How to Prevent Abuse and Milking of Reward Pool

in #abuse7 years ago

I extend a comment on this @ post talking about abuse and milking of reward pool by some power users and whales, into this blog.

Self upvote should be removed. I personally never upvote my posts or comments and I think that self upvoting is most stupid think here on Steemit. It's like to fuck yourself and enjoy in the process. Again! It is stupid, weird, silly meaningless!!! Just greedy pigs upvote themselves to grab as much as possible from the reward pool. We all know them Steemit don't hide anything. I boost my earnings to use @minnowbooster bot lately but I stopped using it, because it's silly too.

So to domesticate this greedy herd I propose three changes in steem voting protocol:

  • Cancel self upvoting.
  • Powering down should be done through delegating steem power. Could be done automatically to followers which upvote your posts most, or user can delegate SP according his will.
  • If reputation/steem power ratio defined by the steem blockchain is exceeded the user is forced to delegate superfluous SP in one week. It this haven't been done superfluous SP is then burned by sending too the @null account.

This measures will stimulate users more to upvote other users for contributing good stuff and get an upvote by doing the same. Power down process will help distributing SP and sprout fair distribution of reward pool and SP upper limit will have same effect beside preventing abuses from really dominant whales.

Also flagging will be much more effective to whales too. Because if you get flagged hard your reputation is decreased, with that your reputation/steem power ratio is also affected and you will be forced to delegate your SP too (cooling your head and thinking what you done wrong). This will in great extend prevent a revenge hikes and also enable less powerful users to have a chance to defend themselves against power users attacks.


This theme is always hot here on Steemit. My intention is to start productive debate about this issues and I challenge you all to comment and contribute solutions to this problem on this platform.

Sort:  

I'm not sure if this works. I don't quite understand what u mean with powering down via delegation.

The thing is, if one does not allow self upvote then people just will create different accounts and use those to self upvote.

Why do u think self upvote is such a problem. I do think that voting has a bunch of design flaws, but i don't think that not allowing self upvoting helps much, and i think it creates other problems.

By powering down via delegating I mean that instead of gradually just easing your SP account and release steem to your liquid steem account this process will include delegating SP to other people.

Steem intended for power down is transferred as delegated SP to their accounts and is there decreased gradually over 13 weeks, then it is transferred back to the account from where it came. With this operation a time of easing SP is better used. And People get SP for upvoting. This will probably help red fish and minnows to established on the platform and create better distribution of wealth on Steemit.

As a matter of self upvoting I think it is a little illogical. It can be really done with have multiple accounts but my point is somewhere else.
I think that making self upvoting so obvious this has become a common practice here. Because almost everybody upvoting themselves, the part of distribution of rewards is not circulating between people it is in eternal cycle on one account.
Technically self upvoting can be replaced with delegating some SBD from reward pool proportional to your SP per day. In extreme case if all SBD from reward pool is distributed in this way no SBD will remind for upvoting each other. Steemit is then degraded to a facebook level where nobody get anything for social interactions. Even worse, those who have a lot of SP will have it more and more in proportion with those who have few SP.

This promote a stand that if you just have an account here you automatically get reward for doing nothing on the platform. This contribute to growing a wealth gap between people here on Steemit.

If direct self upvoting is not possible on the platform than smaller part of population on Steemit will use this a little more complicated way of having multiple accounts to upvote themselves. So sitting on the platform upvoting shitty posts of no value and sucking reward pool (what's is most people dislike here) will not be so obvious option. In majority people, especially newbies, will have to move their asses and do some work to provide more valuable content to get upvotes and this is a social dimension, where Steemit can benefit.
Gradually smarter ones will discover a way to upvote themselves (multiple account stuff) but those who established a flock of active followers will continue earning rewards through the social interaction of rewarding followers and friends for providing good content on Steemit.

This will provide more good quality posts, less shitty stuff and better social health on Steemit.

@knircky if you think my ideas are sound, I will be delighted that we can start a campaign about this matter, because strength is in numbers and as more and more people interact and cooperate results can be amazing.

Which other problems, you mean, self upvoting create?

Be good! :-)