I think you missed my point. You’re wasting resources trying to treat symptoms (some of them not really much of an issue in general) rather than curing the disease. The disease is the incoherent and socially/economically destructive blockchain protocols currently in place. If nobody is interested in fixing them, then all of this is a waste of time, energy, blockchain resources, and money.
And we’ve been down this road before with these “countering” bots and how you apply your metrics and methods for dealing with the “abuse.” What you’re trying to fix and your actual results don’t align well.
If you want to address abusive self votes, you know how to find those users and downvote them.
If you want to address circle-jerks, you know how to find those users and downvote them.
We all know who these regular “abusers” are. There’s no need to hide behind bots or use some convoluted calculations or algorithms and have this pretense of “objectivity.” Just identify the users and downvote them.
Newsflash for you! @sadkitten is not the name of the HF proposal that force people to be sharing and caring instead of selfish.
Most don't know, regardless, why would you want to put the burden on anyone to search for it and then do the flagging in a time consuming and suboptimal way over simply supporting this bot?
Actually fear of reprisal is a reason to stand behind an organizated initiative like this bot.
There is nothing convoluted but to the laziest who don't want to understand.
svROI mean for that a Steemit subsidized account with 15 SP that post and upvote itself 10 times a day at precisely 2.4 hours would be @sadkitten first target.
It's technically impossible for any human to manually counter that without a significant amout of workload.
Don't assume that treating minor symptoms on a per SP best efforts basis is of lesser merit or taking away from implementing a contentious consensus change.
Yes, I understand. I'm not saying that you need to be proposing hard forks. I'm just pointing out that these types of initiatives don't really do much in the grand scheme of things. There's far too much "abuse" to be countered, which is the result of horrible changes to the blockchain protocols last year. I'm only commenting on the futility of this, not the intentions of those putting in the work.
Because just like the random upvoting bots, the "countering" bots are absent of the human element that can actually differentiate the larger, long-term abusers from the smaller and mostly inconsequential ones. It just indiscriminately finds and downvotes posts/users based on some subjective criteria by the bot creator. I just don't find that to be a practical way to address the actual abusers that most people who want to counter the abuse already know about. Automation begets automation begets further automation. It's an endless cycle of bot creation and escalation and it never cures the actual problem...it just adds to them. And it usually ensnares a lot of good/honest people along the way, turning them off of the platform while not really making a dent in the actual abuse.
But the delegation and other support given to the bot can be viewed by anyone. Unless people are actually donating via exchange transfers, the support can be easily discovered, so reprisal is simple to do.
So is this primarily looking at volume of votes to target the large but low-SP bot-nets?
I'm not saying that there is less merit or that the intentions aren't good. I'm only pointing out that these projects often prove to be minimally effective and can have just as many negative consequences as the current automation and abuse, and that they also redirect blame or the cause of many issues to users within the system rather than those who have made the system what it is via protocol changes.
I know that getting the code changed isn't easy (unless you're STINC and control the narrative and direction of blockchain development) and I'm not saying you guys are stupid for trying to do this. I get it and I applaud the intentions. My disagreement is only with the method and the previous effectiveness from other attempts to do the same. If the code can't be addressed, I think it would be much more effective to directly counter the well-known and longstanding larger-SP voting rings and the unaccountable vote-sellers. I still question the effectiveness of that in both the short-term and the long-run if protocols are left as they are, but, in my opinion, it would be better than another automated system of identification and targeting.
But feel free to give it a shot. I'm still interested to see the results, despite my disagreements here. I mean...I don't think things can really get much worse than they are. I hope I'm right about that!
While those changes may have made the problems worse, they aren't the cause. All the problems pre-existed those changes.
The problem is stake-weighting.
I agree with almost all your points.
Ignoring stake-weighting as the root of the problem of financial manipulation will, as you point out that it has, result in endless loops of attempts to mitigate via other means, such as @sadkitten, which in turn bring on new problems, which require mitigation...
Wash, rinse, repeat...
While I strongly disagree that things can't get much worse, I share your hope that they don't.
While the concept and code of @sadkitten may look simple to you, the final outcome is the result of many hundreds pages of brainstorming.
There has never been anything this thorough done aiming to do the same.
@SadKitten is using emotion and a fair punishment that strikes a balance between people preferring to slightly change their voting behavior instead of self-voting via proxy.
It is completely automated and contentious only to the extent of it's amount of SP. I personally believe it would show result with as little as 50 SP.
With this bot it is up to everyone with SP to decide what they think is an acceptable level of selfishness and push a % of their SP to be used efficiently to send a message where it make the most difference.
We tried to make @sadkitten as simple as possible to understand so it can be seen as some sort of soft-consensus.
Basically a statement saying.
"Too much self voting is fundamentally not acceptable" and enforced to this extent.
I really dig the initiative. This is one of the best initiatives to counter abuse but I also agree with probably most people here that something more fundamental by the way of a HF needs to be done.
Nonetheless, I very much applaud this initiative and I'll consider delegating some SP to it.
Thank you :D
There's nothing to hide behind, it's just a bit of automation. Who has the time to manually search this stuff out? The people who do that are stretched to breaking point. All associated names are known and the calculations are pretty simple.
I agree that ideally we'd have blockchain level changes and that these kinds of things are patches, along with cheetah, steemcleaners, etc. etc. but I'm sure you also appreciate the difficulty of that.
I think of it making one particular abuse vector less attractive. Others are working on other vectors, this is just one. I'd like to expand it but we go step by step.
We'll see how it pans out this time.
I note that creating a bot with delegations creates a larger pool of SP to flag with.
I have too little SP to effectively flag various abusers. Did I not oppose bots voting, I might well delegate to @sadkitten. Paradoxically, I am giving the matter thought, as automated opposition to abusive automated financial manipulation may actually be appropriate.
I wouldn't delegate to hide my participation, and I have no fear of flags. I would delegate, if I did, in order to add SP to the flag pool, so it would have the ability to counter more SP.
This.