It has only been days since I wrote about How to milk the reward pool with complete freedom and we are back again.
I've tried stopping this a few times without any success as this has been going on for months in many different forms.
It all starts with a Chinese investor who was punished for upvoting himself.
Initially he would post a line or two about the market, then a video with cute girls. This is what initially got him to -10 rep.
For a while, he shifted to selling upvotes, although not everyone will agree with this, and some will claim it is his stake to use as he pleases. He didn't always seem to upvote, but you could do really well if he did. After a while, he felt this was not as lucrative as upvoting himself.
Why sell votes when you can vote yourself using a different identity?
This is where he gets really clever, he made a few alt accounts using photos from a porn star claiming to be an average everyday person.
@animal-lovers is my favorite character in @davidding's army.
Yeah, hmm. I'm not buying it.
A little digging reveals this is a porn star named Katerina Hovorkava. You can read her complete introduction post if you want all the details of this fantastic cover identity.
Although it is a great picture, I made some creative changes for the general public who may have weak knees. If you want to see the original, you can find it here.
Ok, cool so what?
This is where it gets really dirty. @animal-lovers primary focus was to post animal photos and videos as the cover but the real objective was to comment on #introduceyourself tag and then whack it with a $15 vote while taking $2.50+ in curation rewards.
This went on for a while, but then @davidding just started selling votes to MinnowBooster while working on the next project.
We all remember askquestion and funny-gifs right?
yes, that's all one day, and not even a full one!
My last post luckily shut that shit down, but has it stopped?
Nah, we have another identity created who is actively getting delegation from @freedom.
Every time one is shut down, another will come up. This is only one of the voting circles that abuses the delegation. There are a few others using multiple identities to circle jerk the reward pool.
Only upvote bots and circle jerks can afford the high cost of delegation. I know many don't agree with bidding bots, but they do (or should) offer a fair promotion tool to users. These circles jerks do nothing but rape the reward pool distributing wealth to the same people with no effort or participation.
Although there are lots of breadcrumbs publically available on the blockchain to find all the connections to these accounts, I will post some common transactions between them.
- sarahlouise transfer 58 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
- alanazhary transfer 43 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
- askquestion transfer 44.627 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
- elizabeth302 transfer 3.073 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
- animal-lovers transfer 1.358 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
- funny-gifs transfer 6 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf
A majority of the users asking for delegation from @freedom are the same users with alternate accounts. I could spend all day researching them (and I have spent a lot of time) and many of them come down to the same users.
Some of them are quite entertaining.
These cirle jerk groups jeopardize all of our investments and the possibility of the platform being around in a year or two, much less even 6 months. If you want to see Steem worth $0.5 again, by all means, let's all do this.
My recent popular posts
- Witness Support Application for Minnow Support Project
- @bellyrub gone full evil? double selling votes, self voting, trying to get 40K from users; triple dipping?
- How curation rewards work and how to be a kick ass curator
- Markdown 101 - How to make kick ass posts on Steemit
- Work ON your business, not in your business! - How to succeed as a small business
- You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it!
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If nothing else, scams like this invalidate one of the central axioms of the steem protocol:
Proof-of-brain.
As has been described many times, steem is supposed to replace the trade of electricity-and-cooling-for-commodity (found in proof-of-work systems) with the trade of interesting-content-for-commodity, the idea that those who create content and share it on the blockchain would be rewarded in line with how much "everyone" found the content "interesting."
Scams like this expose a very painful truth. "Interesting" is not a systemically emergent property from focus of activity.
All of these accounts focus quite a lot of system activity on some really terrible content. As you've discovered, vapid commentary – not even blog posts – are perfectly valid loci of activity, which the system as a whole treats as interest. Interest equals more likely to receive part of the random payout. More likely to receive part of the random payout equals a steady income.
The problem is the assumption that steem activity actually denotes interesting content. I'm not sure that the system as it's conceived can work in the way it is generally described because of the way that creation content is decoupled from any sort of real valuation.
Because the value is assumed to be global and all actors are assumed to be seeking the same definition of "good," all activity is assumed to be equally good.
Clearly not the case. Bots, which never sleep and are much more reactive to new information, make it easy to vote up (or down) posts based on any sort of arbitrary metadata with the actual content being of no interest at all. Feedback loops of delegators make use of the easily observable economies of scale when it comes to maximizing your potential of catching some of the random rain of dollars from on high.
I don't actually have a solution for this problem. I'm not even sure I have a really good suggestion – and that part bothers me. It bothers me a lot.
Playing whack-a-mole with these scammers is always going to be a case of trying to follow the trail and knowing that you're only catching a small percentage. I'm sure there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, which aren't making enough ripple to attract attention.
I wish I had an answer.
This is the most important part of what you said. I feel like I am in the same spot. There are many suggestions I have but in the end, it's like fighting spam and security threats. It's an endless game and you have to win 100% of the time, they just need to win once to be successful.
The blockchain will evolve much slower than bad actors.
All systems evolve more slowly than the parasites which live upon. If we've learned nothing else from evolutionary biology and simulation, we've learned that. Put a pile of self replicating bits into a primordial soup, turn on the sun, and let the system have a bit of mutation and within the first 15,000 generations you have a fully flourishing parasitic and meta-parasitic population.
We knew that just from playing with Ray's Tierra simulation back in the early 90s.
I'm coming at this as someone who used to be, once upon a time, in the software/security threats business but who moved on to something that suited him better: game theory and game design. And from that very different perspective, I can only say with aggressive emphasis:
You get what you reward.
The steem protocol rewards activity at loci on the blockchain. And that's all it does. The assumption of content value at that locus is completely assumed and arbitrary. The designers assume that there is interesting and useful content there because "people" are active there – but that has nothing to do with the actual content.
In my gut, I feel like the problem is the generalized assumption that everyone values the same content.
If the system differentiated between locations on the blockchain that I am active in and locations on the blockchain that you are active in and locations on the blockchain that the bots are active in, then we could make reasonable decisions about the value that we ascribe to each of those potential states. You might think that locations where I'm active are likely to be interesting and that locations where the bot is active are less likely to be interesting. I might think that locations where your active are likely to be interesting and where the bots are active are likely to be interesting (and let's be clear, this is just for the sake of illustration – because that would be insanity). What the bots think doesn't matter to either of us.
It's the lack of individuation that seems to be the attack vector on this system. I'm not sure if individuation is a thing that can be brought to the network as a whole in a way that retains the current set of expectations that a lot of users (not necessarily ones that we would like to associate with, but a lot of users) currently hold. Many of those users have significant stakes in comparison to either of us.
I really would like to solve this problem. It seems soluble from a game theoretic point of view. Viewed purely as a game which involves a series of exchanges between players, this is a thing that we can make interesting for everybody.
I'm just not sure if people want that.
Funny how people will always find a way around the rules...he has great pics, though....
Any set of rules has an exploitable architecture. Even the simplest. And in a situation where min/max is a value that can be optimized? Someone will do so, and they will profit by doing so.
That's an inevitability of systems. Orders of magnitude more if we are talking about "money," even money in the abstract. Just the idea of money will find people working very hard to get some of it. (Chinese gold farmers and World of Warcraft come to mind.)
We'll have to see how things shake out.
Im leaving them for after the article ;)
I think part of the rewarding pool should go to the most viewed and/or replied posts. Because it reveals how interesting to the platform it was.
The problem with that particular rule – and I would generally support it under other circumstances – is that there is no way to determine the difference between a human looking at a post and I bought looking at a post. We already know that bots can post new content and comments; we see them doing it all the time. Driving the reward pool to "most viewed" and/or "most replied" would drive the bot swarms to sell views contentless commentary, which is already happening to some degree thanks to mutualism groups who vote up each other's comments, either via automation or manual.
Again, I think the core problem is trying to figure out "how interesting to the platform" a thing is, where the real question is "how interesting to an individual user is it/was it/could it be?" We have all the signals we need to start developing an answer to that question.
I'm still not sure it's a question that the platform wants an interesting answer to.
I agree. Obviously the drive-by upvoters who just use the list to try to earn rewards aren't proving anything. Oh well, I'm a newbie minnow, so what do I know?
I don't get why we can't just flag their accounts off the platform?
You have to sacrifice rewards to flag, and most of us don't have enough stake to make a big difference, which means either a big whale or tons and tons of minnows have to do it. Plus voting power is a big limitation unless you have enough SP to be able to use small votes to accomplish it.
Me and a few Steemians discussed this yesterday on Steemit.chat. Is there plans to reward down voting? We think there needs to be, if down voting is not incentivized very few will ever flag.
There are talks about it, but currently no.
I think down vote rewarding and account creation are the two problems plaguing Steem's growth. Hopefully they'll soon be solved.
Would there be a way to limit the withdrawal, not only in the power down...but in how much could be sent to individual offsite wallets or accounts within a time frame?
I am not sure if I am saying it correctly, but if there was a way, then these multiple transfers to the same bittrex wallet could have been seen, and halted?
I know that would stink for people who just needed to shift funds for legit reasons...but if it could be done for a while maybe word would get out that steemit is not so easy to scam.
Or, to have things set up so that users could not transfer any SD they earned on steemit for x amount of time. Transfers off site in the first 6 months limited to only funds they personally invested into the platform. This way if they want out, they don't loose what they invested...but it would sure halt the pool draining scams.
Melons and Taco 😁 Oh my weak knees... Loving the Photoshop skills. lol
I too found it hilarious! What a sense of creativity. Thanks for bringing awareness to this issue. It's a shame that someone always has to go against the grain.
I was actually hoping you'd give people advice HOW to behave on steem and be rewarded. All that you complained about is already well known and there's nothing we can do about it. This post is 100% click bait.
so shameless this person how done this.we want money but don't be shameless.thank you for share this post.your content very nice keep it up.
I knew we could count on you!
Here's what I want to know. How the hell did you find the original image of the blonde? I've google searched his original image and it turns up nothing but other "blondes". I suspect you knew of this porn star prior to his post. :thinking:
Nah, I got better tools :)
LOL - Maybe it's his next door neighbor? maybe?
Thank you, Steve Steemit
Who's Steve and for what are you thanking me?
Copy the image location and paste it into a search at tineye.com, but be ready for NSFW results.
Nice digging!
Funny how the bigger upvote on this post comes from an account with Freedoms delegation 😂
I sent $20 to MinnowBooster to help make it more visible to @freedom. I could have boosted it $50 or even $100+ but I don't want to abuse it. The vote is the result of that.
I tried to privately disclose it two days ago without fanfare.
what happens if all of us sick of this just upvote every single thing 100%, all comments votes , posts, what do the seemingly two sources of a lot of this then have , asking for a friend, being serious....drain it so there is nothing for some to feed on, b.a.
As a newbie I would love to learn more about the reward pool you spoke about. Still trying to learn all the moving parts of steemit. (And its hilarious you found the original porn star pic... Great research.)
So what you're telling me is the person who is going around downvoting posts because they're worth more than what he thinks they should be worth acting (in my opinion) as the hero of the reward pool. Actually has a system set-up that drains the reward pool the fastest.
That makes sense to me.
To get to the bottom of all this, don't we have to find a way to get to @freedom?!?! I mean... reward pool abusers are going to use the tools that are made available to them. If @freedom doesn't give a shit what these delegations are used for, then of course they will be abused!
So instead of stopping each individual person offering payments to freedom, how do we make a plea to the big account itself? Obviously someone is paying attention to the account to dole out these delegations and shut them down.
Stop the flood at the crack in the damn rather than trying to catch each individual drop of water.
Or maybe that's just a pipe dream...
I think @freedom does care, or he wouldn't have removed @askquestion & @funny-gifs delegation. I just wonder how aware he is of what is going on, many of these things are not obvious without research.
Perhaps a daily analysis post titled 'hey @freedom this is what's happening to your Delegated SP' might work?
At the price he leases (and It is his choice), it's impossible to make your $ back without employing these techniques discussed above.
A quick check on the wallet tells me $60 a day for 100k SP is around a $9.60 vote at 100%.
So 10 self-votes on comments would be about $90 (?) a day assuming you were taking all the rewards.
It doesn't make sense to lease daily at that price unless you are selling or self-voting... but what's a man gonna do with 7,000,000 SP!
That's why we need inflation, voting rings will eventually dry up if they don't publish quality content.
Keep up the Great work Marky! CLean this community up - the only part I dont like is the sarcasm in the titles misleads me - I was expecting one of your kick ass guides - but this is good detective work!
It's a play on words. I like creative headlines, as they are 90% of a post as you only get 3 seconds to get attention.
True that! I didn't mean 'misleading' as in 'curse you forever!' instead like - 'aw bummer....whats this now?'
I would read the Marky Mark's guide to catching people's eye with headlines in 3 seconds!
Oh I know, I just was just explaining myself.
Headlines are very powerful tools, and I would say they are more important than anything when writing a post/article. If they don't get past your headline, then the rest is pointless.
I am definitely struggling! I have had pretty good success with two things - properly using tags and cultivating community/network, and they generally go together.
Actually getting randos to look at my articles - I'm not at that level yet. But I'm not aggressively looking for new strategies yet - steemit is still exceeding my expectations - although things like this do worry me - great people like you and also the #bisteemit community and others are doing very important work making sure the whole ship doesn't crash.
I remember when I used to blog and write content for my site, the headlines would take longer than the article at times.
There are actually tools to write headlines and give you lots of ideas. Most of the time, I just come up with something quick and dirty. For posts. I want to really do something I'll spend a little more time brainstorming.
Whenever I get around to starting my workflow series, I'll write on brainstorming. The key thing to know though, your brain has two states, open and closed. While brainstorming your mind is open to new ideas, when you start focusing on details (like implementation) your brain is in more of a closed state and is not very receptive to new ideas.
When thinking of headlines, or ideas you want to just keep thinking and write them down, don't try to rationalize or justify, just get it out of your head and close the open loop so you are receptive to a new idea.
I'm no expert, I just no the theory. Most of the time I'm lazy and don't put much thought into it.
You drew me into a frog eating contest months ago with that same line - 'I'm getting around to writing my workflow series...' ;p
You come up with some great stuff, and its nice to hear your thoughts. I too often put great advise into comments. I'm working to make a comment mining tool functionality to add-on to our current opensource tool - coffeesource.net
Its just a play-tool, but we have to learn somehow right?
But I think comment mining could be a game changer for harvesting ideas - how much value did you just give me here in the comments? Will you copy paste later or re-remember and rewrite?
Thanks for the interaction ;p
out with the shlls and bots, in with the humans
well done cleaning up the scum so we can have an actual community, i hope one day to assist in this.
++
As a newbie I would love to learn more about the reward pool you spoke about. Still trying to learn all the moving parts of steemit
Wow man you did a lot of research...I myself personally abhor these people..They are just spoiling our amazing platform, where real creators/real persons get rewarded.... not the fake monkeys.
Be still my fast beating heart, did you have the scammers in there that say for only £299 one of payment we can get you 15 million followers and make you number 1 in google search page!!!
your photoshop skill is excellent very nice picture, thanks
Glad you're on it @themarkymark. Thanks for your sleuthing skills to keep steemit healthy.
Completely agree!!!
We are the generation of witness, where we can make our own freedom and self power.
Some good policing @themarkymark! For this platform to work out we need people like you keeping it tidy.
nice find.....
another detective in the making
Incredible! HAHAHAHAHA! No kidding, it was really worthy to read! :)
Oh! Wow!You really spend incredible time to find out this situation and people have really a lot of time to waste while they don't work?!?
Also, I always wondered when I saw something like "sarahlouise transfer 58 SBD to bittrex 5ae9ebf1220a45cdbbf", and I would click on it and the account would be empty, now it is clear: it is someone having more than 1 account.
I don't even want to know how long it took you to find and track all this usage and data. Good job though.
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Hello @themarkeymark .
you also selling upvotes but if some one other selling upvotes and earn some money then why you Make a post just for earn money ?? and First of all Daviding and @sarahlouise is not mine account i d'nt know who are they but you say its mine account ? yes i have just 3 accounts 1 @askquestion @animal-lovers @funny-gifs But Now a Days i will never work on Steemit Cause of you . Bro it's not fair you do same work like votes selling on Shit post but if others can do you say they are scammers .
Thank you .
I was thinking this platform based on money will end up promoting scams, but I won't give up on this platform I think great content is out there and actual writers with potential will use this to train themselves, or at least this is how I see it for myself.
It's make as a creative one, from that we got bluster info, it's the best way for fresher, carry on to doing this @themarkymark
Reading your post I think we should use steemit with honest and legal ways.Selling upvote is a bad work in steemit.And yes I learn more from your post. Thanks for your good content post.
Well, it is inevitable. Where money is there and the crooks, who use the system to benefit themselves and harm the system that feeds them.
But thanks to such fighters for honesty and freedom, like you, there is a chance to prevent this all. Thanks you!
Ok Google: Katerina Hovorkava...
exellent content bro.I like it.love you bro.
People go trough so much trouble to get some rewards, then again to do this they initially had to buy a shit ton of Steem, so its not all that bad, I partly think "its their stake to use", but I also think they are stupid AF, they could get so much more if they were just honest and try to write original content or pictures...
Anyway, this is a never ending fight, it is unstopable, you can expose one and there will be another 10 fake accounts raping the reward pool...
Congratulations @themarkymark!
Your post was mentioned in the hit parade in the following category:
muzakirpb upvote, posting is perfect
This post has received gratitude of 7.45 % from @appreciator thanks to: @themarkymark.
This post has received a 11.49 % upvote from @aksdwi thanks to: @themarkymark.
@themarkymark de verdad amigo ayudame no puedo perder 20sbd por un error yo igualmente no voy a dejar de eviarlo a ustedes mismos espero respuesta gracias por lo menos la mitad pero creeme que tarde meses reuniendo eso y si no me crees consulta mi monedero
