Some of you oldschoolers may still remember the EIP and all the changes it brought forth to our platform, of course some stakeholders preferred to just ignore it but after the hivefork it became even less of a problem and everyone came to an agreement to stop selling votes and curate. Now I'm not going to get into the curation and how that was evolved over time, there's also some new rules and changes being proposed for the upcoming HF so maybe better to focus on that later.
One thing I do want to bring up that I've noticed lately, though, is something that's in one way bringing back vote selling today already.
Just as a comparison, let's assume (as an example) @curie who is a longlasting curation project on Hive which I know leases a lot of HP thus makes this a good example to compare, would suddenly come up with something like this.
"Hey everyone, we're worried that our Hivepower is too little to support all of you and the people posting into our community, in an effort to grow it and to reward you with more rewards, we'll be starting a new initiative where we're asking people to give us up to 50% of their post rewards, which we then would take and lease more HP with it to reward you more! Of course since you guys are the ones funding this we would focus on the curation on the people giving us more of their post rewards."
What does that sound like to you? Does it sound like curation or does it sound like vote selling covered by curation?
Well, another certain project on Hive is already doing this. The reason I decided to compare this with if another curation project would do it is because this project and its "leader" is already someone who has a lot of enemies on Hive and deservingly so. He's constantly abused the memo system by marketing his posts countless of times by spamming people with links and now he's back with another scheme.
The one thing he of course won't mention to you is that by doing things this way it will naturally even grow his own cut that he takes from the project. Even if that's not the case he's taking 50% more of author rewards while it goes through a middleman leasing project which also takes a cut itself along with more curation rewards just to offer delegators more returns which at the same time takes more power from the other curation projects who lease HP in other ways than dlease.
Anyway, thought I'd make it clear here first about what it is that he's doing, hear your thoughts and opinions on it and what you think about the scheme. Then we'll decide on how to take action towards it as I don't find this acceptable towards the EIP and at the same time authors and their rewards. Not to mention so close to the new hardfork and linear rewards I think it's not a great time to start allowing this kind of activity cause it'll be one step closer to bringing back bid bots and vote selling activity and ruin a lot of the things we've managed to build and repair over the last few years. It'd be a shame to nullify that and got back to looking like our corrupted twin chain.
Take a look at their current trending: https://hive.blog/trending/hive-175254
Surprise surprise, all posts have 50% beneficiary going to their "fund", I haven't checked the data but I wouldn't be surprised that they would just skip posts without this kickback completely as greed knows no bounds.
Let me know your thoughts and if there's any info I've missed out from this scheme and you happen to be involved and know more I'd appreciate to know that too.
This is a very tough call, and it looks like they are having a few internal problems, (their post from 8 days ago). I myself got tired over on steem of one the individuals and the constant wallet visit this post memos. It took me a long time to ignore the wallet crap, but it was his 0.001 so all I did was ignore it.
Intentions are hard to understand in text only format. I do have an issue with them posting on hive and not even bothering to update their description to say Hive:
So since they can not take the time to recognize Hive by updating their description are they really a Hive community, or just decided to start milking hive since as they state:
I myself do not believe they are here to help anyone but themselves, but that is just my opinion. As to what actions need to be taken, I am not sure. It is after all their vote, and their members vote. They do have what they call a whitelist of users, but it seems they do a pretty poor job of controlling plagiarism and spin writers in their community and there is not one single muted account.
Of course the people posting have a banner to tell people the post is plagiarism free, so if there is a banner it must be true.
lol @ the banner, and honestly this was brought to my attention through a steem post and then I noticed them doing it here too but that they were mainly worried about their steem delegations being too low. So imagine their taking the profits from the shit they doing here to lease SP instead of HP, another of many reasons to nip that activity in the bud, imo.
Should be pretty easy move forward to just announce (with the help of other big accounts) that any posts giving beneficiary to their account will get downvoted down to make this activity unprofitable for everyone involved.
Well that's actually pretty handy trick to sell votes "while being hidden". Man, I hope that won't get any more popular. I've been happy when vote-selling has been long gone, I don't want all that to return on Hive.
I agree with you and I would vote your comment but I need more HP so please give me 50% beneficiary in your next comment so I can give you a bigger vote!
In all seriousness, yes, this places a new layer of where the content and who the account is and their contributions are ignored in exchange for giving the curator more rewards.
At first I thought I may be the wrong person to bring this up since I was behind the idea of @reward.app (which can also work to give curators more of a kickback but it's 99.99% used only to liquidate post rewards), but the difference there would be if I would only go around and voting on posts using reward.app with the settings to give curators more returns which I doubt happens at all these days.
I reckon a pretty easy script run could uncover this kind of behavior.
@abh12345 do the needful deer sir
I really don't think he should be doing deer in public.
You clearly don't know him as well as me
<-
Are you his ex deer?
The one before looked a bit like
My brain isn't working very well at present, can't think how to :(
I held off downvoting some of these type of posts mentioned. There are more on the priority lists like blatant spam and plagiarizing. But this is shady trying to use Hive wealth to funnel for Steem gains. LoL
https://hive.blog/@hive.curation/posts
I've mostly just seem them front-running for max ROI, probably a good idea to take a closer look after the HF.
I'd consider this vote selling. The content also seems interesting - as while not an expert on it, it looks like a lot of it is spun content at the least. A lot of it (no matter the account) follows the same format too. Seems like a scheme.
It would be interesting to see the percentage of their vote going to
buyersdonators is - perhaps someone will have a look. From a quick look, every post in their trending has a 50% bene added - so that pretty much says that they aren't looking for other content at all.I've been saying it's a community where people write about stuff they don't have much clue about "writing" for the sake of writing.
I'm sure he and his "core team" receive the lion's share of those beneficiary rewards. But beware, "poor peeps from VZ" gonna REEEE.
I don't mind people exploring, but writing spin for reward is tacky at best.
That's what happens when people pretend to be content creators.
But then again, why not full Yellow Power Ranger mode and make it close to 100% Beneficiary? There’s only one solution, follow the money trail across the accounts. If they cross somewhere, call 911.
Unrelated, but what does this have to do with the yellow power ranger?
That’s just a swinging term for overdoing it, try to cut at the edge.
It’s pretty nostalgic tho :p
Because they won't have takers. This way, the people can post and get the sense that they could get other votes as well as their own. It is a scam. Likely, there would be some crosses.
So it's a light scam? Comparable to cheap cheese with a high price tag, slight taste of almond, but also some salmon later in the breath :P
I don't like nuking people, maybe one can talk them down to earth.
Well that's nothing new with their community either and why more communities should focus on not doing this "we cover so many niches" bullshit because we need experts or people really interested in the niche to curate the content who can tell if something is spun/stolen and reward actual quality original content.
The person was "concerned" on my post with how HF25 will affect curation returnns with voting late. I suspect tey might also be looking for low value posts out of that group of 50% dele's after a few days to vote on, keeping them under the radar.
No surprises there either...
"Project-hope-we-don't-get-caught"
😂
Yeah- - the track-record is there, dating back years.
Project Hope is one big pile of abuse.
There are other accounts that sell votes already.
https://hive.blog/@hive.curation
in the case of that community, it's less vote selling and more Project Hope self-voting. I've left some downvotes to discourage it.
Lowkey taking advantage of people who have not looked deep into this and are just posting thinking that its fine to "buy votes" again. A way to stop this movement would be to start downvoting the content that @ph-support upvotes with a informative comment about it to raise more awareness.
At the very least, start downvoting the ringleaders and strip away their easy access of votes from places like @tipu.
The oldest trick in the book.
Create a problem, offer a solution, but charge a fee.
Dates back probably earlier than those travelling wild west snake oil salesman. They'd roll in to town, make a scene, everyone gathers around, they convince everyone they have a problem, that they didn't know they had before until it was explained, then they'd throw their money at the salesman, he'd hand them the solution (usually a ripoff), leave town.
I'm not going to comment on whether or not what they're doing is right or wrong. That kind of marketing always grinds my gears though. And if that's who I think you're talking about, that's a sleazeball.
Bidbot marketing did it, too. They'd claim it's IMPOSSIBLE to get noticed (created problem), then they'd place you on the trending page, but make you pay for it. Everyone knows it was sleazy. Nobody was even looking at the trending page once the damage was done. Total ripoff. And now they're gone.
It's dirty.
They even had posts saying "stop promoting Hive cause we can't support everyone right now", like, what the fuck is the thinking behind that.
And yep, I still barely look at the trending page today just cause of what the bid botting did to it way back.
That post you're talking about is creepy. Plus I've been looking around.
Stinks of cult. Asking members to distance themselves from family, in so many words. Making them all chant the same message. Asking them to hand over their personal possessions. Taking their money. Keep in mind they're also losing out on support they've gained on their own outside of the 'group', handing it over to him. The way he has them convinced, without him or the 'group', they cannot thrive. That's a power move. That's why people in cults rarely leave, plus they have nothing if they go. Wants to control who comes in. If you open the doors to anyone and allow them into your 'group', many of them haven't been preconditioned, which gives rise to dissenting voices which could potentially destroy the façade from within. Has some on the inside convinced those on the outside are enemies, out to harm the group, making them feel a sense of security and protection within the walls. Seems like the task is spinning articles and anyone who gets caught not spinning well enough is called a plagiarist, and they are disciplined in the open by enforcers. And in the end making them feel like it's all for a good cause. That's the Jim Jones playbook right there.
Damn man, I appreciate you taking a closer look, now go wash those eyes and take some forgetmenows.
I guess those would taste better than the koolaid those folks are about to be offered. Keep in mind that's all gathered from skimming the surface. I could be wrong. It could be all coincidence and they accidentally created some kind of a Jonestown experience where in many cases the seemingly disadvantaged targeted are actually, hired help.
Purely speculation. No way to know for sure...
Dude. I'm being dead serious right now. I didn't think it was that bad.
That's either a hoax; an elaborate reward farming scheme. A cult. Or a combination of the two. Or maybe I'm wrong. But it doesn't feel right. What the fuck is going on?
It's like a collective greed following the ruler on many chains in hopes of riches for recycled content without realizing they're all being used. Of course with a nice mix of sock accounts and people who have no idea what it is they're using.
Are there more minds studying this case? I see a lot of folks agree it's shady, but are people taking a good hard look? I'm concerned about the innocent ones.
I look at trending multiple times per day. Nice place some days.
But about that 'group'...
Systems that depend on gullible minds, a charismatic leader, and a name that brings joy; that's a cult.
Just sayin'
Trending page gives good content to downvote.
Maybe in big bold words you should mention, again, you're simply using curie as an example. I think some people are confused.
Yeah noticed someone misunderstood that in the comments just now.
Hmm. Hopefully that helps. If not, I think I know where to find a flashing "example" sign.
You just wanted me to add a banner to this post, isn't it
Actually I'm just sitting here chuckling at the stupid shit I do and say all over the place.
A few months ago we expelled a curator from them who was in our Whatsapp group. His practices are abusive since steem. We don't want that to flood HIVE
Do tell us more.
I followed the trail of money. It is like small-time haejin tactics. If you look at his steem wallet, he sends funds to a whole bunch of people telling them to get some ice cream, or to take some time off. Thank you for shedding light on this, I will have fun sleuthing.
I’m a bit torn on this particular use case. The one thing that gives me pause is that I actually hope that more community features will roll out in time and enable the original vision of communities being able to set a beneficiary percentage for posting in the community. I think there’s a lot of positive use cases & incentive to that structure. What’s being done here isn’t that different, however the 50% “donation” is rather high!
I feel like at any kind of scale that model starts to break down as too many users vie for the accompanying vote support and the 50% drain is too much... especially if no other curators will touch that community with a ten foot pole.
More than vote selling, I’d be inclined to categorize this as 50% self voting which is rather high percentage by broader community standards. The unfortunate thing is it sets up normal users as human shields... so there’s no easy answer. 🤷♂️
Yeah I'm hoping more community development is done for the extra features, but those beneficiary cuts would be more a thing like "I'm posting here for the visibility because of the growth of the community you guys have worked hard on and of course curation from all your subscribers" rather than a single person/account getting all the beneficiary for themselves and only curating the people if they're paying the beneficiary cut and ignoring all else.
Totally agree on the intent. I'd love to see community owners use it to sponsor advertising, community contests, etc. as well. I think we're bound to see plenty of situations like this though where a community is driven/bootstrapped by a single large account. Acting in good faith that's great for Hive distribution, engagement, and retention. In bad faith... well, see your post above! ☝️
Yeah, right now while those community settings aren't in place yet, we're voting on curation compilations/reports of many communities in our incubation to reward the curators, moderators and at the same time also fund some tipping activity for posts that may not be as great to nominate for curation yet (but you want to motivate them to do better) or comments that standout since the curation curve tax kinda makes it hard to give comments a decent upvote. So we've been using this "hack" to fund contest rewards and keep people who do work alongside the communities a lot but don't post themselves but it would be much better with beneficiary options from the beginning. Hopefully we can focus on the community development after this next HF!
yes.
I do follow your downvote trail anyway, as soon as you move.
Ah, Peter Peter memo bleater.
It's totally vote selling and the content reflects the bid bot days where they will spin anything as it's just a placeholder for the vote.
Hello everyone, I do not usually comment since my English is null, but I am against any auto voting whether they are bought or owned, it does not seem worthy and they are not real.
Little by little after years and a lot of effort and support from many people like you I am going up.
That means that every time I try to do better and that the vote I receive is for quality, not for cronyism or bought.
All my photographs are mine and my texts,
You see many texts copied or plagiarized with googel photographs and the entries voted by the clouds.
Others with a lot of quality almost go unnoticed.
The comments for me are a matter of having time, something that I lack working and having to translate everything.
My language is Spanish and I was trying to make my entries in it, but seeing the results in Spanish, I don't feel like it.
I only see blessings and prayers, photos moved and repeated pos.
Well friends, I'm still happy here after many years and effort, but I'll tell you one thing.
hive has made me look at the world in a different way, to think about what he photographed and where I'll put it depending on the subject, something that seems very important to me and that he had to carry out of obligation.
I am sorry to have said so many things and the same without importance for this subject.
Happy Thursday
Some people just want shortcuts to rewards, even if it means giving away part of their rewards in return.
Well, that makes no sense or logic, much less moral
Try and tell them that... cause I have, for the past 3 days..
I will tell you with a photo she is healthier than what they do
lol
😘
I would never guess!
Who would have thought?
It's not looking kosher.
Also, much of the content looks spun. It's sad to see that crap here.
Check this out:
https://hive.blog/hive-175254/@jjqf/blue-dot-raises-usd32-million-for-ai-to-help-companies-manage-their-tax-accounting
I did a Google search on this paragraph:
What I got was this:
Frankly speaking, the Trending page of that whole community looks quite late 2017 to me.
Great curation!
That's why I refuse to vote on most things with their tags in STEMGeeks. Usually garbage anyways.
Is the stemgeeks site working yet? When I last tried to post there, I could never get the keychain prompt to show up.
Works fine to me.
This also reminds me of the time they did catch some plagiarisers in their community but decided not to downvote them because they're against downvotes... what
LOL
I vaguely recall that community being against downvotes. It's quite handy that they have a community for these posts. It makes them easier for downvoters to find.
Downvotes are a great feature on hive that needs to get used more.
I did the same with a few last night and got similar results
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I went over there and dropped my 3 free flags. I like the idea of giving them a warning, saying that their behavior is considered vote selling and nulling the rewards if they don't stop (Not sure where exactly this idea was posted, somewhere on this thread).
Thanks for the heads up, just emptied my Inverse-upvote bar on their trending page (well down to 20%).
Maybe I summoned him because I mentioned him? I thought he only got attention through transfers, but I see he also has other peculiar ways of getting noticed without spamming
I honestly think it's stupid to participate in such a scheme, what's the point? Let's say if your post has 30$, 50% will go to the curators and 50% will go to you, then you will earn 15$, but, since you give 50% of your author rewards, you will have 7.5$ that will be divided between 3.75$ in HBD and 3.75$ in HP. What is the point? I honestly think it's not even profitable to spend so much effort on an 800-word post to just give away money, effort and time to such a mediocre project.
As someone said in another comment, they don't even care about Hive, they just want milk rewards at all costs. I vote for burning them :)
I don't quite remember if the division of beneficiary rewards works like this, so I accept any correction, thanks
It's not just Project Hope that scams Hive like this.
There are many others.
For example:
https://hive.blog/@hive.curation
Welcome to noise.cash 2.0 soon.
lol now you know why I called reward.app a modern bidbot
Maybe after HF25. Currently, I see people use it mostly as @likwid with a fee.
Just like other content, if that usage goes too far it can simply be downvoted (if you notice people just voting it for higher curation returns), these guys are going out of their way to only vote for content that benefits them.
Here’s what I think: If hf25 will remove tax curve and will make 3 curation windows as promissed by blocktrades then what is curie doing right now, will be pure vote selling. Curie is not the only abuser, there are groups like “Yours Piotr” or sbi. Probably I’m naive but I believe they are forced by current blockchain rules to have a strong upvote, because they want to avoid the tax penalty, so maybe let’s wait with downvotes to hardfork?
btw I used curie just as comparison in the post, the post is about pitor
oops, I didn't check the link
I think it can be improved by simply sending the staked part back as staked. I like the idea of paying out curators more, but what used to be staked would best remain as staked.
This could be an easy change I reckon I don't know if that's the issue, though. If people want to sell they'll find ways to sell anyway, having some liquids as a curator without needing to powerdown can be nice as well with tipping and the upcoming re-curring payment feature.
Just power down? It's not the curator part which should be powered up, but rather the half the author's part. Plus it would but some more buy pressure on Hive and sell pressure on HBD stabilizing it some more as well.
Thanks @acidyo for directing our attention to this. I've been wondering about it for a while now though I've not had my chance to investigate some of the things mentioned here but am fully aware of their existence. I used to upv-otes some of their good content but I will study the project more now. Regards!
I honestly dunno much about these things. I am still happy when curie and ocd stop by cos it means they found my posts worth butbI thought we were past votes and vote selling. Whichever hope to see more feedback, feedback is downtrending but I miss former engagement the mostv
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Been New on crypto and hive, I have a little knowledge on this, so I can only talk on the possible danger of adding beneficiary and getting a vote.
As much as some projects do the beneficiary stuff with positive intentions, the result may turn out to harm both the user and hive platform while the project benefits. Users may start posting without critical thoughts, under duress of gaining rewards, their dedication will be channel on reward above other concerns, and giving no room for personal growth- something I enjoy most about hive.
Quality in creating contents will reduce as more people start to subscribe to that initiative, thereby affecting the hive blockchain either directly or indirectly.
But looking at this, there's a community I believe use the beneficiary thing effectively because it gives back to the users @lmac community. It liquidate the stake hive and give back to the users, and it encourages quality.
So, I suggest a balance should be created when taking decision on this subject, and if necessary, delegation should be fine to complement that space.
This is definitely vote selling, I for one know that it killed steem for alot of people that had no care to play the "game".
I hope this is dealt with before it gets worse
I am a new user in the platform, but I am against it. Through these kind of strategies people attract to get good amount of upvotes and to grow early, but the issue is that good content creater will suffer.
Personally I feel like delegations need to be removed even though that's not really the case here it is part of the issue on these platforms. There are far to few people that hold huge amounts of hive and simply control everything that happens on here. There one vote is worth like 6,000 others accounts votes which is pretty blah if you ask me. I feel like people need to start putting in the time to comment and curate themselves instead of delegating it out to others and earning a APR. It just feels super counter productive and a major issue here on hive.
Hi, I am new to Hive and while I was researching what it was about, one of the things that attracted me was the fact of the requirement in relation to the quality of the posts. I believe that if there is a buying/selling of votes this would impact the quality of the content posted, due to the fact that we would not have to make the effort to give our best as our votes/reward would be "safe". In addition to that, he himself is cutting off his community by requesting such exchanges, since we are NOT all willing to be part of one where there is unfair competition underhanded by his administrator or one of them. I had subscribed to this community but from this moment I unsubscribe from it.
It is a good thing that there are members of HIVE who are concerned that the quality does not drop, that there are no scams or vices and that the effort of each one of us is valued. CONGRATULATIONS!
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
After reading your posting, I went(for the first time) to click on the 'advance setting' to try figure out who are the beneficiaries after I post and how much...
Look how it shows...
How can one really understand how much is going where!?
Now not everyone will click on that 'advance setting' and will just post after writing his/her post.
Can't understand why this can't be clear and seen by everyone...
That's exactly why we should separate the reward pool from the main hive token and have all the scammers run their own voting bots in their own communities.
Other communities can easily prevent vote selling as their stake is bigger.
Ooof, I remember him from way back when he first started spamming my wallet, what a weasel.
It does look like he turned what seemed to be a curation project into a self-enrichment, soft-vote-selling kind of scheme.
Not sure how to act against this though as he doesn't seem like a guy we can easily talk out of doing what he wants to do and downvotes are out of question because that's undeservingly stealing rewards from geniune authors.
Hive should have fit system to fight such abuse if not, when this plaform is widely used how do hive face massive vote abuse. The worst, hive price will be dumped.
Eww. Feelsbadman
I think it's not acceptable to be behaving in this way. I hated the vote purchase games of Steemit and never participated in them.
I was glad when they were gone. When everyone is buying votes from bid bots it creates a massive fake economy that just prints crypto for those who can afford it.
Only in my 4th year have I started earning a return and upvotes through working hard on my blog.
Well done @acidyo and the team, keep up the great work
Mantap