Spaminator Delegation Renewal Application Review
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
We have prepared this commentary as a step prior to final processing of scores and delegation recommendations to Steemit. We'd invite you to respond to the questions presented here in the comment below.
We plan to score the application based on reponses provided here before submitting to Steemit.
Please submit one answer per comment below and reference the question number in the comment.
Questions from the Committee
Please note that scores above are preliminary and will be improved once the committee has received acceptable responses to the below clarifications.
Please respond to the clarification questions in the comments section below.
Please respond one question per comment and put the clarification number at the start of the comment.
(4) About terms of delegation:
(4.2) Under what terms (if any) did you receive the delegation?
Please confirm that you accept that any approval of this delegation renewal becomes the terms for your future delegation.
(5) Market
(5.1) What is the current scope?
(8) Business Strategy
(8.3) How will your business strategy increase the amount of STEEM being powered up and/or burnt?
There is a strategy for revenue here? Note for a spam project, this isn't really required, but just curious
(9) KPIs
(9.1) Would like to see some measure of impact from removal. Suggested: accumulation of computation of reward without downvote + reward with downvote, if about removing reward pool abuse.
(13) Renewal Metrics
(13.7) What is the total quarterly (USD) value of rewards disbursed directly tied to the delegation? (can be a negative number of your projects is a flagging project)
Would like to see some metric here.
(13.14) Describe what value the project continues to bring to the Steem community and why the community should continue to support your project?
a) Can some of these goals be reflected in metrics? How often have you been able to redirect phising attempts, or prevent identity theft cases? etc. Are those categorized?
b) Can this the steem delegation from this project, spamminator and MacBot be combined into one delegated pot, and consolidated into a smaller delegation for educational / anti abuse initiatives? Please justify you answer by providing a calculation of the amount of Steem power delegation required by all three of these projects which demonstrates the continued need of the all the delegated Steem to the projects (1.5M + 2.8M + 0.261M = 4.5M Steem power)
c) Provide an example scenario for when all of the steem power delegated to these projects are currently being utilised for down voting on the same day such that all 4.5M SP are required.
d) Following Hard fork 21 please justify whether the community needs a centralized service to continue down voting content.
(13.15) Describe your project roadmap with expected timelines and milestones.
Please confirm that this project is attempting to decentralise and in some way anonymize its moderators in order to reduce risk of large, abusive whales attacking individual moderators based on their downvotes through spaminator.
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
100% Beneficiary set to @steem.dao
I will Lodge the same complaint here as steemcleaners, it is spaminator that is constantly flagging me but my belief is they are all the same entity.
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(4.2) The terms of the previous delegation are as originally stated: To only use for downvoting in order to counter persistent reward pool drain. The delegation may not be used for upvoting.
I will accept any and all current terms as specified in this delegation renewal.
(5.1) The scope is fluid and gets revised regularly. The current scope rests on cases of farming or spam for the detrimental purposes of reward pool extraction and other malicious ends.
The scope changes based on the current needs of the STEEM ecosystem. To see an example of change in progress, please see this post regarding community input.
(8.3) Spaminator contributes to a cleaner, more resilient blockchain. It encourages investment based on the confidence of users to invest in a blockchain that has a community-driven anti-abuse/security mechanism in place as a cohesive part of its ecosystem.
Spaminator itself does not generate any revenue. It is a not-for-profit project and its only purpose is to help better the Steem ecosystem by protecting the reward pool and mitigating the amount of spam and malicious exploitation.
(13.14) a) To answer this question in relation to Spaminator (it is phrased for Steemcleaners), the following numbers are true to today:
Spaminator's regular queue ranges from approximately 1,500 accounts at the lowest to over 10,000 at the highest. Here is a small screenshot of what Spaminator looks like:
The end goal of Spaminator is to help create an ecosystem where that queue drops down to zero because there is no more systemic exploitation.
(13.14) b) In my delegation renewal request I asked for the delegated SP to be split between two new Spaminator accounts: @spaminator-warn and @spaminator-clear.
Steemcleaners and Spaminator are completely different projects, despite sharing parts of a team. They are managed and operated on different servers, their frameworks are coded in different languages, and they aim to fill a different set of gaps that lead to the unfortunate exploitation of the Steem ecosystem. It is technically not possible through any means to combine Steemcleaners and Spaminator into one account.
(13.14) c) There have been several cases recently where we had to use both projects to restore rewards to the blockchain. During the massive attack by the crystalliu group we have had to overlap our votes to ensure we are returning the huge sums.
During episodes of phishing we had to drain all of our accounts to virtually zero in order to halt its spread. One of the reasons normal users aren't seeing abuse is because of the speed and effectiveness of both projects. Because the projects are separate (both in respect to the size of the accounts and the coding of the account control mechanisms, which are different), we are equipped to address any type of sophisticated content-driven attack on the blockchain or reward pool.
(13.14) d) Following HF21 there have been a lot of users using their downvotes on what they feel is abuse. Often what they downvote is highly subjective. Our work targets specific scopes of fraud and exploitation, including cases that may either be invisible to the majority of the userbase (there are a set of specialized skills involved in being on our core team) or too challenging to address.
Over the years we have developed a manual social network analysis capability that we use to discover organized exploitation rings. Where a normal user will see a single user account, we see it for what it is: an automated bot account in a cluster of 650 other similar bot accounts. We can't expect normal users, who should be enjoying the Steem ecosystem, to pick up the slack.
Engagement of regular users and stakeholders is not a substitution for a systemic approach honed by years of experience.
(13.15) Spaminator does not have any moderators (or individual reporters as Steemcleaners has). There are no whales involved in it in any way. Further, users may not downvote through Spaminator. This is impossible. Spaminator is a bot that works off its framework and does not have any external input from any individual users who may face retaliation from whales.
(9.1) Approximately 25 to 100+ individual accounts get manually processed (evaluated and re-evaluated) on a daily basis. Each account is added to Spaminator after careful evaluation of blockchain-based transactions and removed after a successful appeal or our pro-active re-evaluation. The hours required to manage those are donated via our Discord. We place equal emphasis on both addition and removal.
We will formulate new KPIs moving forward.
(13.7) Unfortunately there is no good way for us to process quarterly metrics at this time but here are some numbers to help evaluate our work in 2019.
Spaminator:
Mack-bot:
The figures are not exact as there are other considerations:
animalcontrolthat tied up Spaminator for a while