#project-smackdown - trends report for phase 1

#project-smackdown - the project reporting weekly on the top self comment voters and flagging the top 20 self voted comments every day.

Now in it's 2nd week of a changed algorithm v2, we look back on some of the trends for algorithm v1.

This report look at weeks 2, 3 and 4, from date 19th July to 8th August. In week 1 not enough stats we kept, though the same algorithm was used.

Note about information

This report is based only on comment self rewards for self voted comments with self voted reward above $1. We saw in the @sadkitten project countering bot net spam up votes (which included self votes) that rewards can be hidden across multiple accounts and at smaller levels. These while they do add up, would not have come to the notice of the v1 algorithm reported on here.

Summary

Sum of self voted comments rewards above $1

We see a general downwards trend which seems to level off at about $130 per day.

Sum of self voted comments with reward above $1

Again, a general downward trend which levels off.

Thoughts

It is of course impossible for us to know what effect this project had over this time. I am confident that we did have some effect in persuading people to self vote less, and I believe some of the downward trend is due to us but we can't know by how much.

One of the things we were criticized most for was that #project-smackdown would force people who wanted to gain directly from their stake to defect to using sybil / alt / sock puppet accounts, and possibly spread their votes out between many such accounts. I cannot say that that has not been an effect, but what I can say is that we are involved with other groups that look for voting rings, such as @sherlockholmes and @spaminator, and are not only doing this self voting intitiative.

To our critics, on this point I want to underline that doing nothing is not an option. We cannot in good conscience sit by with others attempt to "print money" based solely on their stake.

I hope to see this downward trend continue regarding self voting.

Top 10 users by reward amount

User	Amount	Number of days self voting comments
@sigizzang	$705.562	9
@adsactly	$640.375	9
@jejujinfarm	$288.666	2
@damarth	$279.280	12
@grognak	$237.769	12
@johnsmith	$211.812	12
@surfyogi	$189.702	11
@oldtimer	$135.450	3
@danlupi	$132.665	9
@musicholic	$124.196	3

All comment self voted users

with at least one comment self voted to value above $1, for comparison

Some users in detail

@sigizzang

At or near the top of our lists since the project started has always been @sigizzang. Here is an overview of their self voted comment rewards during this period.

@sigizzang is a Korean who seems like a crypto enthusiast. They currently have nearly 125k SP and 7.5k SBD in their wallet - quite a sizeable investment.

I don't read Korean so I translated some of their posts and was surprised to find their second last post made on the 8th August (which happens to be when this report ends) and is an apology for self voting! You can read it here.

Here's an excerpt (picked the most relevant and sensical parts) of it very very badly translated using Google translate. If anyone wants to correct me with a better translation please do.

I apologize for the inconvenience caused by the comment self-voting.

Last week I was informed by some foreigners about self - voting that I came to the top place in self - voting.
I was thinking that it was not a big deal.
[...]
At that time, I was not in a good mood to see such an article.
I've been working on it for a while now and I've been misunderstood by myself.
I personally did not know the problem of self-voting and I do not even know it.
[...]
If my self-voting prevents such growth, I will not do it because I am an investor ...
I apologize and apologize for what happened in my ignorance.
I would like to pass on the first place of self-voting to another person soon .. ㅠ
In the future, I will do my best with a better job.
[...]

This is encouraging. While I feel torn about the tone (perhaps it is simply the cultural style) I am happy that we led them to think about their policy of self voting in the context of the over all project of the network and thus the coin, and furthermore - their investment. We at #project-smackdown do consider our work to be an aggressive defence of our investment and that of others.

@adsactly

A.D.S.A.C.T.L.Y = Autonomous Decentralized Society Acting Cooperatively to Leverage You!

From information gathered here and here, @adsactly appears to be a community of investors who back various projects and speculate on a wide variety of coins. Kind of like a hedge fund.

@adsactly have 638k SP, nearly 5 times @sigizzang, and 2.5k SBD.

One of the ways that they generate value for their members is self voting comments. You can see that they were self voting to huge amounts early in our report keeping, which they are quite able to do considering their significant stake. However since the report their comment self voting has been smaller, though it continues.

For example this comment was generously self voted to $10.89 4 days ago:

We at adsactly love blocktrades infact whatever SteemPower that we have right now was bought from Blocktrades thank @blocktrades for creating such a wonderful platform. discord.me/adsactly

However before that it was 8 days ago (under $3), and before that 15 days ago at around $3.5, so much less than before, so I commend them on their self voting restraint of late. Keep it up 😽 👍

Regular high self voting investor types

@damarth is typical of this type of user. A lot of value locked into the platform as SP (they have 132k SP), posting a lot about crypto currency and - critically for our report - regularly up voting their own comments.

Their amounts are not the largest, but large, and quite regular, as you can see from above. Like nearly everyone on our lists, all this is done manually.

Though not as active in the last weeks, they are still commenting with large self up vote, most recently "Congratulations, it's only the beginning, with great content comes followers." [link, $18.57 self vote] and "Wow i like it :)" - [link, $15.28 self vote]

The same kind of thing from @johnsmith and many others outside the top 10.

"Power users" who happen to self vote comments

Some other users who end up with a lot of rewards from self voting comment also have high stake, and are very active commenters and posters, generally well connected in the community.

For example @surfyogi, @oldtimer, @fulltimegeek who have 71k, 114k, 353k SP respectively.

@surfyogi

@oldtimer

@fulltimegeek

Most comment self voters are in this category. I haven't looked very much at the ratio of self votes to out votes because that's a part of the new v2 algorithm, so it's hard to say anything generally about these users as they vary in stake and activity. However in order to get large absolute rewards, you have to have a somewhat sizeable stake (say 50k+ SP) so they are at least heavily invested.

From my interactions with users I'd put in this category though, they seem to feel they are due the self voted reward because of their not insignificant investment in the platform. It is justified variously by way of their ratio of out votes to self votes, that their comments do have value and so should be rewarded, or simply that they are entitled to do as they please with their stake.

For some it is also "required" by the interface - in order to bump up comments to a higher place in the order, as order is by reward value by default in most (all?) Steemit front end UIs. @Transisto has a great alternative to this (no reward for comment self votes) that would require a hard fork, but while it is still the case, I beseech users to restrain themselves from this. If their comments are seen as valuable, they will get bumped up by other users.

I think this group is harder to reach because it is genuinely felt that there is no wrong doing here. And there is none - it's just not great for the platform. At least that's what we think. We think this because, as has been stated many times now

• reward actions should be outward, toward other users
• outward actions should be well rewarded via curation rewards

And as these smart, invested people know, it makes sense now to self vote. That's why we flag, to contribute to the realignment of incentives. It will require a hard fork to fix the incentives and if you agree please share related posts and make your own contributions to the conversation. Do not let the issue fade away.

Uncooperatives

@grognak

Here's the text from one of their posts, Weekly Steem Burn!

I know some people will have issues with this post, and this is not to offend or upset anyone. This is just a place for others to use up extra Steem power that they have left over or don't have time to Curate with.

Some of us have invested pretty heavily into Steem and don't have the time to Curate articles all day. I usually do a couple of posts in the morning, work all day, and then come home late and go to bed. Not much time to browse Steem articles besides checking out some people i follow in the morning. I usually end up with a little or a lot of extra Steem power every day and it just disappears. So I wanted to start a post everyday that would allow you an area to post some comments and up-vote yourself guilt free and burn off some of that extra Steem and get some return on your investment. So post away below, burn off some of that extra Steem power before the refresh tomorrow!

We automatically flagged some of the comments there, but it's the same behavior as you see in bot nets, just on a smaller scale.

We're really against this concept of "extra" Steem Power (voting power is what they mean) and no time to curate. This kind of thing does not work towards Steemit as a social media platform and is again just printing money.

They seem to be powering down and cashing out, their last comment was 17 days ago and in the last days the only activity is reward claims and transfers to Bittrex.

I think some people will see this as us chasing investors from the platform and ultimately hurting Steemit. I respectfully disagree. I see investors that will just post literally meaningless comments of letter of the alphabet and then self vote them do not Get It ™, that Steemit is not just an investment but a social platform. It cannot be one without the other.

Bots

In general bots and bot nets seem to exist on the lower reward spectrum, for obvious reasons - to fly under the radar. A high SP account will be noticed an under scrutiny more easily. And unfortunately since HF 19, the linear reward curve removes the penalty for not shoring your SP into one account, so for anyone with a sizeable stake there is an overall benefit of splitting it up a bit if you which to do collusive, circular voting.

We did see one known bot account from @patrice 's work on @spaminator / @sadkitten on this list - @tard. We only picked up on the larger comment self votes and probably missed out on the bulk of these accounts activity, but we did see some of it.

A quick look at their comments and posts shows the familiar pattern of a massive Russian language ring we were able to target with @sadkitten.

What to make of all this!?

That's a long post! I wanted to take the time to present some of my work in the first phase of #project-smackdown. It takes really too much of my time, I need to automate it better, but it is certainly interesting looking through the accounts and getting context. While the behavior speaks for itself, with context we can begin to understand what happens to the humans involved.

Next?

As I mentioned in the last report, the algorithm has been modified to adjust for net (available) SP, which turns the metric into a kind of self voted return on investment, or svRoI to make something up 😅

More on that next time.

Until then, stay frosty! ⛄️