Change 1
I don’t think this solves the main issue. People are using smurff accounts to vote up their own comments in lieu with something like buying votes from randowhale. I’ve contacted a few people about one account in particular. Everyone tells me this guy is not doing anything wrong. He has also gotten smarter since the account that he upvotes that is also using randowhale got hit with a bunch of down votes. So now he waits till the end to bump up his own three word comments to 5$ or higher. It looked a lot worse 4 days ago when I started to notice this guy. Naturally with current market his posts have drop a lot in value so everyone just tells me “nothing I can do about it, he’s not abusing anything.” My 2 cents worth of voting power and the kind of negative attention I would get flagging it all myself is something that makes it not worth it for me.
Change 2
While I think a cheaper downvote that carry more weight could help fix things. It also gives people who abuse the downvote system more power as well. In the end, I think making the flag more powerful is the only way to go. There are just too many people going around robbing the rewardpool blind. We are punishing those who are using the flag system legitimately by them having to give up huge amounts of voting power just to do the right thing.
https://steemit.com/@kmyang62/comments
https://steemit.com/@leejin-33/comments
They are voting for each other’s comments and buying randowhale votes for comments. They have changed up a little bit now and appear to be waiting closer to 6d12 hour mark avoiding people noticing and nuking the earnings. He’s still got a few comments that are worth a fair bit if they are indeed abusing the system.
Some people now have looked over it and downvote some of the things. I’m not sure if what was not downvoted was consider “fair” or if more needs to be done. The biggest ones can be found nearing the 6d12h mark. Your investigation into the matter would be appreciated.
Whatever this dude is earning from his "abuse" is probably worth it.
From the whitepaper;
Your right everyone should just stop trying to control the wild jungle. The 120 SP/SBD earned between those 2 accounts from the reward pool last week 100% justified. Would been more if it was not for me meddling in their plans. Who cares about all other accounts doing the same thing in a pairs as well that’s only a few 1000 per week out of the reward pool for their 2 or 3 word comment spam.
It’s also just fine the 280 accounts controlled by this guy as well https://steemit.com/@warren.buffet/transfers
Or is it 1300 accounts.. 1500 accounts? It’s so hard to tell anymore. I’m sure most of those accounts are not bots.
Don’t you worry the bots won’t ever notice the potential of extracting out 50,000+ SP/SBD a week from the reward pool. Surly many different “resources” are not being tested out by the smaller subnets in that voting block.
I’ve spoken with a few people spent over 15 hours dealing with this type of thing and research. My conclusion is--why should I bother. It’s too hard to tell what a legit person in that group is and what a botted account. I'm just going be happy others are using there abilities to contribute to steemit in interesting ways.
I guess you are being sarcastic.
The point I make is straight from the whitepaper.
If someone is making 50k a week from scamming this platform - they earned that by exposing a major flaw. I don't think you will find 50k in self votes being a problem.
The hundred bucks those voters took from the pool is justified.
That's a lot of steem power. May I ask what you call abuse?
Becasue self-voting is not necessarily abuse. \
3 word comments = 5 bucks, that might warrant a flag but there is a lot is subjective here. Especially if others voted the comment up after.
With so much steem power going against self votes, I'd really like your comments on my in-depth post on the game theory of self-votes. The white paper is pretty clear in this aspect.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
I always appreciate topics that start me off thinking one way, and I end up changing into another. I now disagree with both proposals. Blockchains simply do not have ethics or morals and nor does steem inc want to impose its own on it directly. This leavings the blockchain being directed to the highest bidder. Which case you can already buy SP and if you need more to do what you want you need to-- acquire more. Changing the rules beyond that simply takes power away from one group and empowers another to leverage what they already are doing. Which is seen as good or bad depending on what side you are on in that argument and how you view the other state actor(s) in play.