Recently I was asked on discord to help with some flagging, which I dully undertook after looking at the posts in question. The story behind the down votes I gave was simple. The author made a post, upvoted the post, which is fine by me but then went on to leave themselves multiple comments on this post and also upvoted each one of these comments.
There are always people trying to ‘game’ the system and what one person sees and gaming to others it is not.
Then on my Youtube Channel I get this….
I was very surprised that this comment came to me on YouTube and not here on Steemit. The account and post that I down voted was
https://steemit.com/music/@eazyh/izzamuzzic
After receiving this message, my thoughts went to those that often down vote to save the rewards pool. People like @spaminator, @cheetah and @steemcleaners. And then I remembered. I had offered to help @steemcleaners with some data, and never got around to it.
The Aim of this analysis was twofold.
- Calculate how much was added back to the rewards pool by these account by down voting and see which account was most active and
- Create a model that I could give to @steemcleaners, so they can track, monitor and share data on their work.
The Data
To create the model, I am limiting the data set to Nov for testing and reporting here.
First I connected to the Steemsql database held and managed by @arcange and I connected to the TXvotes tables
SELECT
*
FROM
TxVotes (NOLOCK)
WHERE [voter] in ('steemcleaners','cheetah','spaminator')
and timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'11/01/2017')
and timestamp< CONVERT(datetime,'12/01/2017')
I then used a web query to connect to Steemd.com for example https://steemd.com/@cheetah
And here I gathered live data for voting power and effective sp for each account.
Each account required a separate query, and then I merged these 3 tables together into one data table.
I also used a web query to connect to https://steemd.com and from here I got other required live data for vote value calculations, such as the exchange rate, total vesting shares and total vesting fund. All of which is required for calculating how much a vote is worth.
Once I had all the data I needed, I then use DAX to carry out calculations and model the data.
One shortcoming of this model is that in Steemsql, the voter voting power is not recorded, so this has been taken from live data and not the actual rate at time of vote.
To test the data and the model I have used November votes and below are detail of the analysis I carried out
The Analysis
In total the 3 accounts combined, @steemcleaners, @cheetah and @spaminator have returned $49,259.88 bank to the rewards pool for posts made in November.
2888 different authors received 20820 down votes and the average weight for a down vote used was 3.48%.
The bar chart shows the daily number of down votes and the value of these votes. We can see it was a very busy day on the 17th Nov with $4.2K added back to the rewards pool.
In the pie charts below, on the top left we can see the portion of authors receiving down votes by each of the accounts. On the top right we can see what portion of the value returned to the rewards pool by each of the accounts. And at the bottom we can see what portion of the total down votes each of the accounts contributed to the over all total.
From this we can clearly see that @cheetah has given 66.7% of the down votes in this analysis but to only 9.82% of the authors. The level of repeat offenders on the cheetah list is substantially higher than that of @steemcleaners or @spaminator.
@steemcleaners has hit 60.95% of the authors with down vote contributing 95.74% of the value returned to the reward pool.
Repeat offenders
Many of the accounts that received down votes, received more than one down vote. Below is a list of the authors that received down votes sorted by the number of posts with down votes
Conclusion
The data above gives a clear indication of the level of activity when it comes to cleaning up steemit. Kudos for all of the work @steemcleaners. On average these 3 account in Nov down voted 694 times a day. That’s like one down vote every 2 minutes.
By analysing the Nov data I have been able to ensure that I can now contribute in a meaningful way to the support of these services, as I have now passed a copy of this model to steemcleaners.
I am part of a Blockchain Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BlockchainBI. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit or Blockchain data, please do contact me or any of the #BlockchainBI team and we will do our best to help you...
You can find #BlockchainBI on discord https://discordapp.com/invite/JN7Yv7j
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
I often report stuff to steemcleaners using the form on the website. Some dude was plagiarising, comment spamming and then threatening me when I called the cheeta on him. His rep is now 0. I love the fact steemcleaners are here for that.
As for self-upvoting of comments - it's a tricky one. Some big players do it, so enforcing a policy to prevent the abuse of self-voting is hard...
In any case, thank you for investing the time in helping keep our steemit clean!!! <3 And a big loving shout out to @patrice and the rest of the steemcleaners team - if we can help, just tell us how.
it wasnt just self up voteing of comments. there were multiple comments left on the post by the author that were only a couple of words, and each comment was upvoted. there were no comments by means of conversation with anyone
Then report it. https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/
To save the guys time going over the reports, you can check if the user has been "marked" by the mackbot here: https://steemcleaners.org/bot/mackbot.txt
Another note: when reporting plagiarism, include the content source when you can. Saves the team time, and apparently you get rewarded for helping clean the steemit. I've gotten some SP by reporting scammers, so that's nice. Not a lot, but a pleasant surprise!
P.S. I sometimes upvote my comments for visibility. Observe.
I was not aware of this list being public. thanks for the share
Especially when the self-appointed Steemit police, aka @steemcleaners, also upvote their own posts and comments.
That being said and before I get crucified, that could be part of their ability to return a larger amount to the reward pool as @paulag has shown. Honestly, I'm too ignorant of it all to be able to process that notion.
Self-voting will always be a thing. I recently, as in the last few days, began publishing using DSound and to my dismay, noticed it upvoted my post for me. I have no clue how to stop it which reminds me, I need to look during my next upload.
All I know is, I'm here to share great content, and I'm getting shafted by those who aren't, but it's okay. I'm also not here to find these jerks. However, my flag finger is ready and available to help whenever needed.
The reason @steemcleaners was self voting their comments is a little complicated. When it was made clear to us that any of our reports that made the trending page would be flagged we had to ask our larger supporters to stop auto upvoting our posts and look for alternative support for our project. One of our supporters that owns @adm (who also allows us access through community members for flagging) started upvoting our comments instead and so did @steemcleaners.
Since our 1M SP delegation we no longer use the @steemcleaners account for upvoting and @adm continues to support us by upvoting our comments.
Currently @steemcleaners has 2 full time members (40+ hours a week) and several part time members (2-10 hours a week). We also payout a small reward in SP to those who report abuse to us.
Hey @patrice...thanks for taking the time to explain that. It makes total sense.
TWO people!?! Wow.
You know y'all need only ask to get a ton of help from the community. I'm sure this again a case where my ignorance kicks in because I'm sure the work is sensitive and vetting people is a factor. Just know, there are a lot of people who'd like to help.
Thanks again!
There are a lot of things that are not as transparent as we would like. Many of these conversations take place in chat and in the comment sections of posts on other accounts.
There is a bit of a problem with finding time to screen new members and incorporating them into the team. I'm looking at some alternative solutions to get the community more involved.
Thanks for your support.
Just two?! Oy. How can one join part time and help?
Oh for crimini's sake you are seriously a team of 2 and a few part timers?!? OMG I knew you were an angel before but holy jeebus. I am going to DM you on steemit.chat
Cheers - Carl
self voting is okay in the right context. If you write a comment on someone elses post and you want it to be seen the a self vote will raise it. I have also posted before on self voting your own posts. Again, to an extent it is okay, when you are new and your vote is not worth much 100% self votes are considered okay. But if you self vote and dont also spread the rewards, then there is a problem
That's why I really liked @bryan-imhoff's post below. Putting aside whether self-voting should occur, does everyone agree that ONLY self-voting goes against the spirit of Steemit? And can that automated and used?
@paulag This is not true. There is no such rule nor consensus on self voting and I've been on Steemit since day 1. The whole trending page has always been full of selfvotes and still is. That's the whole point of steem power and the attention economy. To give your posts more attention and send them higher or even reward yourself if you put in the effort. It is not just a curation game. If the rewards are considered too high then someone else may come to downvote, but noone contests the self vote itself for genuine posts that took time to make.
Self votes are always considered okay unless for spammy or low effort comments (Ned in a video even said he would like to see more people competing for attention as that would drive up the price of Steem).
but the case you presented in this post is indeed one of those cases that needs flagging as they are low effort spammy comments
@paulag btw if you are involved in flagging could you take a look at these 3 accounts.
This is what I call self vote abuse, though it is done by proxy and automation:
https://steemit.com/@newsteemians/comments
https://steemit.com/@hien-tran/comments
https://steemit.com/@coinlend/comments
Analyst here. Joining discord, hoping to help.
welcome :-)
what worries me is this mentality that steemit is here just as an investment scheme for people who want to game the system. they really dont get the concept of community, creating quality content or trying to make the world a better place. part of this is due to steemits own marketing of the platform as a place to get paid for content. while this gets new users in here in the droves, they come in as an uneducated mass looking only for the quick buck. the guidelines for what is and isnt appropriate arent discussed for fear of impinging on libertarian ideals of getting to do whatever they want. I think education on how the platform works needs to be a cornerstone of entering the steemit domain. otherwise we have no one to blame but our own faulty system when people attempt to abuse the platform.
There are community guidelines, and they are enforced by the community through @steemcleaners . The abusers will keep looking for ways to game the system and the community will find ways to fight it. The scammers can't win because by gaming the system they're actually lowering the value of the coin and hurting themselves in the process.
Yes, this reminds me of the only thing hidden by steemd, which is the available effective voting power by the time of the vote.
And not always can it be deciphered from other data.
cheetah has quite a lot of false positives, like when a website opens a steem account and publishes its own content.
Neohub and Bitcoinhub seem to me like automated services aggregating news on their respective coins.
This comment has received a 25.00 % upvote from @steemdiffuser thanks to: @stimialiti. Steem on my friend!
Remember, above average bids may get additional upvotes from our trail members!
Reminder, we will soon change our upvote policy to only vote on posts <3.5 days old.
Get Upvotes, Join Our Trail, or Delegate Some SP
I am very pleased with all the work and effort of all that try to keep steemit.com clean
However I am a bit disappointed on @cheetah because 2 days ago it made a mistake and left me a comment as there is a similar post to mine
However that is not correct and can be checked as my post has a different story inside.
I hope it gets fixed
However I am happy that the rewards are getting back in the pool from the scammers
So in the end I can only thanks @cheetah for its work along with the others
Thanks for your very detailed analysis
I appreciate your analysis, I really do.
Unfortunately it only underscores my decision to pull involvement with Steemit. The services you listed do a positive thing, but in the face of overwhelming odds I don't see how it can make much of a difference.
The platform is being gamed heavily, and it will take more than a few stalwart defenders to make any headway. Creating accounts is simple, so you never run out of parasites.
Its an asymmetrical war, and a few dedicated bots and human curators aren't going to win it -- unless the platform itself changes to make parasitic behavior non-profitable.
I dont think you should pull your involvement with Steemit, dont think about the money, think about the community and if steemit adds any value
Or think about the money and get your investment off this site, which is a pit of colluding vipers with all kinds of lot of snaky behavior. Not much to be proud of when much of the underlying behavior is fully revealed.
Come back and stay for community is a decent idea. Community has nothing to do with the $$. So I come back occasionally to enjoy the community, but you couldn't pay me to leave more than a small pittance sitting on the site.
I'd pull your money off the platform as fast as you can. I did. The whole system is a gamey colluding mess of crony capitalism gone crazy. There is no long term future in a system where 98% of STEEM is controlled by 1% of the accounts.
There is some new and interesting content on the site that you can't find elsewhere easily, so there is still a reason to drop by occasionally and sample some of the better content.
But as an investment, STEEM is a really really bad idea.
In principal I support the work of @steemcleaners etc. and people like @patrice have my witness vote for that reason. They should, in my humble opinion, stick to down voting people who clearly have no other motive than personal enrichment though. I'm not saying by any means that this is happening and I firmly believe that the intentions are good, however there is a potential danger in creating what could be seen as a self appointed vigilante police force. As undiplomatic as that youtube comment was, I do have some sympathy for that users position. I agree that the main aim of steemit should be community and the vast bulk of rewards should go to authors that create useful content. That being said many people have put significant sums of cash into steem tokens and I don't think it is entirely fair to say they shouldn't gain some return on that investment (more buyers and holders does put upward pressure on price after all). I see nothing wrong with upvoting ones own posts/comments within reason.
I personally use around 20% of my upvotes to upvote most of my own comments, I only do it immediately if I have some reason to want it noticed. Otherwise do it after a few days so that I don't unfairly place my own comments higher up the list, I for one don't always read to the end, I'm sure I'm not the only one, so comments higher up the list probably have a better chance to be up voted by others. If people see value in my comments they will push them up the list, the rest I use to up vote what I see as valuable content. Disagree with me if you will but I personally see that as a good balance between both viewpoints, others may place that line more or less in their favor and within reason I think that people should be able to make that call for themselves.
Many of the people that I see with large followings and adding high quality content, up vote themselves and also post content that is borderline shit posting, I assume just because they know they will be upvoted anyway. One could argue that sending SBD to upvoting bots is at least as bad, there are many ways to "game" the system. I think there are very few people here that have purely altruistic motivations. Community takes all kinds of people and some are more selfish than others, some just plain need the cash more than others, a dollar here or there is not insignificant to many people. Such is life ,and sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad. I know plenty of people that I wouldn't give the time of day to, but it is only the genuinely disruptive or dangerous ones that I would attempt to remove from my community.
That's my 2 cents worth if anyone is interested.
One thing I would be curious to see, if you were to say downvote the top 10% of pure scammers and use the rest of the voting power to just upvote good content thereby weighting that content more fairly, how would that affect the $ value of those projects?
Ha! I had to take a peek at how supportive and encouraging he was of other users... about what I expected! You certainly did the right thing, I don't think anyone will miss his "investment."
thank you for sharing this, and glad you also looked :-)
Jeez, that's not OK. I feel torn about self-voting (my posts take several hours to write and I want to guarentee some return), but I also maintain activity on steemit.
Is anyone using the self-vote information to help flag spam accounts?
I wouldn't feel bad about self voting. I do it myself and I always make a distinction between self voting and "abusive" self voting. I'd even make an argument for someone self voting up to 50% as this at least is a bit of a "one for me, one for you" kind of distribution although I still would personally feel that's a bit high. You're at about 14% according to steemreports.com and I can't think of many folks who would see fault with that.
@patrice running @spaminator uses a variety of queries and reports to find account that are spamming, self voting, and even patterns of collusive voting ring accounts that may employ hundreds of bot accounts to avoid self voting and try to skirt detection.
interesting, where did you get that graph?
steemreports.com has some great tools for looking at many aspects of accounts and these graphs came from there.
Thanks, I'll take a look :)
Does anyone know why we are allowed to vote on our own posts? (From a coding perspective it doesn't seem that this would be too difficult to stop if it's something the community agrees should not be done)
A code solution doesn’t do anything but create a minor impediment. Users intent on abusive self voting will just create secondary accounts. So it’s best to leave the option for those who utilize self voting responsibly and in moderation.
Except, based on the post above, the flaggers above are going after self-voting. They wouldn't see, or at least aren't currently paying attention to, the secondary account voting issue. Blocking self-voting (or reducing it to 2 self-votes per day?) would allow them more time to go after spam-bots, plagarized posts, etc.
@steemcleaners & @spaminator don't flag for self-voting by itself. The post or account has to have some other type of abuse or voting collusion.
I'd much rather allow self-voting. The accounts I control - @spaminator, @mack-bot, @zoee & @patrice self-vote. ¯(ツ)/¯
I also use this account to upvote @zoee & @mack-bot right now to increase their SP. I end up upvoting @spaminator when the person my vote bot follows upvotes it.
It's all out there in the open for anyone to see and flag if they don't like it.
There are those that are already creating multiple accounts for proxy self voting. Limiting or eliminating self voting will just mean more users will create new accounts to self-vote. It won't be as out in the open as it is now for the community to disagree with and flag.
Indeed, capping the number of self votes might be a fairer solution
Nice
You'r very nice
What does this have to do with the post? Stop spamming, please.
Thank you friend. You are giving me very great information. I always wait for your post
Thanks for the info. I was surprise the daily down vote dollars were not more. But then again 2 min / down vote as an average is a lot of down votes.
I have seen this success and will continue to stress :)
It's a very good post .. i've read your post and it's so great for me. You share information that is very important to me. Thank you guys
Sangat membantu tentang informasinya
Very helpful about the information
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved and is most excellent work!
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Really awesome stuff @paulag!
I'm sure we can get this comment farming spam bs down to a minimum by working with steemcleaners, spaminator, patrice, etc.
Great!
Thanks Paula! Lot of cheaters... and everyday more... I hope there will be a solution, cause detecting, fighting "big numbers" (if Steemit grows) will not be easy.
Big hug from Switzerland
Steemitri The Mannequin
Nice
Excellent work and thank you!
As a pitiful minnow with just enough intelligence to understand that without folk like you and the other magnanimous members of Steemit I would just be raw meat for the greedy ones gaming the platform. Do keep up the work you're doing as it a tremendous source of encouragement for me to continue.
I write this comment knowing that it is of little to no monetary value to me because the comment is too late( > 30 min) and the total rewards pool is too small but still you deserve to know that even us peons appreciate your labor.
Thank you again,
there is nothing pitiful about being a minnow. we all have to start somewhere. I too am just a minnow and proud to be a future whale
Paula you're an absolute legend. Upvoted and resteemed.
thank you very much for the resteem
Please help me contact those accounts or please contact them to downvote this individual who is using a bot for votes and cons people for their SBD. Also you can look at the comments and see that he is trying to bully every person that has a different opinion. The user in question is : @randowhale
The user is also @berniesanders, @nextgencrypto, @randowhale1, @randowhale0, etc... He runs a vote bot service, some will argue it is bad and others say it is good. Many people sell their votes, but attempting to pick a fight with those people may not be beneficial, especially for steemcleaners, as those accounts may have the ability to counteract everything (so say steemcleaners downvotes something, they upvote at the same value and vice versa)
Also @dan destroyed bernies rep and yet he is still here... I doubt steemcleaners could stand toe to toe with him for a prolonged amount of time (no offense SC)
No offense taken. I actually like bernie most of the time although he causes me an endless number of headaches at times. I just don't like his methods. He's definitely not user friendly.
All the vote bots are open to abuse. @randowhale isn't any worse than the others. It is actually been better since it limits the amount a person could use to upvote their own posts. There are many bid bots out there that allow a person to upvote their spam, copy/paste, plagiarism posts with $30, $50, or even $100 upvotes. @randowhale has a max of $2 SBD so probably a $2.50 - $3.00 upvote.
Depending on the situation, I will sometimes upvote my own comments to $0.01 or less to raise its position. I understand though that many people upvote their comments at 100% to increase rewards such that they an make money. So I definitely understand downvoting people but I am curious on your position of those whom upvote a comment just to raise its position in a feed?
Wow, that's some serious analysis and $49K+ rewards back to Steemit is huge and that is just for a month. Thanks for sharing.
Nowadays there are lot of repetitive posts as well with the same content being created multiple times by the same user or different users.
One such message recently I saw was welcoming Year 2018 with a photo showing 2018 or a person's photo which got repeated multiple times.
people will try, and as long as they do, we have teams like steemcleaners
Right, option to report to Steemcleaners is an added weapon to Steemians.
When someone reports about another user, is it maintained confidential by Steemcleaners team or will it be disclosed to others?
Hey @paulag I am @utopian-io. I have just upvoted you!
Achievements
Community-Driven Witness!
I am the first and only Steem Community-Driven Witness. Participate on Discord. Lets GROW TOGETHER!
Up-vote this comment to grow my power and help Open Source contributions like this one. Want to chat? Join me on Discord https://discord.gg/Pc8HG9x
I've just noticed that I accidently flagged this post. Sorry, removed.
It was supposed to be upvoted lol
lol no problems
Really, head over to #film and check out the New category. It's riddled with spammers attempting to game the reward pool by posting plagiarised content multiple times. I feel like I'm the only one actually trying to stop it by downvoting them.
What do you do when a drunken mega whale mega ego like @fyrstikken decides to go on a flagging mission and down vote all your stuff.
And his claim is all the flagging is due to my being a friend of @twinner
Who I have never heard of.
I guess @fyrstikken must be considered one of the most effective ways to chase folks away from steemit.com.
Better things to do with their time
Sorry but @fyrstikken is one of the FEW people actually BRINGING people to steemit.com ALL of his posts have THOUSANDS of views do YOU have thousand sof views? do YOU have a Youtube channel with videos that have MILLIONS of vies on it like fyrstikken does? @fyrstikken has http://steemspeak.com with THOUSANDS of members and he brings MANY MANY people to steemit!
if you have a problem with the King of Steemspeak go ask him and he will make things right. If you feel you have been wrongd by him, approach his majesty and plead your case, he will probobly show mercy upon your steem soul and bless you with valuable steem dollars raining diown on your steem wallet like mana from heaven
But don't talk shit about him driving people from stem, he BRINGS people to steem
how many have YOU brought to steemit?
Dont complain about him using NEGATIVE REENFORCEMENT to CHANGE things here, not all rewards are set in stone!
ANYONE can come around take away rewards that are not yet paid, its the right of stake holders to flag if they dont like someones shit and its not like Fyrestikken STARTED IT
TWINNER fucking STARTED it HE STARTED FLAGGING fyrestikkens posts FIRST with NO REASON ok???
I was attacked and flagged by @frystikken for no reason. He explained after a week of my questioning that it was because I was a friend of TWINNER.
Except I have no idea who TWINNER is, have never had anything to do with TWINNER, and all that should be easily verified on the blockchain
So you can worship his lordship @frystikken if you want. And bow down before him if you want. That's your decision
All I can report is he acted like a dick head mega whale to me, and never explained himself. And the limited explanation he provided was factually wrong, and provably wrong on the blockchain.
I don't give a rats if you or he think he is the King of Steemspeak.
He is not a good person and the treatment I got from him was undeserved, irrational, and appeared to have bee motivated by a drunken stupor.
Your King of Steemspeak is certainly a great ambassador for STEEM.
That was sarcasm, if the tone didn't come through the text.
It takes real guts to stand up to abuse of the reward pool, and these initiatives are proof that you don't need a superpower to be super! I hope one day more Steemians will be concerned with where that money is going, and how it is distributed.
@paulag, you've done fantastic work here in the fight against crime. You deserve far more than my current powers will let me give you.
thank you for your kind words
It really sucks, any time something good comes along, there are always at least a few that are dead-set on doing everything they can to screw it up for everyone! Greed, and a belief that they're somehow 'better,' and more deserving than the rest of us, never works out well.