In the post today about the new Steem whitepaper (yea!), there was a conversation between @ats-david and @ned regarding voting abuse. @ned suggested @ats-david take his concerns up with the witnesses, so I wanted to share my views and open a discussion. This is not the first time voting abuse has been discussed, and I'm sure it will not be the last. It is an important discussion to have though, and IMO - one to keep having.
Abusive-Self-Voting vs. Voting for Yourself
I would like to clarify one thing that does cause a lot of confusion. There is a difference between upvoting your own posts/comments, and abusive-self-voting. It is not wrong to vote for yourself. If you created a good post/comment, then why wouldn't you vote for it? It becomes a problem when you are voting more for it because it is yourself. If you wouldn't upvote someone else's post/blog (with the same content) for more than 10 cents, but because you wrote it, it is suddenly worth $5 - then that is a problem. Do you see the difference?
Here is what the (new) whitepaper has to say about voting abuse (pages 14 and 15):
Ok, that is obviously a lot to take in. I'd like to break it down and highlight a few areas that IMO are very key.
- Those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy .... Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves.
- Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders.
- Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
- The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
These are my take-aways:
- There really is a responsibility for the large stakeholders to use their power responsibly, and vote in ways that they feel is in the best long-term interest of the platform. They need to see themselves as stewards of the platform. If abusive self-voting over-runs the platform, users will lose their faith in the system, and the value of the token will go down.
- The primary tool to counter abusive self-voting is to downvote.
- There is always going to be some abuse. We should not try to stop it completely. As long as it doesn't become an issue to the point where it is harming the community, then it is within reasonable limits. (If it does start to become a serious issue, see #2.)
- Rather than going to great lengths to completely stop abuse, we should try to focus on bringing in more users, and increasing the value of the token. (Let's not fight over pieces of a little pie, let's make the pie bigger so everyone gets a larger slice.)
Changing Linear Rewards
There have been a lot of people calling for a change back to non-linear rewards, and see that as the solution to our problem. I want to present an alternate view, which is that we should stick with linear rewards. The reason that abusive self-voting is a problem under linear rewards is because users with a small to medium sized stake are able to influence rewards, and some are using that influence for selfish reasons. If you take away the ability for abusive self-voting to give significant rewards without a pile-on of other voters, then you are also taking away the "regular users" ability to influence rewards. Any shift away from linear rewards is a shift back towards only the major stake holders having influence/power.
I would like to propose a few ways that we can handle this:
- Every Steemian chooses for themselves how they want to use their stake. For those people who want to chose to use theirs purely for the purpose of increasing their own personal rewards (or those of their friends, sock-puppets, etc.) they need to ask themselves if this is their vision of how the platform is going to scale to the masses. Do we want a community where millions of users can join us and have a chance to earn a share of crypto by contributing to the platform/community, or do we want it to be a community where the only way to get ahead is to buy your way in or know someone with a lot of stake?
- The people in the community who want to combat abusive self-voting should organize. In the same way that there is Curie for finding good content, and SteemCleaners for fighting plagiarism / abuse, there should be a well known group specifically for targeting the worst cases of self-voting abuse. There should also be easy ways for people in the community to contribute by sharing links they discover, or delegating SP to an anti-self-voting-abuse account. (I encourage those who are already organizing around this to promote what they are doing in the comments below.)
- The community should monitor the amount of rewards going to self-voting abuse. The last I heard, it was around 10% of the rewards pool. While this is still somewhat high, that does mean that the other 90% is still there for the rest of the community to earn through participation in the platform. As much as possible (without completely ignoring the problem) try to focus on the 90% and ways we can use it to grow the platform.
I know this is a long post, but I want to conclude with two final thoughts:
The Steemit dev team is building us the platform to use, but it is ultimately up to the community how we use it. We can continue to make requests over changes that we want, but unless/until they are made, we have to work with what we've got. I think the platform that we have is already amazing, and from what I understand there are some pretty cool things still yet to come. (I am very excited for communities!!)
As far as abuse is concerned, we as a community need to decide how to handle it. There will likely be a general consensus around 'etiquette' of what is 'right' and 'wrong' but at the end of the day, it will be up to each individual to decide what they want to do with their stake. It is really up to you. Hopefully enough of us make the decision to do what we feel is best for the long-term success of the platform.
We're approaching this from the wrong angle.
Currently, self upvoting is the most lucrative use of voting power.
We can't make it less lucrative (mutual voting alliances, sock puppets, etc); so we need to make curation (the other possible use of voting power) more lucrative.
Give people something better to do with their voting power, and they'll do that instead.
I expanded on this idea here.
(Past payout)
Bingo. This is why having a nonlinear reward curve and curation rewards worked. Most people couldn't do much by upvoting themselves, but with enough stake could earn using their own SP with good curation.
HF19 helped with curation rewards on the lower end but drastically changed the other side of the equation. This has lead to a situation where many people who are thinking about Steem long-term (like Dan and company did when they wrote the white paper) see that this situation of self-upvoting is cannibalistic and not sustainable.
nˆ2 was gave too much power to a few, while linear may indeed not be the right approach as well. I read from many something in between is the best approach. Do you know if something inbetween is possible to implement technically? I think that was part of the discussion, the inbetween functions was not possible to implement, or was/is that more a BS argument?
The "correct" formula, if we assume that "value" is commensurate with network "connections", is n.logn. calculating logs is computationally a pain, but can easily be approximated by n.(number of digits of n)
But anyway, raising the influence at the top end is just for rich accounts. I proposed some time ago how to "squash" the effect of excessive voting for one account, whether self or other. Just think what n^2 actually means: an account with 100k SP compared with 1000 SP will have 10,000 times the voting power.
The idea was/is that the few rich accounts are less bad for the community, and this idea is enhanced since all the more 'bad' seen in recent days with so many new accounts here at Steemit. However, the question is if that is indeed the case in relative terms. I have no stats on this. I must say, before we changed to linear, some of my posts got way more rewards, then I now get. I suppose this has to do with the linear curve where the powerful voters are not that powerful anymore; But it could also have to do with other dynamics that changed. Who knows.
I realise I'm 2 months behind here but ...
If the curve was n.log.n then how much larger would 100k SP be compared to 1000 SP?
It depends a lot on the constant factors. Using log_2 and no fixed constant an example:
SP = 1 weight = 0
SP = 2 weight = 2
SP = 4 weight = 8
SP = 8 weight = 24
SP = 16 weight = 64
...
SP = 1024 weight = 10240
SP = 131072 weight = 1703936
So as you can see here doubling the SP results in "a bit more" than double the weight and increasing SP by 128x increases weight by 166x (compared to n^2 where doubling the SP results in 4x weight and 100x the SP results in 10000x the weight).
There are some technical reasons (some of which I understand and some of which I don't) that complicate implementing n log n. There are also philosophical/fairness/social reasons to want to preserve linear and not convey a programmatic advantage to the largest stakeholders in excess of their stake (even if only by a relatively modest degree).
Going back to 50/50 curation/author rewards is one of the ideas on the table. IDK if it will solve the problem though. If an abusive user has a $20 upvote, it is a lot easier to self-vote and take the $20, than it is to "gamble" and curate, hoping that they will get at least 2x payout on their $10 curation reward.
It is (much) more beneficial for any SP holder to launch a vote-sell service, directly or indirectly through delegation of SP to minnows who run the service. Hence the enormous increase of such services, with a good side (buy vote for someone else) and a bad side (increase of self curation and voting reducing quality more and more out of the equation).
Thanks Tim. Just glad to hear it's floating around. Really appreciate everything you do, mate.
I have generally been more on the side of keeping it 75/25, but I have been warming up to the idea of 50/50 as a way to incentivize better curation.
My biggest reservation is because I still don’t think that the current curation implementation actually incentives people to be good curators, whereas ‘good’ is defined as filtering through the content and identifying the posts/comments that add the most value to the platform (subjective opinion of course). People will continue to vote (mostly through auto upvotes) on what they predict will earn the most rewards. The premise that they are one and the same has unfortunately proved to be false in practice - at least with the current way things are setup/working.
Another factor is that curation rewards generally favor users who already have a larger stake in the platform. Any user can join the platform and be a successful author or commenter (provided they have the skills) but to be a successful curator requires having a significant amount of SP (whether bought, earned, or delegated).
One change that I think will be easy to get people on board with is to reduce the early voting penalty from 30 minuets down to around 5. That would at least bring the balance closer to the 75/25 compared to the current 88/12.
This is true but with linear rewards the effect is greatly reduced. It's certainly the case that more SP generates more rewards, which is natural, and probably okay (and doesn't really promote a 'rich get richer' effect), but to what extent it has a higher return on investment, I don't know, though it is almost certainly much flatter than before.
As a first step I agree with shortening the reverse auction (with other benefits), and we can see how much that changes things. Some part of the effect will be faster bot votes so the aggregate shift may not be that much, I don't know.
Another intermediate step I would support is enforcing actual 75/25 instead of dynamic. When the reverse auction reduces curation rewards on a particular post or comment, instead of giving them to the author, put them back into a pool for other curation, so the mix of author/curation always stays at 75/25 (or whatever specified mix).
One thought to offer in closing: If 'most reward' doesn't correlate with 'good' (value adding) content as you suggest, then posting rewards are no less dysfunctional than curation rewards (i.e. it means content that isn't 'good' is being rewarded). I don't see that as a particular reason to favor author rewards over curation rewards, do you? At least increased curation rewards has the potential to improve this situation by incentivizing more effort on curation. I don't see where more author rewards do anything to improve the dynamic of bad voting. The latter seems almost impossible.
The reduction of the early voting penalty should be the easiest to pass since it isn’t very controversial and it would be an easy change.
The variable curation/author split that which can be set by the individual platforms (or even the users), rather than being hardcoded to 75/25 seems like a really interesting idea too. There are details in @jesta’s reply to the recent steemitblog post. I wonder if we can rally support around that.
Yes, clearly the latter is a more significant change in terms of implementation, maybe controversial, hard to say. But yes, very interesting idea. Overall I agree with your assessment.
It gets into some complicated curation math, but basically if someone votes on a good post before others do, and then lots of people vote for the post after that, they earn higher curation rewards for being one of the early voters.
Wouldn't it be better to disable self voting?
It can't really be done. The users who are actually using it for abuse purposes would just create a second account, and upvote account 1 from account 2 to get around it.
Yes, but that would make it a bit difficult.
The formula gives more of the rewards to the users that voted earlier.
I actually also think that a positive approach (more incentive for curation) is better than a negative one (e.g., downvotes).
I do agree, a positive approach generally works better than a negative approach. But, downvotes are required at all times. It is finding the right balance. What about extra rewards for those who do good, whatever we define as good, on top op votes/rewards to post and comments directly? Maybe incentives towards accounts at account level?
I would tend to say this is good. Anything that rewards people involving themselves on the platform is IMO good, whatever it is.
Very well said, this idea is a good one. Realigning incentives do not always need to be removing something but can be making something else more attractive.
I would completely endorse a solution like this. Because pending rewards are relative to the total pending rewards for everyone, giving more rewards for more positive use of stake would in effect reduce self voting rewards.
a combination of both is ideal. A Bigger Carrot and a stick.
It's all very interesting and we could discuss this until the cows come home.....
But in the end, it's either allowed, or it is not.
And 99% of the folks that join Steemit, just need to know what they are allowed to do.
I think we have a very intellectual crowd, that can "OVER THINK IT" just about 1000%, so we also have to avoid that as well.
PEACE!
We are going to discuss it precisely until the cows come home. The cows of incentive realignment. 🐮
Unfortunately there is a bit of thinking to do here. I don't see the popular will to remove self voting but an idea like @mattclarke proposed would be a massive step in the right direction. Opportunistic self voters might find that curating becomes the way to go to maximise their return.
When Ned delegated his SP to help propel a few crabs out of the bucket he also effectively repelled new, better crabs from said bucket. Those crabs could've gotten the bucket mainstream acceptance but as they were repelled, the remaining crabs will never benefit from their addition. Instead they'll continue to sit in their bucket chat answering the same questions over and over from the little crablets that somehow fell in.
While I am not a ned hater, I have no idea why he doesn't realize this is a problem. It isn't just the trending page, it is also the witness votes and there is no way to pretend we are "decentralized" with this going on.
I don't dislike Ned or have any issue with his contribution to blockchain projects aka Steemit. The SP delegation is the one great issue, perhaps the greatest issue, that's holding the platform back. Look at @paulag's statistics here and a few previous pulls. How is a big crab, let's say from the music industry as that's my background, supposed to willingly enter this bucket when Ned already decided which crabs will be eaten and which will make it.
I don't see any problem with self-voting. I see even some of the biggest critics have come around to this idea. Indeed, very obviously, it's an important driver for Steem Power demand. If this network were to thrive, advertisers would throw in millions to get their posts up top. Neither do I see an issue with linear rewards. Where I do have an issue, though, is the current vote power reserve rate. A target of 10 votes per day is simply not enough, and an overwhelming deterrent for curators to significantly downscale or indefinitely halt curation activities. It's forced me and several other engaged curators to give up on active curation. It also encourages people to save voting power while voting on others, so they can vote for themselves with the precious 100% strength vote.
Anyway, all of this has been discussed time and time again, before and after the hardfork 19.
When I first joined here, I suggested downvote rewards. Fighting abuse is an important function that should be incentivized - particularly if the same post is then downvoted by others. Yes, I'm aware there's revenge downvoting or spiteful downvoting, but I see that as no different from self-upvoting. Besides, they would continue downvoting irrespective of anything. There's also the issue that the most abusive posts will be downvoted to $0; so where's the rewards generated then? Just a thought experiment. Either way, there should be some incentive for people to form abuse fighting groups.
Communities will solve a lot of issues, but there's still the un-communitied posts and comments that are open to rampant self-voting.
I understand you say: we only have 10 votes/day, but with the vote slider at 25%, we have 40 votes per day. Yes ok, we can use the 100% on ourself and a (much) smaller on others, but your statement you stopped active curation because of only having 10 votes a day, I don't really understand since you could continue active curation with the vote slider at 25%.
Incentives to downvotes: Absolutely agree, it needs to be implemented in a way that tools are available for abusive downvoters to get penalised. Account not posting and commenting can currently not be penalised. Maybe we shall think of the ability to vote at account level as well, creating a way to also penalised abusers at account level.
The whole "drop voting slider to 25% and it'll be all the same" doesn't work for me at all. I tried it for 2 months and failed at it miserably. Few reasons -
So, after over 2 months of fighting he system, I have embraced it. Now I just go through a small fraction of the posts I used to go through and call it a day. That's what the system wants you to do, so I shall.
Gee, if only someone had pointed this out ahead of time.
I understand you points, and I see the benefit in active curation by a larger amount of Steemians. The down side of all of this is lower distribution of votes. I still try to give 25% votes to others on posts and comments generally a little less and use up my 20% for the day. But I must say, with other dynamics in our community, I dont look at the normal channels anymore, and use alternative ways to read posts, essentially a list of my favourite authors, and from time to time I go through the NEW channel, but even my own HOME channel I hardly look at anymore. A shame for all those who publish good posts since it is more difficult for them to trigger me to read their posts and get a vote from me. I wish we would have a different system, in which the content I really like gets to channels I actively like to look at . I used Esteem Life app for some time, and have some channels setup to discover interesting posts from authors I do not follow. However, that App is a bit too buggy for me to really like it for daily use. But that said, such functionalities should have been part of our prime interfaces to the Steem blockchain.
Because of the slider bar you have AS MANY votes as you want. I don't see why people keep thinking they only have 10 votes.....
Or maybe you are saying its easier to abuse powerful votes, so REDUCE the max voting power to less and it will be harder to game.....Either way I don't think this is the issue.
It seems pretty easy and simple to me, powerful voters form guilds or groups that specifically notify abusers and then if they proceed anyways down vote them to give them a taste....if that doesn't work, down vote them into oblivion.
No one will play by rules which result in 0 payouts....
Actually you need not even bother with the slider bar at all (I'd love to see an option to turn it off) and you still have as many votes as you want. If you vote 20 times, then your votes are worth half as much each. The system auto-adjusts.
True, though you still have "more control" with the slider bar than without, but as you say you still have as many votes as you use and with each vote the value adjusts within the system.
Hey don't know if your responding to me specifically or just in general but I really appreciate how involved & experienced you are in this community. I see few if any who seem to see what is going on in Steemit more than you.
Sure would have been nice to meet you at SteemFest.
@timcliff, one of things I like most about Steemit is that the community can censor and police itself through free market principles.
You don't like it, then you don't have to buy it (through an upvote that is).
Now when someone within the community acts maliciously, then the community has the ability to penalize that person for his or her actions.
We the people need to understand our role to correct behavior, impact change, and determine what is acceptable.
We the people also need to show grace and understanding to our fellow community members. Let's remove malicious acts, but let's protect differences of opinion and interest.
We can't rely on a corporation to tell us how to act civilly. We need to learn how to do that on our own.
Bravo!
Thanks for this post @timcliff, I'm glad the issue is still being discussed.
#project-smackdown is doing exactly this, and I'm not aware of another group that are doing it. We target the "worst" self voters for comments only, which would probably fit your definition of "abusive" self voters. We do comments only because at the time we started voting for your own post was default steemit.com UI behavior, and because it is easier to hide self votes distributed across many self votes than it is on posts.
The team is the Steem Coop, which now includes @the-ego-is-you, @transisto, @rycharde, @andybets and me. We opperate using @smackdown.kitty and would happily take any delegations. You can find us on steemit.chat at #steem-coop-public and we are more than happy to discuss our policy for identifying what it means to be a "worst" self voter, or comment on any of our posts (made through my account). I will hopefully be making another report within a few hours.
I'm interested that your definition of abusive self voting is voting more for yourself than for others. Why did you choose this? It looks like this is more on ethical grounds than anything else.
I'll try to keep this as brief as I can, but to clarify my thinking (I don't speak for the group here but I think there'd be broad agreement) I am against self voting because it allows users to contribute nothing or very little to the platform and see quite a large increase in their stake (and we use the term return on investment for this). I think this is in line with the founding ethos of Steemit as described in the whitepaper, and still described in the updated version. I would see this as real abuse, because if you are doing this while others are squirrelling away - posting, commenting, curating -
all with effort and consideration, you are taking advantage of the buzz they bring to the platform which will be the thing that makes it succeed.
I think that unfortunitely there are a lot of people who think that there is nothing wrong with simply having stake and self voting. This could be on ultimate freedom grounds (it's allowed, so I will do), on investment grounds (buying and powering up STEEM is valuable in itself and can be automatically rewarded via self votes), or other popular ideas, but it will always fall flat on the fact that this is a social network and social actions should be the ones the system rewards.
That's why I completely agree with @mattclarke in his idea of better balancing curation rewards. When I originally came to Steemit this was one of the things that I was so impressed with, that they system rewards us for the hard work of finding the best stuff and voting on it. There's literally no curation effort in voting for your own stuff. It's just an arbitrary return on your investment.
This perspective is why #project-smackdown currently operates on what we call self vote return on investment or
svROI. We target those who gain the most relative to their stake, so those who are abusing the self vote ability (again, for comments only at this time).In your closing statement you seem to say the community and each of us individually should decide this. The general sentiment seems to be that we should encourage (or even coerce) each other into non-abusive behavior instead of making a blockchain system level change. Is this correct?
Personally I don't think this will be enough but I would be curious on your direct answer to this question. Sorry for the long reply, longer than I wanted, but thanks again for keeping this issue in the foreground.
Great reply! I will respond with a longer comment when I get home.
Re: #project-smackdown - you should continue to make this more of a well-known name. Why isn't the steemit.chat channel called #project-smackdown? Is there a discord one? Is there a @project-smackdown account? I like the idea - I just think you should continue to build on it :)
It is human nature to vote for yourself and your friends. There is no way that we are going to be able to stop it, and to even try is spending energy in the wrong area (IMO). The key is that people are not voting for themselves at the expense of the platform. There is no 'exact point' as far as when something constitutes abuse vs. being normal accepted behavior. It is easy to tell when things are on the extreme end though, which is really where I think the focus should be. I.e. self-upvote of a "nice post" comment to $50.
The goal of the platform is to distribute the currency to users who are adding value to the platform. If there are people who are actively involved, posting, commenting, and voting on other people's material too - then they are adding value to the platform. If some of the coins they earn are because they are voting on their own stuff, then it isn't really in violation of the spirit of the blockchain.
I've comments on this in a few other places.
Yes. Similar to plagiarism, it is ultimately up to each individual whether they do it, but there is an overall sentiment that it is not acceptable. Abusive-self-voting can probably reach similar status, and I think it is up to the community to make this happen.
I think an important thing that will need to happen though is for people to accept non-abusive self voting. The very difficult part is going to be to determine where to draw the line.
Thanks for your detailed reply.
I like you analogy to plagiarism, though I think there's less of a consensus about self voting.
What struck me most was this:
Perhaps. But this can only really happen after incentives change. Right now it's too easy to milk it with direct self voting, and the same thing but with a few alts.
Well, the problem is that if you change the incentives to prevent voting abuse, we go back to a platform where the votes of the regular users do not really have an effect, and the handful of whales will be deciding on the majority of rewards. There isn't really a clean workable proposal that has a solution to both problems.
Do you remember @rycharde 's idea about votes getting less effective the more you vote on the same people? I'd love to see some experiments done with that.
It's hard to know how things will play out without trying them. No one wants to go back to the skewed balance of before. Still, I think we can definitely see that the incentives are not optimal. Do you suggest they are and that we just need to "police" more?
The more I think about all these proposals the more I think we need to run this stuff on a test net. Wouldn't it be fun to try that out with a few hundred people? @sneak, I don't know if you do this kind of thing in house but I think we'd benefit a lot from StInc's leadership in this area.
I liked the idea, but there were some people against it. One of the main arguments was that the people who are actually abusing the platform would just create 10 sock puppet accounts (or however many were needed) to get around it. Creating hundreds of accounts is actually quick/easy/cheap.
Perhaps that level of determination is best dealt with my the ad hoc methods you advocate in your root post here. I am personally involved with opposing nearly 10 thousand scam accounts engaged in exactly this. Unless there is a really fundamental change this kind of thing is here to stay and needs bot type solutions to.
However that kind of issue is "sexy" - very interesting and easy to get behind opposing because it's so obviously wrong. What I aim to challenge that is not so obvious is the self rewarding of established, reasonable, interesting folks who are actually engaged but who are effectively skimming off the cream of the platform.
I think you're probably not in favor of this as you mention that we all need to accept self voting, that it's somehow "natural" (you did not provide any reason to believe this by the way) and we should concentrate on abuse. Well the data indicates that obvious abuse is far less important in terms of value than self votes.
I can see how some power users would be able to create 100 accounts and develop a voting distribution/bot that optimises their voting power for their own benefit, but this would be a very small minority of accounts. I think it would help a lot by creating an administrative burden for those still wishing to continue voting abuse.
You've said it very well. Look at the big picture and take a long term view.
Yes, this really seems quite simple to me. We the community get to decide what is abusive and what is supportive to the long term success of Steemit.
If we use groups/guilds to find abuse (based on the guidelines set forth) to first give notice of said guidelines, then if no change is made give a down vote and if it continues then down vote until no posts make any at all.
No one will abuse the guidelines if they make 0. The only reasons people scam it is to profit. If there is no profit then it won't happen.
Realistically it would be very easy to make a bot that spots spammy activity or "abusive" activity and give that notice automatically.
Maybe I should write a post about it, though it seems like I haven't really thought of anything new.
(Addressing separate issue, just thought it was a good place to put it)
I just feel the bigger more immediate problem should be spam. It may sound like hyperbole but the majority of posts here are spam/theft.
The worst thing for the site is that the word spam enters the room whenever one talks about it to those familiar. That is how Steemit is known in the wider community. When contacting artists and writers to confirm their work is stolen, they frequently say 'LOTS of my stuff has been stolen on steemit' - with anger and frustration.
Steemit is officially a 'spam website', and it'll never grow to anything more until that is addressed.
Whether or not the 'spam' in question fits under the definition purely, there are still those who google translate, post nothing but a youtube video, paste a news article and just throw the source at the bottom. All of these actions are rewarded here and incentivize exploitation. The website is a river of data perpetually crossing the line of illegal content.
I'd suggest something like a minimum time before being able to post. Like the 3 seconds per upvote, 20 seconds per comment, perhaps 10 minutes before posting, and 3 hours between posts or something.
It would at the very least ensure spammers are putting the time into it.
fully agree. Maybe we can have a spam button and mark spam posts as such.
I totally agree with this and this below. Thank you for this post Tim. I really appreciate it!
Thanks for the post Tim. I think the core of the problem lies in the fact that there is an opportunity cost (voting power) to downvote chronically abusive users. You lose the opportunity to reward others - or yourself - when you downvote spammers, etc.
I don't have an answer to solving it, other than potentially reducing or somehow eliminating the costs to downvote others - it's just an observation.
Maybe a separate "downvoting pool?" But maybe that's just over complicating the problem.
There are also no other guidelines to what is and what is not acceptable (this thread comes to mind) and I don't think people can be expected not to upvote themselves if given the opportunity. (This is less of a problem for newer users since the upvotes aren't worth as much anyway.)
This is a really well thought out post @timcliff, you have always been my fav. witness due to your ability to see things through both the witness pov and the end-user pov. Thank you for your calm well thought-out comments. I can't wait to watch the conversation develop.
Thanks :)
Let me see if I understand this correctly. The current linear system means that we are all presidents, and we get to say what we want, and vote for who we want even if that who is us.
And if a president decides to become a dictator, we all revolt against him and show him is only a president, not a dictator.
The nonlinear system establishes a sort of congress that gets to tell me, us, and you that they need a raise so we are not going to give you any breaks today?
And if we decide we don't like congress, we find that that's too bad because they are congress for life. Like a Judge.
Is that it in a crab shell?
Still new and still learning, I will die new and still learning, such is life.
Sorry, I don't know if I was able to fully comprehend your metaphor :)
So, I guess I am close to understanding. There is always going to be people that want to rule the world, I think that is all of us, but some of us do not want anyone else poking their fingers into the cherry pie.
Thanks Tim, great post, stewardship is a great word and it starts at the top. I like the 3 points you propose at the end; about how Steemit should think about how it wants itself perceived, that the community can monitor those that take self-voting to extremes, and to remember that 90% is being shared positively. Thanks for your comments.
I completely agree that the solutions are all community organization oriented and facilitated by the down vote mechanism. I also am against going back to non linear. All that does is square the power and effect of the most powerful abusive voters. With linear voting people have become more aware of voting abuse only because the effects can be seen from more users (users with less power) meaning that the change has done exactly as intended by leveling the playing field.
Bingo. This smacks of a fundamental tradeoff, or a conservation-of-crappiness law. "Conservation of unfairness?" That would be a fantastic title for a paper. The law, in laymen's terms, would go something like "all systems are at least somewhat unfair; you just have to decide where to put the unfairness."
It never occured to me to vote for myself..
I reckon I will refrain from doing so just outa principle.
There is a good bit of quality being submited here, better to save my repo for them I think.
There is still much I don't understand about the power steem up down biz.
The crab bucket analogy is pretty good
It never occurred to me not to vote for myself until a couple of months ago.
Not just my posts, obviously I think my posts deserve a vote or a wouldn't post them.
But my comments - not for the money, but to get them up to the top where people see them.
How did that work? - good, some of my self upvoted comments earned a lot more than some of my posts (and not from me!)
Most people only see the comments up at the top so self voting achieves that.
Why did I stop? - because a whale I respect highly pretty much told me to. Occasionally when it's important I still upvote my own comments. And all my posts always, or course!
I think the whitepaper addressed the issue pretty well. I like the robot that finds plagiarists posts and alerts the readers of the original source without penalizing the author. I think this is clever and works pretty well. I simply don't vote for posts which have been plagiarized without citing the original source. Perhaps we can make this clear
Can someone please rename that bot, it really has such a negative connotation. I see people who have blogs of their own and so are trying Steemit out and get visually seen as a 'cheater' by a robot because they are re-sharing their old content maybe on Steemit, and the only way they can change it is to go to an off blockchain chat to appease the robots owner to get on a whitelist maybe.
With the ton of both visual and audio artists out there, it really is only penalizing new users who do written content. It seems than rather than have a bot possibly chase off new users, we can rely on people downvoting properly, I noticed this worked well with a recent DTube situation https://steemit.com/dtube/@shla-rafia/chainflix-killed-by-hollywood-for-uploading-movies-to-dtube
Sometimes the bot gets things wrong and then you have situations like this https://steemit.com/steemit/@elenasteem/please-remove-me-from-the-blacklist where I wonder when this happens, does the bot compensate the users it may wrongly blacklist?
How about the bot instead be turned onto all the bot and spam commenting, that would be awesome.
I think people need to read, or re-read the FAQ Page to Cheetah bot. Cheetah bot does not flag,(down vote) it upvotes. Real people do the cleaning/down voting.
Yeah, it just leaves a bad connotation in users and even worse, non-Steemit users minds by being named "cheetah". But it or real people behind the handle do downvotes with it as you can see here https://steemd.com/@cheetah
I have seen the downvotes not well earned, in fact it seems to be going on right now if you would have checked one of the links I put in a comment. Also, "so what" is directly because someone claimed the bot does not downvote. I respect your opinions on the matter but I do not agree with them, especially with a bunch of conjecture that we do not have the ability to create analytics to look at, specifically users not joining Steemit based on broken operations coming from a robot that is supposedly from a site based on actual users votes being the thing that makes the difference.
Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to penalize anyone. I said I like the bot I didn't say I didn't like the author. I like the content but I like it even more when I know where the source was copied from. the bot gives us a URL where we can see the content verbatim sometimes. Then decide if it was appropriate. Then I make up my mind to vote or not vote.
Getting out the popcorn*
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I saw that back and forth earlier and I though that the conversation was going to move to steem chat or something. I really don't know what the final answer is on this is. My opinion is not a weighty one at this point because I don't have any SP, however, I do believe the future of steemit is in the hands of those who will stay true. True to the cause, and true to themselves. Isn't that what makes this platform unique?
Anyway, I hope we can find a common ground that takes steem to the moon.
Thanks again @timcliff
Something I keep seeing on Steemit is people flagging ("downvoting") because they disagree with or don't even understand the post.
Seeing it all put like this I better see why flagging can reduce abuse, but I'm often seeing more censorship than self upvoting.
If you are into controversial subjects that all becomes more frequent.
I find you difficult to interact with - last time I ended up thinking you were a real dickhead.
Yesterday I did a post and a guy who has earned bugger all on Steemit but who has put $37 000 of his own money to his wallet flagged my post and all my comments.
That is censorship, and luckily an actual whale unflagged it. Now that post has over 100 comments.
My suggestion to fix this is to make downvotes equal to the average upvote value for that post. That makes it very hard to censor posts.
As I said to you last time, I disagree with your opinion and I could easily flag your comment. I wouldn't do that but I could.
There are people all over Steemit doing exactly that.
Our key disagreement is that you only see censorship as a binary on/off thing. Flagging a post can mean the difference between 20 views and 200 views.
The censorship of flagging is never absolute, but it does nearly the same job
We disagree, both on opinion and presentation. I like to use memes and pictures, and think you do way too much typing. Here I'm communicating in your style, because I think this is important and the people reading these posts like to read long replies (I think).
Last time the discussion was on one of my posts, so the comments were in my style - pictures!
You seem to freak out about that and want to do dozens of comments. Disagreement is OK, so chill out...
I'm glad I got to read your interaction ahead of time with that user, was replying with a dumb gif to something the person said and realized I was going to be just as bad contributing just a "word salad" as he or she put it, deleted the reply and just letting it go. I know there are plenty of Steemit users with differences of opinions that can still discuss a matter, then I see others that are trying to start arguments and troll. Hard to notice it sometimes.
I wish you nothing but positivity and hope behind the screen you are feeling no anxiety over these issues, be well.
Interesting. I am not sure how good the crab bucket works. I just had the case were I called out a fellow minnow out for self-vote abuse and spam and in the end I could only solve it by contacting officials and whales.
@ats-david talked to the abuser after I got a resteem by @berniesanders...
I think a major problem is the sunshine and rainbow mentality of Steemit coupled with many people taking crticism like that way too personal.
I think I am on good terms with @andyluy (abuser that I accused) after all of this. I am the Doctor and he is the Master, even though he might believe those roles are swapped. And I am really happy this didn't escalate into an "insult war", but I don't think it was far away from it.
Having seen how little my normal followers wanted to get involved in the topic showed me that the crab bucket is barely working.
Thanks for your input Tim. One option I can think of is to have the self-upvote reward decrease at a higher rate than upvoting other posts.
For example, upvoting foreign posts:
first post 10 cents, second post 7 cents, third post 5 cents.
vs self-upvoting:
first post 10 cents, second post 5 cents, third post 2 cents.
This way, those multiple daily self-upvotes will lose value much quicker. However, the workaround is to create additional accounts and use them to vote (one abuser did exactly that, but we spotted him quickly), which brings us to square one. The self-upvote is a difficult problem to solve. I would be surprised if those abusers have any consciousness to care about the platform at all. They found a gold mine and they're digging as much as they can to fill their pockets, while the rest of us work our asses to bring quality content to benefit us all. But as you say, let's focus on the positive 90% and support the community projects that are willing to deal with the abusers.
@rycharde proposal for new rules regarding rule changes regarding self votes and voting rings
Since I will likely be unavailable for further comment until tomorrow, I would just like to say that I feel this proposal deserves a larger discussion around it. As soon as I'm able I will post about it and hopefully get some fresh eyes and more feedback.
Untill then, I can say that I will be supporting any efforts to protect the reward pool, to the best of my abilities. It's refreshing to know that it appears only 10% goes towards unscrupulous efforts. I would like to know where that number came from, perhaps I will find out when I read the new whitepaper, which is very exciting!!!!!
In this case I agree so are we cool now even though I called you a dickhead?
I am quite in awe that so many people are putting in so much effort and energy to make this a better place for all of us. Thank you.
Absolutely brilliant post to say the least.
Just brilliant!!
Thanks :)
all the issue has been explained pretty well. I have nothing more to add. I am hoping for the best of our site an our community
Thank you for information. I like to Resteem this useful post.
Great indepth article. I believe there is still a lot of work to do, but that there is also a lot of work done so far. As of what I heard Steemit was filled with spam articles when it just launched and look where we're at now. And yes I totally agree, the biggest investors do indeed have the greatest resposibility to ensure their investment will grow., thankfully ^^
I appreciate you taking time to do this post and clarifying many thoughts on this subject on what you can and cannot do. :)
Interesting post @timcliff. I just posted my introduction post. I would appreciate it if you gave it a read and let me know if you think it is worth an upvote!
@timcliff i think that delegating power with a condition is the solution for this problem ex:
-if you use the 15% of the sp delegated to you for self vote you will lose it if..........> ,
-once you get sp power you must use it or you will lose it (the sp will be delegated to another steemian....)
I really like your 3 proposals. Particularly #2. It seems like the most free market approach to the issue. If enough people deem something an issue, they collaborate and shut it down, as best as they can. I would say #1 would be handled mostly by #2, give or take 5-10% of the pool, as you say above. You can't catch everybody. #3 I think would be a prequel into who specifically #2 goes after. Long post but well read, thanks.
Thank you so much for this post!
I really appreciate the community here. This post shows me just how many people care about this platform! People who want to better it and are willing to hash out ideas and solutions.
I am so grateful for all of you! With this amount of dedication, I can only see things improving in the future!
I'm not sure why you mentioned me. This really has little to do with my comments on the Steemitblog post.
I don't have a problem with people using their stake however they want. I don't necessarily have a problem with self-voting. And my comments weren't only about the full-linear reward algorithm. There are many factors that come into play...several changes of the protocol that have allowed for more abuse/exploitation of the system and that have made this abuse/exploitation more lucrative.
I haven't seen a single person address the abuse-mitigation issue that was essentially built into the code previously and is now pretty much non-existent. I have not seen any competent rationale for changing those protocols other than, "Small stakeholders will have a lot more power now!"
See the points from @mattclarke, @liberosist, and @pfunk. They seem to be on the same page...or at least looking in the same book. Most other people appear to be reading the chalk scribbles on the sidewalk or just completely unaware of language at all. (Yeah...it's metaphoric.)
It was obviously a trade-off. n^2 is less prone to abuse, but has issues with users feeling like their voice doesn't matter. linear gives users more of a voice, but leaves more of a door open for abuse. The developers (and witnesses) chose to favor the latter.
As far as the abuse-mitigation, the WP lists downvoting as the protocol's solution to the abuse. The community/stake-holders are basically going to need to decide if it is something they want to prevent/fight/downvote, or if it is something that is basically going to become socially acceptable, and just accept that there is going to be a share of people in the community that do it.
Curation rewards are a separate discussion. It is a valid one to have, and there are good arguments to be made on both sides of the discussion. There is part of me that would like to see them entirely disappear, but then there is a different part that would like to see them raised to 50 or even 75%. The reason has nothing to do with the abuse though. Unless it were taken all the way to 75%, most stakeholders who are interested in using the platform as a tool to increase their own personal stake (not trying to say that in a bad way) are still going to be able to do it more easily by voting for themselves and getting the author+curation reward than trying to do a good enough job on curation to get curation only to surpass what they would have received by just self-voting and taking both rewards.
Curation rewards seems to be the root of many of the problems here. At the end of the day, it seems like Steemit has too much content for too few readers. We need to do whatever will reverse this equation, and let it then sort itself out.
Curation rewards really only benefit the users who already have a lot of SP though. Even with thousands of users 'curating', increasing the amount paid for curation rewards would not do any good unless they all already had the SP for their votes to be worth something.
I see your point. We want what is best for the site, but how to achieve it... Just speaking anecdotally, I see users try Steemit for a bit then leave. I dont know what part a lack of rewards played in the lack of stickiness.... I see that shear volume of curation isnt the total answer.
Regarding the use of curation rewards to combat comment spam:
@mattclarke has recommended a "rollback" to an even balance between author and curation rewards. I think the idea is brilliant.
I believe there is another benefit to be had from increasing curation rewards. I'm looking at this from the perspective of content creator.
One of the motives that drives me to produce quality content is the hope of actually being read and appreciated by a wide range of readers. Not only is it disappointing to spend hours or days writing a thoughtful article only to have it earn a pittance in author rewards, it is also disheartening to look at the "eyeball" indicator and find that only a dozen people have even bothered to open and read it.
There is an old adage that I think could be applied to Steemit as we know it today: "Too many cooks spoil the soup."
If curation rewards were elevated, the Steemit population would naturally spend more time reading and evaluating authors than they would re-posting or writing trivia. Their engagement in commenting and curating would be more rewarding than merely "tossing off" articles in mass quantity. They would be more likely to search for and bring to the forefront authors of excellence.
At the very least, motivation to actually read and think about articles would naturally increase. As an author, I want that.
And so I certainly support returning to "50/50" and perhaps even beyond that to test rewarding curation over authorship.
😄😇😄
While the thought behind it sounds really good, I strongly believe it would not play out in practice . Curation rewards only benefit users who already have enough SP to earn rewards. For the vast majority of users, whether it is 25% or 50%, they will still not earn enough to make actually curating worth it.
Thanks, @timcliff, for the thoughtful response.
I must confess that I lack detailed knowledge of exactly how the payout algorithms function. And so I'll retreat to commenting that I think any adjustment that would improve the rewards balance in the direction of curation would be beneficial to Steemit. If that means somehow adjusting what constitutes "enough SP to earn curation rewards" to make that an accessible threshold for anyone, maybe that should be on the table.
I think it would be a huge draw for people who would realize that the "wisdom of the crowd" represented in part by their opinion could translate into financial rewards.
Simultaneously, it would encourage creators of excellent content to continue to produce worthy material because they would have an ever-growing readership.
I would love to hear some proposals to achieve this. I agree, this would be a huge plus!
2 words: Diminishing returns
We NEED this applied to upvoting to make it less profitable than curation.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure if I understand.
I think it's what @mattclarke said, if curation provides a better return, self up voting (I presume @klye missed "self") would be less profitable, therefore disincentivized.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I replied there.
Great post.
I think compared to self-voting, it's more difficult to control if someone create multiple accounts then do self-voting.
Resteeming this to look at it later.
I sometimes upvote my post to jump on the "replies" queue. Maybe that should instead be called pay for promotion, or pay to be heard... you get the idea. Although that also introduces the typical unfair problem of, who has more money always wins...
I need to think about this.
Yeah, I do the same thing. I also do it for other people's comments that I want to raise as well though, so to me, it doesn't count as 'abuse'.
I have gone from strictly upvoting every comment made and usually upvoting every other users, then stopping it to only voting other users comments. Thinking about just going back to upvoting all comments. However never been in the spot of an upvote being worth $5 every click so not sure if mind will change based on value. I hope to read good discussion here.
Unfortunately when there are still many delegates who votes for post and comments itself only to find his own advantage while in others post very rare thing to do. Perhaps a reality that we seen today. Correct Me if I am wrong.
Kind of remind me how I get many links drop on me directly on steemit.chat and when I check the author, they are many with power above 94% everytime I check when they drop their link.
Very good information and questions raised. I agree the abuse is not good for anyone or the community.
Re-steemed
Hope that many more read your post
This has cleared up a lot of questions that I've been struggling with lately. Being new to the platform, all of this can be very confusing and overwhelming. Thanks!
Really a very nice explanation.
Thanks for sharing this great info.
I've been at steemit three weeks, and during that short time I have seen examples of voting abuse. I don't know the best way to address it, but i do agree with @timcliff that it needs to be addressed. This should be the starting point of discussion. We need to focus on making Steemit an ethical, fair and transparent at ALL levels community. Anything less risks devolving the platform into an "every man for himself" mentality, which imho dooms it right there.
I agree that we don't need to nitpick and make it a mission to rid steemit of any and all questionable behavior but it seems like the hole in the bucket is quite large and only getting bigger.
I still think there needs to be some kind of a filter on how much and how easily voting power can be bought through investment. I'm not really sure how this can be done but as long as there's no cap on how much investments can buy voting power, we are inviting selfish behavior at the expense of the community, and it's likely to only get worse as steemit begins to go mainstream.
I believe you need more whales who worked for it than those who invested in it because, while not all who worked for it will do what's in the best interest of the community, these people are much more likely to consider the community as they understand the ecosystem much better and are much more invested emotionally. Eventually whales and dolphins who worked for it will make up a tiny fraction of all the whales and dolphins. With a wide open door to investors who have little emotional investment in the community, we invite all kinds of trouble.
But I've been ridiculed every time I bring up this problem so maybe I should shut my mouth and let the people with money to make keep making their money :-)
It seems that most of our debates at steemit are deeply tied to political and economic stances.
At this point I don't really care that much, I'm just going to keep writing what I want to write and as long as there are people who connect with it and ways to connect I'll be here. There are still a lot of great people here.
Anyways thanks for the informative post.
It is a valid fear, but I don't really think we are heading into the abyss :) A lot of investors care about the platform too. They see the platform as an investment, and if the platform does well, so does their investment.
"All upvotes are created equal, but some upvotes are more equal than others."
What is an abusive upvote, and how does it differ from non-abusive upvotes? If I were a politician, whether I was running for dog catcher or president, I'd be a fool not to vote for myself. I'd hope that my wife would also vote for me.
"Upvote early, and upvote often."
I gave my definition in the post.
Highly informative article that just taught me a few things,. Being new to Steemit new information and strategies reveal themselves everyday and I now understand the process of self voting and how not to abuse it! More power to you!
People who want to better it and are willing to hash out ideas and solutions.It's all very interesting and we could discuss this until the cows come home.