Why the Whale War might be good for Steemit
Why the Whale War might be good for Steemit
In case you haven't heard, there has been a bit of a controversy waging on steemit over the past few months. The main belligerents in this so-called war are two users named @haejin and @berniesanders. Others have also participated in various forms. I myself have taken part in many of the discussions regarding the spat.
One opinion I've often seen expressed is that the drama of the war has a negative effect on Steemit and scares away new members. The overall sentiment is that it is bad for Steemit and Steem as a currency. While I have held this opinion myself in the past, I recently started to question the veracity of that statement. By stepping back and looking at the situation from a different angle, I have allowed myself to consider that the war may actually be good for both Steemit and Steem.
Background
First, i wanted to give some background on what the war is about in case you haven't been paying close attention. The controversy began when someone noticed that one user was taking a large portion of the reward pool themselves. That user, @haejin, was taking .6% of the total reward pool at the time. Since that time, this figure has grown to 3.187% at the time of this writing Source.
Upon investigating, people discovered that most of those rewards came from a mysterious whale (@ranchorelaxo) with an upvote worth of over $300 that had very little interaction with steemit other than upvoting @haejin’s posts. The situation is compounded by the fact that @haejin routinely posts 7 or more posts a day, all upvoted by himself (@berniesanders made a post about it, and thus the flag wars started. There have been many minnows and plankton/redfish on both sides that have taken huge hits to reputation. The whales involved have each taken turns wacking each others rewards down. There were also reports of threats beyond Steemit to include death threats.
The main argument against @haejin is that the relationship between him and @ranchorelaxo and subsequent behavior constitutes voting abuse as outlined in the Steem White paper. While @haejin asserts that he is entitled to the large upvotes from himself (currently up to $114.89) and @ranchorelxo (currently up to $338.93) and the resulting high portion of the rewards pool because he offers his analysis on steemit for free and brings many new members to steemit.
Reasoning
So how can I find anything good about this situation? Well, first I had to look at the white paper and see what the design of Steem said about this. In the section on voting abuse, it says the following:
...any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). 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.
So analyzing this section of the whitepaper, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that war taking place right now is not only tolerable, but in fact a healthy correction working very much in the way that the currency was designed. You have two large stake holders collectively allocating a large percentage of the rewards pool and yo have the community (many smaller stake holders) responding.
Some will look at the situation and say the system isn’t working because @haejin is still taking a large portion of the reward pool. This is a fair assessment, however, if you continue reading the Steem white paper, you will see the following statement:
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.
I bolded that last section to highlight its importance. While @haejin may be successful thus far, the response from the community helps ensure that the abuse doesn’t reach a level that makes the currency unstable. While the end result of the abuse may mean less rewards for other posters on Steemit, the response ensure that the rewards they earn now are not devalued because of the abuse. Additionally, it also serves as a warning to other millionaires considering such actions. They know that the community will react and can see the potential for larger whales getting involved. Besides a considerable monetary investment, they will also have to invest time and energy in a war, which makes the effort necessary to pull off such a plan less enticing.
What about Steemit as a website?
For this question, I’ll refer to @ned himself. In a recent comment, @ned mentioned the incredible amount of web traffic generated by the spat. They have a saying that no publicity is bad publicity. I think it rings true in this case. I still feel that steemit offers many more communities and conglomerates of goodwill than most social sites. The ugliness of the flag wars is the exception, and I think that’s easy for a lot of people to see. The social transactions on the Steem BlockChain and the resultant condensers (i.e. steemit.com, busy.org, chainbb, etc.) are unlike anything else on the planet. It’s an interesting phenomenon and is something of which the world should take note. If it takes a bit of controversy to make that happen then so be it. Steem on!
Please let me know your thoughts below, but remain respectful.
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First of all your post is biased. You're only stating info against Haejin. Bernie Sanders has a minus reputation for a reason. He's picked multiple fights with many people. How can you not mention that he upvotes his own posts with $100 as firstvote?
How can anyone take your post seriously if you don't compare like with like?
How have you not mentioned the abuse of the system where I individual's are meant to upvote content via curation but bots are used. Many by Bernie Sanders aka Randowhale.
The spat highlights fundamental flaws in the system. I became concerned with these in the autumn and very concerned after flying to Steem festival and finding the concerns or zero relevance to the developers. I returned home and started powering down. There will be new social media platforms like Steemit launch in the next year. For me it's a terrible shame as I was very excited by the concept but as Dan said, it was an experiment. The results are rolling in. BTW - do you think this comment should be censored? Do you believe in free speech or the tyranny of a dictactor with money? This post will be censored like all my previous ones on the subject. I hope that all within the Crypto currency revolution, remind ourselves that the new revolutikn might bring in a new wave of bad, maybe worse than the old - a revisit to Georges Orwell's book 'Animal farm' could be a good call.
First, I never claimed to be unbiased. In fact, in a comment on this thread I clearly stated that i am biased. Secondly, I did not set out to give a full account of the actions of the war on here. I only dedicated a few paragraphs to the background with the intention to give an overview of the lead up to the controversy. I didn't detail the flagging actions of Bernie for the same reasons I didn't detail the flagging actions of haejin; they are not relevant to the point I am making. My point is this; If the community feels that voting abuse is occurring, they will respond and that this makes those who would venture to do so think twice.
Regarding whether or not I feel your post should be censored, I don't. I have spoke out against it in the recent past. Regarding Bernie upvoting his own post for over $100, I just don't see it very often, compared to haejin. Here are Bernie's earnings for the next 7 days:
Keep in mind that that contains two abnormally high posts over $1000, at least one of which he claims he will burn the rewards earned. Now, compare that to the picture I posted in the article of haejin's rewards. 22K vs 2K, which one would you prioritize? I'll address some of your other concerns in response to your other comment.
This additional information is relevant. I hadn't realised BS had offered to burn his votes. Seeing is believing and I'd much rather he donated them to tree planter or some similar positive action. My point is starting petty wars is not the correct way and BS starts these spats for his own entertainment IMO. I haven't seen his positive suggestions for changes to the system. My feeling is that is because the system works well for him when someone else like Haejin isn't doing well. All this spat is doing is setting up the next Steem competitor.
Bernie has his style and it throws off a lot of people, but this situation definitely needed/needs a vocal whale to address it. He was the only one willing to put so much effort into it. Some others joined in for a little bit, but not to the point of really making a difference. Even @dan began flagging haejin, but I believe has stopped.
See, I think the only thing that has saved haejin from the wrath of other whales is that the price of Steem has been doing so well. His huge chunk isn't that noticeable to them because they are still earning more than they were before. If they had noticed a decrease, more of them would have acted.
Look how your 'hero' is censoring my comments with his bots. This is all The work of BS. Do you agree with his actions?
I do not agree with it. I think it undermines the effort. I also wonder if it works in haejin's favor by turning off whales who would otherwise support the effort.
Why not send BS a personal message as a supporter?
I have no special favor with @berniesanders, but I know he often reads these threads and chooses not to reply. @berniesanders, would you mind removing the downvottes from @tarquinmaine's post? At least this person seems to listen to reason. Many other have tried to tell me it's ok for haejin to kill a charity thread, but not this guy.
But don't you think they should react by either making better posts, voting for content they liked which would have diverted earnings away from Haejin. They could have petitioned to change the system. I haven't seen any if this. Dan downvoted 4 posts on one day only. Id also like to suggest that maybe you could also suggest changes instead of referring to the white paper. The white paper isn't a bible it as just a template with a misson. All missions need adapting whilst keeping goal and agenda the same. This is meant to be a communication platform based on quality of contributions whether as by authoring or curating. All I'm. Seeing right now is an undignified fight over a reward pool with very little positive input to bettering the system. If you have positive constructive ideas I'd love to hear them I a future post, as I'm sure many would.
Fair enough.
No. What haejin is doing constitues voting abuse and really should be dealt with directly. It would be like if Oprah bought a billion dollars worth of steem and then came here upvoted Stedman to 50% of the reward pool. The fact that the self-voting is done through a proxy doesn't negate its effect on the platform. By dealing with the user directly, you send the message that their actions are not tolerable.
The white paper isn't the Bible, but it is sound reasoning on the way Steem was designed.
Many have talked about changing the system, but change takes time and in this instance requires a hardfork to the Steem BlockChain. In the meantime, the situation demands that it be addressed via currently available means.
I'll think on possible solutions. I did write something on Self-voting and reputation on my blog, but that was only slightly related.
How can you tell Haejin has scammed the system?
Using certain tools, you can tell who upvoted the content and how much those upvotes are worth. While haejin would have you believe that his success here is due to his followers, in actuality, it is mostly due to a single user and himself. The user in question is a big whale with a lot of steempower and Haejin speaks for his upvotes and downvotes.
This information is available on the block chain via several tools, one of which is https://steemworld.org. I'd advise you to verify what I'm telling by looking at that site and putting haejin's username. You can tell who votes on each post and how much those votes are worth.
FYI, @dan downvoted haejin 34 times by my count starting 11 days ago.
I'm sure you're right as I've not been delving by through. I stand corrected. Amazing to think Dan cares that much as I thought he was only using Steem for the odd post. If so his stance on this issue is clear. I wonder what would think to the censoring of comments like this oneand my other comments to you?
I doubt he would like it much.
"Bernie has his style"
Indeed. His style is attacking a community minded Steemian because their popular contributions are thwarting @berniesanders parasitism.
It depends on what you mean by community minded. I hope you are not talking about haejin.
@berniesanders contributes nothing to Steemit - check his posting history it's entirely resteems (including this article) and mostly bitching about @Haejin.
Haejin became popular organically and only receives a significant % of the reward pool because people upvote his OC. His TA is sometimes off the mark? He posts individually for each crypto? Boo hoo irrelevant - people choose to upvote him.
@berniesanders, on the other hand, is a blatant parasite who is furious that his previously unchallenged gaming of the system is no longer putting as much money in his pockets.
Haejin's popularity has virtually nothing to do with this controversy. His continuous exploitation of the reward pool through the use of proxy voting by Rancho does. Nobody cares about your vote for haejin nor do they care about nearly any other vote for haejin except for rancho. It constitutes voting abuse and that has nothing to do with anything Bernie does. Bernie's reaction is just that, a reaction. haejin has the power to stop this and chooses not to even after hearing from members of the community besides Bernie.
You're wrong about that. In fact, it's putting more money in his pockets. So much, in fact, that he couldn't keep up with the demand for his services anymore.
Bernie Sanders is using his bots to downvote my comments on your post into oblivion. Do you condone this behaviour Moeknows?
Seems reasonable... I feel like 5 years down the road Saturday Night Live will be running skits about our Whale Wars when @zuckerberg gets flagged by @berniesanders!
This is simply unsustainable. The Steem White Paper is clear:
"When people are recognized for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows. Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community."
Ned's ambivalent attitude to this war between the whales is a shame. Content contributors, aside from the ones that are already connected to the whales here, will not contribute to this platform knowing that there are users that are reaping tens of thousands of dollars in rewards for nonsense.
Yes! If the "big guys" got actually involved, we would not even be having this discussion right now ;)
After Stealing People Rewards, Haejin has also stolen TA of expert @salahuddin2004 .
What @salahuddin2004 mentioned about TRX that it would go 2k satoshi 16 days ago. Haejin copied the same TA and
mentioned in his timeline about TRX going 2k Satoshi 15 hours ago . HERE YOU can see.
![cp 2.png]
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That would be the same @salahuddin2004 (pigs be upon him) who joined months after @Haejin became a major TA figure on here? Lmao. Try harder.
I went on YouTube to see what people were saying about Haejin. And guess what? I found the same thing. People were complaining about his videos. If Haejin was truly this smart in cryptocurrency he would be putting out much better content.
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@thabiggdogg/i-looked-at-haejin-s-youtube-videos-and-found-this
Again, nobody is forced to read or upvote his content. Yet another sockpuppet.
The large scale crony voting risks literally turning Steem into a Ponzi scheme, as I've further explained here: https://steemit.com/steem/@troglodactyl/is-steem-a-ponzi-scheme
Partly this can be solved (or at least managed) by continually building consensus on definitions of abuse and what should be downvoted. In the long run, I think we'd be well served by a few protocol changes:
Downvotes should get curation rewards. Steem is based on the premise that most of the stakeholders will vote in the network's best interest to increase the value of their stake. This should be just as true regarding downvotes as upvotes, but currently dealing with spam and abuse is uncompensated. When a post or comment is downvoted below 0, the voters who downvoted it should be rewarded, just as upvoters are rewarded for curating good content.
There should be curation penalties for losing voting wars. Currently, shortsighted stakeholders see no incentive for avoiding abuse. They feel they have nothing to lose, because each of them think their own actions are too insignificant to impact the price of Steem. If there were curation penalties (negative curation rewards) for downvoting something that settled to net positive votes or upvoting something that settled to negative, then stakeholders who more often than not oppose what others consider best for the network would have reason to sell their stake and move on.
Increase the length of the vesting schedule. The level of abusive voting indicates that many voters don't have the longterm interests of the network in mind. The length of the vesting schedule should be gradually increased after #2 is implemented to give abusive stakeholders time to see what's happening and sell out gracefully.
Return to a non-linear reward curve. Linear rewards reduce the incentive to generate consensus on what is desirable and what is undesirable. If the R^2 curve is deemed excessive maybe we should go with R^1.5, but R^1 is a step in the wrong direction. Combined with #2, curation penalties and rewards should be calculated symmetrically on the same curve, with exponentially higher penalties and higher rewards for posts settling with stronger consensus.
This largely seems to be based on the assumption that most downvotes are deserved. In my experience, that is not always the case. Also, the reason for the downvote is disagreement on rewards payout, then why would 0 be the threshold? Just because you don't believe that a post should make $500 doesn't mean that it should make 0.
As I said, Steem is based on most stakeholders voting in the network's interest (which if the system is properly designed will also be in their personal interest). If this is true, then most of the time when a downvote is not deserved people will come together to counter it with upvotes. If that's what generally happens and if when it happens the downvoter suffers a penalty then continued abusive downvoting becomes much less likely. If most of the stakeholders are malicious and will downvote good content just to watch the world burn, no protocol change will save the network.
The change I propose would make downvoting less useful for rewards disagreement, but I see that as a much less serious issue than outright abuse. It's imperfect, but I still think it would be an improvement.
I think there is a really, really simple way to deal with this. Bring back the four posts per day rule. Before HF19 we had a mechanism on steemit that allowed all users to post four posts per day and receive maximum rewards. At the fifth post, maximum reward payout dropped I think to 75%, sixth 50%, seventh 25% etc. I think this is the best way to mitigate this type of abuse, and would be a really simple solution to this problem.
four post are too many for a whale. i think the number of posts for whales should be less. may be once a week. and there should be a limit to steem power an account. it should not be unlimited
If it's actually purely abuse this is easy to circumvent with extra accounts. Just make 10 bot accounts and post 4 times a day from each of them. A real user trying to build an audience would suffer from splitting across multiple accounts, but an abusive reward harvester wouldn't have a problem with it.
i wound not agree with any of that. And number 4 would require a lot more explanation for me to understand how each curve actually works.
I suspect that their is a financial incentive behind the creation of vote wars especially if you can use other peoples vote power.
Can you explain why you disagree?
Hi @troglodactyl i will give it a shot.
point 1. Downvotes should get curation rewards
I have been subjected to attack simply for disagreeing with people here with severe loss of rep.
I have seen other people be attacked for extended periods of time for NO valid reason.
I have seen whales make stupid up votes with alt accounts to justify their down voting behavior.
Due to the nature of the rewards NOT being distributed in a linear fashion, it seems their is an incentive for big reward pool miners to promote Flag wars. I suspect that the recent and probably ongoing saga regarding a certain whale upvoting one account consistently is being done to justify flagging wars. All the better if you tap into people subconscious pain from past injustices and use their vote power right? especially if i am going profit from my reward pool mining operations.
point 2. There should be curation penalties for losing voting wars.
Given that most of the flag wars posses all the integrity and validity of a witch hunt this thinking blows my mind
point 3. Increase the length of the vesting schedule.
The whales promoting flag wars are the abusers in most cases.
point 4. Return to a non-linear reward curve.
from what i have been told the reward curve is non-linear and favors the big accounts reward pool mining operations.
Thanks for the explanation.
It sounds like the common element in all your reasoning is that you don't trust stakeholders to act in ways that support growth. This is a legitimate problem, but nerfing stakepower won't solve it. It's not just large stakeholders who try to abuse the network for profit, and as long as it remains profitable we'll see an increasing number of people taking that approach.
To solve the problem we can either try to fork the network removing the stake of large abusive stakeholders until the network is controlled by only the most angelic among us (unlikely), or we can modify the economics to make abuse unprofitable. I'm promoting the second approach. All stakeholders hold stake, which means they're united in the positive-sum benefit that comes from long term network growth. The problem is that they're divided by the short term zero-sum competition for rewards. To make the network healthy we need to make that zero-sum competition less appealing/profitable and the positive sum collaboration relatively more appealing.
Hey @troglodactyl I really enjoyed reading your reply, thanks. You got a genuine lol with the 'most angelic' line : )
I needed to look up nerfing and it seems to me that buffing the available weapons is not desirable ether.
I have spent most of my time here observing. I suspect that their is already a financial incentive for promoting flag wars. imho we need access to information already contained in the blockchain to ether invalidate or validate this suspicion. I am computer illiterate and have no clue how to build the necessary tools.
Modifying the economics may be a positive. However rewarding flag wars would definitely propel us in the opposite direction. Right now some people are being easily psychologically manipulated into engage in flag wars that have all the integrity and validity of a witch hunt. Rewarding that will be disastrous.
The political process for changing the rules needs to modified into a system of open democracy where everyone interested is able to easily see how previous decisions have been arrived at and anyone who wants to have a say regarding proposed changes have that opportunity.
Right now a few whales literally own witnesses. This must change.
oh @troglodactyl I neglected to address your opening line directly.
'your reasoning is that you don't trust stakeholders to act in ways that support growth'
I object to being placed in a situation where I need to trust. If people are being transparent I do not need to trust them, because I know what is happening. When people are making secret deals with one another in private, they are doing that for a reason, so why would anyone trust that?
Networks and societies always require trust, it's just a matter of how much we can distribute and manage that trust to make sure the costs of being untrustworthy are high and the rewards of being trustworthy are attractive. We obviously want to avoid having to trust people to act in our interests at the cost of their own.
hey @troglodactyl thanks for replies. I really appreciate your approach. I like this sentence ' We obviously want to avoid having to trust people to act in our interests at the cost of their own.'
imho The way the rules are changed and the way decisions are made right now is putting people in a position of needing to trust that process.
And I would like to see a more open and transparent process where anyone interested can participate.
What if minnows were to be protected against whale flagging them. Might encourag them to "do the right thing"
If minnows were protected against downvotes we'd see even more new 'minnow' spambots overrunning the network, impervious to all countermeasures.
1% max on anyone share of the common pot?
Remember we can't control how many accounts a person has and how many are bots, so any effort against truly deliberate abuse that relies on a per-account or per-post limit can be circumvented with more accounts generating more spam.
1 post per day, 10 steem max on all the post. Your precious spam network is not worth the effort and more ppl can get coffee money. And a monthly vote on whose account should be closed and balance burned, like witness vote but more witch hunt
Totally agree. Minnows (like @haejin) should be protected against greedy parasite whales (@berniesanders) so that they don't have to rely on 'protection' from other whales like ranchorelaxo.
I think you do not know what those terms mean.
:D I hope this comment was on purpose.
I think, Steemit should not only have the option to up&downvote posts but also to rate the Quality of the post. That would bring the advantage that posts which might leck of good content (because its only two lines of words or just a picture) could be grated "low Quality" e.g. five Start Rating System. This would mean that the received post earning showed at the recent time would not been paid out to 100% for "high Quality" but maybe only to 20% "low quality". While the amount of the post is depended on the Steempower Votes received, the Quality Index would be steempower neutral and only collects the Ratings from all viewers. What do you think would this help the situation?
I like your idea and it could be done at the website or condenser level. I think a lot of our issue is the culture, terminology and understanding of how the system is supposed to work. A flag here and a flag on facebook or reddit are two different things. I'm going to be thinking of some solutions in the coming weeks.
I like this idea! The quality of content is subjective and impossible to define by one individual. It would introduce a way for everyone to vote on quality with the same power. But then again, how do you prevent people from creating shittons of bots and pushing their quality upwards?
Everyone knows what some of the whales are doing on this platform !! But i believe things will change. I believe we should keep on supporting good content and majority will win some day. There is always a doubt but still, i dont know why i have so much faith on steemit. I will just do my thing slowly and steadily 😌😌
And thanks for that poetry discord server !! I was searching for something like this since a long time !!
Nice work. Keep it up ✌🏻
Good overview, but you all talk to much instead of downvoting this abuse...
http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-flags-info/?account=tuvokhl&days=14
We all have a role to play. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the reason why people are downvoting. Articulating truth is not always clear cut and easy. It is however essential in order to truly resolve conflict. I think if I can help focus the discussion away from the insults and back to the facts, more sensible people will see that and act accordingly.
Yes its seems to be a good way. Sometimes the little dogs just bark loudest ;-) its way of defence.
And there is difference between me downvoting haejin and haejin downvoting me... here take a short look...
https://steemit.com/haejin/@tuvokhl/haejin-downvotes-me-with-90usd