Whitepaper Discussion on Voting Abuse
In the post today about the new Steem whitepaper (yea!), there was a conversation between @ats-david and @ned regarding voting abuse. @ned suggested @ats-david take his concerns up with the witnesses, so I wanted to share my views and open a discussion. This is not the first time voting abuse has been discussed, and I'm sure it will not be the last. It is an important discussion to have though, and IMO - one to keep having.
Abusive-Self-Voting vs. Voting for Yourself
I would like to clarify one thing that does cause a lot of confusion. There is a difference between upvoting your own posts/comments, and abusive-self-voting. It is not wrong to vote for yourself. If you created a good post/comment, then why wouldn't you vote for it? It becomes a problem when you are voting more for it because it is yourself. If you wouldn't upvote someone else's post/blog (with the same content) for more than 10 cents, but because you wrote it, it is suddenly worth $5 - then that is a problem. Do you see the difference?
Here is what the (new) whitepaper has to say about voting abuse (pages 14 and 15):
Ok, that is obviously a lot to take in. I'd like to break it down and highlight a few areas that IMO are very key.
- Those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy .... Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves.
- Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders.
- Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
- The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
These are my take-aways:
- There really is a responsibility for the large stakeholders to use their power responsibly, and vote in ways that they feel is in the best long-term interest of the platform. They need to see themselves as stewards of the platform. If abusive self-voting over-runs the platform, users will lose their faith in the system, and the value of the token will go down.
- The primary tool to counter abusive self-voting is to downvote.
- There is always going to be some abuse. We should not try to stop it completely. As long as it doesn't become an issue to the point where it is harming the community, then it is within reasonable limits. (If it does start to become a serious issue, see #2.)
- Rather than going to great lengths to completely stop abuse, we should try to focus on bringing in more users, and increasing the value of the token. (Let's not fight over pieces of a little pie, let's make the pie bigger so everyone gets a larger slice.)
Changing Linear Rewards
There have been a lot of people calling for a change back to non-linear rewards, and see that as the solution to our problem. I want to present an alternate view, which is that we should stick with linear rewards. The reason that abusive self-voting is a problem under linear rewards is because users with a small to medium sized stake are able to influence rewards, and some are using that influence for selfish reasons. If you take away the ability for abusive self-voting to give significant rewards without a pile-on of other voters, then you are also taking away the "regular users" ability to influence rewards. Any shift away from linear rewards is a shift back towards only the major stake holders having influence/power.
I would like to propose a few ways that we can handle this:
- Every Steemian chooses for themselves how they want to use their stake. For those people who want to chose to use theirs purely for the purpose of increasing their own personal rewards (or those of their friends, sock-puppets, etc.) they need to ask themselves if this is their vision of how the platform is going to scale to the masses. Do we want a community where millions of users can join us and have a chance to earn a share of crypto by contributing to the platform/community, or do we want it to be a community where the only way to get ahead is to buy your way in or know someone with a lot of stake?
- The people in the community who want to combat abusive self-voting should organize. In the same way that there is Curie for finding good content, and SteemCleaners for fighting plagiarism / abuse, there should be a well known group specifically for targeting the worst cases of self-voting abuse. There should also be easy ways for people in the community to contribute by sharing links they discover, or delegating SP to an anti-self-voting-abuse account. (I encourage those who are already organizing around this to promote what they are doing in the comments below.)
- The community should monitor the amount of rewards going to self-voting abuse. The last I heard, it was around 10% of the rewards pool. While this is still somewhat high, that does mean that the other 90% is still there for the rest of the community to earn through participation in the platform. As much as possible (without completely ignoring the problem) try to focus on the 90% and ways we can use it to grow the platform.
I know this is a long post, but I want to conclude with two final thoughts:
The Steemit dev team is building us the platform to use, but it is ultimately up to the community how we use it. We can continue to make requests over changes that we want, but unless/until they are made, we have to work with what we've got. I think the platform that we have is already amazing, and from what I understand there are some pretty cool things still yet to come. (I am very excited for communities!!)
As far as abuse is concerned, we as a community need to decide how to handle it. There will likely be a general consensus around 'etiquette' of what is 'right' and 'wrong' but at the end of the day, it will be up to each individual to decide what they want to do with their stake. It is really up to you. Hopefully enough of us make the decision to do what we feel is best for the long-term success of the platform.
We're approaching this from the wrong angle.
Currently, self upvoting is the most lucrative use of voting power.
We can't make it less lucrative (mutual voting alliances, sock puppets, etc); so we need to make curation (the other possible use of voting power) more lucrative.
Give people something better to do with their voting power, and they'll do that instead.
I expanded on this idea here.
(Past payout)
Bingo. This is why having a nonlinear reward curve and curation rewards worked. Most people couldn't do much by upvoting themselves, but with enough stake could earn using their own SP with good curation.
HF19 helped with curation rewards on the lower end but drastically changed the other side of the equation. This has lead to a situation where many people who are thinking about Steem long-term (like Dan and company did when they wrote the white paper) see that this situation of self-upvoting is cannibalistic and not sustainable.
nˆ2 was gave too much power to a few, while linear may indeed not be the right approach as well. I read from many something in between is the best approach. Do you know if something inbetween is possible to implement technically? I think that was part of the discussion, the inbetween functions was not possible to implement, or was/is that more a BS argument?
The "correct" formula, if we assume that "value" is commensurate with network "connections", is n.logn. calculating logs is computationally a pain, but can easily be approximated by n.(number of digits of n)
But anyway, raising the influence at the top end is just for rich accounts. I proposed some time ago how to "squash" the effect of excessive voting for one account, whether self or other. Just think what n^2 actually means: an account with 100k SP compared with 1000 SP will have 10,000 times the voting power.
The idea was/is that the few rich accounts are less bad for the community, and this idea is enhanced since all the more 'bad' seen in recent days with so many new accounts here at Steemit. However, the question is if that is indeed the case in relative terms. I have no stats on this. I must say, before we changed to linear, some of my posts got way more rewards, then I now get. I suppose this has to do with the linear curve where the powerful voters are not that powerful anymore; But it could also have to do with other dynamics that changed. Who knows.
I realise I'm 2 months behind here but ...
If the curve was n.log.n then how much larger would 100k SP be compared to 1000 SP?
It depends a lot on the constant factors. Using log_2 and no fixed constant an example:
SP = 1 weight = 0
SP = 2 weight = 2
SP = 4 weight = 8
SP = 8 weight = 24
SP = 16 weight = 64
...
SP = 1024 weight = 10240
SP = 131072 weight = 1703936
So as you can see here doubling the SP results in "a bit more" than double the weight and increasing SP by 128x increases weight by 166x (compared to n^2 where doubling the SP results in 4x weight and 100x the SP results in 10000x the weight).
There are some technical reasons (some of which I understand and some of which I don't) that complicate implementing n log n. There are also philosophical/fairness/social reasons to want to preserve linear and not convey a programmatic advantage to the largest stakeholders in excess of their stake (even if only by a relatively modest degree).
Going back to 50/50 curation/author rewards is one of the ideas on the table. IDK if it will solve the problem though. If an abusive user has a $20 upvote, it is a lot easier to self-vote and take the $20, than it is to "gamble" and curate, hoping that they will get at least 2x payout on their $10 curation reward.
It is (much) more beneficial for any SP holder to launch a vote-sell service, directly or indirectly through delegation of SP to minnows who run the service. Hence the enormous increase of such services, with a good side (buy vote for someone else) and a bad side (increase of self curation and voting reducing quality more and more out of the equation).
How could they get 2x the payout?
It gets into some complicated curation math, but basically if someone votes on a good post before others do, and then lots of people vote for the post after that, they earn higher curation rewards for being one of the early voters.
Where do the extra curation rewards come from, since voting within the first 30 minutes of the post being published gives the post's author more than the default 75% of the rewards and effectively cuts curator's rewards. So on one hand you're penalized and but then you can make a lot more (2x or more?), I've heard before that there's some mechanism for incentivizing the curators to vote early in hopes of a post exceeding some threshold and rewarding better, isn't that incentive for whales more than anything else since they'd single handedly be able to make a post pass that threshold ?
The formula gives more of the rewards to the users that voted earlier.
Not if the users voted in the first 30 minutes, or has that been removed?
It is still there. If you vote within the first 30 minutes you will share part of your curation rewards with the author.
To simplify it - if you found an amazing post that didn't have anyone voting for it, and you voted for it right at the 30 minute mark, then after that a ton more people found it and voted on it and it made it to the trending page - you would get a large amount of curation rewards.
So it's from the curators that voted later, from their 25%?
That's right. Setting aside the 30 minute rule for the moment (assume all votes are >30 minutes), curation rewards are a total of 25%. Of that 25%, earlier voters get more and later voters get less (or nothing).
Wouldn't it be better to disable self voting?
It can't really be done. The users who are actually using it for abuse purposes would just create a second account, and upvote account 1 from account 2 to get around it.
Yes, but that would make it a bit difficult.
It is not difficult at all.
Thanks Tim. Just glad to hear it's floating around. Really appreciate everything you do, mate.
I have generally been more on the side of keeping it 75/25, but I have been warming up to the idea of 50/50 as a way to incentivize better curation.
My biggest reservation is because I still don’t think that the current curation implementation actually incentives people to be good curators, whereas ‘good’ is defined as filtering through the content and identifying the posts/comments that add the most value to the platform (subjective opinion of course). People will continue to vote (mostly through auto upvotes) on what they predict will earn the most rewards. The premise that they are one and the same has unfortunately proved to be false in practice - at least with the current way things are setup/working.
Another factor is that curation rewards generally favor users who already have a larger stake in the platform. Any user can join the platform and be a successful author or commenter (provided they have the skills) but to be a successful curator requires having a significant amount of SP (whether bought, earned, or delegated).
One change that I think will be easy to get people on board with is to reduce the early voting penalty from 30 minuets down to around 5. That would at least bring the balance closer to the 75/25 compared to the current 88/12.
This is true but with linear rewards the effect is greatly reduced. It's certainly the case that more SP generates more rewards, which is natural, and probably okay (and doesn't really promote a 'rich get richer' effect), but to what extent it has a higher return on investment, I don't know, though it is almost certainly much flatter than before.
As a first step I agree with shortening the reverse auction (with other benefits), and we can see how much that changes things. Some part of the effect will be faster bot votes so the aggregate shift may not be that much, I don't know.
Another intermediate step I would support is enforcing actual 75/25 instead of dynamic. When the reverse auction reduces curation rewards on a particular post or comment, instead of giving them to the author, put them back into a pool for other curation, so the mix of author/curation always stays at 75/25 (or whatever specified mix).
One thought to offer in closing: If 'most reward' doesn't correlate with 'good' (value adding) content as you suggest, then posting rewards are no less dysfunctional than curation rewards (i.e. it means content that isn't 'good' is being rewarded). I don't see that as a particular reason to favor author rewards over curation rewards, do you? At least increased curation rewards has the potential to improve this situation by incentivizing more effort on curation. I don't see where more author rewards do anything to improve the dynamic of bad voting. The latter seems almost impossible.
The reduction of the early voting penalty should be the easiest to pass since it isn’t very controversial and it would be an easy change.
The variable curation/author split that which can be set by the individual platforms (or even the users), rather than being hardcoded to 75/25 seems like a really interesting idea too. There are details in @jesta’s reply to the recent steemitblog post. I wonder if we can rally support around that.
Yes, clearly the latter is a more significant change in terms of implementation, maybe controversial, hard to say. But yes, very interesting idea. Overall I agree with your assessment.
I actually also think that a positive approach (more incentive for curation) is better than a negative one (e.g., downvotes).
I do agree, a positive approach generally works better than a negative approach. But, downvotes are required at all times. It is finding the right balance. What about extra rewards for those who do good, whatever we define as good, on top op votes/rewards to post and comments directly? Maybe incentives towards accounts at account level?
I would tend to say this is good. Anything that rewards people involving themselves on the platform is IMO good, whatever it is.
Very well said, this idea is a good one. Realigning incentives do not always need to be removing something but can be making something else more attractive.
I would completely endorse a solution like this. Because pending rewards are relative to the total pending rewards for everyone, giving more rewards for more positive use of stake would in effect reduce self voting rewards.
a combination of both is ideal. A Bigger Carrot and a stick.
It's all very interesting and we could discuss this until the cows come home.....
But in the end, it's either allowed, or it is not.
And 99% of the folks that join Steemit, just need to know what they are allowed to do.
I think we have a very intellectual crowd, that can "OVER THINK IT" just about 1000%, so we also have to avoid that as well.
PEACE!
We are going to discuss it precisely until the cows come home. The cows of incentive realignment. 🐮
Unfortunately there is a bit of thinking to do here. I don't see the popular will to remove self voting but an idea like @mattclarke proposed would be a massive step in the right direction. Opportunistic self voters might find that curating becomes the way to go to maximise their return.
When Ned delegated his SP to help propel a few crabs out of the bucket he also effectively repelled new, better crabs from said bucket. Those crabs could've gotten the bucket mainstream acceptance but as they were repelled, the remaining crabs will never benefit from their addition. Instead they'll continue to sit in their bucket chat answering the same questions over and over from the little crablets that somehow fell in.
While I am not a ned hater, I have no idea why he doesn't realize this is a problem. It isn't just the trending page, it is also the witness votes and there is no way to pretend we are "decentralized" with this going on.
I don't dislike Ned or have any issue with his contribution to blockchain projects aka Steemit. The SP delegation is the one great issue, perhaps the greatest issue, that's holding the platform back. Look at @paulag's statistics here and a few previous pulls. How is a big crab, let's say from the music industry as that's my background, supposed to willingly enter this bucket when Ned already decided which crabs will be eaten and which will make it.
I don't see any problem with self-voting. I see even some of the biggest critics have come around to this idea. Indeed, very obviously, it's an important driver for Steem Power demand. If this network were to thrive, advertisers would throw in millions to get their posts up top. Neither do I see an issue with linear rewards. Where I do have an issue, though, is the current vote power reserve rate. A target of 10 votes per day is simply not enough, and an overwhelming deterrent for curators to significantly downscale or indefinitely halt curation activities. It's forced me and several other engaged curators to give up on active curation. It also encourages people to save voting power while voting on others, so they can vote for themselves with the precious 100% strength vote.
Anyway, all of this has been discussed time and time again, before and after the hardfork 19.
When I first joined here, I suggested downvote rewards. Fighting abuse is an important function that should be incentivized - particularly if the same post is then downvoted by others. Yes, I'm aware there's revenge downvoting or spiteful downvoting, but I see that as no different from self-upvoting. Besides, they would continue downvoting irrespective of anything. There's also the issue that the most abusive posts will be downvoted to $0; so where's the rewards generated then? Just a thought experiment. Either way, there should be some incentive for people to form abuse fighting groups.
Communities will solve a lot of issues, but there's still the un-communitied posts and comments that are open to rampant self-voting.
I understand you say: we only have 10 votes/day, but with the vote slider at 25%, we have 40 votes per day. Yes ok, we can use the 100% on ourself and a (much) smaller on others, but your statement you stopped active curation because of only having 10 votes a day, I don't really understand since you could continue active curation with the vote slider at 25%.
Incentives to downvotes: Absolutely agree, it needs to be implemented in a way that tools are available for abusive downvoters to get penalised. Account not posting and commenting can currently not be penalised. Maybe we shall think of the ability to vote at account level as well, creating a way to also penalised abusers at account level.
The whole "drop voting slider to 25% and it'll be all the same" doesn't work for me at all. I tried it for 2 months and failed at it miserably. Few reasons -
So, after over 2 months of fighting he system, I have embraced it. Now I just go through a small fraction of the posts I used to go through and call it a day. That's what the system wants you to do, so I shall.
Gee, if only someone had pointed this out ahead of time.
I understand you points, and I see the benefit in active curation by a larger amount of Steemians. The down side of all of this is lower distribution of votes. I still try to give 25% votes to others on posts and comments generally a little less and use up my 20% for the day. But I must say, with other dynamics in our community, I dont look at the normal channels anymore, and use alternative ways to read posts, essentially a list of my favourite authors, and from time to time I go through the NEW channel, but even my own HOME channel I hardly look at anymore. A shame for all those who publish good posts since it is more difficult for them to trigger me to read their posts and get a vote from me. I wish we would have a different system, in which the content I really like gets to channels I actively like to look at . I used Esteem Life app for some time, and have some channels setup to discover interesting posts from authors I do not follow. However, that App is a bit too buggy for me to really like it for daily use. But that said, such functionalities should have been part of our prime interfaces to the Steem blockchain.
Because of the slider bar you have AS MANY votes as you want. I don't see why people keep thinking they only have 10 votes.....
Or maybe you are saying its easier to abuse powerful votes, so REDUCE the max voting power to less and it will be harder to game.....Either way I don't think this is the issue.
It seems pretty easy and simple to me, powerful voters form guilds or groups that specifically notify abusers and then if they proceed anyways down vote them to give them a taste....if that doesn't work, down vote them into oblivion.
No one will play by rules which result in 0 payouts....
Actually you need not even bother with the slider bar at all (I'd love to see an option to turn it off) and you still have as many votes as you want. If you vote 20 times, then your votes are worth half as much each. The system auto-adjusts.
True, though you still have "more control" with the slider bar than without, but as you say you still have as many votes as you use and with each vote the value adjusts within the system.
Hey don't know if your responding to me specifically or just in general but I really appreciate how involved & experienced you are in this community. I see few if any who seem to see what is going on in Steemit more than you.
Sure would have been nice to meet you at SteemFest.
@timcliff, one of things I like most about Steemit is that the community can censor and police itself through free market principles.
You don't like it, then you don't have to buy it (through an upvote that is).
Now when someone within the community acts maliciously, then the community has the ability to penalize that person for his or her actions.
We the people need to understand our role to correct behavior, impact change, and determine what is acceptable.
We the people also need to show grace and understanding to our fellow community members. Let's remove malicious acts, but let's protect differences of opinion and interest.
We can't rely on a corporation to tell us how to act civilly. We need to learn how to do that on our own.
Bravo!
Thanks for this post @timcliff, I'm glad the issue is still being discussed.
#project-smackdown is doing exactly this, and I'm not aware of another group that are doing it. We target the "worst" self voters for comments only, which would probably fit your definition of "abusive" self voters. We do comments only because at the time we started voting for your own post was default steemit.com UI behavior, and because it is easier to hide self votes distributed across many self votes than it is on posts.
The team is the Steem Coop, which now includes @the-ego-is-you, @transisto, @rycharde, @andybets and me. We opperate using @smackdown.kitty and would happily take any delegations. You can find us on steemit.chat at #steem-coop-public and we are more than happy to discuss our policy for identifying what it means to be a "worst" self voter, or comment on any of our posts (made through my account). I will hopefully be making another report within a few hours.
I'm interested that your definition of abusive self voting is voting more for yourself than for others. Why did you choose this? It looks like this is more on ethical grounds than anything else.
I'll try to keep this as brief as I can, but to clarify my thinking (I don't speak for the group here but I think there'd be broad agreement) I am against self voting because it allows users to contribute nothing or very little to the platform and see quite a large increase in their stake (and we use the term return on investment for this). I think this is in line with the founding ethos of Steemit as described in the whitepaper, and still described in the updated version. I would see this as real abuse, because if you are doing this while others are squirrelling away - posting, commenting, curating -
all with effort and consideration, you are taking advantage of the buzz they bring to the platform which will be the thing that makes it succeed.
I think that unfortunitely there are a lot of people who think that there is nothing wrong with simply having stake and self voting. This could be on ultimate freedom grounds (it's allowed, so I will do), on investment grounds (buying and powering up STEEM is valuable in itself and can be automatically rewarded via self votes), or other popular ideas, but it will always fall flat on the fact that this is a social network and social actions should be the ones the system rewards.
That's why I completely agree with @mattclarke in his idea of better balancing curation rewards. When I originally came to Steemit this was one of the things that I was so impressed with, that they system rewards us for the hard work of finding the best stuff and voting on it. There's literally no curation effort in voting for your own stuff. It's just an arbitrary return on your investment.
This perspective is why #project-smackdown currently operates on what we call self vote return on investment or
svROI. We target those who gain the most relative to their stake, so those who are abusing the self vote ability (again, for comments only at this time).In your closing statement you seem to say the community and each of us individually should decide this. The general sentiment seems to be that we should encourage (or even coerce) each other into non-abusive behavior instead of making a blockchain system level change. Is this correct?
Personally I don't think this will be enough but I would be curious on your direct answer to this question. Sorry for the long reply, longer than I wanted, but thanks again for keeping this issue in the foreground.
Great reply! I will respond with a longer comment when I get home.
Re: #project-smackdown - you should continue to make this more of a well-known name. Why isn't the steemit.chat channel called #project-smackdown? Is there a discord one? Is there a @project-smackdown account? I like the idea - I just think you should continue to build on it :)
It is human nature to vote for yourself and your friends. There is no way that we are going to be able to stop it, and to even try is spending energy in the wrong area (IMO). The key is that people are not voting for themselves at the expense of the platform. There is no 'exact point' as far as when something constitutes abuse vs. being normal accepted behavior. It is easy to tell when things are on the extreme end though, which is really where I think the focus should be. I.e. self-upvote of a "nice post" comment to $50.
The goal of the platform is to distribute the currency to users who are adding value to the platform. If there are people who are actively involved, posting, commenting, and voting on other people's material too - then they are adding value to the platform. If some of the coins they earn are because they are voting on their own stuff, then it isn't really in violation of the spirit of the blockchain.
I've comments on this in a few other places.
Yes. Similar to plagiarism, it is ultimately up to each individual whether they do it, but there is an overall sentiment that it is not acceptable. Abusive-self-voting can probably reach similar status, and I think it is up to the community to make this happen.
I think an important thing that will need to happen though is for people to accept non-abusive self voting. The very difficult part is going to be to determine where to draw the line.
Thanks for your detailed reply.
I like you analogy to plagiarism, though I think there's less of a consensus about self voting.
What struck me most was this:
Perhaps. But this can only really happen after incentives change. Right now it's too easy to milk it with direct self voting, and the same thing but with a few alts.
Well, the problem is that if you change the incentives to prevent voting abuse, we go back to a platform where the votes of the regular users do not really have an effect, and the handful of whales will be deciding on the majority of rewards. There isn't really a clean workable proposal that has a solution to both problems.
Do you remember @rycharde 's idea about votes getting less effective the more you vote on the same people? I'd love to see some experiments done with that.
It's hard to know how things will play out without trying them. No one wants to go back to the skewed balance of before. Still, I think we can definitely see that the incentives are not optimal. Do you suggest they are and that we just need to "police" more?
The more I think about all these proposals the more I think we need to run this stuff on a test net. Wouldn't it be fun to try that out with a few hundred people? @sneak, I don't know if you do this kind of thing in house but I think we'd benefit a lot from StInc's leadership in this area.
I liked the idea, but there were some people against it. One of the main arguments was that the people who are actually abusing the platform would just create 10 sock puppet accounts (or however many were needed) to get around it. Creating hundreds of accounts is actually quick/easy/cheap.
Perhaps that level of determination is best dealt with my the ad hoc methods you advocate in your root post here. I am personally involved with opposing nearly 10 thousand scam accounts engaged in exactly this. Unless there is a really fundamental change this kind of thing is here to stay and needs bot type solutions to.
However that kind of issue is "sexy" - very interesting and easy to get behind opposing because it's so obviously wrong. What I aim to challenge that is not so obvious is the self rewarding of established, reasonable, interesting folks who are actually engaged but who are effectively skimming off the cream of the platform.
I think you're probably not in favor of this as you mention that we all need to accept self voting, that it's somehow "natural" (you did not provide any reason to believe this by the way) and we should concentrate on abuse. Well the data indicates that obvious abuse is far less important in terms of value than self votes.
If there is a user who is engaged in the platform and adding value through what they do, and they upvote their own (good) content, there really isn't an issue with that. As a stakeholder they are using their influence to direct the rewards pool to the content that they feel is adding value to the platform. It is within the 'acceptable constraints' of what SP is supposed to be used for.
If user is using their SP to upvote their own content above what it is worth, then that is abuse (in my view). I realize that this is a difficult thing to objectively quantify (which is why this problem is so difficult). There are quite a few cases that are pretty clear/obvious though. IMO, these are the ones that we should be focusing on.
I can see how some power users would be able to create 100 accounts and develop a voting distribution/bot that optimises their voting power for their own benefit, but this would be a very small minority of accounts. I think it would help a lot by creating an administrative burden for those still wishing to continue voting abuse.
The accounts that are doing the most damage from self upvote abuse are the ones that can easily do it.
You've said it very well. Look at the big picture and take a long term view.
Yes, this really seems quite simple to me. We the community get to decide what is abusive and what is supportive to the long term success of Steemit.
If we use groups/guilds to find abuse (based on the guidelines set forth) to first give notice of said guidelines, then if no change is made give a down vote and if it continues then down vote until no posts make any at all.
No one will abuse the guidelines if they make 0. The only reasons people scam it is to profit. If there is no profit then it won't happen.
Realistically it would be very easy to make a bot that spots spammy activity or "abusive" activity and give that notice automatically.
Maybe I should write a post about it, though it seems like I haven't really thought of anything new.
(Addressing separate issue, just thought it was a good place to put it)
I just feel the bigger more immediate problem should be spam. It may sound like hyperbole but the majority of posts here are spam/theft.
The worst thing for the site is that the word spam enters the room whenever one talks about it to those familiar. That is how Steemit is known in the wider community. When contacting artists and writers to confirm their work is stolen, they frequently say 'LOTS of my stuff has been stolen on steemit' - with anger and frustration.
Steemit is officially a 'spam website', and it'll never grow to anything more until that is addressed.
Whether or not the 'spam' in question fits under the definition purely, there are still those who google translate, post nothing but a youtube video, paste a news article and just throw the source at the bottom. All of these actions are rewarded here and incentivize exploitation. The website is a river of data perpetually crossing the line of illegal content.
I'd suggest something like a minimum time before being able to post. Like the 3 seconds per upvote, 20 seconds per comment, perhaps 10 minutes before posting, and 3 hours between posts or something.
It would at the very least ensure spammers are putting the time into it.
fully agree. Maybe we can have a spam button and mark spam posts as such.
I totally agree with this and this below. Thank you for this post Tim. I really appreciate it!