RE: Play your part in making Steemit better
Why shouldn't they game the system? This is a no one, whom had an upvote paid for by one of his many many other accounts, all with almost no SP. So what ?
Mean while, self upvoting whale jerking rings abound, and now we have yet another auto curation AI system just launching.
Whats the difference between what this guy has done, and someone getting an upvote on an auto curation trail when the person giving the upvote never even read the post that they upvoted?
I find the reward flagging a little uncomfortable if Im honest, there are too many double standards at play on the whole platform.
If Steem is about content, the it should be upvoted after being read. End of. Viewing figures and the opinion of thise viewers should be the only metric that matters.
Very few people actually read, always the same problem. Too many creators, and almost no consumers.
If curation were rewarded more than the content, as per the @dlike model, perhaps the balance would be much improved. I know of no other business where the service or product provider is more important than the customer, but here on Steemit, during times of relatively weak rewards, everyone is looking for ways to use technology to basically cheat the system.
Another issue is that people are being rewarded to flag when really, if the community that I hear so much about, was so important, they should do something just for the good of it. Im not sure why we need Steemcleaners and the flag reward crew, if the delegations from community minded members were increased, and volunteers were recruited to help this would allow steemcleaners to be more effective. Is only doing something for a reward any more morally or ethically right than the people they are fighting against?
Seriously. How difficult is it to take down spammers and scammers with 5sp? No one sees half of what goes on anyway because almost no one goes through the new feed!
Bidbots arent the problem, they are just paid advertising which may or may not return a profit, anyone who provides any service or product that needs to be sold to make money needs some for of advertising at some point.
Apologies for the typos, Im in bed on the tablet and the fat fingers are struggling badly!
Here are some fun readings for ya.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@enforcer48/steemit-de-evolution
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@crokkon/what-is-the-reward-pool-share-of-vote-sellers-bid-bots-and-autovotes-1535479520399
Basically, automation on Steemit has gone to the point it's not an exaggeration to say people don't read half the times, and it's not necessarily because of too many people are creating, when considering bid bots, et al handle about 8% of the total number of daily votes.
In the process of finding these abusers, it is hoped that flaggers would also come across genuine Steemians creating content. Hence, my response to @kabir88 when he promoted @steemflagrewards.
Actually, it's super easy to turn profit. The smaller bots are especially so. Even a top witness encouraged me to use them.
Most vote sellers/bid bot services do not actively check the contents they are promoting. They are automated, just like the Steemauto votes, which not only void a step in the QA, but also allow these 5SP accounts to come in with 100 liquid Steem and start rolling in more tokens until they are caught by the community.
Dont you think though that if its possible to write complex bot for initiatives like UA or truffle pig that can work out whats quality and upvote it, it must surely be infinitely easier to code a bot to pick out one word posts and down vote them!
Will give your linked articles a read later. Thanks :-)
You are oversimplifying the scope of abuse if you think auto-downvoting a one word post, or a few words for the sake of discussion, would resolve things. There are such things as a misclick of an incomplete post or a failed test, even with rewards declined. What about other languages? What about photographs with little to one word descriptions?
Are you gonna waste voting power downvoting those? Are those the only kind of abuse that exists on this platform?
Don't you think with millions of SP, @steemcleaners or @berniesanders would have done that long ago? What about @therealwolf? He's a developer, why do you think he hasn't done that already?
UA and Truffle Pig are works in progress. While I believe AIs have that sort of potential, but the technology is not refined to that point yet. Take @aicurator for example, it's great at being efficient. It doesn't see quality. How about @cheetah? It's ran into some hiccups with non-English languages.
Have you even seen the current UA algorithm in the works right now? It correlates with whether or not you interact with Witnesses or not. It's still got some ways to go.
Excellent points but using keywords and word count to trigger an autodownvote bot is at least something. None of the points raised in the original post are an ideal solution either but as Steve rightly points out, everyone has a part to play and every little helps.
None of this addresses the question of how autocuration is a good thing. The point still remains that if you arent read by a person you dont have chance to be upvoted. Thats life and we need encouragement to actually read and then decide if what we read is worthy of one of our upvotes.
If we follow the route we are on, we will get re spun articles using one of the many online article spinners being upvoted by ai powered auto upvoters, with people following only what they know will pay them a curation reward.
The languages issue is a substantial one but shouldn't be as this is allegedly a decentralised environment.
Many of the views expressed on the abuse topic come from 'privelidged' for want of better word, context. This also needs addressing and throwing into the equation.
I look forward to reading @slobberchops article on reward flagging as a career move!
At the end of the day, the rewards reclaimed from flagging the post were repaid to the community minded people who flagged it! If there was no reward, how many would have still flagged it?
It is something, but keywords and word count can be gamed; hence why we need to be careful when we consider which part of the process to automate.
Auto-curation is a gray thing: it all depends on the user. For example, @johngreenfield taking a break from Steemit and set authors he knows he enjoys the content on auto-votes. It's like a sponsor vote, the creator is encouraged to continue to work while he is gone.
@fulltimegeek does something similar. He has a whitelist of authors.
Like you said, it can't be entirely a good thing, especially when we hit over 41% on Steem Auto. It's like half the people aren't even here. At some point, auto-curation tends to be abused anyhow.
As for @slobberchops career choice, well good luck to him. Checking out all their wallets, I think only the actual Steem Cleaners and maybe some industrious Reporters in their group have good compensations. Other than that, I don't think even Bernie's Abuse Reports can top those in terms of returns.
Spun articles are already around. Some are more apparent. Some are not. And yes, I do agree with the reading part because that is one thing the AIs won't be able to do for some time and picking up spinning is one of them.
Automatic voting will always have limits. I think we could use AI to alert humans about good and bad posts that need attention. A lot of those we flag could be picked up that way. If be tempted to create a bot that picks up SFR confirmation comments and automatically does a follow on flag of appropriate size.
Hopefully, that will be in the works as we improve our workflow. I think @admiralbot is supposed to fulfill that role at some point when it becomes strong enough.
There are other ways we can shave time such as having a bot that picks up all SFR mentions, so all the approvers have to do is review all links, but like you said, there are limitations. We could be spammed by throwaway accounts, etc.
Real debate by real people....real Steem :-)
Respect to everyone. I often find the people I disagree with most are the nicest people I chat to lol
Of course anyone is free to do whatever they want on Steemit as there are not rules, but the community gets to decide what they like and if they don't like junk posts to get rewarded then they can flag them. No rule against that.
I don't like to here people saying 'everyone does ...' as it's patently not true. I manually curate what I vote on and I do read posts. The comments I get show that some people read mine. You obviously did :)
The curation crew put in a lot of effort finding bad posts and their rewards would make for a pretty poor hourly rate. The rewards scheme just goes some way to paying them back, but some would do it for nothing. If people are getting rewarded for voting up crap then we need some incentive for them to flag it. I sacrifice my SP to support this.
There are no absolutes. Steemit is not perfect as it's made of people and people will be greedy and/or selfish. We have to fight the winnable wars and leave the big cases to the whales. We can at least stop some spam minnows becoming bigger fish.