating in the community of interest and you will post to that audience. You haven't done that yet. You are now, by commenting here.
The words of wise man once said the above speech. I agree with all your advice. What is curious is that I make more money off photos. The money from comments and posts is on average the same!
Agreed. As a new user, I was able to spot this in a few weeks.
The fact that one user can throw a tantrum and downvotes my reputation from 40 to -5 proves that point. I am talking about #hgin if you haven't figured that out.
Unless these loopholes are fixed. There will be others like him and then the whole place will turn into a total spam fest.
@kabir88
I'd really love to witness that change @ats-david, but I guess if Steemit, Inc had any interest in fixing steemit.com they would've taken according actions. We're doing circles around the very same issues since months.
In that context I always remember those words from Ned during the 'blocktalk' two months ago (Source):
From that point on I stopped worrying about steemit.com because I realized that it's not a priority anymore. Yet I never fully understood their reasons. As you perfectly described, it's not a superficial issue but the consequence of a lacking governance.
The larger stakeholders would tell you now: Wait for Hivemind and SMTs. But then they don't tell you how long you need to wait...:-) Communities were announced in January 2017 and planned to be implemented in Q3/2017.
From my point of view, to abandon steemit.com and focussing on something completely new is as if someone wanted to fix a broken relationship by having a baby. How could an additional project built on the very same unstable ground, have a chance to succeed?
I've been powering down since November 2017 for the simple reason that I don't agree with how Steem is governed, and I never regret my decision. Since I only engage with my own community - both on the blockchain and on discord - I also sleep much better :-))
Now I perfectly understand your will to change something, I've been on the same track for months. But then there is a point of time when you realize that you're trying to fight against windmills...
Have you checked EOS.io already?
See you around 👊
@ats-david You havn't really explained what the disease is and why those forks created a problem.
You said that these protocol changes have stripped away spam protection, spam to me is also a symptom not the disease. Spam is the consequence of a system that penalize its users for moderating it which is what the steem blockchain does.
There needs to be some rewards for downvoting too, for example if a post has more negative weight than positive after 7 days then all the rewards on that post goes 100% to those who voted a negative and the author and those who upvoted get nothing. I don't know how hard and gameable it's going to be to build something like this but it is absolutely necessary for the community to police itself.
Regarding OP, the first question we have to ask is :
Is vote buying advertising or not? We have to come to consensus to what it actually is. If it's advertising then simple UI changes can solve most of it. On a side note I'm also surprised how all existing steem apps display the steem content in the same way which has proved to be one of the worst discoverability experience for users.
To answer the initial question, I see a lot of flaws in the vote buying model for it to be the way advertisers promote on steem in the future. To name a few: advertisement can be downvoted, buying limits ( model doesn't scale ). I could be wrong but in its current form I don't see it being used on a large scale by serious advertisers.
Of course. That was my entire point. The spam, the vote-selling, the shit content being “advertised,” the disengagement, the lack of accountability...this all became a bigger issue after the protocols were changed. They are all symptoms/consequences of last year’s hard forks.
I could explain in detail why/how the hard forks created these problems...which I’ve done many times over since last summer, including before they were implemented. And back then - just like now - nobody listened. But just for good measure, I suppose I’ll detail this again in a separate post. Too long to cover all of the various aspects of it here.
Are you really surprised by this though? Most of our “developers” here are hobbyists or first-timers developing in the social media space. They unfortunately don’t know the fundamentals of social media and user interests...and the users here aren’t typical SM users/content creators either, so both sides skew the metrics. Then we have the actual results of the voting/allocation and displays skewing it even further.
There isn’t even enough of a critical mass of users for real-world advertisers to even consider spending advertising dollars here. Anyone looking at the actual viewing and engagement stats - even for “trending” posts - would quickly look elsewhere to spend their money.
But even if we assume that advertising here actually gained visibility and returned some profit for businesses, it would be more beneficial to them to buy the STEEM once and use it repeatedly for self-voting or self-promotion, not rent space on the trending page for every post they make.
This is the mistake that current users continue to make as well. They pay for temporary advertisement and have nothing to show for it when the advertising period is over. So they’re stuck in this perpetual loop of paying for visibility over and over again when they could simply buy the STEEM outright and get perpetual use out of it.
But this happens in the real world all the time as well. People often rent for the wrong reasons and think that they’re coming out on top financially, but they truly believe that there’s no other way. They continue to do what keeps them poor...so they remain poor, even if it’s just relative to those who are “richer.”
And we have a ton of admittedly real-world poor people here on Steem/Steemit. Does anyone truly wonder why things are the way they are around here?
Wow, you are one of the few witnesses that actually understands a social network. You got my vote
The last point you made is spot on. In the long run users are much better off using those SBD's convert to SP and build their influence. Very few understand this but the steem blockchain rewards very well those who invest in it, compound interest is powerful but users have to be patient, it's not an overnight get rich quick thing.
Same goes for self voting, in the long run this strategy is detrimental. Because users isolate themselves by doing this and will end up being the only ones voting for their post instead of many that they could have supported through their upvotes.
I believe most of the issues on steem are self correcting, some of them also comes from the fact that the user base is still tiny. The moderation one however is critical IMHO. Posts on steem only have likes, they have no dislikes. This is problematic because there is no balance in the system.
I agree. I am very new to this but I want to say I am getting a creepy cult vibe from a lot of the comment sections because there is no hard way to challenge content you dislike. And when I look at what ends up on top I'm like WHAT??!! WHYY
I know what you mean, I'm getting the same vibe..comments on steem are monotonous, most of the discussions are boring and unexciting imo.
If users were incentivized to moderate content, then all the content that provides no value would get downvoted and the quality of interactions would increase greatly.
The constant drama on steem is a direct result of users lacking the tools to moderate this site. Vote buying abuse would be a no issue if downvoting was profitable.
Although... what would stop the power players from buying downvotes and bombing whomever they didnt like into oblivion
This is true, but it is also true that doing so is highly profitable, thus our allopathic medical establishment.
You failed to elucidate the underlying problem, IMHO, which is stake-weighting. Stake-weighting is also the source of meatspace problems, but Steemit makes it worse by directly linking financial holdings to societal power. At least in RL that link is obscured by rhetoric and the need to corrupt society covertly.
The virtues of society aren't even mostly financial. Simply making everything about money degrades society, and stake-weighting guarantees this. As a result, pimps and war profiteers are better rewarded in RL, just as on Steemit.
This is the root of the problem. All else is a symptom.
I love to see a discussion about this topic happening here.
A few weeks ago I made proposal how to fix current issues here on Steem - but didn't received that much feedback on it.
Maybe it's worth a try again now:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@steemhq/how-to-make-steem-great-again-the-exponential-author-reward-method
Here is a short summary:
Those changes described in this article would lead to a much fairer distribution of author rewards.
Promotion Bots will still have their place in this scenario but it would discurage people from putting large amounts of Steem(dollar) into those services in order to get on trending. And if they do, they better have REALLY GOOD content otherwise even a minnow downvote will have a huge impact on author rewards.
In order to get on trending good content is what matters again and not how much money is put into bots.
Sorry for self-voting this comment, but I still think this proposal would be a gamechanger for Steemit and will lead to huge growth on the platform and of course much more value for Steem on the market.
non-linear rewards
If only people had listened to this last spring...
Stinc wants things this way.
Its time to buy stinc stock, not steem, and vote the greedy f**ks out.
Are they public?
No. And if they were, their stock would be worthless. Ned would have been ousted as CEO about two years ago.
Who holds the keys for changing the code?
Well, STINC, of course. And all of their STINC-ophants.
Tow the line or risk being labeled and blacklisted. That’s always been the game around here. It isn’t exactly a secret.
Yeah, that is what i thought.
The witnesses are puppets, either vote with stinc or get voted out?
As for blacklists i know too well.
Folks that used to autovote me got talked to about how voting for me was holding them back.
Welcome back to high skool!
XD
Here is my view, before the bots the trending page was the same 12 people. Now it is interesting to see who made it to the top.
It wasn't about content before, and it still isn't.
I love the idea that anyone can choose with their free will and Steem to get on the trending page.
Occasionally, something with low quality gets on the trending page, it can be flagged or blacklisted or accepted.
Get rid of the voting bots and you will get rid of a lot of investors and the trending page will be back to the same 12 people who were on it before.
If it is about the reward pool, focus on Haejin and Sweetsssj, that my point of view, you don't have to agree, but I wish you would consider it.
With the whale experiment limiting votes to 100mv the little people have a chance inthe math.
Nonlinear rewards discourage selfvoting.
Going back to hardfork 16 and applying lessons learned from this fiasco might make the next 800k new users stick around rather than tell their friends not to bother.
You are saying @sweetsssj is raping the pool? But she looks so innocuous. Her sweet smile doesn't look like the evil smile of a demmented rapist.
She looks so sad, even when she's smiling.
Particularly when she's smiling. =/
Serial rapist.
It's not just a job anymore, now you too can make it a profession.
When you are working for a living, the job can't be fun and giggles on a 24x7 basis.
I guess some of her pics catch her at a low spot. Not at the @sweetsssj high for the day.
Hope there is page on Popular Voted page excluding upvote bots. Although I cannot say most on trending is a trash but I wouod glad if we give more chance to a more valuable one
Why don't you guys just implement a profit cap? That makes the most sense to me. These bots are supposed to be used for promotion purposes and not to make profit (Directly anyway). By setting a profit cap of 0% all the people abusing the system will simply stop using the services all on their own.
VOTED FOR VISIBILITY
I Strongly disagree with this solution.
If the main problem was people making too much money then your solution would make sense. Your solution would only increase the profits the Bid Bots are already making an encourage more people to make bots...
I think the main problem with Trending is "Non-trend" worthy articles pushed to the top by the same few people.
Either blacklist abusers or changing how trending works in general might be a better solution.
Agree with you my friend @digitokash.
What about separating the posts voted up by bots versus organically voted up. Ultimately, using a bid bot is advertising and one of the things a lot of people here are trying to get away from is advertising.
Further to that, what if the bid bots somehow rewarded the reader? Instead of money going to the bot to vote content artificially up, they money goes to users who choose to read the content.
One of the other blockchain social media platforms is doing that. sola or something like that or ong social. Can't remember which one.
Kind of like swagbucks pays people to watch advert videos by paying them a fraction of a cent for each video. Money goes to the viewer rather than the advertiser.
That won't stop users from buying votes from 5 different bid-bots which pushes them to the top trending spots.
Bids are publicly accessible right?
@oups
yes, they are
Well what incentive would they have to push the content to trending? They are clearly making money from the votes. If they decide that they still want to spend all that money getting to trending after a 0% profit cap they clearly think that they have a good/important article. If this was implemented there is NO way to abuse the bots, sure having a cap on 1 bot might not do much but this would need to be something every bot supported.
Let's say you want to promote your service, ico or whatever - then you don't really care about the ROI of this post but more about the publicity.
That's why ROI capping won't solve this problem.
Can you answer me what the difference is between buying or getting a large delegation and self voting post to trending or those who have little SBD and buy votes to get to trending. Shitpost are shitpost, why are delegated selfvoted shitpost not downvoted in the same manner as bought votes, they are 1 and the same!
Yeah, pretty much. Buying a vote one post at a time or buying delegation for a series of self-votes is the same. All shitposters have to buy votes to be “popular.” Most people can identify shit when they see it. Steemit is a little different because of the voting/allocation system, but the fundamentals of social media and popularity are generally the same.
Yes, it is social media and the theme of social media has always been shit floats. Does it surprise anyone that the same shit that is being paid to the top of other social media is moving here and doing the same thing now that the system is built that way?
What I can't wrap my head around is the few top 50 witnesses who promote steemit vote buying on youtube are top 50 here. It will be hard to change things when people are giving these select few power. I can think of one witness who has a bot that makes money off of bids to fund ads on youtube about how to come to steemit and use vote bot services. Why isn't that problem being corrected? He has even moved to top 20 now, so I guess the consensus is that these services are good or he is just buying proxy votes to move himself up the ranks with his bidbot.
At least you can go to his birthday party for delegating 5,000 SP.
XD Good lord, panderers are pathetic.
I replied it on your comment on the grumpycat's post, I hope it is somewhat worth seeing if you don't read it there.
The posts on the trending page upvoted by bidbots don't deserve to be there!
That's what the real problem is, most of the people think that the low-quality posts dominate the trending page and they don't deserve to be there.
Now, as the founder and developer of the smartsteem, I know that you can't check each and every post upvoted by your service, and I definitely know that you want to make steemit a better place and help people here.
So, instead of concentrating on all the users, how about you concentrate on the users bidding for big upvotes?
I mean nobody cares about if anyone gets 1$ upvote from any bid bot( small abusers can be handled easily by making guidelines and rules, blacklisting) but the ones who make it to the trending or hot page, everyone has got eyes on them, and it is your service that will be held responsible for taking them to the top of hot/trending level.
So if you check all the users who bid big( which would be about 1 or 2 in every 2.4 hours, that makes a maximum of 10-12 posts a day), you can considerably improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service that makes it to the trending page
You said it yourself that it took more than half a year for you to develop smartsteem, now I know that you don't want it to end in a way that people will remember it as a service that supported abusers. A service hated by a lot of people.
The whole thing depends upon how inclined you are to find a solution to improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service. That will help everyone, the investors, users. And more people will support the users in future if their post quality is good, that makes a long-term benefit for the user for the one-time investment, rendering your services more useful.
In the end, I believe that this is quite an opportunity for your service to make this a better place not just for the content creators, but for content absorbers too, as of now, most people create content, very few read it.
Why not? Afaik they are only allowing people after reviewing their profile and content (to look reasonable). Every post can be checked but who is smartsteem to decide what should I see or not? Is this why we should abandon greedy centralized social networks?
Possible solution is shut it off unfortunately. It might sounds harsh but it's for the greater good. It's just a matter of time that another network/coin will be available for us without this kind of services. When it happens, all those stake-holder just going to watch us leaving one by one. Than they try to out-bit their own contents.
👍
Truth is I never go to the trending page because of the bots. This also means I miss a lot of good content as I haven't found another way to find good content yet.
A good start would be a strike system for abuser accounts, after the 3rd strike you get put into the global blacklist that should eventually exist for all bots.
There's also need to be some community consensus on what abusing is, using bots on the 6th day of the post is obviously abuse and just reward pool raping but to what extend is using bots to promote your post also abuse? maybe a cap can be set in how much sbds/steem a user can give to bots for a certain post (i'm aware this can be hard to implement and there will always be non-compliant bots) and of course, community consensus should be reached for this cap, maybe a cap of 25/50 sbd/steem per post can be set or any other value really, just to stop seeing those post in trending with 500$+ of bot votes.
Just throwing my 1c into the convo after all i'm only a minnow lol.
I think @abh12345 asked a valid question in What if all users delegated to bidbots? I don't think the response you gave to the question was adequate.
It seems that there is an extreme unwillingness for the owners/delegators/operators of bidbots to actually engage with any part of the community who sees what they are doing as harmful for the larger community. None seem to want to actually explore let alone find a solution because it is going to likely cost them profits.
When people do not respond it means they are unwilling to take responsibility for their actions which in this case likely means they know the harmful nature and their claims are nonsense.
There has been a mountain of data showing the harmful nature of bidbots, where is the data showing their value to the community? This is blockkchain and you guys are experts, rather than make claims, show proof. I am open to be convinced to the benevolent nature of bidbots once all the numbers are added up.
hear, hear!
Good luck in getting a response. As you have written an intelligent reply of over 20 words, your chances are slim based on what I see so far.
They have no proof because it does not exist - you know this, I know this, and a growing number of agitated users know this.
I'm spending most of my time developing - so excuse my low reply-rate.
But I guess you won't understand, since you only add "value" through blogging.
Good luck with future work.
@tarazkp
I don't see the point of that question and I will def. not get forced to answer it. There is no reason (!) to think about that case. If you are against bid-bot delegations, then say it - but don't ask ridicioulus questions which are simply trying to put fear in people.
You shouldn't put everyone in the same pot. @themarkymark and me are doing more than the rest combined.
And just because nobody else is doing anything, doesn't give you the right to put the blame on me.
I feel that since I do care about Steem - people are willing to put the blame on me and find the mistakes I do, instead of looking at those who are doing nothing.
Possible. But I personally won't respond to personal attacks and ridiculous questions.
Show me the data.
Anyway - thanks for commenting @tarazkp!
When your bot votes the few low value votes that i, and the newbs, do get are diminished in value.
Your bid bot is taking bread out of mouths that live in countries where a dollar a day feeds them.
Arent you proud of your profits now?
Its ok, we see the price doing what it needs to do, when you, and others like you, can no longer make a profit here you will move on to rape something else and those of us still here can rebuild from the ashes of the platform that your profits burned down.
Too bad those folks in venezuela will have starved by then, but that is just the price of crapitalusts profiting, eh?
The point of the question is: if the bidbot system ( the one you develop and defend) is fundamentally beneficial, than everyone should delegate all they have to them as it will be in the best interest of both platform and individual.
I put no blame on you other than as one of the developers and 2nd largest operator. There has been no personal attack made by me as to me, it doesn't matter who you are. However, developer and 2nd largest operator implies a certain amount of expertise, knowledge amd carries responsibility as such.
@paulag showed conservatively how much is paid and how narrow the spread is.
The system is broken, untenable and is quickly destroying the community yet, still no answers. Still no actual data showing the bidbots are helping the community. Does it exist?
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@freebornangel/re-jesusjacr-re-freebornangel-re-jesusjacr-re-freebornangel-re-jesusjacr-re-freebornangel-re-jesusjacr-re-freebornangel-re-jesusjacr-re-freebornangel-from-crapitalism-to-freedom-20180408t025743375z
The real problem is everyone always wants 1/2 of the data. If we pull data on bid bot delegations and distribution, we also need to pull data on self-delegation/ self-votes distribution. Delegation and self-voting is a 1/1 distribution at least the bid-bot are there for anyone to use. One is a single purchase for 1 vote the other is an extended purchase for many votes. Both are pay to play and they BOTH need to be addressed without singling out one side.
They are on the same side. Paid delegation is a problem I have spoken about too many times. For the most part to cover the cost one has to self vote. The numbers don't add up for it. As long as there is profit to buy, the maximisers will maximise.
I know, you know. You're losing big time and the votes you can't give, to cover what you can is costing many, many more users. That is what I am referring to. Delegation as a whole is fucked up, IF people really want to support a project, VOTE the project, strip the delegation.
The best step would be to move any posts that use bid bots to the promoted tab.
I believe this will take place when developed into other condensers, and/or when communities come into play.
However, at present, managing a bot list is a daily task as these services continue to appear.
I wouldnt hold my breath on communities or smts, stinc is just lying to extend the time for growing more bag holders, imo.
Let them crash the price, when folks finally catch on then we can rebuild without allowing the greedy f**ks to make millions from our doing it.
Yeah I'm not holding my breath, sometime before Xmas is my current thinking!
The 'rebuilding' can start yesterday, we just keep voicing our opinion - it's worth 'something' don't you know 😊
Right, it is up to us to make steem what it will be.
Im gonna laugh when stinc is finally exposed for their fraud.
They sold us on making money, but only give it to the favored few.
Its crumbs for the rest of us.
I will be glad when the folks figure out that they are being led on by lies.
Maybe we can buy some more ten cent steem.
I like that you are still of the thinking that STEEM still has a buy in price - this has to say something positive, and I'd also be very interested in some 10 cent STEEMs :D
We just have to wait for the current policies to do their thing.
Then once the greedy have left we can go about fixing things so that normal folks win rather than the already wealthy and their sycophants.
Like weeds, lol
Yep!
I love the ones that appear and are trying to start out with the 15 delegated SP that Steemit hand out for new accounts 🤦🏻♂️
As a humble minnow, I've joined this new platform mainly to share my art to fresh viewers, however, the idea of earning a few dosh is very appealing. But simply hardly anyone is seeing my artwork! I would prefer to grow my audience organically than superficially utilizing bots just for my own self-serving greed.
The clever clogs that are abusing the system for monetary gain, shame on them for blatantly and boldly putting two fingers up at this unique platform that was designed for bringing people from all walks of life sharing their interests and freedom to express themselves without censorship.
These bot-abusers are like lazy opportunist bank robbers taking advantage of lax security.
Here's a plan...why don't Steemit ban all bots altogether until they find a solid solution to combat this irksome problem.
We could stop enabling the reward pool rape by not using the bots, nor delegating to them.
Any rewards not voted to an account by someone that read the content, and supports the author, is reward pool rape.
Schemes that enable rewards without contributing content to the blockchain do a disservice to the intent of the reward pool, imo.
Maybe you should start by not enabling all that?
Your bot could burn its procedes, then we all benefit.
Especially I'd like to hear the opinion from:
@lukestokes, @themarkymark, @heimindanger, @yabapmatt, @transisto, @patrice
Well, I gave you my opinion. Sorry to disappoint.
All good - your opinion is appreciated @ats-david
Yes thanks i visit blog of these steemians thanks for mention them
I can understand that it is a big problem here, but what about Minnows! The most of them dont have enough Steem Power and nobody notice them or upvote their posts. If they dont promote their posts they have no chance to survive here. Everybody needs a chance and the trending page is their only hope. Personally I dont see any other solution for this problem. And this way whoever is rich becomes richer and Minnows give up and leave :(
The most users are following users with high upvote value to get some benefits. Everybody looks at the reputation before opening any post. So we need to change this. We need more dolphins than Whales and Minnows here to get the balance.
Moreover the most people are using bots now a days and it is not more like before. It became a part of the Steemit platform.
I agree with your sentiments, but honestly cannot agree with your points =p
First, I have become a minnow after almost a year here. I have never used a vote bot, or paid service of any kind, because I seek criticism--which is in no short supply here XD--rather than emuneration. The problem is many people focus on emuneration. They don't care about being right or wrong very much, as long as they're accepted and financially rewarded.
If I was focused on money, I would have been long gone, this is true. But I have survived here without ever trending, or buying access to views from those that seek to raise their curation rewards by stacking on the right posts. IMHO, giving two shits about who has and gets how much from the ducat bucket is the actual problem that drives quality down.
Trending is not only NOT my only hope, it isn't on my radar. I'm not here to be popular, oddly enough. I'm here to engage with folks that introduce me to critically important ideas, and to share those I find important. Popularity and encomiums are nice, if you get them for the right reasons, but don't stem from, or create, what is important: the quality of engagement, the ferment of good ideas, and the felicity of those whose good company we keep (or want to).
The last point you make I have to disagree with is that everybody looks at reputation before opening a post. I confess I tend to be interested in reputation--as, if it isn't purchased, it relates experience, and thus lends credence to the statements of those with high rep regarding topics informed by experience on Steemit.
Otherwise, I don't care. I don't look at reputation before I open a post. I consider reputation when giving their views thought, for the stated reason.
One thing you say I do strongly agree with is that we need more Dolphins than Whales. Nothing I can do about that, but it's true nonetheless. The stronger the middle class the stronger the society. Societies highly stratified tend to violence and aggression, since the absence of the middle class demonstrates that there is no upward mobility, except for violent seizure of the assets of others. Since we can't seize other's assets here, we just get ragequits and rants, maybe some fleabite flags, when people confront their incapacity to progress up the social ladder.
We live in a world that money lords power over peons in, and dramatically increase that dynamic on Steemit by making power directly dependent on the phatness of the wallet.
This terribly discounts various matters that are far more important than mere money. Society suffers as a result, and Steemit and the trending page is a wonderful representation of why that sucks to do. Society is people, not their money.
Society, including on Steemit, is far more important than SP, and VP being based on SP is a foul twisting of our attention away from those things that matter more.
I haven't figgered out a way to base our VP on how much we love our families, however, so dunno how to fix it.
Thanks for your forthright comments that come from the heart.
That is something I value highly.
Unfortunately even reputation can b purchased now a days. Your reputation goes higher whenever you get upvotes from bots. I didnt know about it before, but discovered it yesterday in one of the blogs.
Moreover there are many people with multiple accounts upvoting their spam comments all the day :(
@heimindanger
So what is your alternative then? Should buying votes be banned?
Or we could go back to the n2 with the whale experiment set at 100mv.
Until the whales stop sucking up the rewards with their sp advantage in the math we will never attract minnows.
The 800k dead accounts demonstrate that the newbs think this game sucks.
Most list the whales not letting the minnows earn rewards as why they left.
Its a clue, ya greedy bastards.
@heimindanger the only people that got hurt is average users
for whom they really fighting if they want a good content to be on the tranding page , how can this be possible if they just downvoting every single content for the name of "good content" from the tranding list without looking at people content?
for my opinion the only thing they do is that they can't downvote whales because whales have a lot of steem power and money to invest into bots so while the whales stay on top, the only people they hurt is average steemanians that don't have a lot of steem power or money to invest, correct me if I wrong but their fight is exactly for average users power just like me, but downvoting posts without reading a content for the name of "good" content isn't that hypocrisy?
the only thing you did is the poor get poorer and the rich get richer
you don't even have a link to user blog or post so people can check what they downvoting
Since the content flagged is only trending because it was upvoted without consideration of quality, merely for money, it is not hurting anyone. It is directly attacking the root of the problem, which is substituting rewardability for quality.
This is a dirty trick, and degrades not only Steemit by infesting it with pandering and pay for play and ponzi schemes, but the hearts and minds of those that get sucked into believing they are improving their lot by buying rewards, rather than earning them.
They're being tricked into substituting money for things that actually matter.
A toddler that gets their hand swatted away from a hot stove is discomfited. As sad as they are at the time, it is only because they do not understand the danger, and how they'd be hurt worse by being allowed to stick their hand in the flame.
There is a metric that drives the flags, and it's percentage of rewards from bot upvotes. IMHO, this perfectly targets the hands in the flames.
The real power of rewards for being upvoted is the elimination of trolls, and the strength of engagement it drives. Those rewards being doled out on the basis of the thickness of the wallet doing the voting poisons the society, however, and warps power into right, which is bass ackwards from what it should do.
@valued-customer
but by downvoting average steemanins only whales will stay on top because they have SP and than once again we will see the same faces on the trending page
I think the bots operators they the once who need to focus on
because people who have money will stay on top no matter the downvotes
@heimindanger The strategy of the curation reward is good, but you get the same result. The most of it will go to the whales. They have the high upvote value and will earn the most of it. It is really complicated, but there must be a solution. We are dealing with many problems here.
Spammers! And yes you see them more active than the other users. We flag them and they loose their reputation, but whats the point! They are still here. My opinion is to remove every account that looses the reputation after checking it.
Scammers. They are stealing accounts everyday and nobody can do anything for that. I can tell you about some acoounts and you can see it yourself. They transfer money out of Steemit and it is visible in their wallet. We must have more security. Maybe block that account and transfer the money back to the owners, otherwise it is not gonna stop. I mean their doing their job and very comfortable here, while thousands of other users are pissed off.
I agree with you. It is correct to downvote posts from the trending page, but not all of them. If someone shares a stupid photo and gets 300$ for it thats wrong. But There are users who write good posts and you can see from the comments that many users follow them and interact with them, then nothing wrong with that.
We should try our best to help Newbies and give them a chance to be on the trending page. The problem is that the most people are not coming online and instead using services like "Steem Voter" to upvote other users. So nobody has time to discover what Minnows are sharing or read their posts. But as I said if we limit spammers and remove their accounts after they loose the reputation, things will look a bit better.
But dont forget that everyone needs to invest at least 100 SBD to be on the trending page. That means if a minnow invest 10 SBD for a bot and get 20 SBD for the upvote wont really help much. Yes some people will see it, but there is a big difference between 200SBD and 20SBD. I see many Minnows with excellent posts and photography, but not getting there :(
Also dont forget that there are many Dolphins using upvoting bots as well. I mean if you check every post on the trending page you will find 70% of them using different bots.
in my humble opinion the bid bots should be permanently finished........ it should be kept in mind that every individual is equal to the other one........ and the concept of bid bots draws a line between the rich and the poor user...... so in my humble opinion this discrimination should totally be finished........
I think the blacklist is the simple and most direct way to attack the abuse.
I also really appreciate the tiered whitelist you've created for your service.
I think smartsteem is helping set the bar for the way these services should operate.
I proudly use smartsteem for Hots or Shots and will continue to do so until I've built up a large enough audience that will allow me to just operate the show organically.
Thanks for all that you do @therealwolf
Maybe we could just do away with bots and let people's content be organically found and appreciated by real people?
I've just started here on Steemit and like it very much up to now; really nice folks to talk about topics I'm interested in, and a chance to make my opinion known too. But I was immediatly bombarded with new followers, even before I ever wrote an article of my own. When I click on these users, I see they all offer some kind of promotion-, resteem- or upvote-service for money... I don't use them (at least I don't pay them; I have had "free" upvotes from some of these "services", but that was 1 time only I guess, just to lure you in). Should I go even further and mute them?
When it becomes possible to buy power to influence... It would be a shame if the level playing field is destroyed in this manner and I would like to help combat this in any way I can as a total noob.
Speaking of total noobness, I just wrote only my second real article here on Steemit, and I would love to hear your opinion on it, if you can find the time :-) Who Do You Trust? Full Disclosure!
Thanks for a very informative wake-up call! Upvoted and resteemed.
I like this but cannot say a whole lot myself as am new to the platform. What i would say is that i think influence and power can always be bought or given by people who know people etc. Or simply: life isn't fair. At the same time, people who belong on Steemit, have good intentions, become part of the community... should see rewards, and personal gains that even extend beyond the platform, where others will probably fizzle out on here, perhaps after cheating for a short while.
Yes i agree with you and thanks for informing and guiding us keep it up
Nice post
@AbuseReports
@Duplibot
@Spaminator
@SteemCleaners
@SteemFlagRewards
@Steemit-Abuse
Comment Spam
What can i say here that would be effective? Anyway my stand is against abuse. Any post that is not worth where it is should be taken out. I don't have much experience here yet but i was made to understand that steemit stands firm on quality and not quantity. So i do leave the rest for all expert here to handle. Hope steem won't be abuse
Well, in most cases the whole platform contains the run for the money campaign, which phrase I like to use. Anyway, what people do is they are trying to get recognized and sometimes it is really hard. So what they do? They post in different areas of possibilities. And not anyone should blame them. Some of them have good content, some don't. I think that filtration should be the key for such a things, because after all, we all know that there are communities supporting only each other instead of everyone. At the end, we are all here to help and share. Thank You for your time and understanding.
each person is by his side do not help anyone to get votes
I Respect your opinion.
When I joined Steemit, I was happy to see a social media platform without all the ads such as those that Facebook and other traditional platforms deliver. But with the increased use of bid bots, basically, every post boosted with one of these is a promoted post. But contrary to traditional social media platforms that mark this kind of posts as "advertisement", there is nothing like that on Steemit and the only way of seeing if a post was promoted is opening it and scrolling down to see who has upvoted it - and with smartmarket, not even this is possible anymore! This especially is a problem for heavily boosted posts advertising shady ICOs or crypto sites such as those often found on the front page. There is a reason that many traditional platforms have banned ads for ICOs and that reason is not that they fear Steemit or the Blockchain, but that there are a lot of scams in the crypto world. But even for regular posts, I see a problem with them not being market as promoted posts.
If I was in charge of managing vote bots, I would make it mandatory to use a certain tag such as "advertisement" or "promoted" as the first tag of a post for it to even be eligible to buy votes. This would be the only way to mark ads on Steemit without making changes to Condenser and every other UI for the Steem blockchain.
Besides that, while I have been using vote bots myself in the past, I now believe that buying paid upvotes on great posts can be counterproductive for content creators because this disqualifies a post from getting a curie upvote which is easily possible every 2-3 weeks for great content when using curated tags such as #travelfeed, but if people decide to buy votes to get more visibility they don't have this opportunity.
What's the goal of bid bots? Only for promotion purposes?
In that case it doesn't work anymore. Since thousands of people use and abuse it on a daily basis.
To my opinion the solution could be to technically kill all paid upvote bots. Would that be possible?
The blacklist seems like a good idea. Lately I have seen many robots offering service. I have barely 2 months and this last month I have seen many bots. compared to the first month. I really appreciate your interest in improving and I hope everyone is aware of it so as not to damage steemit, which is a great platform.
👍
I am with you plz upvote my comment
Hello!
I am a steemit user since Oct 2017. I have never seen my post upvoted by users.
Maybe they are bad , OR maybe upvotes are only gained by Bots.
If i see any indication of upvoting of my post i will continue using this platform.
By then, i will strongly believe that Steemit is only about the guys that own bots.
it's not just about receiving upvotes. Upvote and reply to posts you like. Make friends. it takes some time and energy.
A LOT OF time and energy, I say.
I'm getting close to a year on Steemit now, and for the most part I get about 3/4 of my rewards from my comments. I don't bother to track curation rewards, as they're too little to consider.
Mostly though, I don't care at all about rewards (my personal rewards. I care about how rewards impact society). If all you care about is your rewards, do go away.
Don't come back either.
If you actually care about things that matter, then I hope you are well rewarded for your contributions here, and stick around, regardless of the money you get, or don't.
If all you want is money, go mine cryptocurrency somewhere else. If all you want is popularity, learn to twerk. If you want to engage with people and discuss fascinating ideas and society, then welcome to Steemit!
That you for an informative post. I'm new to steem and haven't decided how i feel about this. I think the person who said "what about the minnows" has a point....@hanen...
I support bid bots but I'd like them to have more caution and be selective about what content they are promoting. I know they are bots and can't comprehend post contents like we humans do. But bot owners can check what contents are getting high percentage of their votes and take action accordingly.
I take the bid bots as advertising service like FB, Google Adsense. I am paying them to make my content visible that I can attract curators/readers to vote me, gain followers or make my presence known. Sure not everybody will appreciate my contents, but there are some they may do. There is nothing that gets support from everybody. I think Hivemind will fix this problem or at least I hope.
If you remove bid bots who will get to trending more frequently? People with lots of SP or friends and acquaintances of whales and dolphins. Because people will always want their or their friends' well-beings.
Some people are concerned what the social aspect of it when everybody can use bid bots and boost their contents. I do not know about others I sometimes read articles from trending and hot, and most of the times I read interesting articles from my feed (I came here from my feed).
So, my suggestion would be a global blacklist which willing bots will follow. I want bots to be more responsible because people won't be.
I'd like to here others' opinion too.
This is true, and that it is demonstrates that bidbots are a symptom of the underlying problem that degrades Steemit as a society: stake-weighting. Money isn't virtue. Virtue matters in society, and substituting gross mammon for virtue is perhaps the most degrading thing that could happen to a society.
Steemit suffers as a result.
I have strongly advocated substituting rep for SP as a metric for weighting VP. While rep is still gamable, it is far less so than SP, and would result in a far more equitable distribution of rewards, while vastly improving the responsiveness of rewards to quality of content. Most things valuable about Steemit as a society would be greatly improved by this.
Investor participation is not one of those things, however. The problem is that those with substantial financial assets tend to be folks focused on financial matters, and the worst of them are naught but whores, pimps, or pirates, without anything substantial to offer society.
I but rarely stray from my feed, except by following links from posts I discover in my feed, as I did to get here.
New is chaos, and trending is a swamp of profiteering. I find discord a better source of #tag specific posts than the #tags themselves.
There are some UI issues Steemit could improve, and that is one of them.
The most important, IMHO, is that bidbots are promotional/advertising services, and posts and comments availed of them aren't appropriately tagged, which is degrading to society, dishonest, and stupid. It's stupid to allow advertising to masquerade as honest opinion because it is a lie that misleads people into valuing the paid opinion equally or more than actual reason and understanding, which is difficult to overestimate in the degree to which it contributes to harming people and society they comprise in fundamental ways.
A crappy hypothetical example of such harm: being microwaved is bad. At a certain point it is fatal. How bad it is at lower doses is unknown, because paid advertising/pr/promotion of microwave based goods and services substitutes the interests of such services seeking profits for the interests of folks trying to raise kids that survive, and does so using every subterfuge possible, including lying.
Posts claiming that microwaves are perfectly safe, or even beneficial, surreptitiously made by gaslighters using bidbots can trick people into believing such claims are widely supported, when in fact they're venal profiteering by businesses that may well be killing people without regard while seeking nothing more important or valuable than financial rewards.
Society is far more valuable than mere money. Stake-weighting not only disregards that fact, but obscures it by making the only metric of value economic.
That is why there are votebots. They're not the cause, but a symptom of the underlying problem of substituting for the real blessings of society mere money.
It is a very thin line. And obviously people with money will get their posts out there and profit more. Is it fair??? well they are spending their profits and investing. But at the same time that wont allow People with good content but without money to invest getting seen by the community. I do use bots now and then. But I think the community keep focusing on curating manually and bring more audience in and if that happens People will hand pick what it is going to be trending. All over social media there are promoting programs where people pay for their content to get in front of People so even if we want to say that voting bots are not fair.... It happens all over the place. It is marketing.
Yeah because of this community loving to use bots
This issue is really hard to fix
I think it's a war and in a war, their no winners every one has some losses
and I think it will never end people will keep paying for bots , and people keep downvoting people that paying bots and this game will never end it must have another solution an especially in a platform controlled by people, where everyone who got so SP can somehow controls the system
(talking about both sides the people that using bots and people that downvoting for that )
This isn't true. The actual problem is that you are convinced that buying votes solves the problem, when it only makes the problem worse.
Stake-weighting, substituting financial holdings for societal virtue, is the underlying mechanism that degrades Steemit such that people turn to votebots to gain attention to their ideas. By doing so they're surrendering to the power of money to command influence, and this makes the problem worse.
Targeting posts that gain most of their rewards from botvotes directly attacks this exacerbation of the underlying problem, so it's good. It just doesn't go far enough in directing it's impact to the substitution of money for virtue.
Some people will whore out their mothers for money. Attacking the financial rewards they get when they do that may discourage them from whoring out their mothers, but it won't teach them to value their mothers for more than the money they can get for popping their pussies.
This is exactly the degradation that results from substituting money for virtue, if the extreme end of the scale.
The substitution of money for virtue is what hurts the average Steemian, not @heimindanger's flags. @heimindanger is just swatting their hands away from the far more harmful hot stove they are trying to stick their hands into.
Substituting botvotes for actual curation is like offering people who need gloves hot stoves instead. If you don't want to get harmed, don't stick your hand in there. Find actual gloves to use. Seek actual societal virtues as the rewards you care about, rather than being fooled by greedy profiteers that financial rewards are the point of society.
@valued-customer I hate the idea that you need to pay for your own content in a place where you need to be paid for that, that is stupid its a Ponzi scheme
but I understand that this how the system work and I just play along
and that's not good I admit so what do you suggest and I absolutely serious
you think I should never use bots in any of my future posts?
but now I understand the other side as well and why they don't read posts before downvoting and that because:
steemit community need to be educated not to use bots
and it doesn't matter what good content you have,
if people not educated it will never be stoped and all the steemanians will be used to fact that the trending page is only for money
I now understand that
It is good to gain understanding.
I have never once bought a vote.
I have done my best to explain why they're bad, and walk my talk. You do you. But don't complain to me if you get burned by buying botvotes.
@valued-customer I was emotional since I worked hard on that project and maybe I was complaining at first but thru reading the comments I now more educated
if I wasn't complaining I never learned that, so in my opinion, this is a good progress
and I think more people that got burned using bot votes need to put their emotions to the side and opened up to another side instead of looking at each other as a bully.
and I don't know if people that downvoted understand that but when just downvoting without a person understanding why it's just using force, the true power is when you educate that person and next time he will not use bots, not because of he afraid to get downvotes, but because now he understands why it's a bad thing for a community.
and I think it's a win/win situation and most importantly now that I more educated about that I will continue the footsteps and tried to educate other, don't you agree it's a good thing that came out of all these comments?
I've always said that subsequent votes between the same users should have a diminishing returns, including self votes.
It would make it harder for people to game the system the way they do now, and bots would have an element of luck to them as if the same user is picked for a vote then the upvote won't be worth as much.
Promoting good faith is not an easy task. Humanity has been trying since the beginning, and that was before internet anonymity. I'm trying not to sound douchy here. Just thinking about the basic problem of rewarding honesty and knowledge without creating an incentive for fraud and pretentiousness makes my head spin. Just looking at how someone says something reasonable and insightful and someone else agrees and adds something unfathomably ignorant...
The sad thing that's going on right now is that whales are the only one who's profiting bot bots and instead of them helping minnows, they downvote them. What's the fight of minnows against those whales? Sad isn't it?
Hi @therealwolf, can you please explain me why the bot answered me a memo returning the steems I sent and saying it doesnt support spam? I think my posts are quite obvously not spam, and its all original content.
Thanks
Sorry @rizzopablo, our spam-filter was a bit too harsh. Please try again!
Rejected again, it says:
I made only this one attempt now, so I don't understand the bot's answer.
You can't solve the problem, since you don't impose stake-weighting. That's the essential mechanism that devalues all societal virtues by imposing stake as the sole virtue determining power on Steemit. All you can do is act to mitigate or exacerbate it.
One thing you can do is simply refuse to provide upvotes to posts that don't have 'promoted' or 'advertising' as the primary tag. This can help folks to sort posts that actually have value per their interests, but it won't be a profitable endeavor.
If all bots did this (which will not happen), things would be some better, but it doesn't restore the various actual true benefits of society that are vastly more important than money by rewarding them commensurately to their real relevance.
I don't think Steemit will fix this. I don't think @dan is going to make a platform that does either, from my assessment of his considerations of the matter. Dunno if you can, or even want to.
That's the real problem, though, and stake-weighting is the disease to be cured, rather than following the example of allopathic medicine by continually and expensively treating the symptoms rather than curing the disease. It's more profitable to treat the symptoms, and maximizing profits in medicine is an egregious example, notorious, universally reviled, and utterly endemic in the world because of stake-weighting.
This principle underlies practically every problem that confounds society and costs inestimable lives and treasure, from our legal system being the best money can buy, to censorship by Gargle, Fakebook, and Twatter, to the last profitable industry in America, surveilling people for fun and profit.
Basing power on virtues other than financial holdings is essential to functional society. That it is continually inversely done is why we're increasingly facing global war. It's also why trending sucks.
@therealwolf, I've reported abuse to your team multiple times. Can you start rewarding people for reporting abuse to your service like @steemcleaners does?
That would help.
Good post
BEWARE OF SMARTSTEEM!!! It has downvoted many users. Smartsteem gang attacked me too.....Noticed the warning of @savemax about smartsteem bot. Savemax is telling the truth, smartsteem attacked me too. The reason is very funny. Savemax had transferred some SBD to me, selling his SBD and buying INR from me. So smartsteem thought that my account also belongs to @savemax, and started attacking me too. All the accounts associated with smartsteem like @clvr , @therealwolf , @smartmarket @mac-bot , @spaminator , @prowler , @kuminga, @blacklist-a , and @steemcleaners which are mentioned in the post of @savemax, down-voted all my posts and wiped out all the earnings I made. This is very un-ethical. Tomorrow, if @savemax transfers some SBD to some other reputed account, smartsteem and his gangs will attack that account too. @savemax is telling the truth, Do not use smartsteem, otherwise you may sometimes lose all the transferred money without getting an up-vote. You cannot even ask the money back, then they will start attacking you too, like they did with @savemax. I am conveying this message to maximum people who are posting links using steembottracker.
Un peuple malheureux fait les grands artistes. - Alfred de Musset
@cleverbot @banjo
I am with you by voting for you and you will be with me
😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
https://steemit.com/@forgetsharif
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