I am very glad, that reacted to this post. Thank you for that, also for the resteem.
It is very interesting that you call your approach an "ideology".
An Ideology is a collection of normative beliefs and values that an individual or group holds for other than purely epistemic reasons.
Or translated into understandable english: An ideology is more or less a pile of inconsistent BS.
Sorry for being so blunt about it. Imho most of todays problems result from "natural morals" turned into more and more complex "laws" without asking for common sense. The fact that @sadkitten isn't an AI anymore makes this even worse, because this means you made the decision to flag @steembay well knowing "morals" and able to consider what is helpful and what not.
There is no question, that massive selfvoting is damaging the overall value of STEEM. Providing a FREE service and financing it with a stack that is provided by the community is a completely different story.
If you don't see the difference and if you are not able to react accordingly, then you weakened your own "ideology" much more yourself than I ever would have been able to.
Fun Fact:
With a relevant Stack (or a nice delegation) we would PAY people to use steembay and upvote EVERY real auction. This is planned since we started the project. Unfortunately we earn less than a third world hourly with it, because the Service is widely ignored by those with power. You and your "Service" are slowing down reaching this goal even more.
I will not use the easy way to wiggle around the problem ( e.g. by voting for myself with steembay once a day ). Your approach reminds me in its mechanics too much the spain conquerers "missionizing" the Indians to Christianity.
I don't agree with the characterization that there is some stupid ideology behind the rationale for @sadkitten. The comparison to "missionizing" is poor. I don't think English is @transisto 's first language, but they can defend themselves for their own comments. I can only say that there is a consistent reasoning for @sadkitten if you care to find out.
Read this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@sadkitten/self-voter-return-on-investment-svroi-notoriety-flagging-bot
There is also plenty of discussion from people who disagree with it there.
@sadkitten could arguably still be an AI, I don't really know what @transisto meant. I am the technical lead for the project. What it does is a fully automated scan of the blockchain on a weekly basis to determine the most optimal self voter and then flags from highest to lowest the next week using whatever SP and accounts currently available.
The use of your SP for solely your own gain is up to you, as it is up to everyone. It's not however the vision of that platform that we agree with. Down votes AKA flags are a disagreement of rewards. We only ever down vote when there is a self vote, and only to 85%.
I never said, that it is a "stupid" ideology. The main point behind an ideology is that there are good ideas behind it, spoiled by a line that devides between "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "bad" without inducing common sense.
I think we both agree upon trying our best to make the platform "better". There is no doubt that in general self voting is harmful to the platform. When your approach is harming other projects, that without doubt make the platform better as well, you have to consider a better way (e.g. a whitelist ). The main point of an AI is to learn... If it is up to me to find or use a way to wiggle around your "ideology", then your ideology is weak and you are in fact "missionizing" for a good reason with the wrong means of doing it. I cannot imagine that this is what your ideology is aimed at.
PS: English is not my first language either. In fact it is my fourth...
You could also see our philosophy as community induced selfvotes, because if there is no auction started by a community member, there is no selfvote as well...
This way we can guarantee the service to stay free to use and to grow with each auction, even for those with no stack at all. An alternative would be to charge for each auction, which would ostracize everyone new to the platform from our service.
Anything done dogmatically is prone to massive error. Determining right and wrong however is not in itself problematic, only when done dogmatically, or without reference to reality and one's ever changing grasp of it.
We will not whitelist any account. You are contending that the means (self voting) are justifying the ends (supporting your project). Wouldn't everyone love to support their project this way? Why should yours in particular be viewed differently from any other account, any other project?
The main point of an AI is not to learn, it is to automate tasks. Perhaps you buy into the grander hype of AI and the coming robopocalypse, but sadkitten is what is technically termed narrow or weak AI. The problem domain is very small.
I only said that English is probably not @transisto 's first language to broaden consideration of the word "ideology" which is a trigger for you. Again, he can explain the usage himself, but again, I disagree with it.
How you fund your operations is your business. If you self vote optimally sadkitten will be interested in you. It is our view that Steem is not a piggy bank for entrepreneurs. If you do that we won't and can't stop you, no one can. But we can choose to vote against you.
As I personally am not dogmatically minded though I engage with people such as we are doing now and I'm genuinely open to the debate around it. The project has changed several times based on these debates, and I have gained a lot from that too. However you're not putting anything forward here which convinces me to change my mind.
I thought about this for months... and I prepared an answer that was VERY long. Probably noone would read it nor understand it.
So for the moment we probably really have to agree to disagree, as I strongly oppose the path you choose. And only the LAST reason I say this would be that I am actually a "victim" of it.
I would be happy to read and I am sure I would understand it. But that is your call.
Yes, I think your goals are counter to ours, that is just the way it is. It's clear it would be the case that a self voting operation would be at odds with a self voting countering operation.
I think on the positive side you try to do something for the community but you touch an area that is not the main problem where you go after and punish smaller players - huge whales (or larger stake holders - with or without delegation) that e.g. upvote their shit with only a 95% click and 4 posts a week while giving generous 1% votes to 5-6 people a week probably will not get into your target zone - just as an example - not knowing the tech specifics - that is it hitting the wrong accounts here. That is my opinion.
I know what you mean, but as I said in another comment we don't have to do everything, this is just one thing and I think the rationale is defensible. There is relatively low SP behind sadkitten accounts and friends currently.
For example @haejin did appear on our list last week in 51st place. When we improve the algorithm to not only take into consideration self voting but clique voting we will see the focus change a bit and I expect the bot will be more interested in even more problematic cases.
The bottom line is that there's nothing controversial going on here, @steembay are massively self voting. Even a little less self voting and the bot doesn't care about them.
@personz I hadn't really looked into @sadkitten till today but I like the concept. It would be great to see this bot growing to tackle some of the bigger fish who are probably getting around the self voting in other ways. I am sure you will get there.
I was curious as to the feedback your getting on the bot and if your tracking how it is changing peoples voting patterns. Has anyone done some analysis on this?
We're currently on v3 of the algorithm, and all versions so far have focused only on the self votes of the user. In this version we were able to pretty much perfect a behavioral model instead of a value based model, so with that working well the next step moving to v4 is to take all account votes into account. Self voting will no longer be the strict focus then, but variance in votees and behavior around that. So if an account only votes for one other account, it will be rightfully recognized as effectively the same as self voting. And that will scale up.
I get a lot of positive feedback in private, and we've always had some opposition from people who disagree with it, such is the kind of venture it is. It's hard to know but several large stakeholders, developers and people I respect and think highly of are backers, which encourages me.
I did attempt to reach out @paulag recently to ask her to do an analysis. I don't have the time right now to do one except my own internal metrics. I was intending to publish something soon and @transisto and I are still discussing the best way to do this.
What is it you'd like to see in particular?
This post is one big data point, where a person feels that the bot is taking away his right to rewards. It would be interesting to see if other users felt the same and wrote a post, or if they adjusted their voting behaviours as a result of the bot downvote.
It would be also good to track repeat offenders and and what level of SP Holding it took for people to take notice of the downvote. The whales surely don't care at the moment as the downvote is inconsequential to them.
If we could get out of the analysis what cohort of people are affected by this bot and what cohort take notice of it that would be very interesting.
I cant wait to V4 as I think that will greatly improve the effectiveness of the bot.
Me too, I'm working on it now, moving slowly and carefully to make sure we get it right. There will be a lot of testing.
This week starting today marked the start of the 6th week where I have good records of all the data. I will do some kind of report soon, I think I will aim to do one at the end of week six, so in one week. I could also summarize some of the comments we've been getting, and the type of arguments people make against us and our concise response to those.
We will also be launching some kind of method for people to contribute their accounts to the bot when their VP is "idling" at 98+%, but that also needs to be done carefully, of course.
Thanks for your interest and spurring me on to get out some kind of report! Some others have been asking too.
Oh? Clique Voting!?
What percentage of random votes do we need to stay out of the badkitten crosshair?