There is little cost to adding spam to the blockchain. Accounts are given a limited amount of bandwidth to use, but as long as they stay within those limits - they can create as many posts and comments as they want for free. What users do with those posts and comments is entirely up to them. Some use them to create content that adds value to the network. Others post spam that does nothing more than annoy users and add garbage to the permanent storage of the blockchain.
One thing that I think increases the amount of spam is the fact that there is a small chance of earning rewards - even if the posts/comments suck. If a user posts 10,000 "nice post" comments in a month, and 10% of them earn a few pennies worth of rewards - then that is still a profitable business model.
One change that I think would help address this is to increase the amount of rewards a post/comment must reach before it gets a non-zero payout. Currently if a post/comment earns 0.001 to 0.019 SBD worth of rewards - this is rounded down to 0.00. If a post/comment earns at least 0.02 SBD - then they receive their reward.
If we increased this threshold up to 0.10 SBD, or even 0.25 or 1.00 SBD - then posts/comments that did not receive sufficient votes to pass this threshold would receive zero payout. This would likely decrease the incentive for users to create spam.
Technical Details
For those of you who aren't interested in the technical details, feel free to skip this section. It gets a little nerdy :)
Here is the section of code that is currently checking the "dust threshold" (0.02 SBD). If posts/comments do not reach this threshold, the payout is rounded down to zero.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/chain/util/reward.cpp
This is the definition of the function, where it does the computation:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/chain/include/steem/chain/util/reward.hpp
Here is where the threshold is set to 0.020 SBD:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/protocol/include/steem/protocol/config.hpp
Feedback Requested
What do people think of this change?
- Do you think it will help with spam?
- What do you think the 'right' threshold should be?
- What are the potential negative consequences?
- Do the "pros" outweigh the "cons"?
- What other suggestions are there?
Note: There are currently no plans to implement this. I am just proposing it to see what people's thoughts are. If it seems like there is a lot of support for it, then further discussion on whether it should be included in a future hardfork would be needed. (So far, it is just an idea.)
This post has been resteemed from MSP3K courtesy of @aggroed from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ).
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Tim, this is a terrible idea. Wanting to reduce spam is a noble goal, however doing that through limiting the potential for comment rewards doesn't seem like the right way to go about it (especially with your suggestion of 0.5 or even 1 SBD!). It may help discourage spam, but at the cost of also discouraging legitimate discussion and harming the future of the platform.
I agree with you here. Reducing spam by making it less lucrative is a great idea. But this proposal is just another symptom treatment that ignores the actual disease.
Spamming can be more easily and effectively handled by blockchain protocols that were already working in the past. And they can be handled by actually applying bandwidth restrictions that were meant to explicitly deal with spamming.
Rounding rewards from $0.10 or $0.50 (or even $1.00!!!) down to zero isn’t a solution. Most users would be making nothing from interactions at that point. And without rewards, this place would be “dead.” Sad, but true.
How about we roll back full linear rewards (and find a better alterative to n2) and delegation (the two things that make spamming lucrative and reduce accountability and the engagement from “invested” users) and tighten bandwidth restrictions so that both comment and wallet spammers aren’t able to run wild with their scam promoting and block bloat? And at the same time, perhaps STINC can halt the creation of massive bot-nets via their sign-up process?
Tap-dancing around the causes of our many problems here won’t fix anything. They need to be confronted head-on. To do that, the sources of the problems need to be identified. But to do that, there needs to be an honest conversation about it...where criticism isn’t automatically/reflexively shut down in favor of endless cheerleading.
Until dissent gets some support its full steem ahead for the circle jerk.
lmao theres my hero
I will be glad when i can get back to crapitalism being the bad guy on the block,...
its always been
Boom that there is a good solution. raising it to .20 and even 1 dollar is just anti plankton.
So you are telling us to hold on until a nice whale takes notice of you but keep posting you'll get there eventually. Shakes my head.
yeah this is the most ridiculous idea ive heard in awhile. lol talk about repelling all new users to the platform.
Exactly! This is why I support your witness.
I had an idea on that one a few days ago:
https://steemit.com/steem/@krischik/seven-upvotes-and-no-payout
My own existence is a testament to the problem with account creation through steemit.
Amen!
No one is censoring messages in this method, so there is no cost by applying a higher dust threshold. There is no discouragement either. There's only a 'quality' threshold before financial rewarding occurs.
The risk here is that insightful, value-adding comments won't get rewarded financially if they are not seen or upvoted by people with enough SP. I don't think that's a problem, those insightful, value-adding comments do get rewarded in other ways: relation-building, follower-growing, meaningful discussion, etc.
The problem with spam is that it's done purely for the financial incentive. Remove that incentive and you will drastically see the level of spam drop.
@timcliff: I really like the idea, but the actual value of the dust threshold (whether that's 0.1 SBD, 0.5 SBD, or any other value) should be part of a permanent discussion and always open to debate as the situation on the Steem platform changes.
Of course there is. I would be discouraged enough to leave the platform for https://www.minds.com
Which is the reason I would leave for Minds. Minds is better at all of those. And soon Minds is getting a cryptocurrency as well. And as beta tester of that cryptocurrency: It looks like rewards for small accounts will be better on Minds.
Looks like their view-count and vote activity is already higher on some posts, and that's even without the crypto distributions attached? Wow. The site layout and the content doesn't seem too bad either.
Well, just to play devil's advocate - let's say we set the threshold to 0.10. If a comment doesn't receive enough votes (either from a large stakeholder or several small ones) in order to reach a 0.10 payout - is it actually adding sufficient value to the network to warrant a payout?
Yes, it is.
The value of the network is in the social interactions that occur.
What you're proposing is for everybody but the bigger accounts to get rekt. The big accounts already see their farts going over the threshold, while the entire essays by the small fish can't get over 0.01 a lot of the time.
Basically, your position is that only the big fish provide the value to the network. The rest of us don't count.
With the rep of 72 and 56k in SP, your experience here on steemit is definitely something most of us don't experience. As a member of the steemit's fledgling sports betting community, I've seen a ton of conversation taking place where the total payout doesn't go over 0.10. The real people having the real conversation. That is the real value of the network in my opinion.
Setting the limit at 0.10 is equal to pissing on the small fish. Make an account that can't be traced back to you and join one of the smaller communities here, see how much the upvotes you're getting are worth.
With such a terrible retention and engagement rates this platform has, you want to make it even worse. Try to remember what it looks like to be a small fish just starting out. Yes, 0.10 and 0.01 makes no difference, but it counts. It's a feedback you get, it's a sign you're doing something right. And if you can't remember (if you were always a big player), try to imagine at least.
As a relatively new user I can confirm this. In the beginning it is very hard to stay on track at steemit, because you are not very much seen in the first place and the UI is not very easy to use. I think it would be much better to think about ways to motivate and reward real people and make them contribute content than to get new barriers in place.
Appreciate the feedback :)
You're most welcome :-)
Sorry I took such an offensive tone. I've calmed down a bit after having a discussion with @tarazkp in the comments below.
The worth of the platform is in the number of real people having real discussions no matter their SP. What is the FB but a place where hundreds of millions of people are having discussions? Do their investors want fewer people on their platform? I think not.
I know, steemit is not the FB, but it isn't a knockoff of the medium.com either. Steemit is a different beast altogether, making it into medium or fb is a mistake in my mind.
Would you, as an investor, want to see a lot of real people creating real communities around their interest or a bunch of weak, artsy fartsy, attempts at writing by the second-rate authors (most of the medium.com)?
Of course, there are different schools of thoughts on what steemit is or should be. For some, it is just a prop for peddling STEEM/SBD. For them, a cheap knockoff of medium.com does the job.
I think that is the most shortsighted attitude towards this platform.
This thing can be huge, but the key to the platform's sustainability is the people that believe in it, the people that find it worth their while to invest their time and energy here.
The content is secondary in my opinion, it's all about the people. There are entire libraries of pirated books written by the most talented and intelligent humans that ever lived. You know how much people bothered to download them? You can count them on fingers. It's all about real people having the real conversations and meaningful discussions.
Spam is A problem (every platform has it), but engagement is THE problem this platform has. Cheers!
Well said! The main value of facebook is generated by the huge number of interacting users (I don't like facebook, but that doesn't affect the statement above).
Well said. I just got my Steem coffee mug and I just found out I can only vote at 100% once every 3 hours so my vote is not a lie - or else only vote on popular content. What a buzz kill.
You should find me on Steem.chat or Discord. I may be able to help with that.
Just sent a DM to @ats-david [ats-witness] on discord.
EDIT: I've tried to contact you on steem.chat, but weren't able to. Anyhow, I'll drop a link on discord on something I'm thinking about doing in the near future. I would appreciate your feedback on it.
I like to encourage the readers to comment my articles by granting their comments 1 % upvotes (depending on the STEEM price that's about 0.1 dollar). I would consider it as counterproductive to void these small upvotes.
Instead of that one could limit the number of posts + comments per day and user which are qualified to earn money (that would be an incentive to make 'good' comments instead of many). In my opinion it was a big mistake to increase the number of four fully rewarded posts per day and user to 'unlimited'.
I'm only 69 days old on Steemit. So there's LOTS I do not know.
What I have already figured out, quite early in, I may add, is that unless someone has $$/SP in their account, or one/several benefactors who do, content posted sinks fast.
What I already know is that many red fishes post their hearts out publishing good content, get some $0.00 upvotes from a small growing fan base and their posts NEVER even reach $0.01.
Are you saying that in an environment such as this, the $$ value of a post is the ONLY indicator of it's 'true' value? That $0.00 upvoting by non-big fish community members, because it has no financial value, has no value at all?
I'm truly confused here. I truly felt Steemit was a place where there was hope to work hard, meet and greet other community members via comments and slowly advance without a lot of money.
Then I realized it's necessary to get to that 500 SP level fast. Fine. A good goal to work towards.
Now?
Small peeps adding to the good content pool that will forever keep Steemit's SEO value high, now can't even collect the little few cents they may miraculously earn without the help of bots... just several $0.00 and $0.01 upvotes adding together?
The 'real' world already lacks vision and compassion and says most of the 7+ billion on the planet have no 'value'. I don't need to be on a platform that makes it plain as day in policies that work against the little person. If the 'poor's' content has no value, then maybe the poor don't need to be publishing here.
We can all find some other way to express our gifts, passions, make money then find somewhere to invest our money.
All most of us are looking for is a place we can share our talents, build a base of followers and advance based on a system that's constantly evolving to support, not sabotage that.
I may be looking at this the wrong way but does the fact that you @timcliff are making almost 100 sbd a week by delegating to minnow booster make you apart of the problem as anyone can buy upvotes no matter how spammy their posts are? Don't hate me for asking but it seems a bit hypocritical.
I do lease my SP to several users, but I have vetted them to ask what they plan to do with it, and I would remove the delegation if I found it wasn't being used in ways that benefit the platform.
Fair enough, it is in the best interests of us all to see the platform succeed and personally I'm not worried at all by the fact that we have a lot of spam earning a few cents here and there if it keeps those people engaged in the platform. Maybe when they have been here for a while and they realise that its in their best interests too for the platform to succeed they will try to improve their input and see the value beyond a quick buck. We are all on the same side.
0.10$ would mean 10 or even 20 minnows (new users, whatever) upvotes, at 100% Voting Power. If one does make 0.09$ by getting upvoted by 15 minnows, it will mean that its content is not worth anything, this is what you propose?
Well there is a perspective that they are not adding financial value to the platform. Will a conversation that is had between 15 minnows attract any new investors to the platform? Will it do anything to cause the price of STEEM to go up?
I am not trying to say that conversations among minnows are worthless, but I am asking you to think of it from an investor’s perspective.
Curious your thoughts.
I think you need to separate a few things here.
Users
Investors
SMT
Tons of minnows interacting with eachother causes the Alexa Site Ranking to go higher. Which shows up more in search results. Minnows and people with almost 0 steempower add a lot of value in views/shares/word of mouth to interest more people to come into steemit. What if you had almost no minnows and everyone was just a small dolphin up to a whale? Do you think any investors want to come to this platform and see a bunch of dolphins and whales upvoting eachother for absurd amounts of money?
Investors, who and what do they want? heh. I think a supar majority of the whales/dolphins/minnows here have never bought any steem, so I think this is more of a thing to focus on for the future.
Which leads into SMTs, this is what investors are going to come here for. Looking at how successful fund raising is for ERC20 tokens on Ethereum blockchain, that is what investors do/care about. I don't think that you can have any kind of success with SMTs if you only have a few thousand dolphins/whales on this platform(vs millions of minnows).
I would take millions of minnows all day everyday over a few thousand dolphins/whales. Investors would to. A few thousand people don't make steemit(or the steem blockchain), they just earn the majority of rewards.
I hope my reasoning makes sense in this regard. Just trying to say that investors won't care about a platform that doesn't have millionws or tens of millions of users(minnows). Minnows are largely users and they won't ever earn much, but they still have a lot of value in many other ways.
Thanks for your question, it is a good one indeed and I was actually waiting for it. Let me answer it with another question:
Does the over 2 billion users of Facebook bring any value to it?
Actually they do, and they make it one of the most successful social media of this world, and we all know that it is a lot of lame content over there and a lot of misinformation. But economically speaking, with an increased number of users, comes a greater value of the platform. There will be advertisers who will pay for their content to be seen, there will be companies that will want their product to reach this market and this society that we all represent, and it will come with an increase in the price of Steem. There were a lot of them who took advantage of this blockchain in order to increase their popularity, and I am sure that there will be more if the Steem user base increases. My personal belief is that Steemit Inc. should focus more on this type of income that could sustain both the company and the blockchain on the long term. If a SP delegation or upvote could increase one's visibility and considering how much are people paying for that, think about it more when the userbase of Steem will be ten times higher. Or one hunderd times higher. If you can visualize that, well it will be just 5% of what facebook has right now.
I hope I have answered your question and excuse me if my answer is not that complete or correct gramatically speaking, I am writing this comment on my phone, at work :)
I am a redfish (here). I invite you to see who follows me on Twitter at BRIX617 and on Facebook brix.boston. Then ask if it would attract investors.
That said, I would not dare invite my celebrity, ecommerce, and science friends here now knowing how some of the others have been so deeply criticized, attacked, and received. At least not at this point.
Investors aren't going to just drop a million of their own dollars into this and walk away. No, they're going to want to leverage their investment and use the platform much the way the likes of Jerry Banfield, Joe Parys, and others.
You never know who someone is OFF steemit or how much money they have in real life. Thats why it's wise to not let ones steem ego control every decision.
♥️
What do you think are the main things keeping people from investing?
That's debatable. In the real world the biggest proportion of the populous could be called minnows, yet they are the ones that keep the money engine running and pumping the money back up to the big companies at the top. Cut off that population and where are the companies?
If it receives a vote it deserves its reward.
There are ways to identify spammers that dont include making the game pointless to the majority of the nonpopular.
How about implementing downvotes for witnesses to get bad ones out?
I tend to agree. Raising the threshold for payout will disincentivize new users/minnows which is definitely not what you want when you are trying to grow a platform and while there may be no short term financial harm in doing so, I think it will have a long term impact. There must be better ways to handle spam.
There are ways. Like reversing the hardfork that brought this on.
But selfvoting and vote selling are features, dont you know?
Imo, this is just a shot across the bow of the nonpopular speakers here.
Either start kissing whale ass or get demonetized.
Well, to be fair...
You can’t really kiss much whale ass anymore. They have mostly disengaged or delegated their stake to bid bots and spammers. So, in order to be “seen,” the game now is to pay bid bot owners (who mostly don’t even have their own stake in the platform - which reduces accountability and, consequently, overall quality) or try to join one of the many collusive voting groups that pretend to be “communities.”
I’m not one to focus only on the money aspect (because I think expectations are way too high for new users), but the fact that the system in general has become a de facto pay-to-play scheme is the exact opposite of how Steem has been “advertised.” Right now, we seem to only be able to attract spammers, scammers, and the general refuse of social media pseudo-“celebrities.” This isn’t a sustainable growth model in the long-term, especially if actual competition arrives.
The disturbing part, however, is that the direction doesn’t seem to be changing, despite all of the problems. In fact, the current proposals from STINC are essentially doubling down on the stupidity. Their incompetence and the culture here has so far been protected by irrational crypto pumps. If it weren’t for these price pumps, the failures of “leadership” would be much more tangible and much less palatable.
Yep, until they run out of bigger fools this is what we get.
Its very telling about the mindset at the helm.
Now they've had time to build an outer circle to insulate themselves from the unwashed.
Its sad what they have done.
We could've been well on our way to becoming the default cryptocurrency.
Instead we are wasting time being a scam coin because scammers are at the helm.
Smdh.
Thank you!
Np.
There are many legitimate reasons for commenting for a post or for a comment (like me, now) on steemit.
There are times where comments can be more lengthy than the posts themselves!
In my opinion, there can be a character limit to avoid short sometimes meaningless comments.
We should focus in educating the users entering the platform and adding more support to them right from the beginning. (It took me 2 months to figure things out with loooots of search)
Also by making it easier for honest people who wish to join and cannot or need support and have to ask it through (non so legitimate) facebook groups (where everybody sells and buys fake accounts, sbds etc)
Dear @timcliff please do not get me wrong, I very much appreciate your efforts and work and you have also helped a friend of mine in the past...
But please, lets focus at
I am at your disposal if I could be of any assistance
Thanks :)
This is a great comment especially
It is hard enough not worrying about will my post just turn to dust now and if it is raisedd even further it will just send the message without money you are a zero.
I have votes with 7 upvotes and 0 payout. How many upvotes would you need?
https://steemit.com/steem/@krischik/seven-upvotes-and-no-payout
Wrong question: Will the network be adding sufficient value for me to stay.
You are removing what make your network unique (monetisation for small accounts) while the competition (https://www.minds.com) is catching on.
Steem is a stake based systems. Votes from users with more stake are worth more.
Nobody is really entitled to rewards here. There are (unfortunately) lots of users that do add value that are under paid. Getting noticed is really one of the big struggles here. It is going to be the same on most platforms though. If anyone can just show up and start earning tons of money without adding value, then that is probably not a sustainable system.
Which is not a bad thing. For example on Minds all votes are the same and I am not sure that's a good idea. We see how that goes.
I am a bit on the middle ground here: I think a stake bases system is a good idea but I am unsure of an unlimited and linear stake based system because that is very difficult to balance.
exactly true
Yes, it will remove span once for ever, there will be just some bots that were left alone to spam because their owners did not took the time to turn them off, but indeed, that will stop spam. I got a more important question, socially speaking:
Do we really want this?
Let me share a short story:
When I joined Steem for the first time, there were a lot of things to learn, and I was not that fast with them, considering my limited time. As a newbie without any follower, I struggled so hard to get noticed, since my posts were completely invisible and nobody knew or wanted to talk to me. So I relied on the only thing that seemed profitable and okay to do: I started to spam. Comments like "Great post", "Nice cat" and so, brought me a little pennies that motivated me to continue to be active on this blockchain and with time I realized that it was not okay what I was doing and I stopped. Then with time, I convinced more people not to do this.
The moral of the story is more than obvious: If we stop the small rewards that people get from commenting, we may lose more people than we currently lose, and this is a thing that we must avoid. I have written about this previously and I still consider that one of the most important values of Steem is activity and traffic. Without that, Steem will never be as successful as it is today, processing that huge amount of transactions.
My personal belief is that before trying to fight spam which we still could do as a community using our flags and educating the spammers, we should focus more on the user retention, activity and good content discovery. When we will have these problems addressed, including bandwidth which demotivates newbies also, then I guess we will be ready to come back at disabling small rewards in order to fight spam, unless the community can not succeed to educate spammers.
As a second argument against this approach, is the fact that there are a lot of minnows who's posts are not worth more than $0.10. How that people would feel when in the 7'th day they will see that they do not get anything on their hard work and underrated and underviewed posts? This favors centralization of the Stake to the same big people who are able to make real money. Not to mention that if we put the trigger at 1$, only dolphins and whales will get some rewards.
I really hope that you don't mind, and that you will take a look at my sincere words right here.
What do you all think?
EDIT: @tarazkp came with the following idea:
Which basically means applying the increased threshold that you want to make, but after some time (like a few months I believe) from the moment that a new user made his account. This would be a better idea, but still, I don't think that this is the way to go, at least for the moment. As I said above, there are much important aspects to address and we should start with that and postpone as much as we can this kind of decisions which could affect the user-base of Steem.
A min cashout on post is not what is needed. Minnows / new members have a hard enough time growing on this platform as it is. If everyone wants this place to become more popular and have the whole community against spamming then something needs to be done about the vote values of all members. ONE steemians vote should not be worth more the 100's of other steemians vote's combined. This discourages new members once they sign up and after a week or two (if they last that long ) they give up or in some cases find another way to grow their account ( spamming ).
Another thing that stops this place from growing is the length of time it takes to make a free account. I waited over two weeks before being approved. I bet thousands signed up for an account here and because it took so long for them to get a response, they either completely forgot about this place or their acceptance email got lost among what-ever junk mail they may receive.
Find a solution to the above and watch this place grow, while at the same time the spamming issue will become more frowned upon. Allot don't mind it at present time due to the fact it's the way allot gravitate to so they can grow on this platform.
Great points. To add on to this here, every new user here trying the platform, learning it, and using it aren't all broke — even if they don't come with their investment in hand. Perhaps they want to see what it is like at the bottom first and what their hard work is worth. Usually, that is most telling. You know who your friends are when people care about you BEFORE you have something to offer them. And you can know how a system functions by the happiness of the lowest caste.
Exactly plus we will have the ones that want to build from nothing. What some whales seem to be forgetting is all the SP on Steemit is no good to them if all the minnows get fed up and leave this platform. Steemit needs minnows.
We talked about the plankton part before. You know what might be helpful to show the orcas and whales?
A statistic on how many plankton become minnows each month.
A statistic on new accounts is misleading. As is a statistic on registered users.
Engaged user is far more important. And making it past that plankton ⇒ minnows hurdle might be a good indication on how well the platform performs.
I think the percentages will show a large amount of sign ups leave the platform. A whale could always create a new account and start from scratch with no help from it's whale account or whale friends to see how hard it is to grow as a plankton / minnow.
I think the gentlebot has a sense of humor considering it's upvote was worth exactly $1.00.
Exactly!
Guys, in case you've forgotten, I stumbled upon a post resteemed by @jesta a few months ago which showcases an elegant mathematical solution to the spam issue, from @scipio:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@scipio/how-to-solve-spam-on-steem-introducing-userauthority
I agree, and have written about this recently on my blog. I think steem needs to put more effort into hiring curators with delegation. --like a much more serious initiative, traditional media feels less robotic... Cause they have real people curating as much as their fancy algos. And steem doesnt have fancy algos, so it needs people all the more.
With time the curators number has increased and it will continue increasing as the number of users on the platform also increases. I really believe that curation projects have evolved a lot and that they will keep evolving. You have got a nice point here!
Not sure. A plankton vote is mostly worth less then a Ȿ 0.005 — you can't be a curator before you are minnow. You would need look at minnows to make a prediction on new curators.
Indeed, but I didn't said that plankton will be curators. And yet, you don't need over 500 SP to upvote and earn curation rewards. I am more than sure that even less than 100 SP can still bring curation rewards and most likely that even under 50 SP, for a pretty good or lucky curator can also bring curation rewards.
On the other hand, as the number of users increases, the demand for curators will increase and most likely their number will increase. This is what I believe.
When I started I did make some in curation rewards. Then it dropped, had none for almost a month and as I just saw it's picking up again. Of course they are all absolute minimum Ȿ0.001:
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmY8ofe9xifeiSxzWMaePB9F9czfA2gKzMZNn2vt9V142Z
But even that make me happy as it's more then 0. The motivation of even the smallest payment is important.
The curation rewards that you received were higher than usual because the price of Steem was pretty high => your vote was worth more. When the price of Steem got down, your vote got lower value which also reduced the curation rewards that you got. Now the price of Steem is rising again, which is a great thing!
I will admit that I don't have much experience with steem's code but it seems to me like it would make more sense to make the bandwidth way lower. Also people should downvote spam whenever they see it. (As long as it's not a bigger fish)
Agreed on both fronts.
Hey @timcliff.
I'm trying to figure out how your idea here about raising the dust threshold to whatever it needs to be jives with the proposed HF 20 changes where the dust threshold is eliminated and SP downshifted by 1.219? How can a non-existent dust threshold be raised? Are we talking about two different things here but using the same term? I mentioned you on a comment I left for @smooth, so whichever one you're able to answer on is fine with me. No need to go for both.
There are two different thresholds. One is for a vote to have enough to ‘count’ and the other is for a post/comment to have a high enough payout to receive a payout.
Okay. Now this is all making sense. I really wish we could come up with more than one way of naming things. :) But then, we've got $ stamped all over everything, too. :) I appreciate your response.
Now the question is, with what they've got planned with HF 20, and what you've thrown out for comment here, how does that all work in concert so that we're not completely into the realm of unintended consequences? If payout is being adjusted down via the HF 20 SP deal, and then the payout threshold is raised, just how much will we have to make in order to reach a "valuable" enough payout?
And what's to prevent these other scenarios in the comments where the spammers just change their tactics through consolidation or proliferation (or whatever other scheme works best) from happening? Is it possible to war game this out so we see what plausible adjustments the spammers will make so we can honestly gauge whether or not any moves made will actually have the desired effect?
This proposal doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere, so I don’t think too much more thought needs to be put into it.
What about a small 0.005 (arbitrary number) cost to comment an post? Perhaps it could be wiped out if the comment gets rewarded more than that. If there is a cost to comment, wouldn't that make people think a little more and also target their comments to where they may actually earn something rather than spamming indiscriminately?
The problem with many things here is that there is no direct cost to engaging in any particular bad behaviour until caught meaning someone in the community has to not only see it but take the initiative to shine a light on it. Up until the point that @steemcleaners or @cheetah flag automatically, all gains are profit.
This is the same for plagiarism and ordering bidbot votes on nonsense.
I have a proposal for you guys with 70+ rep and 10k+ SP: make an account not traceable back to you, and start posting and engaging with people here. You'll stop with this silly proposals.
Sorry if I sound too harsh, but the reality of your experience here on steemit doesn't match that of an average steemian. You are followed around by an army of ass kissers and even your farts are upvoted to hell. An average small fish is putting his/her heart and soul into creating something here only to see it go unnoticed. For the most part, we are shouting in the dark.
The engagement rates on steemit are abysmal and you propose to tax it (thus lowering it still). Please, create an anon account and start posting. Do it as an experiment in order to see what the most of us experience on a daily basis.
I've won a contest last month and got 75 SP delegated for a month. I've been doing my best to spread that $0.01 vote of mine around the sports betting community in order to encourage folks to not give up. I've been posting comments cheering them up, providing feedback,... Your proposal is pissing on people like me. Sorry for the anger in my response, but think twice before proposing that stuff. You're big enough for the devs to listen to you. For the opinion of people like me, nobody cares.
Don't, by having a good intention, drive the nail into the steemit's coffin. Cheers
Exactly, and all those 0.01 comments were not paid to any of them. In fact, it cost you voting power to basically lead them on. You spent part of that delegated time frame putting miles on your mouse.
And there I thought I'm rewarding the efforts of the newcomers... what a downer.
Nevertheless, knowing what I know now, I'd do it again. My efforts didn't go completely unnoticed and my participation in this discussion had some people take a closer look at what I'm doing. The end result of me making noise and putting miles on my mouse is that I've got 550 SP delegated to continue doing what I did so far.
The only thing I regret is destroying my voting power. It will take me at least a week to regenerate it :-)
Have you had a close look at my blog? Have you gone back to the start? Do you see the rewards that go to the hundreds of minnow who do engage well on my account? None of them would be affected by this proposal because they engage well and don't spam. I can only speak for myself but, if people actually put the effort I do into this place into their work, they would likely do very well in time. It is an investment isn't it? Investments have a cost and their is no guarantee of return.
Again, drop by my blog. Engagement rates are abysmal for many reasons, one of them is because of Spam posts, spam comments, spam bots that add no value to the system but do extract some.
I have a few dozen people I have brought onto the platform and helped, some do quite well now. This is a social media isn't it? It is about being social and engaging with the community. None of them spammed to get their start. If people come in and expect to spam for reward without engaging in the community, should they earn?
It takes work to earn here and that work is going to increase as more and more come onto the platform. If one wants to treat it like facebook, do not expect earnings.
Because their is only upside to acting like an ass here, there are a lot of people acting like asses. What you call a silly proposal is work towards real solutions and trials in the early stages of a startup.
So now, What is your suggestion to stop spam posts and comments?
I appreciate your reply. Thanks for not ignoring me.
I see where you're coming from. You see the small fish on your account engaging meaningfully and getting properly rewarded for it. Props to you for taking care of your community, but most of us are not on your blog engaging with you. Our interests lie elsewhere and I don't appreciate the proposals that will damage my community.
Try to see a perspective of somebody who's not following the big accounts here, somebody who's interested in a niche topic that sports betting is. There are no big accounts there, and the most members have less than 0.01 vote. What's worse, the nature of the beast is such that great essays, photo travel logs, recipes and such are not to be found (no chance to get @curie reward or to be featured by @ocd).
The most valuable content a member of our community can produce is the tip. Which outcome to bet on. We don't care for 2000+ words essays, we care about the profitability of your tips. Now, you may call the content we produce to be not worthy of the reward, but I can say the same thing for the umpteenth artsy fartsy post by someone well versed in the gentle art of kissing up to the whales.
Should we all drop what we are doing and line up for the crumbs the big accounts are bestowing upon us? Screw that!
Every proposal that discourages the engagement is beyond silly - it is suicidal. With the eos around the corner and the panic that will ensue here, the last thing needed is to piss on the small guys just because the big ones are tired of seeing spam.
Whack-a-Mole. Do as I and report the spam to the steemcleaners when you encounter it. It takes time to get an account here, and mere seconds to get it flagged to death by them. The solution we have works well enough.
Don't fight a relatively minor problem this platform has by solutions that would kill it completely. If the solutions the two of you proposed are to be implemented the steemit is done for.
See the numbers in the reports that @paulag is making. Spam is not this platform's problem. Dead accounts and meager engagement are.
EXACTLY!
New users NEED to be helped, otherwise they are totally LOST among the vote-buying bots and other gimmicks. I'm finally out of the dust stage and made it into the minnow category, yet even after a year of working hard and honorable, I don't have 1,000 SP despite putting everything I earn into SP. The way the system works, the more users that come on-board, the harder it is for the new users to earn anything at all. Putting greater barriers on the new users is not the way to grow the platform. Without those helpful votes from dolphins and whales, it is pretty much hopeless to start from nothing at this point in time. I've had a few random big votes or curation trails land on my posts and let me tell you; it's like winning a lottery!
Please don't stop at helping only your friends, but spread some love around, because the platform desperately needs that now. There is no reason why Steem couldn't be a real currency already in use, except for the mindset of those in control.
Another point, most new users won't have built in mentorship. To have empathy, you must experience it for yourself to the point of feeling it first hand.
My point exactly.
So our voiçe is only valuable once blessed by a golden boy?
Bring back the n(something) and a 100mv vote cap until we get enough users to slowly raise the cap.
And what do you propose for all the new users that downloaded the Steepshot App from the appstore?
Your account is more then a year old. Times where different then. Times where different six month ago. Voting power for plankton is on a decrease.
And what about the plankton?
that in time is getting longer and probably exponentially. I don't think you can reach dolphin in one year any more. Heck you are now hard pressed to become minnow in a year.
I am a SteemSTEM honor member, mentor and engagement officer and i make a lot of comments (some are very long) and very few of them get any votes. We are trying to make others engage, comment and socialize, we are educating them to prevent plagiarism and spam. And it's working, and like me are tens more. Adding a cost to socialize and make friends is prohibitive. I consider myself one of the good guys, I don't self upvote or use bots.
This will ban the people we are educating to build upon the community.
It sounds like you work for the government ;)
In another comment I added in this chain somewhere I also suggested *payment withheld' on new members joining the system until after some trial period . This would likely help you a great deal in your public servant position working for community development as it will lesson the people wasting your time.
Part of my goal here is to take people which show promise, educate them, help them write better articles and make them socialize and get noticed. The rate of success is small, adding another hurdle will reduce the comments they will make and thus their exposure and their involvement.
Do you think that people will post quality things while in the trial period? They will post "nice article" until the trial period is done. Then they will post "nice article". Because what is changing in their mentality? Psychologically speaking? Why would he not?
Because, they will be flagged, much like they are now and lose their earning potentials. Anything earn up until that point will be burned. It might not be a time thing at all, it could be 1000 comments.
The education of these people is absolutely atrocious and that seems to be before they even get to Steemit. The onboarding here is non-existent and none of the suggestions to UI tweaks that have been offered up to improve behaviour from day one have been implemented. Still, something has to be done.
This is a 'get paid for content' site, there should be a few hurdles. work needs to be done before the pay.
I have observed that the lack of education about such comments is to blame.
Which means that they will spam and lose until they will get educated, case in which initial spam won't be reduced by much, and I rarely see accounts over 40 spamming.
I have nothing wrong with reducing spam, it's just that I don't want it to be the equivelent of chemo: poison everything and we hope that the bad ones die before the good ones.
Yes, it should be better outlined at onboarding but, thinking that the introduceyourself tag is filled with bidbots, they come in knowing something.
As said, the education seems bad before they come onto the platform considering what people seem to think being social is.
I see quite a few.
My problem with that idea is that when you're commenting and encouraging small members you often don't get any upvotes because they have to vote at 100%, so they limit their votes. It could become costly to then communicate with them and they would lose even more encouragement. When I started a little community of homesteaders were encouraging and looking out for each other. Our votes were near worthless, but the communication was priceless because it kept us going. A fee would have stopped that dead. We could have moved communication to discord maybe, but it takes away from a discussion focused on a post that could add value.
Hi Tim. I had not known about the $0.02 post/comment threshold. Thank you for sharing because I now know to meet that minimum to show my support on comments.
I understand the need to combat spam. However, setting such a high threshold to 0.10 SBD, or even 0.25 or 1.00 SBD would mean many newbies will lose the small support they are getting now. Many quality posts receive pennies due to it being lost in the Steemit feeds. Some are lucky to break out of the 1 SBD mark if they try to grow organically. Setting a high threshold that would result in no payout would discourage the few lingering to give up hope completely on steemit.
The change would mean not being able to give newbies their Newbie Nickel as @davemccoy likes to do for newbies that engage within our community. Many of us don't have the SP to even give the minimum $0.10 you suggested at max voting power so we wouldn't be able to encurage newbies to move outside their blogs and engage with others in contests or general chitchat.
On a personal note, Thank You for your witness Q&A responses to my teammate @mellofello. He is offline at the moment due to life changes in the real world. I wanted to thank you for your answers. The real life is just as busy for me at the moment. We will find time to get those answers out to the newbies in our community. Finding time to write is the challenging part!
Exactly my thoughts, I believe it is important to remember that most of the traffic and the huge number of transactions that Steem is processing is due to minnows who are a lot and who a posting and interacting much, trying to get noticed there. Without them, this will not be possible:
And the value of Steem will not be the same. This kind of threshold removes their chance on this blockchain, more morally than financial...
Thank you for the snapshot @mejustandrew.
If I may point out, Asher (@abh12345) has a Curation and Engagement leagues he does weekly highlighting the engagement done weekly by the 300+ steemians entered in his leagues. His post receives a minimum of 200+ comments a week (last one was 465 comments made!), and many of the engagement action are made by redfish and minnows. Some find the community aspect of steemit the reason to continue blogging/engaging with others despite their pitiful earnings.
I understand Tim throwing this idea out there to combat spam. It is an idea afterall and is subjective to agreement or not by the mass. I appreciate that he is asking everyone for their thoughts because change has to start somewhere.
Indeed, the transparency and the involvement of the community in the decisions regarding the future of this platform are essential things which stay at the core of Steem, and this proposal debated publicly here by @timcliff is the perfect example that this blockchain is running healthy. His proposal has a completely correct intention, but the side effects, as you pointed out too could be devastating.
Earlier today I decided that I need to get involved more with small minnows and help them grow in order to increase together the value of Steem, as I concluded that they are the foundation which gives a big value to this blockchain. Curation projects as the one you highlighted above are perfect and we all need to interact more, to create here a better social network than any other one. After all, considering censorship resistance and decentralization of this blockchain provide the means to do so!
We hold the same values with the #newbieresteemday initiative. A lot of our members are other redfish and minnows, with the simple intention of helping newbies as they are starting on here. That is great you will be more involved with small minnows.
I also read your comments up above. Excellent points!
Change the minimum potential payout for a post from zero to a small negative number. A post or comment starts at zero as currently but a flagged post will receive -0.02 or -0.05 payout.
The negative payout could be deducted from wallets (controversial and potentially tricky legally no doubt) or built up into a debt which is deducted from any future positive payouts. Spammers will get less than nothing, making the practice uneconomical. Minnows will be unaffected.
As an alternative, give users a set number of posts and comments per day (5 posts and 20 comments for example) with the possibility to purchase more from a central market for a small fee. Alternatively an additional free comment could be awarded for each comment that makes a certain small level of payout.
I think the first idea is great. This will actually impose a cost on spammers. In my comment, I outlined why this measure doesn't really impose a cost on proficient spammers.
Not sure if it's possible to impose negative rewards that takes away from one's wallet though.
Thanks @wilfredn!
When I've looked at spam accounts before in analyses, the majority do tend to shut down once their potential return falls to zero. No doubt they start up again with a new account but that's a different problem to solve.
Another option (bouncing off the ideas in your comment) is to reduce the delegated SP or bandwidth as the debt builds up, so spammers spam themselves into submission.
To prevent free speech suppression it could be made possible for other users to remove a user's debt using upvotes. The amounts of potential debt would only be small, unless the user is producing vast numbers of flagged comments.
This is a brilliant idea, and if the negative payouts reduced a spammer's SP that would reduce the power of mass produced spammers that have their SP delegated from a main account.
They should take away from the user's Steem Power, because spammers could easily avoid this by not having any SBD or Steem in their wallet, but Steem Power is required to have bandwidth.
This should work for this idea as spam accounts will never get out of debt.
I think so. It would be a question of calibrating the negative amount so that it takes away the thin margins on which spammers operate, without allowing any serious impact or abuse from flag wars. Even -0.01 might be enough to deter spammers, who would quickly rack up dollars of debt. Whilst a flag war with far fewer posts would still be only be cents at worst.
It is at least worth an experiment isn't it?
Many people writing normal comments won't get out of debt. Imagine some minnows interacting on this social-network, they will lose money with each comment they are making to each other. Where this will lead?
Not under the (first) approach I put forward. Minnows won't have any debt. All comments start at zero. You will only build up a debt if you start getting a very large number of flagged comments. Minnows writing normal comments won't be affected.
That theory could possibly help a great deal and some help is better than no help.
@timcliff have you seen the idea posted by @minature-tiger? What would you say this would do on a broader scale (you know the code better than others.)
Wrong.
With bidbots you can increase this threshold to 1$, and it can still be b/reached.
The only answer is deletions once a certain ratio of the witnesses agree.
And scams should not get a favorable treatment over spam.
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I prefer deducting a small amount from the each reward. Of course if the resulting payout ends up below zero (or probably still below some dust threshold defined for technical reasons), then the reward would not be paid.
This has the advantage that it can't be trivially circumvented by buying a "top off" vote from a bot (adding even more bloat to the blockchain) and it also better recovers the "costs" of adding content to the blockchain. Finally it is arguably more fair to stakeholders of all sizes, since all must incur the cost. With just a minimum payout threshold, a stakeholder with enough SP to exceed the threshold on his or her own incurs zero cost from it. This is vaguely similar to the situation with n^2 where whales with sufficient SP could reach the very superlinear portion of the reward curve on their own and monopolize influence, while smaller stakeholders could not.
I believe something like this is scheduled for HF20 but I don't recall if the per-content deduction was implement or just the per-vote deduction (the later replaces the minimum dust vote threshold and discourages spam voting in addition to spam content).
One last thought. I believe that an actual 'cost' in the form of a reward deduction (which isn't eliminated once the post reaches a threshold and can't be circumvented) would likely be more effective than a threshold. Therefore to accomplish the same degree of spam control, it could be smaller, all else being equal, and direct impacting small SP holders less. I don't know this for sure, it is just an opinion. Could be wrong.
I agree, that is probably a better way to implement it.
The change that was implemented for HF 20 subtracts a small amount from the individual votes. This is very similar to what you are suggesting, although at the level that they are implementing it - it is probably too low to make any significant difference with spam.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/1764
https://github.com/steemit/steem/pull/1934
It shifts the incentive for people with swarms of small accounts to delegate to either one voting account or a paid delegation service rather than have each account vote with a bot. That may not affect content spam but it does reduce vote spam (in the case of delegating to a paid service, it may even reduce content spam, with many variables). Although for people with small accounts receiving delegation, they won't be able to do that (since redelegation isn't possible), so the problem persists. At least in that case a possible solution is getting the delegation removed.
Hello @smooth I recently became aware of huge issues with fake accounts going back to day 1. I see now that many good people are aware of this and trying to implement corrective measures. @anonymint pointed me in your direction. Is there some off chain area where info is posted? Like who are the good guys VS the bad? I would like to at least use my witness votes correctly. Bad actors from day 1 still have immense control and power here.
Nuff said here and now, Thanks for your time.
I don't know of a specific resource to suggest. Be engaged both on the site and on steem.chat, learn, and reach your own conclusions about "good guys VS bad". This is not an easy problem with a cookie cutter solution.
This could be taken to @anyx, @patrice, and company at http://steemcleaners.org for reporting, but they have to chose their battles by severity and applicability to their mission to fight spam and bot rings. But it's a resource to at least consider. There is also #abuse I think it's called, on http://steem.chat but that's a pretty noisy channel.
Finally! Someone who mentioned HF 20. I'm including a screenshot of the two paragraphs from the late December update by steemitblog that address the changes that are set to occur when HF 20 drops. It not only talks about a 1.219 shift down of SP, but the elimination of the dust threshold.
It also says that basically powerless votes will have no impact on the blockchain, just I presume, as it is now. Just that the user will be able to vote to their hearts content.
So, if this is still happening, and the dust threshold is eliminated, how can it be raised (this question is for you or @timcliff or anyone else that can answer it) if it doesn't exist? And wouldn't this and the idea of raising a non-existent dust threshold be working at cross purposes, if a no defunct dust threshold could be raised?
Please excuse my confusion. Maybe the problem is the terminology being used, ie, dust threshold, has two different meanings here: one affecting the ability to vote, the other affecting if someone can be paid. As it is, I think both are addressed in the screenshot above, so I'm still not sure how this raised dust threshold is supposed to work. Add in the SP shiftdown, and I'm even less sure.
AFAIK that vote shift stuff is still in the HF20 development code.
On the topic of dust votes and dust rewards (as well as this post), there are two different issues, one concerns individual (very small) votes and the other individual (very small) reward payouts. I'm not aware of any already-implemented changes to the dust rules for reward payouts in HF20, only for dust votes.
Okay, that's the distinction I was missing dust votes vs dust payout. Thank you for clearing up my confusion. I really do appreciate it.
It is good you are thinking about solving spam. But automated ways can be problematic. And in comments, many times we only have one single vote, worth 0.01, and it means a lot. It would be psychologically a bit bad if that cent that a lovely friend gave you is removed. I know it can sound stupid... being only 1 cent.
I cannot contribute with code in github, since it is not my programming language, but with ideas.
I guess it is a bit more complicated to do, but what about being able to flag posts/comments with different types of flagging, one of them could be flag as possible spam. Then if only one person flags it as spam, nothing happens, it could have been a bad interpretation, but if many different people flag a post as spam, then all pending payout rewards are removed from that user and bandwidth is halved or something similar. They could buy SP again and keep doing it? Then maybe a spam flagged user, should not be able to increase bandwidth or SP for some months for example. We could also flag users, not only posts.
Thanks!
Influence disenfranchisement of lower SP holders.
This is a part of how Steemit killed me when I was young.
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It is pretty similar to non-linear rewards though, and with a pretty low barrier to have an impact. Plus, a vote that is less than whatever the threshold would not be wasted - if the post/comment reaches the threshold, then whatever payout the low-payout vote added would be included in the total.
Let's say we set the threshold to 0.10 SBD. If each user votes and adds 0.01 to the comment, and the comment gets 10 of these votes - then there will be a payout of 0.10.
With new user votes at 0.001, it takes 10 users to earn 1 cent and 100 users voting to earn 10 cents. With new users lucky to get 10 votes, how are they to meet these requirements?
That is by design. New users who have not earned any of their own stake yet do not really have a vested interest in the platform. The expectation should not be for 10 or 100 new users to be able to join up and be able to start having a significant influence over rewards right away. If they participate and add value though - then over time the value of their vote should increase.
You totally baffled me with that comment. Someone earning 10 cents from 100 votes is a significant influence? Very few new users can even hope to get 10 voters to vote for them, let alone 100. If they manage to get 100 votes then they must be very exceptional. Even then, 10 cents is hardly a major influence in my books.
So, if they can't earn their first cent, HOW are they supposed to EVER get their own SP to increase the value of their own votes over time? Am I missing something or misunderstanding your proposal?
Nobody said they couldn't earn their first cent. That is the whole point. They should be looking to earn more SP so that they can actually have a vote that is worth something. The intention was never for brand new users who have not invested anything (not even time to earn some rewards) to have influence.
OK, then I must be misinterpreting something. Please help me and others like myself to understand what the proposal actually says.
The way I understand it is that new users who post something cannot actually earn anything unless the value of their post is greater than 10 cents, 25 cents or even $1 in order to prevent people from making SPAM posts. If that were to be implemented, then without the help of a benevolent dolphin or whale, the likelihood of these new users earning anything would be slim to none, because mostly other new users will be voting on their articles. I often don't make over $1 on my articles, so even I would be held back if this were to be implemented at the $1 threshold. So let's say the threshold is set at 10 cents. In that case, I'll be fine for my articles, but many times my comments will receive only a vote worth 1 to 7 cents. With a 10 cent threshold, would that mean that any comment receiving less than 10 cents would be considered SPAM and get zero pay-out?
This is not about influence; it is about cutting off the earnings of those who already earn very little and have practically no influence anyway.
Are we interpreting the proposal incorrectly? If so, a lot of people are unnecessarily concerned and would appreciate being set straight. Thanks!
On one hand, I think it's a great idea to deter spam profitability. But on the other hand, the impact on minnows would be great. Legit new comers already struggle for their pennies, especially when new account delegations have been slashed down to 14 SP. I often get users freaking out why they haven't received their payout worth in pennies, only to realize they're simply too eager to earn and didn't wait for the full 7 day period to elapse.
Considering the increase in users from poor countries, I feel it would be a devastating experience for them to increase the threshold to 0.10 SBD.
I think spam should be also addressed with better algorithms to throttle posting. It's nothing new, such mechanisms already exist for email spammers, why not have the same on Steem?
Throttling frustrates power users who move quickly responding to dozens of mentions, comments and posts about me or my projects every day, but if it meant that spammers were throttled by IP, say on a time-increasing curve with each post, woot woot, and such, same could maybe be done for signup.
rule per ip address:
first comment/signup immediate
5 second timer
second comment/signup
10 second timer
third comment/signup
15 second timer
etc perhaps.
all the way up to a 45 second delay
then if you wait 60 seconds after last comment/signup submitted, then reset the clock.
Wisdom. Also, users of the other apps built on the blockchain could be widely negatively affected by such ideas. Imagine the drop in innovation.
I don't think that my being part of steemit really matters in the overall grand picture, but I'm like many others who produce some content, have bought Steem to power up, and take time to help smaller members grow.
But if many of the ideas being tossed around were in effect when I joined there is absolutely no chance I would have bothered to stick around and for sure wouldn't have purchased any steem.
It's really easy when you can rack up a $94 payout in 10 hours to talk about 0.10, 0.25, or 1.0 SBD as a nominal amount, but for a new member making anything at all is hard. We are talking about being excited to get a 0.10 SBD payout...not looking at it as something that can be tossed to the side and ignored.
Potentially owing money because someone flagged me would have been a massive red flag to me and stopped me from joining. No way someone that isn't already here can understand the flagging system enough to get that the odds of owing money if you aren't a spammer is small so this would just be a roadblock.
Like many I hate the spammers and flag them on my posts, but we need to think about the honest newbies and the effect on them first and foremost. If not we can forget about the explosive future growth we all hope to see, we won't have any future growth at all as newbies will sign up and then leave just as fast.
Believe it or not, but I do understand what it is like to be a new user. When I first joined, I made 0.00 on all my posts - just like pretty much everyone else that is new. It took me 3-4 months of pretty consistent effort to start making any significant rewards. For me at least, it was never a 0.05 payout (or even a bunch of them) that kept me going though. It was always the idea that if I kept at it, I could eventually make a lot someday. I do get what you are saying though, and a lot of people are saying the same thing. So it probably will be best to not make the change.
I believe that you remember as nobody was here that long to forget...or at least I hope they didn't. But being a new member has gotten harder and harder over time as so many of the whales and dolphins are now using much of their voting power for bidbots which are an automatic looser for newbies. The reward pool is decimated with trash making the trending page sucking up massive amounts of the pool each day.
If we want to worry about spam how about not focusing on the pennies and looking at the thousands being earned by the professional spammers.
Good point. Agreed.
This is baddest idea.
I cannot agree with this. This is another way to say goodbye to new users or users who don't have much steempower on their account. Do you think it's eays to make 0.1SBD for new users?? I am here from last july and till now I could only accumulate around 2000 SP with more than 1500 followers, I can't even make 0.5 SBD from organic upvote including my self-upvote. You can simply imagine the situation of new users. they have already made this place a botland and most of the big users even witness has massively involved on vote-selling rather than giving organic vote for someone.
First, propose something to improve this situation rather than putting a threshold. Or you guys already has had enough of users and don't want more from inside???? This will only affect the real users or new users and spammers and circle jerkers are still safe.
I'll go over my thought process below, but bottom line, no matter how I look at it, I just don't see a way of using payout minimums to stop spammers without also stopping new people who can't buy SP from using the platform legitimately.
A better approach seems the one SteemPlus is using, where they mark people as human, bot, or spammer. Once that classification system has enough data to be reliable the penalty for being marked a spammer could be to simply hide all your posts automatically, so that no one can even waste an upvote on them.
MY THINKIING
It's helpful to separate the discussion of posts vs comments. The goal is to fight spammers without penalizing newbies who can't afford to buy SP, so are working off the free delegation for the months it takes to grow that.
COMMENTS - If we look at the comments on this post, which has a number of high SP Steemians interacting, we see that not all the comments on here would get a payout at even the .10 threshold. Yet all but one of the comments I've read are clearly not spammers. If we increase the threshold to .25 we see that almost none of the comments on even this "well-healed" post would receive payouts. It looks like a handful that would.
We can anticipate that comments on the posts of newbies, the people who must desperately need to build an audience of readers and commentators, would receive even less because the people reading them tend to be other newbies. Asking someone to get 10 upvotes on a comment before they can expect a payout is like saying "don't expect to make anything on your comments unless you only read Whales or at least Dolphins."
The vast majority of comments on my posts get only my upvote. And I don't want to have to use a 100% weight upvote on every comment just to get the person paid something, which is about what I'd need to do given my current SP to meet even a .10 threshold.
So basically, I don't like the idea of raising the payout threshold for comments just to try to thwart spammers. I'd like to use a method that doesn't destroy the earning potential of newbies, either for commenting themselves or rewarding those who comment on their posts.
POSTS - Here I don't as much mind a threshold of some amount, because the person first has to get people subscribed to them. To do that they probably need to post something of quality somewhere at least some of the time. And only their own followers will see their posts. (Well unless they have money for bidbots and if they do, none of these 'payment threshold' approaches are going to stop them.)
So to say that a post needs at least .05 to payout seem reasonable to me. Basically you have to get at least 5 people who have a penny upvote to upvote your post. Since most newbies don't even have a penny upvote right now and it takes 2-3 of them to reward a penny, that effectively means that 10-15 other newbies have to upvote your post with 100% voting power for you to get anything.
It's still a tall order for many people I know. I see often people write very good posts, but only get 2-3 upvotes. So for posts also, this is not the way IMHO.
edit: I came across an example after leaving this comment that I think really makes my case on the posts issue. Here is a post from someone who's been consistently writing quality posts and leaving quality comments for about 4 months now, @eugenekul. I think this is a very high quality post, but before I upvoted it it had only .04 on it. If you look at his blog list, you'll see that most of his posts get less than .10, yet I think he is very much the kind of writer we want to see on Steemit, but clearly he can't afford to buy SP or even buy delegated SP. He is one of several examples I see that convince me that it would be best not to erect barriers to keep out spammers that really just keep out poor writers.
Very reasonable suggestion!
Yes, I understand the thought here too and it is very true. Reaching that 0.10 threshold on comments for many users, especially for newbies, is extremely difficult.
If you want users to leave this platform even faster, set it higher.
Because if they don't get at least a simple payout on their first posts, why the hell stay here, where only rich people win?
Just try it out.
Open a fresh account, not connected I any way to your user and stay under cover for some weeks.
I know how hard it is to get started. It took me 3-4 months of constant posting to get noticed when I first started. I've seen the same thing with friends that I've gotten to signup.
It took me 3-4 months just to have enough SBD to be able to give myself any reward, and my SP alone is still not enough for it, and no, I will keep powering down as fast as I can.
I have no plans to powerdown for a long time. Accruing SP makes so much sense.
Maybe I’ll siphon off some SBD a year or two from now, but not any Steem Power. For better or worse, I’m here for the long haul.
I believe the long haul is mostly in the past, that STEEM without deletions and without any organic incentives towards maintenance of its free interface (steemit.com) is unsustainable, and that the current management is worse than just incompetent.
For all of these reasons, I wish to diversify out of STEEM.
I want to remain, but I wish I could trade some of my STEEM and SBD for a better currency.
The concept of STEEM makes it the most useful digital currency I know about, and I have to admit I did not study BYTEBALL enough.
Its implementation makes it a failed experiment.
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With way less users to get noticed..
It was a small puddle on year ago.
These days it is a sea to fight against.
Way harder to get noticed. And those little payout are good motivation bursts. To not go back to Facebook or other platforms
True words here, unfortunately nobody will scroll to the bottom on this page to see the rest of the comments. Whales these days seem to have forgot how it is to get started...
I am 11 screens and scrolling and still reading. Interesting to see the 50 rep comments sitting down here with so much validity lol.
Lol that is exactly what I was doing...
We also have to consider how spammers will optimize their operations to get around this limit.
True. At the moment, it's cost free to create accounts via steam, and spamming allows a spammer to earn either through random upvotes given by users, abuse of upvote bots, or circle upvotes - in fact, the more accounts they create, the higher the rewards because each Steemit-created account has a total active SP of at least 15.
In other words, it's a cost-free venture (disregarding server and time costs for running a large ring of accounts), with the chance of reaping rewards. Profit is guaranted to be non-negative.
But will raising the threshold impose a cost?
Not really. There's no direct monetary cost imposed, and only an "economic cost" from less expected profit. The outcome will be less expected profit per account and spam post/comment, but it's still non-zero. The time cost for a true spammer who uses computer programs is close to 0 once there is some system set down.
If I were a spammer, I would get around this by creating more accounts to put out more posts so I hit my target return, reap more self-upvotes to get over the limit, or simply use upvote bots to hit the minimum required.
i.e. The spammers will optimize their operations to get around this limit easily.
Spammers will hardly be affected. The true cost will fall upon new joiners and low SP holders.
I do not think that this will remove spam, but it will have opposite effect, the new & small newcomers will have no chance to have their content visible, independent of the value of their content. Why? Because spammers will use paid votes (yes, they have the money for it) to increase the value of the spams above the dust limit. Spam will get promoted, and they will get the payout. But the categories will be filled with promoted spam, making it impossible for the newcomers to get in the hot spot.
If spammers use paid votes, they are putting their own money at risk from getting downvoted. New users would have an easier time being discovered if the huge amount of spam was not around. Just something to think about.
Also correct! But then, a better idea would be to code in the STEEM protocol the possibility to have a limited amount of free down votes, so that the people are encourage to flag the spam (free in the sense that they should not consume voting power)
I support that idea. Basically if there could be separate voting power pools - one for upvoted, and one for downvotes - that would do the trick.
Yes, this can work. Also, rewards and transfers should not be available for people with low reputation... this would make the Steemit a completely different world. Imagine, ... reputation <50? No transfers possible! Or, ... reputation <25? All posts set to "decline payout"! 😀
That part won't fly :)
I don't think it would matter how many Free downvotes I had. I just went past the 500SP and my downvote would knock off a whopping $0.100 of a spammers payout. A person with 50SP may get lucky and be able to knock off a whopping $0.001 of a spam payout. So more downvotes are not going to help anyone other that the people with a lot of SP because then they would be able to downvote your account into the ground and not cost them a single penny. So free downvote=really really bad idea.
The problem with implementing such a change is that it lumps everyone together. Punishing the newbie / minnow user who are providing good content to the platform because you want to punish spammers. Good content can't always be defined by it's monetary value. If you are a newbie / minnow then for the most part your good content goes unnoticed aside from some other newbies / minnows commenting and upvoting. You can get a dozen upvotes from newbies that like your post and only have 0.05 in rewards. Why should such a comment have it's rewards removed due to wanting to punish spammers ? The answer is that it shouldn't. Newbies and minnows alike depend on these small payouts to grow our account. It's a momentum occasion when we see one of our comments has reached $1.00 in rewards.
Picture Source
If Steemit goes in this direction, for the most part only Dolphins and Whales ( posters with the most influence on steemit ) will be receiving the bulk of the payments. It's hard enough to succeed on steemit as a newbie / minnow if this is introduced it will only get harder. These small payments we receive as newbies is what helps us grow our account.
Firstly I’d agree with the majority of the comments that state that the proposed change would hurt minnows.
As for the idea of withholding funds earned for a period of time, I think long term it wouldn’t make a difference. The biggest and most successful spammers are carrying out their operations using dozens if not hundreds of different accounts. All they would need do is wait for the said period to end and then they are free to spam again. Seeing as these individuals are creating accounts on such a frequent basis, the whole process of account creation - waiting for restrictions on funds to lift - spamming, would only need to complete once for them to have a steady stream of revenue again.
Most of the ideas on here are very much from the “stick” end of the solution. Where are the “carrots”? How about some onboarding for newbies? An arm around the shoulder to help them get started and know what is acceptable and what’s not? Steemit already produces those badges for certain achievements. Perhaps an enhanced version of those for new users who are playing by the rules? If these were visible on a new users account for a certain period then it would almost act as a verification of them as a genuine community member. I think it’s worth remembering that not all new users spam!
"If we increased this threshold up to 0.10 SBD, or even 0.25 or 1.00 SBD - then posts/comments that did not receive sufficient votes to pass this threshold would receive zero payout. This would likely decrease the incentive for users to create spam."
I wonder how many people even read the suggestion...
Sadly, this would be a sure way to destroy the vast majority of new users' ability to earn anything here. As if it's not bad enough at the moment. Now it's really difficult to achieve even 500 SP without a whale buddy upping content regularly. After the suggested change, it would be nearly impossible.
Nice photo! I love to travel also.
Potentially or, it will drive them to where they could actually earn more which is the community nodes who regularly read, engage and upvote comments if worthy. I am not ure about this suggestion but some experiments would be welcome at the moment considering the shape of the platform.
People that are actually contributing things of value should not have a difficult time of earning 0.25 on a post/comment. [Edit] I do acknowledge that earning via posts is harder at first, because users need to build an audience. Starting out by posting quality comments that add value to posts is probably a better way to get started.
@timcliff "People that are actually contributing things of value should not have a difficult time of earning 0.25 on a post/comment. " Yes, should not.
Look, you are a highly active whale who obviously supports commenters regularly and also your readers upvote each other too, and still barely anyone could earn anything in this comment section after the change. If you as a top whale, who is in the top ~0.1% of all Steemit users(based on SP), would have a hard time avoiding a bunch of rounded down rewards, then what would the 99.9% do? :)
Since this is a new article and we could say it's because of that, I checked an older post. Literally, no one was above 0.25. All of their rewards would be rounded down to 0. That's why I said it would be nearly impossible for the majority to earn anything. That wouldn't be something that could we label as decentralized. Giving power to only a few people to control most of the wealth is what we try to avoid here(not the case but still).
(p.s. Comment upvote bot owners would make a bank too because people would pay big money to get the rewards on their comments up to the minimum. Let's say 0.25 is the minimum, 0.05 is on the comment, so you pay for a 0.21 vote in order to avoid a rounded down reward. -> Yet again, money pouring to a few people/companies -> Less decentralized outcome. -> Random comments stay but from that point, not only the posts but the comments will be massively bot manipulated too. )
@tarazkp Yes, probably people would gravitate towards a place where they could have better outcome. So whales(or vote for vote communities). Like, the top few dozens. Since only they could give an upvote that would not be rounded down. To reward your followers without the help(votes) of others, at the moment you would need a few thousands of SP at least. In case if you have lots of regulars, then you need a lot more. Also, if you would like to calibrate the voting weight too in order to customize rewards based on the quality of comments or would like to spread votes among more people, you would need even more. Minimum tens of thousands or even 100k+. Not much people/communities have that amount.
0.25 is maybe too high then. What about 0.05 then? Another question that should be asked - if a post/comment is not worth a 0.05 upvote (either from one user, or several smaller ones) - is it really adding enough value to the network to be worth getting paid?
@timcliff if I do understand it correctly that an upvote from me or even other people with an SP below 300 are not good enough to upvote a comment?
Let's take as example that I would write my best article and get 20 great comments on it. It would not be able to upvote these because it would be tossing money out of the window? Since a few day ago an 100% upvote from me wasn't worth more than 0.03, due to the increase of the value of steem, it jumped to 0.05.
But believe it or not I am still the same person! Only no an upvote by me would be worth something while it was not!
Let me tell you what chain reaction this will cause: people will not comment anymore on post by people with an SP below 300, cause an upvote will mean nothing.
People will start up voting their own comments to pas the threshold! Erasing voting power to be given to good article or comments from others! So, the comments of the poor people will stay at the bottom. Does this sound fair to you? Because let's be realistic not everybody takes the time to read all other comments, let online to upvote them!
While I do appreciate the attempt it would kill the steem block chain according to me!
I'm writing around 300 genuine comments per week, I do try to interact as much as possible and also try to change things ( you can read my blogpost from last Friday)!
I know that people are not equal on the steem block chain, but this would create an even bigger gap in the inequality!
Just my 2 cents, oops sorry 2 cents isn't enough value to the network!
Sorry couldn't leave that out!
Cheers,
Peter
Hehe, actually 2 cents is just enough ;)
@timcliff
Well at the moment it would be, but if we are going to change this, then it would be wasted! Normally I would give you an $0.01 upvote, but after reading your post it became clear to me that it would become dust! So, you will get my 2 cents :)
When a post or comment doesn't get to 2 cents, what is happening with the 1 cent? Does it go back to the reward pool or will it just be burned?
Damn this is what I am looking for. that comment that because we dont have enough SP we can't reward good comments because of the whole dust thing.
I would say that 0.02-0.03 is the best range, because most spam posts won't be upvoted that high, as most people voting on spam posts have very little SP.
That's pretty much where it is at right now - the limit is 0.02.
I am probably in the minority here, but I feel the dust level needs to be lowered to the $0.009 level. So a one cent reward is paid, and less than that gets dusted. The solution for taking care of spam pretty easy, if the Person who made the post has an individual muted, then those muted peoples comment do not show at all for anyone on that post. No one. If I mute @blahblahblahbot then none of his comments should be visible on any post I make.
Your theory seems sound, but it doesn't take into account niches. For example, my area is gardening and homesteading and the only account on here for that interest who might be able to give a comment a vote of that value is @papa-pepper. As you can imagine, he is only one account, so although I've conversed with him I've never had an upvote from him. He prioritises the people he can also work with offline, as he should, because that is what homesteading is about.
Okay, I'm willing to concede that increasing the comment payout might sort out the wheat from the chaff, but I've been here a while and my full upvote is still not at that level. After all the work I've put in to trying to increase my SP I'd be really disappointed not to be able to reward an amazing comment with a payout worthy vote. I've only recently discovered that I need to get it to 0.02 or more to even net them a payout, so I've been increasing my votes or not upvoting at all.
I am hopeful that once communities get rolled out (hopeful soon) it will significantly help with niche content such as your gardening and homesteading areas.
As am I! 😊
Me too!
Yes you are right, should not but sometimes it actually really does take a while to even be having that as a new user, to be honest
Indeed, and many of them will get very discouraged by the payouts that refuse to come, others may end up thinking that the rewards are fake and that nobody is actually earning anything. I remember that I was suspicious too with the rewards at the beginning and then I did not even believed that the rewards are true. If then I wouldn't got anything on my posts of 10 cents, then I would have been tempted to think that I am right and that the rewards do not even exit, and of course, drop my account...
I think we should lower the limit at least down to a penny if not more.
Steemit/steem fraud!!! I got robbed!!! :(
I agree, it makes for a very bad UX. I opened an issue for it a while ago: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1819
Better Auditing Process
Spam comments
Let’s assume a user does post 10,000 comment months and it’s just the same message. Is there a reason why Steemit cannot do a weekly/daily audit to find this in their own database and pull 100% of their delegation to those accounts? Spammers will always find a way around things but if they are having there delegation pulled so they are sitting at 0 SP or let’s say .01 how often are they going be able to use the network? They will have to invest to be able to keep up their operations or be very hinder greatly won’t they?
Assuming they do this daily and eventually they have hardened the sign up process to cut down on how many accounts a day these people get to make.
Same named accounts
If the users can find them I would assume someone who understand how to do quarry searching in the database could find Account1 Account2, Account3 and silly named things like that.
Again, why should they get to have delegation from Steemit? It should be rather clear one there 10’s to 100’s of them that something not right here and the system should not be supporting whatever they are up to with delegtion.
Upvoting
If an account never makes any blogs or comments is there any reason they should be getting to continue to use the delegation they get from Steemit? It seems odd if they are not producing anything that they should just get to keep free SP to use as they wish. I think of many 500-1k upvote botchains out there that only do one thing and if they had no SP that make them worthless.
Other types of spam
One strange thing I’ve seen with a lot of new accounts. First thing they do is go out and spam follow 1000’s of accounts. What kind of impact does this have on overall ecosystem if in terms of resources used to facilitate these massive feeds they are getting from following all these people? Does it not make more sense to limit accounts under 500 SP to 500 people they can follow?
If I think of scalability this seems to be a possible issues down the road is it not for the servers? I start to wonder when we one day see 10 million accounts what this will do if someone is following 1 million people themselves while only having starting SP delegated to them by Steemit.
The example of 10,000 comments that are exactly the same was a little bit over-simplified. A lot of the spammers are doing it in a way that is not very easy to detect. A lot of the spam is in a 'gray area' that does not necessarily warrant getting their delegated SP taken away. The real question is - are the comments people are making actually adding value?
There is another thread on this within the post. I replied to that there.
That is an arbitrary requirement. What about users who just want to view content and curate?
Agreed, it would probably be good to put some form of limit on this, but as far as blockchain resources - this operation actually causes very little "bloat". It is a pretty small problem compared to the resources that spam comments take up.
One question I do have is how much are spammers even making in a week? Does anyone even have a ballpark or data points for such thing? Is this even $500 a week issue outside of spammers doing voting circles that get hunted down by people like Spaminator?
We are assuming having a $1 threshold would even be doing more good than bad. Out side of the major abusers that land themselves on comment trending or surpass such a threshold anyways. Its hard to even know if such a dramatic measure is even worth.
I'm not even sure how someone would even try and find this out. I'm sure people with right skills can easily find out how many comments are under 1$ and that total per week is. Trying to determining how much of that is going to spammers I have no idea how they work that out.
You have any thoughts on this @paulag?
@patrice may have some data on that.
I agree with many of the comments I have read: A threshold equal or above 0.10SBD would most probably diserve the platform: The first pennies do count, they count a lot psychologically, more than the dollars that may follow further in the path of the Steemiam.
In addition, if the spammer purchases a little SP or even SP delegation, he could upvote himself to pass the threshold...
Wouldn't there be some more efficient way to prevent this kind of abuse? for example, a code that would screen the content of posts and comments, and if the same series of words repeat in different posts and comments N times in a period T, then all revenue on these posts is put back in the pool. Of course more reflexion needs to be put into it, in order to consider all cases and not hurt genuine posts inadvertantly. A starting point would be to define the threshold for detection (N/T) as a function of the length of the post, of the flag ratio of the user, etc...
It is an interesting idea, and not ruling it out - but the code for both the Steem blockchain and steemit.com (condenser) is open source, so whatever rules are put in place, it would not be very hard for an abuser to figure out what they are and code around them.
This argument makes sense, however all is a questions of stats: How many spammers would have the knowledge necessary to do that?
Yet, on second thought, you just need one person to translate the code to english, and post it... So all algorythmic rules are out of the game...
On third thought maybe not, if there is an engagement button: what about an anonymous Spammy button? If too many 'spammies' appear on a user, there could be an alert for anti-spam / fishing moderators like @arcange. A spammer account is easy to recognise on inspection.
Communities will have something along these lines
This.
My first six posts earned nothing. My seventh earned two cents. I had arrived.
Nice suggestion, re the checking for the same series of words coding.
There is an easy way around that: vote buying. Just buy what's needed to get over any threshold used. Do we need any more vote buying on this platform?
If users were doing that, then there would be more money "at risk" if they got downvoted.
Users are at a very low risk of being flagged for vote buying now. If the practice was practically a must for every newbie, then a flagging campaign against vote buyers would kill platform growth. As the valuation of STEEM is entirely based on expectation of future growth and advertising and promotion income in the distant future, the cessation of growth would kill the platform.
It is a bit of a speculation to go that far, but I see your point.
Wouldn’t that proposal harm minnows that are creating genuine content but don’t reach the sufficient threshold? Wouldn’t they deserve to get at least the few pennies so they can grow slowly but steadily? Most of the comments only end up being on those few pennies. For example when I want to reward activity on my blog by upvotes i do so with about 10%-30% which is about 0,04-0,12 bucks. That very well could be a limit that even spam comments manage to get.
Anyway i believe that it WOULD help with the spam. The more important question is, what harm it would do.
Just throwing ideas... What if it was 'payment withheld' for the first few months like a trial period until someone passes muster (doesn't get flagged all the time as Spam).
That might work, if earnings were placed in savings to be collected, if they stick around 90 days or whatever and are proven to not be a spammer...
Now that is a REALLY good idea! Yes that would solve the problem I outlined. The only problem left would be: How to set the right threshold in order for the minnows not to get dis-incentivized because they have to wait so long for their payment.
When I first started many of my early jobs, there was a trial period with some percentage withheld. It is common isn't it? Perhaps it would actually incentivize som, maybe 50 percent withheld and if they don't pass 3 months adequately, the other 50 gets burned. I would have to think more on it but without a cost to spam, plagiarise and act like an ass until caught, it is going to be the wild west. The problem is that action is always corrective rather than preventative and it requires the community to catch and act, something the community doesn't do very well at the moment.
Yeah, this is a better proposal here!
Actually, I have included this idea in my comment above, it was a pretty good one!
I think one of those would be, throwing-the-baby-with-the-bathwater effect.
Because some of us minnows still have less than 150sp, and when the voting power is less than 100%, the value of our upvote would be about 0.01 (depending on the price of steem), and it would be unfair if these meagre sign of appreciation we give out to the steemians who take out their time to read our stuff, doesn't count anymore.
They would count though - if the post/comment they voted on got other votes too. Let's say we set the threshold to 0.10 SBD. If each user votes and adds 0.01 to the comment, and the comment gets 10 of these votes - then there will be a payout of 0.10.
Please take a look in this comment section and see how many comments did get 10 upvote or more. And here a lot of wintered stemians are discussing not a lot of newbies.
Take a look at blogs from red fish or plankton and see how many comments or view they are getting. I really don't find it realistic from a beginners viewpoint.
I did this comment of you multiple times. Do you remember how hard it was to get ten upvote to a post? Let alone a comment!
I'll ask you this question though: from an investor standpoint - for people looking to buy STEEM with the expectation/hope that it will go up in value, they see the rewards pool as the funding for their investment. As investors, they get to vote on the content/contributions that the feel are going to make them the most money. Does some random person commenting on a post that few people find valuable enough to upvote add any value to their investment? Are any of those comments going to increase the value of STEEM?
Don't get me wrong, I do understand that you are trying to fight spam and did come up with a solution! As we can see in the comments the steem blockchain has several populations. The whales and Orca, the upper class, the dolphins and minnows, which are the middle class and the red fishes, which are the lower class.
Lots of interaction is going on here, which is good with such an important proposal to the system!
But I did read all the reactions and I think that we can say, that the sentiment is diverse!
I do understand that you are willing to protect investments, but we have to be careful not to disrupt the ecosystem with the change, which I think that could be possible.
Lately I did read a lot of post if we should run our blogs with the heart or like a business, also there the sentiment was mixed!
Your proposal does give me the feeling about running it like a CEO, where you do want to protect the investors more than the employees or customers. I compare it with a company which is making enough profit but want to make more to satisfy the investors even more and therefor firing some people to decrease the costs!
I'm honest that I don't have another solution, but I think that we can agree that no matter whatever solution will be chosen that we will never to eliminate SPAM! Look at all the mailboxes in the world. Lot's of spam prevention has been enforced and still spam rules the mailboxes!
Maybe we should better educate the users so that they won't reward SPAM!
I'm happy to discuss this further with you!
Good suggestion :)
I like the motivation behind it, but if I can't reward my supporters with an upvote then they are less motivated to support me. It's nice to be nice both ways. This will punish smaller users and spammers alike
HI Tim, I don't like the idea at all, I'm sry.
I think it must be better altenatives that could be less "painfull".
I'm sorry I'm not much knoledge on the Steem code but maybe frontend platform could perfectly code tools for users to block other users or at least use a tool to wipe the content from the post before it gets stored in the blockchain.
Maybe my lack of knoledge about how things work drive me on the wrong direction.
Anyway I appreciate a lot the info and interest on solving some of the issues affecting our ecosystem. Many thanks for the info.
Well sure but then you remove some incentive from minnows to participate because their vote is now useless in most of the cases
And this change means that you de-incentivize commenting and interacting with people
It is not a useless vote though. Let's say we set the threshold to 0.10 SBD. If each user votes and adds 0.01 to the comment, and the comment gets 10 of these votes - then there will be a payout of 0.10.
This assumes people would be more willing to vote on comments after the change.
I've been upvoting comments under my posts almost since the day I joined, which means my initial votes were way below the threshold. It's not a problem anymore now, obviously, but the change would force me to use a lot more VP if I want to guarantee that a comment I appreciate gets anything for it. I rarely see more than 1 or 2 people upvoting a comment. If not at least one of the is a dolphin or voting with 100%, there will be no payout and people have wasted their VP.
I get where you're coming from with your proposal. But imo, it would accelerate the death of this platform. Spammers have to be dealt with (I flag them under my posts all the time), but not at the cost of hurting minnows.
Still a symptom. When we know how dart can make (crowd source?) thousands of new accounts per day, (command line?) which are attributed to standard steem upstream registrations, when a regular user takes weeks to months to never to get registered, we can intervene on bot signups before they take root, which will probably otherwise in this scenario, just increase the size of their rings to meet the new dust threshold. maybe
There are still issues with the signup process, yes. I am open to discussing those, but they are not the root problem of spam.
Regarding signups, Steemit continues to make improvements to their signup system. If you look at the
faucetrepository (the one that handles signups) it is one of their busiest repositories right now.If there are accounts that have abused the signup process, and are abusing the system with delegations they received via the faucet, someone should provide that information to @andrarchy at Steemit so they can remove the delegations.
This is skewed perception. The "dart" users have to go through the same signup process as all the other users. They are not fast-tracked. They have the same wait as everyone else. Yes, some are probably slipping through - but it is not like they are getting special approvals. They are just finding ways to get through Steemit's current review process.
Also, most legitimate users are approved in a matter of days, or possibly up to a week. The number of legitimate users that are taking more than a week at this point is really really low. (I know this because drakos and I are the main people that deal with these users.)
I would hope Steemit can at least spot new accounts that just differ by a number. That should be trivial to check. Streamlining sign-up has to be a priority, but it's not easy to deal with abuse.
@patrice hammers this point in Trash Talk, her tuesday evening show on the SteemStar Network.
The proliferation of spam accounts named such as:
abc123
abc1234
abc12345
or
Abcd1
abcd2
etc
Are pretty obvious and have recovery accounts pointing at legitimate signups. If there is a manual process, it's got some very funky guidelines to let 1000 accounts in a row with that kind of naming convention slide on by.
Until that hole is plugged, raising the dust rate hurts venezuelans and other disadvantaged economies, while proliferating these automated / crowd sourced spam sign ups.
Ahh.. well. They figured we were on to them with the sequential numbers. They are mixing it up now. The biggest problem in identifying them is manpower.
Just today I found an account that was added to mack-bot that was a ramodom voter and not part of a group. These have to be manually checked. Even then I make mistakes so I spend a couple hours a day looking at those that respond to my comments or DM me. 99% of the time they are multi-account abusers but there is always human error.
Well, damn.
Oh yes, good old gina-bot. @neander-squirrel. You done good. I love it when a mention results in an insta-reply.
My guess is that the username that a user chooses is not factored in to their identify verification process. I suppose it could be, but it would not be that hard for an attacker to then just randomize their account name choice, and then they would be back at 'square one'.
Fair point on randomization.
So raising dust, only means they make more bots to meet it.
Chasing sequential usernames forces them to obscure them.
Wonder what the magical "manual verification" step is?
There are separate discussions here. Signup abuse != spam. They are related, and there is overlap - but we cannot solve one problem 100% by just addressing the other.
If delegations are removed from abusive signups, then the damage done there is relatively minimal.
(While pluggin the hole would reduce the automated spam and In turn reducing load on the sign up process overall)
I have 2 friends who signed up on March 1st and still haven't gotten their final signup email.
Send them to the help channel of steem.chat.
Have a look here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@guiltyparties/account-creation-issues-solutions
You are perfectly right with your post @timcliff.
I can make myself as an example, when i first joined this steemit platform, i never knew any thing about this spamming of a thing so i was been flagged on several occasion till when my reputation goes down and not until a guy explain all to me.
So i would like to make some contribution also that people does not read the introduction write by the steemit platform when starting as that is my case.
Also like you said that there is a small chance of earning rewards, so if there is any way the reward system can be increased like you said, it may help in bringing down the rate of spaming in the blockchain.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful write up with us
I think steemit should be very very careful about not taking minnows for granted. A LOT of people that I use to engage with here on steemit no longer post here and just left without a word. I don't know if they quit steemit but their account has been dormant for a while.
This solution seems rather draconian and I'm not even sure if it would stop spam since commenting would still be free unlike the memo message function which has a minimum 0.001 SBD fee.
Having a higher threshold could work in some instances, but there would be even more need to support curation guilds that find users who are contributing to the platform and make sure they earn enough to stay here. There already is a need for massive support in this area. Perhaps you'd consider using your last witness vote for @curie. (No, I don't work with them, but they helped me find confidence on Steemit and I see the good they're doing this platform, so I'll make that suggestion as someone who votes for you as witness.)
I appreciate that you want to combat spam, but also please remember there are people using this platform whose posts might not make much, but to whom 1.5 SBD is equivalent to a month's wage. There are also a lot of people who join and don't have blogging skills yet, or are so overwhelmed with everything there is to learn it takes them a while to make friends.
Thanks for inviting public discussion on this issue, and for all you do to make the steemisphere a better place.
I have been on Steemit for a month. It has taken me this long to find my Niche here. Real quickly, what I do is three contests a week Monday Wednesday and Friday geared toward new people. While I may not be as successful as people like you, I feel what I do is important. And from what I hear from others as they do too. Sometimes I only get $0.20 to $0.50 per post. and with my posts I let everybody win who participates. That means that for the new guys that I have playing my games they get very little reward. And quite frankly, a lot of the time I end up paying out of my pocket to make sure that everybody gets a little bit. However to them because they are new and have no money it feels like a lot and helps them to want to stay around. If the minimum is raised I feel that a lot of my friends will leave. And truthfully I probably will too. No, as a matter of fact I know I will. And I know that probably to you, I don't matter that much. And neither do a whole lot of the other minnows floating around in your ocean. But if all of the minnows leave everything at the top of the chain will starve.
THE TOP OF THE TOTEM POLE QUICKLY BECOMES THE BOTTOM WHEN THE BOTTOM IS NEGLECTED.
With it already being as difficult as it is to get a start here, why would anybody who's already struggling stay? I am here because of this community. And because I believe in it. I am not here to make money. I'm here because I have faith in the system. If changes like these are implemented, I will simply abandon this platform and spend more time mining cryptos.
So the long and short of it in my humble opinion is that it's a bad idea. But you guys do what you want to, and we'll see how it plays out. It's ideas like this though, that make me want to pull out what little bit I have here and put it into other cryptos. I'm sorry if this is not what you were hoping to hear. But I will tell you that I am thankful that at least somebody is trying to think of a way to stop spam. Because I do too agree that something has to be done. However it seems to me like this is like telling somebody who uses marijuana for medicinal reasons that they will face the same fines and penalties as somebody who sells cocaine by the pound. I just truly don't think it will work out in the advantage of the platform. Thank you for taking the time to read this comment if you do. I'm going to ask that you please respond, because I'm curious to see if you even listen to what the people say. I believe that that will speak volumes about you as a person. That is not an attempt to be rude or or mean. It is just me being truthful. Thank you, and I hope you have a great day. Sending you all of my love until we meet again. And may our creator bless you and yours.
Courtesy of CBS Minnesota
Feedback acknowledged. Based on the feedback that you and others have given - I don't see this proposal going anywhere.
Firstly, I would like to thank you for getting back with me. Secondly I would like to apologize for how I responded. I was upset and responded right away and I should have taken time to think about it. I just really really want this platform to succeed and I have promised all my friends that are all me to here that I will do what I can to help them in any way. One of them brought this to my attention and they seemed concerned. So I responded, and I should have calmed down first. Any case, thank you again for the response. I know with the games are Run for the newbies and trying to help them along their way that I can barely keep up. So I can only imagine how hard it is for you. Thank you for your time. And I wish for your continued success.
No worries. People can get passionate when they care a lot about the platform. I totally understand :)
So you know sir, you have earned my respect. I've chosen to follow you. I thank you for and appreciate the time that you have taken to reply to me. And the fact that you listen. As I said before, it really speaks volumes. I'm sure we'll meet again, so until then I send you and yours all of my love.
Thanks :)
I really wish it was only 10% of the time they were getting rewarded last time I read about it, it was much higher. While the post Analyzing 'spam' is now a 2 months old it does go into some detail about rewards.
While I understand your desire to kill off spam this is killing off engagement for the little guy when it comes to comments. If someone writes me a decent comment it would be pointless to reward them under this new system. Most that I know consider upvoting comments with 10-20% vote at most. While you might not think it’s a large threshold it is for new users. This also makes curtailing my own comment sections to do my best to have great stuff at the top also pointless as I’m just tossing voting power out of the window than. As a result spam would be first comment on far more blogs forcing people to downvote instead of rewarding the good stuff if you are a little guy.
What’s the different between YouTube and Steemit? Our comment sections are not as toxic and we also don’t give the little guy the middle finger with “sorry you don’t meet the minimum thresholds to be paid here.”
This is not addressing the larger issue and that is the UTTER FAILURE TO NOT LET THEM IN. Sorry but the network is not protecting itself in any way or shape. People have pointed out number of times spammers just create username1-1000’s and all they do is change the number at the end. That is pathetic they could evade whatever “protection” the network has. Such proof can be found in post like Steemit creates accounts for scammers?
I consider my comments to be ok. According to steem.supply comments are 24.4% of my projected weekly earning at a whopping $6 worth (I’ve had a good week so far and comments are not 50% or greater of my rewards.) Maybe 1/6 of that under your new system would be reward now. I don’t go around spamming the platform with “nice post,” I don’ think people should be forced to buy comments upvotes just to get them reward because they lack the means to do so with their own voting power.
There got to be a better way to reject spam by the network than to just punish everyone because of a couple of bad apples. It would not shock me if just a handful of people are running these spam bots.
I can think of a lot of places like that try and reward engagement by tossing out upvotes that are far under your proposed thresholds. You are not just killing off spam with something like this it would be hurting places trying to foster and have conversion. @abh12345 @denmarkguy @hanshotfirst
For me it depends which Spam is the focus - is it down to Blockchain bloat or rewards?
All these dust accounts use space, but earn nothing compared to the alt-spam accounts being used by larger accounts just to reward themselves a little less obviously.
I'm for knocking a bit off payouts, perhaps even to the negative as @miniature-tiger suggests - that would help reduce space usage perhaps, but not the also sizable issue of larger accounts doing the old 1 sock 2 sock 3 sockpuppet routine.
If you want to reduce comment spam, you can prevent by doing this becasue they want to get upvote from it. But for the post spamming I think it happen in esteem community. Some users create multiple accounts and try to get upvote from esteem. You can check in this post.
https://steemit.com/english/@naturicia/abuse-of-the-votes-from-esteemapp-or-english
I have a separate question: I was watching Jerry Banfield speak on how top witnesses are getting about $300 per day. I found that video when I was asking around and researching the costs of having a full node and seed node. Crim said a fully outfitted witness + seed costs $600 a month. Granted, most smaller witness don't have full nodes or seed nodes nor are being paid. Smaller setups looked around a loss of around $150 a month until breaking even point, if lucky. Okay... some exchanges have witness nodes (not sure about seed nodes.)
Are these numbers wrong?
If these numbers are right, witnessing for the top witnesses pays for itself in 2 or 3 days. Can you explain why cost is a threat?
Here is a post that explains the witness pay. The ‘miner’ was replaced with an additional top witness (there are 20 now instead of 19) but the calculations are all still correct.
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/til-how-much-witnesses-and-miners-make-per-block
Affording servers is not an issue for the top witnesses (assuming the price of STEEM stays above a certain level). The costs are a lot harder for the backup witnesses though - many of whom run their servers at a loss. There are also exchanges that run nodes, and if the costs for those get too high - we risk getting delisted from exchanges. Many third party developers also need to run nodes to support their applications - so expensive nodes are bad for them as well.
It is important for us to keep the costs to run servers in mind - because a lot of important parts of our ecosystem depend on running servers. Right now the cost per legitimate user for running the network is on the high side , and spam is part of why that is. That’s basically where the post is coming from, even though the particular solution being proposed doesn’t sound like it will fly.
Is the miner returning with the next hard fork?
I'll read then and be back.
No. They have proposed to add back mining, but only for account creation - not for producing blocks.
The pro's and con's mentioned below are pretty much aligned with what I think as well. I would only add that its a balancing act. How can we do all three main points suggested. Increase the mini reward required before payout, add more manpower to check duplicate accounts, and improve the registration process?
Well, I think the witness could help brainstorm a script to help with this.
It should be easy enough to up this incrementally. I'd rather not just to 1sbd, but I'm fully on board trying 0.5SBD and seeing what happens.
I wouldn't go there, see my comment at this post, @aggroed, please. You were once a minnow and this is how you started, with $0.1. You remember how hard that was, this change is killing newcomers...
What happens to the newcomers if all the whales leave for a competitor not drowning in spam?
Well, I have seen whales and big dolphins educating their followers not to spam, flagging them and so on. And it actually worked, that people had a clear comment section, with really good comments and construcrive discussion at their posts. I know that investors are really needed, but I also know that without the traffic that this blockchain has,it will also be less valuable. There are investors that come to Steem because it has a great user-base and they can post articles which will have thousands of views if not tens of thousands of views. Imagine all of these things if we had a 10x the activity that we currently have, it will be huge. This proposal does not favors anybody, not even whales, even though it seems like it does because it reduces spam. If you take away all of the minnows, Steem will be left with a few hundred (if not even less) users who will be able to exchange their votes and comment between them and I really don't believe that this is what we want. Not to mention that some of these whales that can take their stake and walk away are actually people who mined for their Steem and did not put any real money into this blockchain, but who cashed out a lot.
This is what I think about it :)
What happens to the whales if it's a website where all 400 of them can hang out alone with each other?
It would certainly make people think twice about their comments, and put more effort into them.
However, while it certainly wouldn't do you any harm, and me very little harm if the dust threshold was increased, it would damage new users more, so it's a good idea, but a difficult thing to balance.
A sensible approach to implementing any increase would thus be to do it very gradually - raise the threshold to 0.05 for example, see what happens for a month, then up it from there if necessary.
how about you make real comments valuable first. All this does is take more power away from new users, making them less likely to stay on the platform. I would rather have new users + spam over no new users and no spam.
How so?
. Increasing threshold means increasing the amount of inactive users, because if we first consider users who are earning less than 0.1 they must be almost 40% of new users, and these few 0.09's they are getting keeps them coming back. If that is taken from them, then inactive accounts will flood the place.
You see spammers are users without knowledge, i will recommend some sort of compulsory guide to new users, like a driving school, where they have to pass before they can step ahead into the main platform.
However, increasing the threshold will work, because users will have the need to do better, and be more cautious of their bandwidth, but as i have stated, there needs to be proper guide for new users. Information is knowledge and it helps proper application
Would this apply to comments too? A lot of those only make a couple of cents and that may be all some people get. Not that they will get far that way anyway. I can see some merit in the idea, but we have to be wary of alienating the minnows.
Meanwhile others are milking the system for much more with self-votes on junk comments. I'd hope whales can deal with those. That shouldn't be too hard to trace as votes would come from certain accounts.
Yes
Yes, more downvoting (in cases like these) would help as well
Many that could or would are now blind voting what they are told to.
Who is telling them? It's up to the whales if Steemit survives. They can go for the short time win or help the platform thrive.
Come visit y blog from time to time ;)
It is perhaps a symptom of the crypto sentiment in general, a long hold is 6 months. To build a community takes years.
@steevc and @tarazkp I am sorry to inform you that due to the new relegations the upvotes of Steve to Tamara has become worthless because I did not meet the threshold! Taraz you can assure that Stevens voting power will not be elimated by upvoting your own comment! Is this the direction we want to go!
I really cannot support this proposal cause it would mean that my upvotes have become worthless! Just like ten thousands of others!