I want to give my take on the whole whale wars and self-voting and bot discussion. I’ve previously been fascinated by the bot ecosystem and voting properties, and if you’ll look at my history you’ll see some analysis posts about payouts, bots and curation. After playing around with all that, I wanted to share what I've come up with so far.
The short of it:
- In terms of value assignment, the system is designed to trust those with more stake. Bots essentially spread out the stake.
- Using Bots on own posts is the same as Self Voting. Apparently, this isn’t obvious.
- The whole system’s success depends on value assignment being “fair” or “accurate” from a market point of view.
- Self voting and bot voting is bad if the value is “unjustified.” Market perception will eventually catch up with us all.
You’ll notice I’ve put a lot of things in quotes there, because ultimately the market (not just people in Steem, but Steem’s investors as well) will react accordingly.
There is a community that wants to see Steemit succeed. And there’s some that are visibly trying to milk the system. I can only assume that those that are abusing their stake to vote garbage are in the latter camp. Milk STEEM’s current valuation until the market turns sour. Even that’s a bit of a risky proposition, given that STEEM POWER takes a long time to liquidate. But such people only serve to reduce the market’s valuation of STEEM, and should be destroyed. We just haven’t figured out how yet.
Value Assignment and the Forces at Play
The higher STEEM POWER (e.g. stake) you have, the more value you can assign as well as remove from posts. This value in turn is influenced by the STEEM price, and the external market decides that.
Now, the number one justification anyone will see concerning self-voting is that a person should be able (and should be allowed by the community) to exercise their stake however they want, because they bought into the platform.
But this is flawed, because the whole point is that STEEM as a whole is trusting those with that stake to reinforce the success of STEEM. The external market can lose faith in our value assignment, and the price of STEEM will eventually reflect that.
Any outside can look at a garbage post on STEEM and go “This gets 100$? What the hell is wrong with the world?” Even if they agree that there is potential value in a decentralized social media platform such as STEEM, they end up justifiably skeptical about the future prospects of the platform. Especially if nothing can be done to thwart such blatant abuses.
The same goes for whenever a large power stakeholder flags without good cause. If it's perceived widely as unfair, and this large power stakeholder has free reign to run the place, it makes the whole thing less desirable, and that would also reflect on market values in the long run.
If Steem is not a great place to be, soon these whales will be ruling over a dried up pond.
Bots and Self-Voting
I see bots as an extension of self-voting. It enables self voting for people that are not whales. Okay, it allows whales to dip more too, but they don’t need to. Given the above, the same rules apply, any value assignment needs to be justified, or the market will react.
What’s the hold up? If there’s so much abuse, and abuse is so bad, why haven’t we seen a correction? Well, the STEEM game is young, and I don’t think we’ve fully understood it. Also the crypto market is still crazy speculative, you can’t really trust it. But think fundamentals. Think about all the exciting development that is happening around STEEM. All these factors mixed in make it hard to isolate the impact of abuse. Some might say this abuse is the hold-up that is preventing STEEM from rocketing. Who knows. Bleh.
I know the other point of view concerning the bots is that the bot operators make a pretty penny for this service. Should the community that wants STEEM to succeed react based on that? I’m not so sure. I do like the fact that it provides a way to extend one’s stake for a fee.
Countering Abuse
We as a community seem very efficient at identifying when payouts are out of control, and drawing discussion to it. As well as when whales are being too oppressive. This discussion is a good thing, because it means we are reacting to the abuse.
Earlier I mentioned that the higher the stake, the higher the value you can add or take away. The good news is that with current rules, it is proportional to STEEM POWER (SP). This at least gives a fighting chance for lower SP holders to negate the actions of an abusive whale.
Why haven’t we been doing that? Well, because it is so disruptive, and there is a fear of retaliation. If only there was a tool that could make a group of people react as one to negate the abusive whale, without fear of retaliation before enough SP is amassed… One can dream, I suppose.
Where Am I?
I had a previous Voting Declaration about how I wanted to use the bots and self-vote. I’m sure nobody really changed much given that behavior, since it really didn’t amount to much difference, but in any case I have stopped doing it. Mainly because I started to take the position of using bots for promotion instead.
In the current state, it is really difficult to compete for attention. There's a promotion section to burn SBD's with, that is just silly. I don't know a single person that looks at the promoted section (let me know if you do!). There's tons of garbage being sent to the hot and trending sections with high values.
You might put me in the abusive camp as well, and I can't say I disagree with you. I don't know how much my posts are worth, but they surely are worth more than that upvoted garbage we all keep complaining about. I know, it doesn't justify it. I'll admit to being a bad person.
There's one thing I've been noticing, though. This might just be wishful thinking, but lately I've experienced that bot returns are going down, and bot votes are more scarce. Could it be that the demand is much higher than supply? Are we moving towards saturation of the bot voting market so that it has self-corrected to a point where they are all barely worth anything at all? (Well, except for the bot operators). Not sure... but that will ultimately be a good thing for STEEM. The bot with no return, used for purely promotional purposes (harder to use to get immediate returns).
Anyway, we should focus on looking for those that really are poisonous to the STEEM community, if we don't want to dry up the pond.
Nice piece. I wish I had some answers for you. I've been thinking about this a bit. Personally I think self-voting is OK on posts where authors need some exposure. Most authors would struggle to write 2 decent posts a day so that still leaves 8 x 100% votes that need to go elsewhere.
Self-voting comments I consider OK only as means for curating the comments. Frequently these can be much lower % votes if you're just trying to bump your comment (usually an answer to another comment or question)
Clever abusers then create multiple accounts and "circle jerk" to hide their self-voting. Harder to detect but not impossible. It is generally easier to spot the "good actors" from the "bad actors" so I personally think there should be focus on rewarding the good rather than punishing the bad.
I'm in agreement there. Promoting good actors is happening at some level already with various community projects forming. The bad actor... Well, at least some we're quite good at spotting. The only thing I'll point out is that going after blatant bad actors that take a huge chunk of the reward pool gives the greatest return on effort in terms of improving it for everyone else.
I think we are slowly getting to the saturation point for bots because with the price of SBD changing from time to time by the time your payout comes out the price of it could have gotten lower than 10-20% of what it was on the previous days.
the 3 day validity is a good one to implement so that people will have enough time to check on some posts and downvote it. Although there are golden shitposters who are flying down the radar who reap in 200-300 easy and they dont get noticed by flaggers.
I hope that there will be a time that we can correct it and make it an even playing field but for now play the game and amass SP.
Yeah the golden shit posters. The thing is, that is so easy to catch, I'm surprised it's still allowed to happen. I should be aggregating these with a bot or looking at the projects that are trying to stop it (steem flag rewards).
Paid advertisement, nothing wrong in that
While paying bots to vote posts of other accounts is fine?
Who decides what is fair or accurate in a decentralized platform?
Not without flagging / downvoting being promoted
If you don’t have enough voting power or followers with high voting power, your opinions or claims do not matter as much as those who do. This is not an opinion.
About who decides: Money talks. On the first level, it's SP holders maneuvering to assign value. On the second level, the market is some signal of approval for what is happening on the platform.
If the SP holders don't do a good job, we are all doomed :). That's how I look at it. About how the market values? Well for the platform to be valuable to potential social media advertisers, there needs to be people there. People leave if they all think steem is a rat hole with no hope of improvement.
I wrote a post about an idea called Steeminators to combat things like rewards pool abuse, and I think you might find the idea interesting. Unless something like steeminators is implemented, then I think rewards for the typical person will continue to move towards the rewards portion of the yearly STEEM inflation rate because more and more tools will likely be developed that enable people to get much of the benefits of self voting without blatantly self voting. One popular tool that already exists to do this is delegating to minnowbooster (i.e. per their own words, "delegating STEEM POWER to the @minnowbooster bot and get roughly the returns you would get if you voted up only your own posts, but without the shame!" Disclaimer: I currently delegate some steem power to minnowbooster, and I also self-vote fairly often.
Vote mixers lol. Won't those be fun to chase down.
I was thinking about delegation but in the end I prefer to self vote. Unless the returns are better, I probably will skip it.
I did take a peek at the proposal, and will comment there about it there. Thanks!
Brilliant write up. I hope people with high SP read this and use their voting power more judiciously then they currently do.
This is a general statement not directed towards any individual as I am nobody to judge which content is worth upvotes and which is not. At least, I can't decide for others not can I suggest.
It's rather a call to everyone who votes to understand that each vote matters, that each vote will impact the success or failure of Steem. The more SP you have, the bigger the impact.
Agreed. I think the simplest is to do the analysis and call out bad behavior and react. Other way works too on finding undiscovered posts. Thankfully there are a lot of efforts on that front too.
Thank you so much for the informative post @eonwarped; I stumbled upon this from @theinbox ...congratulations!
I've only been on steemit since the third week of December and in the beginning, I 'experimented' with the upvoting bots just to try and figure them out, you know, another avenue on this platform. It kind of felt like I was either giving myself a birthday present, OR, paying myself for a job well done. I was successful with them a few times, but lately, I watch steembottrackers (https://steembottracker.com/bottracker.html#free) and watch people over-bidding at the last minute and everyone ends up with only matching their original contribution or sometimes being in the negative.
For the time being, I have stopped using them because I quickly figured out that it was more beneficial to try and become a legitimate member of this community, by genuinely commenting instead. And by "beneficial" I don't mean financially, although that was a fortunate result of it all anyway. The bots have a purpose for sure, and everyone has a right to use them, not use them, love them or hate them:)
Thank you again for the post...you've given me food for thought for sure. Cheers!
This is a really good analysis of what's happening here, Eon. It's a worry that the high SP scammers are upvoting shitposts just before payout to sneak their actions under the radar. Like you say, outsiders are gonna see shitposts making a fortune whereas excellent, quality content makes pennies. It's obviously scammy. It'll repel investors and new content creators. There always will be people who'll rape the system to get an easy payout. It's nigh on impossible to police it. Maybe we need a vigilante bot.
My worry is that the big scammers and flaggy whales may drive curious rubber-necking traffic to steemit then become repellent to quality content creators who don't want their gems wallowing in a stinking pile of detritus. I hope Steemit doesn't turn into another shithole full of selfies, one-liners and 'look how cute my kitten is again'.
I use the bots to help nudge my posts up a bit and I delegate SP with the aim of getting a return on my investment (I'm no charity).
Great post!
Anj x
Yeah that's a good point, and buggedout above mentions finding the good comment to promote up. Having the community support is a definite help in perception in terms of boosting good posts.
I'm okay with that level of content (cats) if they are assigned the appropriate value relative to others haha.
I also hope that supply and demand can drive this too. High supply of shitty posts priced appropriately. Of course, it's not really a market place. But I was just thinking about how if dmania pays well with the bot, and enough people use it, that pay quickly spreads thin and they do all get lower amounts. We'll see.... It's all a very many adjustment process in terms of Delegations and votes. (Even auto votes, and adjusting weights based on the votee behavior).
Yes, lol. As long as they're paid what they're actually worth. Someone took a picture of a jacket and made $100s. Crazy!
About the comments. I don't upvote my own comments. I think, in a comments section, other members of the discussion (and the OP) can decide which comments are worth better positioning. It seems a bit too self-promotiony to do it with a comment.
Yes DMania posts. I've seen some pretty good memes in there. I know some think of memes as shitposts but if they're done well they're worth something even though they're often low-effort. Come on, we all have 'don't wanna write' days :D
But, yes, the more people that use bots, the less profitable they'll be. Interesting times ahead.
cheers
Anji x
This definitely left me something to think about. I even have to reread it LOL. Resteeming to help get this out there. I want to see what more people have to say about it too. Thank you for this ^_^
Yeah... not a fan of the bots... they feel like a "cheat" to me.
But what if the bots that upvote other people that you want to encourage are helpful? Say life got super busy and you are not there to support but you want to keep supporting. Wouldn't that be a helpful tool to have?
I just don't think those are genuine. If I can't engage... I can't engage. but I don't want some tech upvoting posts that I may disagree with or dislike just to give the other person a few cents. My name is worth more to me than that. Usually If I get too busy. and can't engage for a bit. When I can. I put in the effort to make up for it with genuine likes/upvotes, resteems and or comments. but even then. ONLY on things I like and support. People I like will inevitably post stuff I would not want my name attached to and a bot will never know what those things are. as it can't know which posts I would deem as deserving of more than just an upvote. I think the value here at steemit is in personal engagement far more than it is in the monetary rewards. imo. if you're doing it for the money and not the social interaction. you're here for the wrong reasons. People will sense this and in the end... your earnings will suffer due to it. but that's just my opinion.
hm, I never thought of that with the bot voting on things you may not agree with. Bots are a huge discussion, many things to think about. People's opinions do matter and need to be taken in consideration. Bots are unable to do that.
As much as I would like to admit it but they only way for smaller people like us to get noticed is through bots. It's the only way for us to have some traction, most especially when steemit is a pretty vast community. ^^
I guess everyone is still trying to figure out what works. If one method gets a bad reputation I'm sure people that value their content will stop.
I was recently thinking that if there was a real threat to flagging bot voted posts, the incentive to use them on crap would go down. That's an interesting thought.
Although we're seeing even with grumps random bot flagging people are still using those bots that grumps is targeting.
I appreciate you writing this. Thank you.
Your post touches the key question in mind... Is there logic in the code base to feed the 'noble whale' and kill off the 'toxic whale'?
Just joined today! I'm fascinated by what's going on here and look forward to contributing myself.
There is not. It's All SP actors :). Welcome to Steemit! It's never a dull moment here.
This article is simply superb. And I don't give that praise often.
You are our go-to guy for advice on the technicalities of steemit related matters. You may or may not have all the answers, but you certainly have more than we do.
@tripdespider has proven himself a great asset to steemit in his short time with us, and he has done nothing here but enhance his reputation with us. You'll have to share the honours with him.
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Never used a single bot for the post's of my own and i think i never will
I am not a fan of the bots. They take away from the genuineness of the site and just feels like a cheat. imo. If a post is good it'll be upvoted and if not it won't and I think that's how it should be.
I agree in principle, but that's not how the incentives are set up. A whale can throw money on their own posts already, shitty or not.
its always good to make more steem out of the content from work i think even in cents
1.60% @pushup from @eonwarped
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