It all started with a humble comment...
I had read an article by @e-steem in which he discovered that clicking the auto upvote box on a new blog is less effective than upping it at a later point due to the original post depleting your voting power.
I thought that was a great find so I left the comment below
At which point I was nearly immediately flagged 29 times. In the interest of full disclosure, I deleted the comment and then re-posted an essentially identical one as my personal curiosity demanded to know if it would happen again. Well, it turns out it did happen again with the same speed.
Not only that, but the same group of users downvoted my posts in the same thread and some core members of the bot also down voted my comment in an unrelated thread
So I went to Steemd to do a little analysis
Comparing my steemd to the OP, e-steem's, I was interested to find that the same bot that targeted me had upvoted his article.
It seems like what this bot is likely trying to do is profit by giving articles value via upping them and then ensuring a selected commentator receives the maximum comment rewards possible by downvoting the competition. It's brilliant, really; brilliantly abusive.
Screenshots from my steemd feed showing the bot downing me
Screenshot showing the same bot upping the OP
Finally, a one-to-one comparison of the OP's ups vs my comment's downs.
Since this incident I have been harassed by this bot reacting to completely unrelated comments with the instant multiple-flags. This bot is also registering new names still. Analyzing my downvotes on my unrelated comment I was able to find this account. Which was created after my initial contact with the bot and is targeting all the same users.
This bot is even so audacious as to target good bots such as @cheetah who are our primary defense against abusive bots.
I know the platform has largely embraced bots, but surely there must be a way to reign in malicious bots such as this?
EDIT, this article has been targeted.
You should thank those bots for helping you earn at least 7$. ;)
I suppose you're right there, @neoxian
Upvoted a few of your comments, with only a few thousand SP that I have your already in the green, so just move on and don't worry about it.
Some of your images are broken, but it looks like one just fixed itself. Sorry about the situation you find yourself in. I see nothing in your history that warrants this!
@pfunk see this is what I was talking about. We already have bots causing problems because the barrier to entry is low and the rewards are high. A bot like this can be built from the tutorials online here in a matter of a couple of minutes and serves no purposes except to harass and annoy.
The solution is to provide better quality tools, knowledge and incentives for people to play fair.
The solution looks a hell of a lot like STEEMBOTS.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@williambanks/announce-steembots-com-your-source-for-everything-bot-related-now-hiring
If we were live we would have tools to and incentives to address this such as a bot registry and way to track bots that are gaming the system and swarm into action, by reupvoting.
But I doubt we would even need all of that. You just need to direct the builder's attention away from playing shitty games like this. I can't and won't do it alone though. So it's your choice. You like the status quo then keep it for as long as you can. Or go to STEEMBOTS and help shape the direction of things to come.
@desmonid I upvoted this, hope it helps, also asked @calva to upvote as well since at the moment he's the only bot that lets people tell him who to upvote.
@calva upvote
I read your article about #steembots and I must say I am impressed with your idea!
...plus I am already ready to use your hashtag #steemBotCome
Thanks @desmonid!
Ok so here is what I think has happened and this is just a theory not an accusation.
You hit a hornet's nest.
It is deadly, dirt simple to build one of these upvote bots.
It's only slightly harder to set it to listen for "friends" activities and copy their movements.
@pfunk and many others have been advocating for flagging any bot that is found in the wild., as well as generally using the flagging operation as an "i disagree with you" button. This is dumb because you will be "flagged back".
There are bots and people some who are being "followed" in this manner, some of these people are INSANELY profitable. So people build bots to do whatever the profitable person/bot does. So if the queen bee gets flagged by you and then flags you in retaliation, then EVERYONE of her followers is going to repeat the process...
Why?
Because he/she makes so much money that every move they make must be part of some incredible profit making strategy.
The solution here is to not flag things that aren't spam or abusive and just be really careful what you flag in the future unless you're a whale.
Short term, you should probably create an alt account and wait out this storm. It's likely to run until the swarm gets bored and dissipates. I can promise you though, that I am working on tools to break exactly this kind of AI and make it stop. That may mean finding who the queen bee is and getting her to remove the flag (hence the registry and leash codes). Or it may involve getting large numbers of these bots onto the STEEMBOTS platform so we can send a kill switch signal if crap like this happens again.
Think about it this way though.
If this were a large swarm upvoting you instead, you'd be a millionaire!
Anyways, thanks for your support and I'll keep working on this problem to see what other solutions I can find. In the meantime, who have you flagged for abuse lately whether they deserved it or not?
@hasherfromhell Sounds good to me. Question, have you read the STEEMBOTS posting? If so would you mind putting in a check for #STEEMBOTSTAY & #STEEMBOTCOME ? This way the bot hate is reduced. People who genuinely don't want the bot traffic can simply indicate this desire by adding the leash code and you can know for sure that your bot is wanted when you see the invite code?
I think that will put down a lot of this problem. Some of us like to play with the bots. I know I enjoy them. In the meantime I'm working to find the owners of the "botkiller bots" and telling them the same thing.
I've also asked the devs for a bit of help on this by filing an issue asking them to change the rules a little bit so flagging has a slight monetary cost on the flagger as well so that it's not something you want to bot, unless you want an empty wallet and making it so that flags don't take money away, but simply nix the post all together when the total flag count hits a certain number like 100. But that's 100 users not a single whale with 100 points or whatever.
Remember, we can complain, we can fight or we can fix. I'd rather fix this stuff piece at a time and have the best platform in the world.
Thanks for the perspective @williambanks, although that doesnt make me more pro-bot, if anything it makes me feel more like the rewards distributed via bot activity also have a certain illegitimacy or unethical air about them just as the punishments by bots do.
Reply to "@pfunk & @neoxian you are promoting a view that it's ok to abuse the flagging system and use it as your own personal "i disagree" button"
Once again you put words in my mouth. I actually don't think you should use the flag as your "i disagree" button, and if you read my blog, you'd know that.
@pfunk - check this out - your vote weight went to Zero weight on the post about the Auto Upvoting I did:
Not sure if you unvoted or ? but thought I'd point it out as it seems a bit troubling when a new user can throw around so much power.
One thing I forgot to say in the latest reply to your other thread is that generally, I don't think anybody running a value-taking bot is going to listen to guidelines. Just look at one of your favorite bots, calva, he was stubborn, and continued with his value-taking ways.
@pfunk is calva still not on leash? Have you tried to talking with @calva directly and telling his owner what the beef is? He's one of the very few that actually monitors his bots for complaints and comments.
As for guidelines, they don't need to listen because at present there is no incentive. When STEEMBOTS launches (if we launch), it will be expected you follow the code of conduct or you don't play.
@pfunk https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@calva/calva-update-no-spam-no-downvote
It's intended to be voluntary. You register the bot you get to play the bot games, you get access to our information, get to learn what we know and explore something more challenging than copy/paste 10 lines of text from 3 month old blog posting.
Your bot starts acting up and someone knows who to talk to.
No we don't upload ids but it is a free leash and dog collar for your pets in case they get lost.
Nevertheless this is a blockchain, there's no way to enforce anything except by changing the economic incentives in such a way it benefits people and you'd have to talk to the devs about that.
yeah, I noticed my images weren't working from imgur so I reuploaded them to steemimg.com
I am too a victim of a bot called "clamp". Each comment of mine gets downvoted. Just muted the account from my end.
That is why I was searching for this kind of article.
It seems I am not the only one. Let's see if this gets downvoted too.
Update: It didn't this time. Will be interesting to see if It will downvote my comment on a new post.
Second Update: The bot was actually late this time.
If anyone can help...please help me
I wrote an article about this earlier... https://steemit.com/doyourpart/@sigmajin/spam-bots-and-retributive-downvoting it looks like youre being hit by the same bot as me.
Incidentally, im 99% sure these bots are all related to weenis, and possibly to wang. I seem to have been targeted after posting about weenis.
https://steemit.com/steem/@sigmajin/downvote-bots-might-all-be-dead
this might be fixed
WOW this is great, and while I know it was probably in the works before the problem I had, it feels super timely for me :p
Great article regarding the fix too!
Good to see such a fast response. Now the only thing left to speculate on is when the daily active users and daily joins hit a peak and begin to go down. How will the market survive?
All the images work for me on this post and wow it shows -1 votes but $1.57 wtf? I am really sorry for this situation and hope something can be done by devs @ned @dan or @cheetah
Have a free upvote on me!
thanks for your generosity in my time of need :)
Oh my god,
it is already happening? why peoples always tend to destroy?
Why dont we just pull our heads out our asses already?
What the hell is the point in all these bots ruining the landscape?
Sure you big fish might have made enough money to be comfortable but what about the others?
woah WTF? what can be done about this???
Up voted you, sorry to see this happening!
Hi @desmonid!
Just seeing this, and I wish I could offer some advice or help but I don't have anything that can help you yet. I'm fairly new to the platform, and I'm still getting accustomed to things on #Steemit.
@williambanks seems to be on the right path, and I hope he succeeds because these evil bots seem like a nightmare. I can only imagine what you're going through.
Best of luck @desmonid, and if there is anything I can do to help on my end, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Upvoted you. Very interested so see if/how you sort this out. Keep us posted.
Looks like the bot gave a pardon. Didnt even know about the mute feature and seems like the person who runs the bot is just expiramenting and got mad since they thought desmonid attacked even though all he did downvote something (probably just wanting to mute)
Hell yeah this thread took off!
I recently got spammed with a bunch of downvote bots. Are you still getting targeted?
I don't see any recent activity on this post, but thought I'd chime in anyway. I've had the same thing happening to me, although it doesn't seem to be having a significant financial effect. Maybe that's only because my posts aren't really seen by many people. Anyway, someone in the comments section here speculated that the downvotes were in response to the OP flagging or downvoting something first. I've only been on steemit a few weeks and haven't done either of those things to date. Any other ideas on what may cause a bot, or swarm of bots, to target someone?