By design, it is not a very intense verification process. There are going to be some users that can meet their criteria to get an account that will end up abusing the system. The main thing is to try to deal with it as best as can be done.
@timcliff Can be anything done about phishing! Hackers transfer the stolen money everyday out of Steemit to Blocktrades or Bittrex.
I know it is users responsibility to protect their own accounts, but things happen! At least stolen money can be stopped here and returned to users or to the reward pool.
It is really a major problem and hope someone can look into it :)
The Trending Page
I have a suggestion which might be a solution. As voting bots became a part of the community, we cant fight them or remove them. But we can limit users using them. For Example whoever has more than 25000 SP wont be allowed to use voting bots in the future. Minnows who get flagged and loose their reputation for reasons like spam or plagiarism wont be allowed to use bots as well. That way only minnows can use them to be visible. Dolphins and Whales will be on the trending page anyway. They dont need any support to be visible.
There is another solution which might be even better! Push all promoted posts to the "Promoted" page, whether they use Steemit or voting bots to promote their posts. This method will clean the trending page forever!
Phishing
There are many accounts involved in phishing. They steal accounts with high reputation and use them to downvote others and spread their phishing links. Finally transfer their money to another account and from there to Bittrex. I was also a victim some weeks ago, but didnt loose much and my account was recovered in the same day. Other users lost about 100 SBD and the money remained in the scammers account for days, before they transferred it to Bittrex.
So if we will have a live chat to report the problem at the same time and resend the money back to the users or to the reward pool, it will make a big change. It is happening everyday and many users are frustrated. There should be a real solution for this, because nobody can do anything against it. Maybe the scammers accounts should be suspended as well.
Self upvote
I dont have any problem with self-upvote, but I noticed many thing lately. Some users spam and upvote their own comments up to 6$ and not only one comment, but about 20 or more. Dont you think they are misusing this option!
This is one of the examples:
My suggestion is to limit the usage of selfupvotes maybe to 10 per day. The most of them dont even read or upvote other users posts, but upvote only their comments.
This is all what I can think about right now and thank you for the opportunity :)
25,000? How about just end the stupid, non-egalitarian, site-rep-destroying practice altogether??
We also desperately need a policy for malicious downvotes. I was recently hammered by a user named "bunny chum" just for using valorfortruth's trending trash downvoting tool on ONE of his 96%-PAID-BOT-upvoted posts.
But we can limit users using them. For Example whoever has more than 25000 SP wont be allowed to use voting bots in the future
There is no way to prevent users and stakeholders from doing this.
There is another solution which might be even better! Push all promoted posts to the "Promoted" page, whether they use Steemit or voting bots to promote their posts. This method will clean the trending page forever!
Trending is currently based on the amount of upvotes (measured in SP) a post receives. If a post receives sufficient upvotes, it will be in trending. Trending will be replaced once communities are implemented BTW.
So if we will have a live chat to report the problem at the same time and resend the money back to the users or to the reward pool, it will make a big change.
There is already a steemitabuse channel in steem.chat and Discord. There is no way to 'send money back' if it is stolen.
Maybe the scammers accounts should be suspended as well.
This is not possible. I appreciate you are trying to make helpful suggestions, but you should really spend more time to understand how the platform actually works.
My suggestion is to limit the usage of selfupvotes maybe to 10 per day. The most of them dont even read or upvote other users posts, but upvote only their comments.
If this were implemented, the abusers would just create a second account and do all their "self-upvoting" by upvoting account A from account B.
This person @abusereports seems psychologically disturbed. He spends his days downvoting everybody out of pure bitterness and doesn't contribute to the community in any positive way whatsoever. He seems to be taking a revenge on the world. Poor soul...
Thanks. I'll forward this on to the appropriate people and try to get the delegated SP revoked.
Tell them they should also STOP creating accounts until they have something to prevent this in place. It REALLY is NOT that hard.
Hold on, it needs some refining. Picked up commenters too.
Brilliant idea, I second
By design, it is not a very intense verification process. There are going to be some users that can meet their criteria to get an account that will end up abusing the system. The main thing is to try to deal with it as best as can be done.
I'd be curious to see how many legit accounts were created during this two day period. This is a significant amount, regardless of the excuse.
I agree that it is a lot. I'm going to forward to the appropriate people to investigate.
Around 25,000 accounts were created around that time though, so percentage-wise it isn't necessarily that bad.
If that was the only abusers, we know from past experience it isn't. In fact, this is far from an isolated incident. I posted a lot created here:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@themarkymark/steemit-creates-accounts-for-scammers-and-nobody-else
I find large chunks of 50 users created immediately from Steemit Inc being used nefariously.
I’m aware. I’ll discuss with you.
@timcliff Can be anything done about phishing! Hackers transfer the stolen money everyday out of Steemit to Blocktrades or Bittrex.
I know it is users responsibility to protect their own accounts, but things happen! At least stolen money can be stopped here and returned to users or to the reward pool.
It is really a major problem and hope someone can look into it :)
This is one example:
https://steemit.com/@richardman/transfers
And there are some others, I can share them as well if needed. But all the money is gone :(
Lots of changes have been made to try and improve the situation. More are under discussion. If you have any suggestions for improvements, let me know.
@timcliff Yes I have many suggestions :)
I have a suggestion which might be a solution. As voting bots became a part of the community, we cant fight them or remove them. But we can limit users using them. For Example whoever has more than 25000 SP wont be allowed to use voting bots in the future. Minnows who get flagged and loose their reputation for reasons like spam or plagiarism wont be allowed to use bots as well. That way only minnows can use them to be visible. Dolphins and Whales will be on the trending page anyway. They dont need any support to be visible.
There is another solution which might be even better! Push all promoted posts to the "Promoted" page, whether they use Steemit or voting bots to promote their posts. This method will clean the trending page forever!
Phishing
There are many accounts involved in phishing. They steal accounts with high reputation and use them to downvote others and spread their phishing links. Finally transfer their money to another account and from there to Bittrex. I was also a victim some weeks ago, but didnt loose much and my account was recovered in the same day. Other users lost about 100 SBD and the money remained in the scammers account for days, before they transferred it to Bittrex.
So if we will have a live chat to report the problem at the same time and resend the money back to the users or to the reward pool, it will make a big change. It is happening everyday and many users are frustrated. There should be a real solution for this, because nobody can do anything against it. Maybe the scammers accounts should be suspended as well.
Self upvote
I dont have any problem with self-upvote, but I noticed many thing lately. Some users spam and upvote their own comments up to 6$ and not only one comment, but about 20 or more. Dont you think they are misusing this option!
This is one of the examples:
My suggestion is to limit the usage of selfupvotes maybe to 10 per day. The most of them dont even read or upvote other users posts, but upvote only their comments.
This is all what I can think about right now and thank you for the opportunity :)
By having 10 selfvotes a day, they could still drain their entire voting power on themselves, so that will not change anything at all really.
25,000? How about just end the stupid, non-egalitarian, site-rep-destroying practice altogether??
We also desperately need a policy for malicious downvotes. I was recently hammered by a user named "bunny chum" just for using valorfortruth's trending trash downvoting tool on ONE of his 96%-PAID-BOT-upvoted posts.
There is no way to prevent users and stakeholders from doing this.
Trending is currently based on the amount of upvotes (measured in SP) a post receives. If a post receives sufficient upvotes, it will be in trending. Trending will be replaced once communities are implemented BTW.
There is already a steemitabuse channel in steem.chat and Discord. There is no way to 'send money back' if it is stolen.
This is not possible. I appreciate you are trying to make helpful suggestions, but you should really spend more time to understand how the platform actually works.
If this were implemented, the abusers would just create a second account and do all their "self-upvoting" by upvoting account A from account B.
Hmmm ... My name is in the list. Are you sure it is reliable ?
I'll review each one before sending it on. Thanks for the info.
Wait... @orcwithaspork has to be the best name I have seen in the history of the internet!
your name, or the list @arcange? from your knee jerk reaction to my comment on your latest report, I am not so sure about how reliable you are!
Replied! Next time, please avoid overreacting too fast!
This person @abusereports seems psychologically disturbed. He spends his days downvoting everybody out of pure bitterness and doesn't contribute to the community in any positive way whatsoever. He seems to be taking a revenge on the world. Poor soul...
It is not reliable. @airdroptakibi is on the list. I am following that account for months. And now he is getting tagged because of this bad job.