RE: Operation Clean Trending
Sorry but that sounds a lot like "mob rule". When you write "it doesn't deserve a dollar since it brings no value to the community" you are implying that you are the one or among the ones who decide what brings and doesn't bring value to the community ... Who gave you that role or what makes you think you are entitles to it ? That there is only one way to define "the community" and it is obviously the way you (and those who think like you) define it ...
I guess this drama currently unfolding goes to show why anarchy cannot work - every guy with a metaphorical gun implicitly assumes that things are "right" or "wrong" according to a scale of values that he takes for granted and believes absolute, and also happens to be his scale of values ...
Also saying Suesa's post shouldn't make that much because other posts more deserving do not earn nearly as much is again a very "communist" way of looking at things (it implies "everybody should be judged and ranked according to one rule" - it basically ends up encouraging conformism and kills creativity)
Most of the Trending posts are "overvalued" - is one way of putting it that implies that there is one definition of value (and you are using it).
Paid votes using bots are a bad idea I believe but in this case the cure is worse than the disease, in my opinion
Yes, everyone is. That's why we get to vote.
Another way of seeing it is "nobody is".
I can decide what brings value to ME. But I shouldn't judge on behalf of THE COMMUNITY, nobody placed any power-of-attorney in me ! I can only talk for myself. You can only talk for yourself, you cannot suddenly decide that, because YOUR PERSONAL JUDGEMENT says that it doesn't bring value to you then it automatically means that it doesn't bring value to THE COMMUNITY.
Actually, I'm not sure you even realize the enormity of what you've written ... We get to vote FOR OURSELVES. Your vote indicate what is valuable (or not) FOR YOU! You have absolutely NO RIGHT to imagine that you speak on behalf of THE COMMUNITY.
YOU and THE COMMUNITY are distinct entities. THE COMMUNITY as a whole cannot vote. What is valuable for it results from the aggregate of individual values. If you flag something that many people upvoted it means you are challenging the judgement of the people who upvoted, you are defying them, by annihilating the effect of their vote you want to deny them the right to express their appreciation. It is extremely destructive.
In case the value comes from bots then it means you are defying and challenging the current steemit system. You can do that indeed, I too believe the current HF19 could do with some tweaking, but I think downvoting is the wrong approach. We should instead plead with whoever can do something about it to change the system.
If you want Steem to be successful then you (speaking generally, not just you personally) need to be assessing what in your opinion adds value to the community (especially the community of investors who have entrusted their capital to STEEM/SP) and what does not. And then expressing that with voting. Because otherwise there is no mechanism to ensure the investors' money being spent on rewards is actually delivering value, and instead those who value their own personal enrichment will prevail. Investors will then abandon it and it will die.
There is no 'free money' here. It all comes from investors who buy in. Unless limits are put on those who want to take that money and put it straight into their pockets, investors will turn off the lights and the party will be over.
You are wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to debate. I'm preparing a more elaborate answer that I'll publish as a standalone post because I am convinced the debate is central to the future of steem (the blockchain system)
What value does it brings to the community that it deserves to have such a humongous payout? Does it help people? Change someone's life? Does it develops the ecosystem?
The whole idea of this platform is that if the community find a post valuable enough they upvote it. If you upvote a post up to 800 with bots, 85% of the votes being bought then who is the one deciding the value? You or the community?
I have my definition of value and others have theirs, but that is the idea, if people find something valuable (whatever that means to them), they use their VP to upvote it, showing their appreciation.
For example, your post is in Trending on the tag Steem, way above mine but you bought all of your votes, and I didn't. The community upvoted my post because they found it valuable. So what does that mean, your post is of better quality because it has a bigger payout?
How's the cure worse than the disease? If someone from the community finds your post overvalued, they flag it. The rewards someone bought, go back to the reward pool and the whole community is benefiting from it one way or another.
I agree with your analysis, I think the whole idea of self-voting and bot voting is extremly misguided and said as much in the beginning. But then everybody answered : "these are the rules of this platform, if you don't like it you can go away". Ok, if these are the rules and self-voting and bots are part of the game then what people are doing is just playing the game by the rules.
I agree the game is rigged (a guy from Nairobi or Aceh has little chance to be able to buy several hundred $ worth of bot voting) but the solution is not "opininon wars" that are ultimately destructive ("I think your content is not valuable so I harm you") but rather correcting the problem from its root.
The root of the problem is the "Sybil attack" that the Steem whitepaper acknowledges as a challenge yet it brings no solution, quite the contrary it lets the reader think that it is a good thing to have a system that is vulnerable :
The flagging was not intended for "over-valued" posts - especially when the guy paid for the exposure with his money, it was intended for spam, trolling, etc.
The cure is worth than the disease because it seeds discord and calls for revenge, it generates destructive strife instead of healing and community building. It distracts from encouraging constructive contribution and channels effort and energy into destructive behaviour.
Have a look for instance at the ideas that are presented and inform this post from @lishu, especially the Ted talks he links to.
Every educator will tell you that in order to build and educate gently you need to 1. encourage desirable behaviour (obviously) and 2. ignore undesirable behaviour. Punishing should only be reserved for extreme cases.
To get back to solving Steemit abuse, I am convinced that the solution is to have true, real, provable identities.
As you hinted, the value should be indicated by the communities (plural, very important ! otherwise we go toward a mirror image of the "politically correct" that so suffocate our societies today). But you can't build communities when you don't know who you are talking about, when you cannot tell whether two accounts are of the same person or of two different persons or are bots.
This platform has no rules, and this is the beauty, the people can decide what's acceptable and what's not thus the bots don't have to be part of the game.
It's not a vulnerable system, it has no central authority that can stop bad stuff happening, but the community can decide how to operate and flagging is the only way to stop bad stuff. When I say community, I refer to the whole blockchain as a community.
The flagging was meant for whatever the individual wants to use it for. We have plenty of low-quality posts in Trending that are just overvalued, bought most of their rewards and certainly deserve some flagging.
I don't think you're right; you can't just ignore the undesirable behavior, if you see bullshit, you have to call it out. Otherwise, if you ignore it, that person doesn't learn anything and just moves on with his life thinking he did the right thing.
I don't think that's the solution, far from it. Many people want to stay anonymous because it's a matter of privacy since it's a blockchain and everything you say stays here forever. In case something happens in the future, those people don't want to have their views linked to their identities here forever.
When I write "ignore" it shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. The usage of a strong word ("ignore") is to divert the reader as strongly as possible from "punishment". I do think that some gentle remark, for instance how to improve a post so it's not bullshit anymore, is more appropriate than simply "ignore". I try to do as much when some Aceh-based steemians come begging for upvotes :-)
Then about the anonymity: it's anyone's choice but someone who chooses to be himself basically makes an implicit pledge to all the other participants: "I choose to be myself, therefore I pledge not to behave like a d*ck or a moron in order to never be ashamed of myself in the future".
One can easily imagine the reverse from someone who choose, on the contrary, to be anonymous: "I wanted to stay anonymous because I want to keep the option open of someday behaving like a complete d*ck with impunity". Maybe that was not the motivation of someone in particular but those interacting with anonymous characters have, by definition, no way to tell beforehand !
The problem with this is that some people are harmed when information sources are targeted for retribution. Anonymity is necessary for some truths to be revealed. Anonymity can be abused for the annoying of others, but is existentially important for certain content to be available.
That availability is vastly more critical than preventing trolls. Simply having a rewards mechanism almost eliminates trolling on Steemit. Losing anonymity might cost lives, or will preclude sensitive content from surfacing on Steemit because of the danger of source targeting.
Particularly as censorship and laws restricting free speech proliferate, anonymity becomes ever more important.
I also fail to see that verified identity will impact content quality, trending, or rewards pool mining substantially.
I don't follow your reasoning but maybe we live in different contexts and have different backgrounds. "Information sources targeted for retribution" ? I would be curious if you had a concrete example maybe ? Like what, someone sending a hitman to your house because of what you wrote on Steemit ? Wow. I wouldn't want to live in your neighbourhood if that is something that looks likely in your context ...
"Losing anonymity might cost lives" ? Wow, really ? Are we talking about Caracas here ?
Censorship and laws restricting free speech proliferate ... for no reason ? Or do you choose to only look at the empty half of the glass ?
The relationship between verified identity and content quality is, to my mind, as follows: if I put effort in my post and craft a good post I am proud of and this post is appreciated by readers then their appreciation will be linked to my real-life person. Because this reputation is on the blockchain, I can take it anywhere with me, it accrues in time. If I was the first in 2018 to write a seminal article about the future of society under crypto as my verified-self I can boast about it even 20 years later when my prediction comes true and then bask in the glory of my realized prediction. So I have a strong incentive to try to write good articles where I display my knowledge, my ability to analyze facts and make sound predictions, etc. All these turn into unique assets associated to my real-life person, assets that I can leverage later.
If instead I am using, say, @regaemuffin as screen name and some fan art as profile picture I have no incentive to take myself seriously and write thoughtful articles because those require effort and who cares.
As I try to explain, including in this post trending and reward pool mining need first to be tackled correctly by Steemit in the next HF. Once that is implemented correctly, then verified identity should discourage people from abusing in a too obvious manner, as negative reputation would be associated with their real-life persona.
So, verified identity will solve Steemit's problems by enabling braggarts to boast. Neither that nor the inuring of a bad reputation will impact the problems addressed in this post at all.
It's a straw man.
I doubt you could point to posts I have made that I didn't take seriously. No cat memes here.
Apparently the fates of Eric Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning are unfamiliar to you. Since I have had my head pounded into concrete, against holding cell steel benches while cuffed, been mocked by cops, prosecutors, and judges, while vainly fighting for my rights, I assure you that there is good reason to not say certain things as your verified self.
Unless you like that kind of thing. Some do.
I don't.
Thank you for your answer.
I'll try to convey the nuance once more, I think there's still a chance I didn't make myself clear: once the self-voting and the voting bots are disabled in code then having a one-to-one relationship between real-life people and steemit accounts will greatly help in diminishing the level of abuse because of "portable reputation". Participants will be incentivized to behave responsibly (yes, you may call that "self-censoring") and disincentivized to blatantly mine the reward pool.
It might not solve completly the issues addressed in the post but it will have a markedly positive impact. Of course that's my opinion and absent a testing ground I can't prove anything.
The fates of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning are irrelevant here. A straw man, as you'd call it. I am an investor in Steem because I believe and care about the whole idea, the success of (my vision of) Steemit and also, reasonably enough, about my investment. As a "stakeholder", my opinion is that I do not care about Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. They do not feature anywhere in my vision for Steemit. I do not dream of Steemit becoming the über-whistleblowing site and take over from Wikileaks. I'm not sure that's how it's been positioned by Steemit Inc. either.
Snowden, Assange and Manning and others that want to do what they did (not judging what they did in any way) can keep leaking where they were leaking before. I have zero ambition for Steemit to become the site that hosts Donaldleaks or Xileaks or whatever. I vastly prefer Steemit to become a "virtual country" of creative communities, not a crypto-Wikileaks.
I'm expressing that, the whales might or might not agree. Basically what i'm saying is that "freedom of expression" is only dangerous when the expression itself is harmful to someone. I would prefer to avoid expressions that are "harmful to someone" on Steemit because that tends to get in the way of building harmonious communities. Somehow, calling someone openly a douchebag, whether you're right are wrong, tends to get in the way of building strong social relationship and poison the atmosphere for everyone: even observers will feel the impulse to take sides : "What do you think, is he a douchebag or not? Whose side are you on?"
So yes, there is very good reason to not say certain things as your verified self. My point is that I'd rather not have those kind of things being said on Steemit at all, whether under a "verified self" or as "anonymous". Just go say those types of things someplace else, please, if you have to say them ! There's always Wikileaks or other places who have made their mission to host your "certain things that you'd rather not say under your verified self". Steemit wasn't built with that mission, as far as I know, so please do not hi-jack it.
Test: You got a 40.00% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
Hi Juliàn, are you on discord by any chance ? May I contact you somewhere ? Thanks
Yes, contact me on discord: jga#0699
Regards.
Can't find you. I don't know Discord but could it be that we don't share any "discord server" maybe ? My discord user is @sorin.cristescu#6999, can you find me ?
This is not so.
Code is law. Software is little more than rules.
This is a difficult one, I agree that bots are kind of a plague in the steem ecosystem and it can really go sideways as we progress.
However, I also agree that some solutions can be worse than the disease. It will take a lot of finesse in dealing with this, and out of the box thinking.
The idea is that forces that counter themselves will result in a lot of power being used for this conflict, while forces that complement themselves build on each other and take us further. Sorry, but this subject is one for which I have no practical proposal yet. Maybe the communities should take a moral stance at least and communicate to the users that bit-bot-ing is shitty behavior that might lead to exclusion from certain groups, but this can also go sideways really quick.
In my opinion bot voting and multiple accounts shouldn't be allowed.
"One person, one account". The blockchain is powerful because it can mediate and allow real people to find consensus and built trust. If you allow fake accounts then it's all useless and we are back to FB and the rest.
How that can be implemented, I don't know.
But for as long as bots are allowed and the Steem whitepaper says, black on white "Eliminating "abuse" is not possible and shouldn't be the goal." (page 15. I disagree, but who am I?) then downvoting people because they have used the system as designed is destructive and harmful
Yep, bit-bots might be to cost of uncensorability. Personally, I would prefer a level of abuse rather than censorship or the need for identity.
But the fact we are having these discusions is the way to aproach this problem :)
Why not? If someone manages two different accounts differently, you can relate to either identity per their behaviour. If they simply have multiple accounts they manage with the same behaviour, why would you treat either account differently?
What difference does it make who is the actual meatbag behind the behaviour?
Well, the root being discussed is botvotes for profit. Thus decreasing the profitability of the botvotes by flagging is directly getting to the root of the problem.
How would that impact buying botvotes, selfvoting, or circlejerks?
I can easily see how it could prevent people from speaking forthrightly. I do not see that as a benefit.
The problem is that we cant flag it or wont. Im all for this (well with a different approach) and even i wont flag undeserving posts. Because, you know what, those that can buy their way to the top of trending frequently have the power to run me in the ground. Who cares if what i do brings value to the steem platforms. Retaliation is a sure reaction.
I propose that we look at bid bot owners and talk to them. Short term they are profiting but in long term this will destroy steemit and steem based platforms. EOS is just behind the corner waiting.
Once you get upvote bot owners to adjust their practices (yes at a cost to their profits) you will have a much healthier ecosystem. It doesnt have to be perfect but any move in the right direction is a positive step.
This will literally kill steem in the long run.
I dont care if people upvote themselves. Its their sp, their invested money but the upvote bot owners are here to blame.
When the facebook fiasco was made public i didnt blame those that abused the system, i blamed those that put the system in place. Now, Ned probably wont fix this, but we can police ourselves and those that profit from such a loophole.
Im a bot user myself. But i keep the use to the smallest of scales. Bots have their use but the abuse they allow to happen makes them have a net negative effect.
@guyfawkes4-20 we believe we are adding adding massive value to the community with a unique Steem platform (not more tools or steemit styled interfaces) and yet this system has failed us.
After a months work on a unique open source platform we get neg votes because we seek to rise above the crap posts.
Very disappointing.
There is a very simple solution to this that will eliminate the mob rule, that will effectively stop the abuse in its tracks... And thats a simple matter of having the bot owners
That way the decision if something is a justified upvote or not is completely in their hands. They still keep control of the trending pages, but guess what?! Crap content isnt going to get as much exposure anymore!Smartsteem has a 3 star rating and thats great, but thats not nearly enough to stop abuse. Even those with 3 star ratings start abusing the bot after time when they see they arent getting reprimanded. I tried to recommend this to @therealwolf but since im insignificant here it probably went by him.
I know this would be hard to implement and i dont know even how to go about that, but im sure there are people that could figure it out.
Yes... This will hurt bot owners profits and those who delegate to them but, cmon guys, this is hurting Steemit badly.. Take up some responsibility. People arent even checking the trending page anymore.
....a planktons opinion.... :D
It's not realistic in my opinion to expect people who have a life to just sit there 24/7 and review articles above a certain amount. I promoted my last post with (among others) a 50 SBD bid through smartsteem. It's a pretty long post, almost 10' reading (about 2000 words), how is the guy behind smartsteem to read all that and decide whether that post is worth 50 or 30 or 200 ? Especially when he has maybe 20 posts like that day-in day-out ?
I think bid bots shouldn't (somehow) be allowed. How to prevent that ... "is left as an exercise for the reader" ... :-)
Well you pay themfor their work. As a curie curator i couldnt tell you how many lines of text i could go through in 2 hours. Probably a 100 posts. And how many 50SBD or 100SBD bid bot payments do you think there are? Not many. You find those willing to do the work and give them a cut. Curators are payed by Curie and all Curie makes is from curation. Not a full blown business like upvote bots.
The problem is that there is no will. And wheres no will theres no action. Outside the coding im positive this could work.
I think you are being a bit pedantic with the wording. I think all value is subjective. Even money. But I can still say "overvalued". I would argue that he is not the one to determine the value of a post but rather he is one to determine the value of a post.
Whales have been flagging for disagreement of rewards for over a year now. I disagreed with flagging for that reason because it is based on aggregate earnings of a user over many other up-voters when the flagger has nothing against the post itself. I find I agree with you.
" you are implying that you are the one or among the ones who decide what brings and doesn't bring value to the community"
It is their Steem Power, it is precisely their right to use it to downvote content they don't believe brings value to the community. How is that 'mob rule'?
Yes, that's the whole idea, the individuals should be the one to decide what's valuable and what's not for them through upvoting/flagging. If the author is upvoting himself to Trending with bots, then the whole purpose of this platform is lost, but the community can still decide to flag, which is a much-needed action.
Still, I don't think that bots will ever be killed, but they can still be improved.
The bots could be killed if a superbot was created, enough delegation given to it and it began targeting all the trending/hot posts that were using vote bots. I believe Grumpycat proved this with his/her targeting that if people start losing money (in that case, bots that vote after 3.5 days) that vote buyers will modify their behavior to avoid the monetary loss.
Yes, if the people with the stick start pushing the bot owners towards change more, they would have to comply at some point.
Think "worshipping different gods" (disapproven but sometimes tolerated) versus "witch burning" in ancient times. If you use your steem power to upvote whatever shitpost you want, that's your right and freedom. When you use it to harm someone, to do (financial) violence onto someone it's not equivalent.
I am convinced downvoting should be used very, very sparingly, only when there is a manifest abuse.
I also do think having bot voting and paying for upvotes is a bad idea and should not be possible but as long as their are allowed downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...
Good then please commence downvoting regularly because there is manifest abuse on a huge scale including as described in the post. If you don't agree then that's perfectly okay, but those of us who do see it that way are going to express it with our votes.
By "abuse" I meant posts attempting to promote demonstrated scam schemes, phishing posts, child pornography or other such egregious abuses. I think it's a very, very slippery slope to start calling abuse the fact that suesa post racked up $900 or that yallapapi scored $500. I haven' t read the others in the list but I read those two and I upvoted them.
Are they worth that much ? Heck, who am I to judge ? Are Cristiano Ronaldo or Neymar Jr worth the money they are making ? In my opinion no, but again, who am I to judge ? Some people take from the same "reward pool" (the sum of all euros printed by the ECB) and directs those euros to Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr. That is the system ! If I disagree, I try to do politics to change the system. But I'm not "downvoting" Ronaldo and Neymar
When @heimindanger and others downvote @suesa's post and @yallapapi's post I feel insulted ! I feel that my very right to upvote a post is being questioned ! Do I have a right to express my liking for a post ? Because I feel that the flaggers want to deny me this right ! They want to censor my right to vote posts that I consider worthy of my votes !
You are Steem voter and that is precisely who judges. That's how this decentralized system works.
Who the hell are you to be above questioning? This is a decentralized system run by voters. Voters have to be free to disagree or it is meaningless and dysfunctional.
BTW, your right to upvote the post is not being questioned. You can do so any time you want. Others can downvote any time they want. The system adds up the votes and allocates rewards. End of story.
The power of the voters is highly centralized, and thus the system is highly centralized. All it takes is enough money to capture it. It makes no difference how many voters vote. It only matters how much money votes, in regards to rewards and witnesses.
Since the money is highly concentrated, power is highly centralized in the accounts the money is concentrated in.
Hi again, I've published a more (too?) detailed analysis why I believe using the downvote might be useful for the economics of the reward pool but detrimental overall to the Steem system
https://busy.org/@sorin.cristescu/steemit-and-the-fractal-society
You don't seem to have the slightest idea of human psychology and of sociological mechanisms. You remind me of myself 20 years ago.
If only you'd admit that you might be able to learn something and maybe be ready, with strong arguments, to change your mind, that would already be progress.
I change my mind all the time, but be aware that I do consider the economic issues facing Steem to be dire, potentially failure-inducing, so I'm willing to accept costs in other dimensions. You may be surprised to learn that at times I have been against downvoting for what I suspect (without having read yet) are many of same psychological and sociological reasons that are you. But there is a point where one must prioritize the lesser harms (and/or reducing the greater risks), and we probably just disagree about that.
I will read your post and consider your point of view. Thanks.
thank you
"downvoting is understandably seen as stealing from the pocket of the guy who paid for his upvotes ...". Huh. That is the exact opposite of how I see it. I see buying a huge upvote to put your own post in trending as stealing from the pocket of everyone else who is posting without paying for votes. The reward pool is finite. Buying your way into trending decreases the payout going to other authors. If anything, the community coming together to flag an author who bought huge votes is stopping theft.
That is correct if someone has the monopoly of that behaviour. But when doing that is available to everyone, there is a pesky things called "game theory" and "Nash equilibriums" who stick their fingers in the spanner.
To be clearer: the fewer people buy upvotes, the bigger the incentive to be the one that cheats. The situation is not stable and evolves toward a Nash equilibrium: people start paying more and more to bots to get on trending page - it's the system that's broken and needs fixing, not the actors who are inside the system and playing by the rules. You can indeed attempt the latter but it's self-defeating if the system stays broken.
None of which changes the fact that this behavior is in fact "stealing" reward from the users who chose not to do this behavior. None of this changes the fact that buying votes to trend a post puts the lie to "proof of brain". I love how quickly "this behavior is allowed so it is okay" is forgotten when it comes to flagging. You can't have it both ways dude. If you truly think that just because other people are going to do something, and it is "allowed" by the code, that it is okay for you to engage in a behavior that is objectively bad for the long term health of the STEEM blockchain, than it is also okay for users to flag you for this behavior. I fail to see how this is hard to understand, or even debatable. Users with large stake in this platform absolutely should be flagging the crap out of any post that buys its way to trending under the current system which does not mark such posts as advertising. Failing to do so is putting nails in the coffin of their own investment.
I fail to see how you fail to see the fatal flaw in your reasoning: who and how defines "crap" ?
If you define "crap" by "anything that buys its way to trending" then you stack the deck against any talented minnow writer who basically has no way to come to anyone's attention.
Take a look for instance at my very early posts (after the "introduce yourself") I had put a bit of work in them and while I don't think they are necessarily stellar I am pretty sure they are better than $0.00 with no votes and almost no views. I just happened to be a minnow who knew nobody else on the platform and believed the "proof of brain" theory - I was naively thinking that "good content will be discovered and will well-up by itself". It didn't.
Now look at @yallapapi. I think he had produced some distinctive content that I wouldn't have seen if he hadn't bought his way to the trending page. What he writes has value, I think, and is useful. But without buying his way to trending a lot less (and I mean A LOT LESS, like in ZERO) people would have noticed him.
He uses a mechanism not only permitted but used by many others before him in order to draw attention to his posts. Nothing unusual. Are his posts "crap" ? I wouldn't say so, on the contrary, they are a really great read. So for me defining "crap" by "anything that went to trending based on paid votes" is shortsighted and wrong. Especially since the guy paid for that advertisment with his own money.
You (or @heimindanger) are free to say that @yallapapi's content is crap but that is, in my opinion, mobbing, censorship, and basically stealing and abuse, like what grumpy cat used to do.
But if you also find that his content is actually rather outstanding then it would turn out that not every paid post that trends is crap after all ... the picture is mixed and things become a lot more complicated, like in real life. Things become debatable.
So you are entitled to your opinion that "whales should be flagging the crap out of any post that buys its way to trending" but I am also entitled to mine that this will lead to only circle-jerking whales trending for any minor "contest" that they, in their magnanimity have the kindness to organize. it will basically leave no realistic avenue for isolated minnows to get spotted for the content they produce and will drive them away from the platform.
How is that good for the long-term health of the Steem blockchain ?
Voting to prevent reward pool rape isn't financially harming anyone. It is voting to determine how the current reward pool is divided. An upvote is an upvote in favour of giving a post/comment a slice. A downvote is a vote that a given post should be paid less.
Not really sure what any of that has to do with religious persecution.
"Reward pool rape" needs defining. When someone with a lots of SP and consequently a lot of VP publishes obviously shitty posts every 6 hours and upvotes himself, as I believe haejin is (was?) doing, I believe that qualifies as "reward pool rape".
When a guy pays with his own money to get his post trending he's only getting back what he has put in. He pays X and the bot upvotes for a value of X. If you downvote Y he only gets back X-Y < X so you are financially harming the guy who paid the bot.
You can indeed argue that it is the bots that are doing the reward pool rape and I will agree with you. But then you should "punish" the bots, not by taking money from the guy who paid the bots (for as long as the bots are officially allowed at least).
You can argue like grumpy cat that, for instance, one shouldn't use bots for posts older than X days but, when steemit allows bots, that basically means that you are making up your own rules (on top of those of the system). You become a kind of vigilante: you take your own gun and start dispensing what you believe to be "justice" of your own accord, following whatever rules you edict.
That is what I call "mob rule". I was comparing this with a village that suddenly decides that a lady living alone is a witch and then proceeds to burn her at stake of their own accord (ok, my analogy wasn't very well formulated in the previous post, I hope now I got it a bit better)
Payouts which exceed added value to the platform, community. and stakeholders (especially the latter since they, or more accurately we, are paying 100% of the rewards).
This analogy is BS. Equating receiving smaller or no monetary payments with being lynched is absurd and offensive.
Sorry, the analogy was indeed too extreme.
But the point remains: when you think content is good, you upvote. If you think content is not good, you don't upvote. But you don't flag, unless it's a clear abuse (scam, phishing, etc.)
Flagging posts that you think have higher reward than look ok to you means that you are questioning the judgement and defying either the people who upvoted ("you think this is good content but I think you are wrong, this is bad content") or the very system of steemit (with bots and all). If the Steemit system leads to absurd rewards because of bid bots and other abuse then the correct approach is to tackle the issues with the system, not each and every post that exploits a broken system
I personally question the judgement made explicit in page 15 of the whitepaper (see above) as I believe that even if completely eliminating abuse is never possible, it definitely MUST be an explicit goal of any sane and self-respecting society. But I'm not starting my own militia war by downvoting abusive posts. It's profoundly destructive to the very system we want to see thriving
Yes that's exactly right and people should be (and must be) skeptical of each other. In a decentralized system the answer to "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who Guards the Guards?) is "each other". Our voting decisions are all open to scrutiny and disagreement by each other. That is the only way this system can work.
I agree with that, but downvotes are also part of the system. If the system can work (at least better) with a new and better emphasis on downvotes, and new and better ways of downvoting, then everything is just fine. The goal is a system that works well, not a system that works without effective and intelligent use of downvotes to express and mediate disagreement between voters, whenever needed (not just in specific cases decided by you).
I believe this discussion is important and I like a lot that we can have it. As answered on another comment, I am preparing a standalone dedicated post on this topic.
"Reward pool rape" is an unfortunate term that should probably be replaced. Rape is as bad an analogy here as you comparison of downvoting to religious persecution. Both are ridiculous appeals to emotion.
The concept behind the term, which I understand as the mechanised generations of rewards to deplete the reward pool in an industrial manner, without the reciprocal creation of good content, is however a valid problem faced by the steem system that does need addressing.
The ONLY means we have been given for addressing the issue is downvoting. It is the responsibility of SP holders to use their power to address the issue, else steem will become useless as a platform and the reward pool may as well just pay SP holders a dividend instead of rewarding content creators (because that is where bidbots are taking things if left unaddressed).
Aside from the "ONLY means" part I agree. I proposed another approach in the other response. 1st: change the philosophy in the whitepaper - as important as the Federalist papers for the US. 2nd: change the code to at least discourage or better yet make upvoting bots impossible to exist. They are not needed, they do not serve any useful purpose.
But while these two things are not implemented, keep the system stable, as it is or else people will get discouraged and desert it, IMO
True, ONLY was a bit dramatic. We can campaign to get witnesses to vote in changes to the platform, and vote for witnesses accordingly.
good idea ! that was the whole idea behind having DPOS and witnesses - a kind of representation
Bidbots are a scam scheme that robs the reward pool. Instead of putting the rewards in the hands of content creators, it goes mostly to maintainers of bidbots and those that lease steem power to them. By making the bots unprofitable to use, or risky to use for undeserving content, then this is literally the only way to use the free market to punish the bots. Anything else would require top down authoritarian intervention, which would pretty much defeat the point of having a decentralised system. SOMEONE has to decide what constitutes bad acting. The WHOLE POINT of the steem blockchain is that this decision making is DECENTRALISED, with power to make these decisions in the hand of INVESTORS, those that hold SP, proportional to their investment.
Steem allows bots. Steem also allows downvotes. You can't argue (sucessfully) that because one is allowed, another thing that is also allowed isn't right.
Look, it is this simple, users of bidbots are complicit dupes in a scheme that robs and reduces legitimate content creators of their rewards. It is the users, and those that lease to and build bidbots that are economically harming others. They reduce the amount of the reward pool that goes to creators (with oer 75%-85% of the reward pool going to bidbot maintainers and their SP leases). This reduces the incentive for genuine and quality content creators to participate, which in turn reduces the quality of the system, which prevents the value of STEEM increasing, which harms ALL investors.
Who, other than those with the SP to downvote these bad actors do you propose do something? Do you crave some centralised authority to come in and lay down the law? Ned? Steemit Inc? How would you have them do this without compromising the decentralised nature of the platform?
Those 37 accounts, out of upwards of a million accounts that have been opened on Steemit, wield the vast majority of VP, and thus power is centralized in those accounts, and not decentralized at all.
Almost all of that stake held by those 37 accounts was mined and not purchased for fiat, I believe.
True, but that is a whole other issue, and not one easily addressed. Steem is still relatively decentralised compared to facebook, twitter or reddit.
I have given this thought, and reckon it's not a separate issue at all, but the very heart of the issue.
First, the supposition that those competent and fortunate enough to be able to mine Steem during the attempt to avoid US regulations during it's inception are investors is ludicrous. Those folks that simply mined and held on didn't invest in the sense investment generally has meaning.
This establishes that their motivations and experience are different from actual investors, who depend on capital gains for their ROI. Speculators, traders, and profiteers are other things entirely. the whales on Steemit are practically universally not investors.
Since they aren't investors, and aren't intent on capital gains for their ROI, they seek ROI by other means, and those means have become bidbots. This is the root of the point of this post OP has made.
This is what profiteering looks like, and as is usual, profiteering is a short term gambit, that almost always sucks all value from the source of profits before moving along with the essential value and leaving the shriveled husk of the endeavor abandoned in their wake.
I see but little sign that whales as a group have any intention to grow Steemit into a platform nominal to provide the substantial capital gains investors would be intent on. Such ROI would dwarf the meager returns rewards pool mining provides. The means of guiding Steemit to generate such returns in unfamiliar to them, as they are not seasoned investors, nor even actually investors at all.
They do what they know, and that is mine.
That is not a separate issue, and is the issue at hand.
In my opinion Steem shouldn't allow bots, I think they poison the well. Downvotes are a good tool, if used with clear guidance, according to a set of rules, specifically as a defense mechanism against clear abuse. I want to argue (my deep belief) that using downvotes to rank the perceived value of a post that is not an obvious abuse (scam, phishing, etc.), even without bid bots, is a very slippery slope of destruction.
I mostly agree with your argument about bidbots and their users but punishing the users is a bit like saying "all German soldiers in WW II were complicit in a horrible thing so they should all be killed". Ok, maybe my analogy is a bit extreme, but I hope it won't detract you from the message: it's the system that needs to be fixed! Punishing the victims of the system because they participate in the system is ill advised.
Yes, IMO Ned and Steemit who have coded this blockchain system based on a manifesto called the steem whitepaper should
Ammend that manifesto, most notably by changing page 15 to read "Eliminating abuse is not possible yet it should always be the explicit goal of the platform" (unlike the current version which implicitly condones abuse by saying "shouldn't be the goal"
Implementing new rules in the code to make bidbots at worst unprofitable for those who would try to run one, at best downright impossible
Frankly decentralization is great but if I have to choose between a completely 100% decentralized platform that is a complete jungle and a platform that is not 100% decentralized but is safe to use and has structure, I take the latter every day.
The first and probably main attraction point of Steemit is the rewards. If they become completely unpredictable because any passing whale might feel that your content is not good enough, the platform will die ...
You know what's worse than getting $0.01 for a post that took 2 hours to write ? It's seeing it valued at $5.00 today and then at $0.01 the next day because some random whale thought it "not good enough" for $5.00
I would see a centralised solution as a last resort if we can't build the tools to make a decentralised system work. This does mean a certain responsiveness.
There are ways @steemit could intervene without compromising the decentralisation of the blockchain itself. Firstly, the main problem is they way their 'trending' algorithm works. If the use of bidbots excluded a post from appearing in 'Trending' pages, this would go some way to solving the problem. Steemit Inc could do this for their own site. @busy could do it for theirs, if they wanted to. I am beginning to think they should.
Buying votes and self-voting are promotion, and posts with either belong in Promoted, rather than Trending.
Neither are curation, and no curation rewards should inure to either.
Only people have any capacity to judge value of a post, and curation rewards should be limited to human curation.
One thing that bothers me as well is the pandering to whales (a lot like in the real world). If a whale posts something, anything, every plankton in the pond rushes to upvote because they know the post will get huge rewards regardless of its quality. It becomes self-fulfilling as most whales are friends, having been around for long while and to a certain extent upvote each other.
I'm less bothered by the fact that "trending" shows posts that have been upvoted by bots, it's a bit like advertising. If you believe your post is really good, what means do you have to show it to people ? You have "promoted" but there you waste your money. And then you have the bots and trending and you mostly recoup your money.
Now if you bring to trend a shitty post maybe there should be a parallel mechanism to gather opinion, that would be less directly linked to money.
For instance an additional "like" or something. You pay for advertising and I am grateful to @yallapapi and @suesa they did so because otherwise I woldn't have discovered their very nice posts. But people could also indicate that they didn't appreciate your post, without linking that to the rewards, at least in the beginning. Regardless of how much @suesa post made (I don't think $800 is fair but it's not outrageous either. It's not $15 000), we could have a parallel signalling: I enjoyed / didn't enjoy that post.
With this information, we could afterwards implement a more fine grained mechanism to discourage shitty posts somehow.
The key message is: the system needs to be made more sensitive, fine-grained, accomodate more varied inputs, not just monetary rewards. Communities is probably going in the right direction