Hi there 😄 The following is my witness report, something all witnesses are encouraged to do. It's basically a round up of what I've been doing here these last 10 days as a witness.
Don't forget my witness is at account @personzzz
Made it to the top 100 witnesses, thanks to you!
My current rank is 99 by votes, but effectively 52 when inactive witnesses are removed. This is absolutely awesome and I could not have done it without you. Even more so since I removed by witness self vote, but more on that later 😉
I caught my first block and I couldn't be happier! Thank you again!
Price feed and block size
I am still using @furion 's conductor scripts to set the price feed and I am happy with it, I believe it is reflective of the market. SBD interest still at 0% as SBD above $1 USD.
I am not convinced yet that the block size needs to be increased but I will be focusing on researching this in the next week to make a firmer position on it.
Pull request for Whitepaper update document approved
@sneak approved my second pull request on the official Steem Whitepaper update project on GitHub. This included changes he specifically asked for, so perhaps not surprising.
I'm really glad this is moving and have been told by @sneak that there are some Steemit Inc. people on this. As I said, I'm available to collaborate with them on this too. I hope to contribute more to this soon.
Anti self voting experiment - @smackdown.kitty
This project is came from a discussion with @l0k1 on a thread where @eeks was self voting and the rewards were quite large. As the discussion went an idea popped which would become @smackdown.kitty - a bot which will do three things:
- Flag self voted comments with a 1% flag, increasing on each self vote comment to 100% or matching the effect of their self vote, whichever is smaller, but only on accounts with more than 1000 SP
- 1% vote on the comments of users who used to self vote on their comments, for every comment not voted on (but it will still flag comments where it left off if they do that too)
- Keep detailed stats of comment self voters and publish these periodically (probably weekly) through my @personz account and / or @l0k1 's
The idea is to promote restraint in self voting, by flagging up to and including the negation point (if we get the delegated SP power), and encourage by a little vote on comments without self votes. Obviously this will seem punitive to people, and the @smackdown.kitty was even called a policeman (both positively and negatively), this is not our perspective. Flagging is really down voting, a disagreement, and if you have followed my posting here you will know I support it when it makes sense.
The published stats are to increase the visibility of self voting. The interface does not show self votes prominently, and worse it does not aggregate comment (est) payout data in any way, so it's hard to oppose it. The list will obviously be a naming and shaming, if such a thing is considered shameful, which you may become convinced it is.
I may not go that far myself - I just disagree with it and want to promote it for all the reasons @l0k1 eloquently stated here. My own announcement was here, and we launched the closed beta test here.
This also extends to self voting my own witness which I have stopped doing. I do not think I am the best judge of whether I am I good witness, that is for you all to decide.
Get involved in @smackdown.kitty
We are still in the testing phase and will stop running it tomorrow (Tuesday) to review the data and comments on this bot.
If we continue I will be making a call for SP delegations to the @smackdown.kitty account to give it's down votes a little more bite. I have delegated 500 SP, @the-ego-is-you has delegated 500 SP also and @l0k1 about 200 SP.
Please comment on our posts about this. It is a community project, and though we have taken the initiative your feedback is important.
Issue and pull request to contender (the steemit.com website)
Related to #project-smackdown is this. In this issue I explained:
In light of the changes brought in by Hard Fork 19, there is growing concern about self voting. This is mainly to do with rewards, especially extreme rewards for comments of medium to high SP holders. Also of concern are redundant bandwidth usage and simply the fact that one is a poor judge of ones own work.
Submitting a story via steemit.com, which is I think where most posts are posted, may lead to self voting unknown to the user as the Upvote post check box on Submit a Story page defaults to checked, i.e. true for auto self vote. Also this could imply tacit endorsement of self voting by Steemit.
I think this should be changed to default to unchecked, i.e. false, and perhaps even be removed from the interface.
Since it was a change of a few characters I went ahead and created a change PR here.
No discussion yet, but I hope to get a response from some of their devs soon.
@treeplanter volunteer project to plant trees in Cameroon!
@kedjom.keku, a conservationist working in Cameroon, approached us in the #bots channel to ask for help making a donation bot similar to the @randowhale. The idea grabbed me so I volunteered for the project.
I've been working on the code and testing it for a week via my @roguelike test account, and we are days away from launching it.
It will work like this: for each STEEM you donate to the @treeplanter account, from 1 STEEM up to a limit of 10 STEEM, it will match your donation in percentage for a vote on a post of your choice, which you supply in the donation transfer memo.
Of course for this to work the account will need a lot of SP, hopefully up to whale size. I have donated 500 SP to get it going, and will also be running the bot on my server free of charge for one month to get it going.
For more information see the announcement posts here and here.
Note on Steem FOSSbot Voter
@treeplanter and @smackdown.kitty knocked me out of schedule with Steem FOSSbot Voter. So I have missed the milestone deadline and have extended it two weeks hence. I really hope to keep this and some more critical bugs have come to light.
Witness guide
I heard about @jerrybanfield 's $180 course to become a witness, and decided to publish my own guide for free (well, you know, votes if you want, no up front charge). You can read it here. The best part of it is a Steem FOSSbot script project which will automatically do most of the legwork to set up a witness server if you have a Ubuntu 16.04 server.
Steemit.chat moderation
I became a moderator of the #Cooperative_Agorism room on steemit.chat as I've been hanging out a lot there recently. That's to @the-ego-is-you for this. I also neglected to mention before that @pfunk made me owner (and mod) of the #bots room, to keep it on topic for the most part.
Discussed the @welcomebot with @reggaemuffin
I asked @reggaemuffin to reconsider some of the text on the @welcomebot which was self promoting as I felt this put it firmly in the category of spam. We had a good conversation and in the end he agreed with me and made some changes.
@reggaemuffin seems like a cool guy and well worth your witness vote
Forming of #steem-coop
From chatting a lot with @l0k1 and @the-ego-is-you during #project-smackdown there is talk of forming a kind of Co-op for the things we are up to. Watch this space.
@l0k1 is an active guy and I recommend you vote for him as witness.
Important side note - I am LEET
I saw this one day when I logged in, super happy 😂
I have seen my followers increase daily for the last while and I'm happy that people are interested in what I have to say.
I don't think the solution to bad hard fork changes is to create bots to indiscriminately counter self-voting. The best solution would be to roll back the hard fork and fix what was broken...what has allowed the undesired behavior to become more prevalent and lucrative.
There are consequences for making changes to the code. When those consequences are problematic, then the obvious solution is to fix the code. If I recall correctly, STINC has stated that they would roll back hard forks that caused problems. Let's see if they're willing to do this.
It's not quite indiscriminately, it won't down vote a self voted comment by a user with less than 1000 SP (I didn't mention this above, editing it now). Before I go on, how would you consider it if we raised the threshold further, say to 5000 SP? Or even 20,000 SP?
Perhaps the solution is to roll back the hard fork. The problem with that is that minnows will lose their newfound power. This has been a big boon and encouragement for many.
However I think those with lots of SP are making hay while the sun is shine so to speak. Most of us think Steem will go up and up, so this is just good self interested practice at this point, based purely on the incentives. So I guess in a nutshell we intend to try to counter those incentives mostly using social means, which can be effective.
The trade off has been more massive than I would have thought. The rewards curve set to squared was intended to stop self voting not just from the same account but from other, as it makes the loss of dividing your SP significant. That too has been removed in HF 19.
I would argue though that dealing small flags, up to but not further than countering a self vote, does not seem harmful to me. At the very most it is a disagreement with the reward that you have allocated yourself. It would be hard to make a cry moarh post about it and get support I would think.
I would be interested to hear an @steemitblog or similar official mouthpiece response to the self voting (and other) concerns of the populous since HF 19. I hope they do not lose their teeth because of the pressure to be super positive happy fun marketing people.
" Before I go on, how would you consider it if we raised the threshold further, say to 5000 SP? Or even 20,000 SP?"
Kinda like it was uneven treatment under "the law".
Whatever do you mean?
Well, you are treating people to different rules based on the money they have, right? This is admittedly a bit melodramatic, but that sounds like Aristocracy.
Yep
Usually, when someone concedes a point, you are supposed to respond to the rest of the logic rather than repeat it.
Do you have no response for the fact you endorse different treatment based on net worth, and that you think "your" (collective) judgment is correct on where that line should be drawn?
Because that's self-assigned power, however you slice it.
For one thing it's for particular purpose that has nothing to do with aristocratic ideas, for the other it's in a voluntary situation. Noone is forced to operate in the network.
I guess by that logic, all laws and rulings are voluntary. After all, nobody is forced to live anywhere, am I right?
I'm heading to the witness page now and adding you to my list. I have many votes left, because I am VERY selective about whats going on here.
I love smackdown kitty, though I do sometimes self vote comments, to move them up a page for visibility, above bots and crap, I am practising more self restraint since HF19 on all my votes. I do let my posts get the default self vote on steemit, and I hope "smackcat" (just wanted to say that outloud) is trained to know that on steemit, default self vote for posts is on, so it would be punitive to minnows to smack that for now. On chainbb, i'm told, self post votes default to off. /shrug, right now I'm making 6 cent votes at 100% so I'm hardly "draining the pool" but I am still practising better management in general to get the muscle memory I need as I grow in voting power.
So I want to propose another cat. I've been up and down the dial on witnesses whose ear I could reach and in chat #steemabuse and talking to the one or two friendly whales I have managed to interest in conversation, but still have no solution to a problem built in by design to block chain systems and steemit.
I and some others I know attracted the attention of an unsavory, copyright violating, user abusing, female attacking dhead and it turns out his day old account became instantly funded for over $18,000 and now he rageflags everything we post. He seems to have created a bot that trails his flags and also flags. It has cost me hundreds of dollars this week alone compared to post HF19 numbers from last week and on posts he managed to miss flagging before employing bots.
I'd like to see a judiciously moderated, heavily leveraged delegated massively powered bot, that can "fix" wrongful rage flagging with a powerful, mathematically derived minimum viable vote power to offset the flagger. Potentially dealing some damage back to their reputation as well but that's just because "I'm mad bro" and a vindictive secondary goal and probably not very savory.
Is this request making sense on a technical and philosophical level?
If you want to see the fully documented use case, contact me on discord @sircork or steemit.chat @sircork
Discord minnow support channel is ALWAYS on and I'm at my PC around 20 hours a day. I own an international company and have a steemit addiction, so sleep is for someday never maybe.
I'd love to introduce myself and kick around some ideas. I'm not just a newbie blogger, I'm a 30 year online tech vet who got his first computer in 1983 and first pro computer tech job in 1985 at age 15 and I've been Dir of Tech on multimillion dollar social network app projects most recently at 48yo until launching my own company again when some opportunities fell in my lap. Now I have three full stack dev teams running on four projects for high end corporate clientele. But mostly... I'm on steemit, desperately trying to contribute to the community and make the eco-system a better place. I'm working on three apps for steem now, which are user facing enhanced feature set tools for much needed things not currently possible in the UI/UX of steemit or steembb.
So, if you are down for some nerdy talk about saving the world, I'll show you the use case from hell. Hit me up.
Thanks for your time.
(Witnesses that I support:
@aggroed, @teamsteem, @gtg, @timcliff, @clayop, @ausbitbank, @dragosroua, @lok1, @reggaemuffin, @personzzz)
You just made the list with this post, which smacks of integrity and backbone. Admirable.
Thank you! I'm honored 😁
Two things: @smackdown.kitty only targets self voted comments, not main posts, for exactly the reason you mention. And it only targets users with more than 1000 SP, to leave the little ones alone. (I actually forgot to add this above and will be editing it in now).
You are NOT above the threshold so by the current plan your self voted comments would NOT be targeted.
If the troll in question is posting copyright violating material you can report in #steemabuse are you are, and let @cheetah know what's going on ( @anyx runs that). You can also petition people to back you up, and I'll certainly keep and eye on your account now for a while to see what I can see on this.
Don't lose heart, this is the way the game goes.
Again thank you. Looking forward to continued conversation.
I am a big boy and I hope you didn't interpret any of my comment as "whining!"
That would be embarrassing!
I appreciate the reply and I was aware of those other resources for sure. Hopefully other people who find themselves up against trolls will find those resources as well.
I will never lose heart! Thanks for the encouragement. I've been doing the online thing since the early 1980s, and this guy is HARDLY the worst thing I've ever seen or sadly, will likely see again.
I'd still like to see @fairflagfixbot come to life though! Yes, you can use that splendid name. free of charge! :D :D
Oh and @l0k1 is one of my fav people in chat and @reggaemuffin has always been very nice to me in our 1 or 2 comment encounters. I am also impressed with their work. We all love @timcliff, the most helpful man in the world and the rest each impressed me in various ways with their various contributions. @aggroed does such great things as "the welcome wagon" of steemit with P.A.L. and MSP and is one of my hero champions most of all. Not sure about his geekiness on witnessing as I know little about it, but as a community guy? Just stellar.
Your direct nature was the instant magnetic attraction bro... You be you, (and your alt lol) and never change except to grow when the opportunity presents itself and suits you!
Humble is as Humble Does :D
BRILLIANT! Please revert to above where I express total admiration for you man! You already had my vote. Wish I could liberally vote twice LOL! :D
I wonder what witness are used for :P, nice report dude
You can get more info about that over here and find info on various other topics as well in our guide channel on Steemit.chat.
+1
Yes as a newbie I was unaware that it was frowned upon and has negative consequences for those who upvote a post I upvoted. As soon as I found out, I quit upvoting myself. I think there are many who do not realize this. I wish the upvote yourself wasn't even an option.
That's great. I should underline that the effect newbies have is very small compared to users with a lot of Steem Power, and it's really them that we are trying to reach. But of course the arguments stand for everyone.
I quit upvoting myself also, after reading up on the subject.
Yes. I felt awful that I was doing that, but you can't change the past. I am happy I learned that my first week and a half in and not a month or more down the road.
Yeah, I learned it after a few days from reading posts like this one. Have a good 4th of july.
You too!
the idea of this bot of flagging self voted comments impressed me because it will encourage people to work more on their content quality
Thank you 😄 And to use their votes for others 🙂
Teem work makes the Steem Dreem Work!
I appreciate all the work you're doing, but I'm still not comfortable with that @smackdown.kitty idea.
I've read and responded to your comment on my announcement post, thanks of it. The project considerations are on-going at this point.
There are things we need to learn as newbies. It's a daily thing. Nice report.
Hmmm... i see the 1337 posts goin on there... (•̀ᴗ•́)و ̑̑
Glad someone got it 😜
How could i let that 1337 pass by? hehehe :>
I was just wondering what is FOSSbot voter?
I'm like the least techie guy that ever lived. :D
HI @personz,
I voted for your Witness. Can you also please vote for my witness?
Thanks
Hi @pouyan, firstly thank you for the vote. But I'm afraid I don't do votes for votes. I have read your witness report and will keep an eye on how you develop what you do and might vote for you in the future.
Thanks a lot for your reply. Can you help me on how to contribute to the community more? Do you have any document? Any instruction?
There are some introductions here and there but nothing I have to hand, sorry. What I do is read and comment on other people's post which are related to issues on the platform and engage in the conversation for solutions. I also make tools and make them freely available. I run a witness node and a seed which contributes in some small way to the platform by validating a few blocks here and there.
Also I noticed you voted for @personz as witness, but my witness account is @personzzz so if you want to support please vote for that one
Thanks, I will corect it.
Fixed
Nice report
"The interface does not show self votes prominently"
I don't get how you guys can be missing why this is. Because it is frickin' pointless. Anyone can just make a new account, transfer, and vote for their other account. YOU CANNOT STOP THIS. It's like you guys are following the "criminalize marijuana" playbook here.
It was enough of a concern to the founders of the platform for them to devise a solution to it if you read the whitepaper. I'm not convinced that it cannot be stopped.
I reject the analogy with marijuana criminalization. For one point, that always affected those on the lower strata of society disproportionately. What we propose would reduce the advantage of those on the higher strata of Steemit, i.e. those with large stake.
So, you're ok with the lack of logic that justifies the "repression", it's the target that you find offensive?
Have you considered this "whale's" thoughts, who think what you are doing will punish everyone via reduction in the Steem price?
https://steemit.com/steem/@sean-king/life-ain-t-fair-and-neither-is-steem-deal-with-it-and-self-vote-away
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STOPHello my dear friend
You are flattered
Please flood me @haji ♥