RE: 100 DAYS OF STEEM : Day 33 - Tackling Abuse on Steem - Part I - What is Abuse?
As you stated, fighting abuse on Steem is a complex topic. I think it is nearly impossible to let the code of the blockchain alone protect us from abuse. Limiting the number of posts per account will hit very active users and community bots as well. For example, a very active curator who comments on 50 posts a day should not be limited. Limiting only the number of possible root posts per day would not prevent abusers from creating and self-voting comments instead.
One automatic solution that could help for extreme cases of milking would be to add kind of a max_total_pending_payout constant, which defines a maximum total pending payout amount for all active posts per account, but it would not be easy to implement something like this and it might have a slightly negative effect on the nodes performance.
For now I support that Steemit Inc. takes on the role of judge of abuse cases. If something goes wrong, the community can contact the witnesses or leave a comment in your posts to publicly discuss the issue.
For the future I would prefer a solution that enables witnesses to vote on abuse cases. I will have further thoughts on the subject and discuss possible solutions in a future post.
Instead of limiting the number of posts one could introduce 'diminishing returns' which means one still could write as many posts as one wishes, but starting from a certain number of posts upvotes on every further posts would have a weaker effect than upvotes on previous posts. That means a very active author would earn less per post with an increasing number of posts (this effect could for example start after his second post per day) but still could earn anything.
Similarly one could try to prevent the effectivity of upvoting the same users again and again (circle voting). How about if after each vote on a specific account (including one's own account) each further vote on the same account would lead to significantly less curation reward for the voter and less profit for the upvoted account? Thus, when upvoting an account which I had already upvoted before, my voting power would be smaller than in case I upvote an account which I didn't upvote before.
If I upvote for example my wife, my daughter or my cat more than twice per day every following upvote for the same account would get weaker an weaker (like voting power is exhausting anyway already, just faster).
This would work, but it would come with a side effect. If I would create a few shit posts before posting a real masterpiece of a post, the good post might receive less rewards than the bad ones :)
As we discussed many times over the years, in my eyes this would be the ultimately perfect solution. Using something similar to the calculated CSI on SteemWorld as a factor, so that the voted
rshareswould be multiplied by it prior to subtracting them from the pool and adding them to the active votes.This would not eliminate all cases of abuse (for example, if someone owns many accounts with much SP and votes each day with a different one), but it would work very well for most common cases.
Then just publish the "shit posts" after the masterpiece? ;-) (Of course also the ability to receive full votes for posts would recover again after some time.)
Or maybe not post any "shit posts" at all? Seriously, if you yourself think a post is a shit post, then, it is a shit post...
You won't find any "shit post" from me (but sometimes kinds of humorous meant replies).
"Using something similar to the calculated CSI on SteemWorld as a factor, so that the voted rshares would be multiplied by it prior to subtracting them from the pool and adding them to the active votes."
Sorry but I think that it's not a good idea to use CSI on SteemWorld as in my opinion CSI isn't a reliable factor.
If I see that an account with 100% self-voting (no vote to anybody else just vote for the own account) has an CSI from 0.0 but other accounts has negative CSI, f.e. my account in the moment, than Steemworld consider it as better to vote 100% only your own account instead of voting for others.
How this can be a reliable factor ?
I think as long as you can claim for every approximately 5000 Steempower one account a week I don't think that this solution will work.
If a whale has 500.000 Steempower he can just claim approximately 100 new accounts at once and than post in every account only one post every week.
So in this case he could always get full rewards for selfvoting.
He wouldn't be able to handle all these accounts in a way that every of them could create more or less reasonable comments/posts. However, pure automated comments, created for farming puposes only, could easily be detected and flagged by members of an implemented anti abuse committee, which I suggested, as well.
OK I wrote about 100 acconts.
You are right this is really hard to handle.
But if you allow one vote in full strengh every day it would be also ok to use only 10 accounts.
Every day one post in every of the 10 accounts and the other 9 vote this post.
I think it's not much difference in time to post 10 times a day in one account or to post in 10 accounts only once a day, isn't it ?
It's rather easy to spot (even by automated algorithms) if these ten accounts were only interested in upvoting each other instead of upvoting other users as well ...
For example also Voting CSI in SteemWorld would be very low.
haha, so I am the worsest guy at all cause my Voting CSI is negativ (-0,6)
Indeed, just another evidence of how well these kinds of algorithms are working. ;-)
Yes with 100% selfvoting you have 0.0 (like your friend hae...) so I am worse cause I have 0.0% selfvoting and - 1,1.
OK so your opinion is that selfvoting is better than votings others.
Haha - I even get worse than I was before, now -1,1 :-)
Such I bad boy I am.
Completely useless. Alts can be used to circumvent that and frequently are by abusers.
Nothing wrong with plain old PoB. But it takes an active anti-abuse community to do curb abuse. Not even Steemit, Inc with its mightly voting power can curb anything if there is no anti-abuse community to constantly bring abuse to its attention.
I'm on Hive but I want Steem to succeed also. In fact, forks are good in the world of DPoS because that's how things decentralise . Each project takes a different direction and attracts different people.
NOT completely useless!
I am pretty sure that most current abusers wouldn't take the effort to create that many alt accounts which are necessary to cirumvent this hurdle.
In addition it would be very easy to spot these accounts it they weren't active themselves and only received upvotes from one single abuser account (or circle upvote each other).
Concerning the committee, that's my idea since a long time.
It would only take creating one alt to double the number of daily posts one can make from ten to twenty.
That can easily be circumvented, too. Add a bit of randomization in the process and the detection becomes much harder. Add a few legit posts in the mix to attract votes from others.
Nothing wrong with a committee.
I also suggested to reduce the number of fully rewarded posts per day. In the early STEEM days this number was actually four per day.
The combination of these two suggestions would be rather effective in my opinion.
I disagree. That's all rather effortful and most abusers wouldn't do that. In the past it was very easy to spot the majority of abusers just by checking their 'Voting CSI' in SteemWorld.
For the remaining rest the 'committee' could be responsible.
Sure it can be tried. Time will tell if it works.
Another interesting related idea is a tax on too many rshares spent on the same accounts within a time period. That would force users to either create a lot of alts, which would cost them money in the form of account creation, or actually motivate them to look for more users to curate, which would be an excellent thing for user retention.
Sorry Jaki01, but steemcurator01 aka steemit inc is still abusing people on steem and posting here keeps it near the top. As a developer, I must say it is fun watching steemit committing suicide trying to destroy speech it doesn't like. Their myopic focus as a heavily censored Reddit clone will destroy the chain's true potential.
It is long overdue to move over to hive; Steemit inc and justin Sun don't know what the hell they are doing here. All their real talent left, and notice that all they care about is restricting speech to appease the CCP.
The should have never stolen the restricted stake, they should have never install ransomware on the major exchanges embezzling users Steem to takeover the chain, they never should have used the stolen restricted Steem to kick out the people who knew what they were doing. And you can't say that the old witnesses were in the wrong for many reasons. Most notably, when after Justin Sun condemned it demanding his stolen loot be protected, He did the same exact thing to legitimate Steem users to stop the Steem price from freefalling to 0 and prevent them from investing early in hive with their legitimate private property. Subsequently this led to the theft of a huge amount of Steem, and Justin Sun is silent about funds being super safu. Oh, he isn't just staying silent. That statement that Steem funds were super safu was a criminal act of fraud. The CCP conman, and his agents at steemit inc, needs to be prosecuted and where the statutes permit it-executed.
The biggest abuser on steem is Steemit inc.
... and if someone dares to disagree with certain whales on HIVE, that's an example what may happen (together with the kind wish to "catch the virus"):
Furthermore, on HIVE whales (most of them early miners), 'top witnesses', (former) bid bot owners and 'VIPs' determine how the trending page looks like (full of crypto, blockchain and HIVE related stuff which isn't of interest for people outside of a very small microcosm).
Concerning the equivalent of the 'steemit stake' it seems the influencers mentioned above are just finding ways to satisfy their greed and benefit from it ("I want to get my part of it because I did sooo much for HIVE").
HIVE is centralised in a sense of being an oligarchy where very few persons determine the future direction, for example who gets the huge upvotes and whose proposals are supported (for sure not the ones of new, unknown developers).
Is HIVE worse than STEEM? I didn't say so. Do I wish HIVE to fail? Of course not!
So what do I want? For example:
I suggest you to try to improve HIVE (there is a lot to be improved!) instead to interfere with STEEM (especially as your critics isn't constructive at all).
My reason to use HIVE or STEEM aren't any 'top witnesses' or whales (they may lead their individual wars, argue in their private slacks and circle vote their friends, but in the end it's none of my business as they also don't care about me as well). I am here because of small and middle sized users which are my friends and which I like to support! And I see no single reason not to support users on STEEM as well. Right, many things here can be criticized, but I also observed some encouraging aspects: for example there are many very engaged users who are taking over responsibility, dare to express their opinions, whereas until recently always the same people (again and again) appeared in trendig and dominated the public discussions.
If you want to convince people to use HIVE the best way is to improve ... HIVE, to show the world how good it is ... but not to attack users who have their own valid reasons to stick with STEEM.
Den Kommentar muss ich mir bookmarken - danke @jaki01
I wasn't attacking you, you are on my friendslist from over the years I believe. I was going after the illicit user steemcurator01 and steemit inc in general. Top keep steem curator from hiding posts to the bottom due to downvoting, the mechanism of responding to the top most appearing comment ensures that steemcurator01 is impotent at tossing the dissent/critics to the bottom. There is more overt censorship going on, including fully hiding users and their post at the condenser api level. Eventually they will do that to all of us.
Justine had a talk with Bernie about a year ago, he supposedly stopped downvoting literally just about anyone. He was behind a lot of pojects at steem, knew there was a lot of potential behind steem, but knew how idiotic the leadership was and the risk of the ninja mined stake. In his own way, He likely was protecting new users and their investments from the incompetent management of Powell and Scott. That is, not to invest in the sinking ship. They have since played the ninja mined card, and you have the same set of retards at the top....and Ned Scott is back.
I rarely use the trending page, I mostly use friend's feed. Steem's front page is really bad though. I think i know a potential solution but the implementation may have to be tailored beyond a proof of concept phase, but not going to help steemit. I'll see who I can try to talk to in hive about it.
I've never observed the, "I want to get my part of it because I did sooo much for HIVE" attitude you speak of.
As far as hive being oligarchical, it isn't a dictatorship that is scaring away anyone who is interested in investing and having a say in governance. Before the justin sun Takeover, only a few people took time to vote. If anything the those hive whales have lesser say now than all the minnows who schooled together to hold off the invasive predator. Witnesses have changed naturally over the years, so replacing witnesses wasn't unheard of. Due to justin Sun causing the minnows to school together, it is now, I would imagine, 4x more difficult for a new hive witness to enter the top 20 in terms of votes and are the witnesses that the community-not the mad dictator-wants.
The old witnesses brought years of knowledge to the chain, and knew the limits inside and out, and potential outside of blogging. Steemit inc just has the same ole retards running it, the true talent left, and they are destroying it internally, while trying to keep it limited to a steemit/blogging box. When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, don't interfere. So it really is comical to watch the old leadership commit seppuku in terms of western markets. Really the only market that is going to be left for steemit will be the the CCP.
Downvotes aren't erasing an entire account's blog from hivemind, genius.
Y'all Steem-humping necrophiles should learn what a false-equivalence fallacy is so you can figure out how dumb you look when you try it.
Angry? That's what I mean: it's so hard for many people to discuss in a friendly, unemotional way.
For a better discussion: what about to quote the passage to which you are referring?
Which "equivalence" did I talk about, please?
But my question stands: do you really think, attacking people here (with flags/insults), spamming or farming will cause anybody to join HIVE?
The part where you think getting downvoted is equivalent to getting all of your posts censored, your account essentially erased, from front ends courtesy of some censor-happy monkeys pulling the strings of the corpse of Stinc. I thought these guys had a lot of posts? @themarkymark @ausbitbank @gtg Where did they all go?
You mean that part where you think I would think ...? :)
That's why I asked you to quote me!
Then without quote: I think for the average user (who doesn't care at all about wars between millionaires which he doesn't know) the probability is much higher to get flagged permanently by any angry whale than to get his accout blocked or deleted on STEEM.
In his eyes that's nothing else than censorship. It won't help if you explain him "Look, that's no censorship, people can still find your content in a block explorer." That may be right, but he just won't care. He gets no more rewards and cannot see his posts in his preferred interface anymore.
If you want to convince him to join HIVE, to show him that his stay there is more user friendly and rewarding is the better method than flagging or insulting him here on STEEM. Correct? Correct!
@steemitblog
I think that their is nothing like abuse on steem. We don't need to talk over it.
The post and comments can be different from user to user. How can we decide this is abuse. Every user can have different thoughts. They can write/read anything they like. The one thing can be right for one user but same thing can be wrong for other user. Their is no way.
For post payout, Milking : For one user it may 1$, for other 10$, for third 50$, for fifth 500$, for sixth 5000$, can be anything or me it is XXXXXXXXX $. That's not the criteria to decide the abuse. They have invested so much money here to work and support others. That's not abuse.
I don't find anyone who is abusing the system till date (from 2 and half years). So, I never downvote anyone. Their may conflict of interest/thoughts like @themarkymark and me always have different thoughts, we didn't agree on any single point. But i many times agree with @steemchiller thoughts. For abuse point i didn't agree with statement that, their is abuse on steem. Here is the power of feedom. Do whatever you like:
ALL IS WELL.
MY APPEAL TO ALL STEEMIANS : PLEASE DON'T SPREAD NEGATIVITY ON STEEM PLATFORM, MOST OF THE NEGATIVE PEOPLES ALREADY GONE TO HIVE. LET THEM SPREAD NEGATIVITY AT HIVE, NOT HERE. WE ARE STEEM WITH POSITIVE PEOPLE WITH UNITY.
Sorry @mehta, when I see that it looks like abuse for me do not you think so:
Already in the past all kinds of farming (for example the self-votes executed by @haejin / @ranchorelaxo), circle voting, use of bid bots ... prevented me from investing more money into STEEM!
STEEM was always described as a community blockchain where quality content gets rewarded. Such a social media site with really great posts on trendig should attract more and more investors. However, if these potential investors get aware of the fact that STEEM is only a place for people who try to get as rich as possible as fast as possible, without to care at all about STEEM price, reputation of the platform and future development, they will look for other opportunities and invest their money.
For example when using bid bots there is never a chance that posts are selected according to their quality but only according to the money anybody is ready to pay.
If a user like @haejin would upvote many small accounts instead of upvoting himself only, he could contribute enormously to the user retention rate of the platfom. And as we all know, the value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users. That means @haejin would increase the value of his own investment. But he (like many others) is completely focused on his short term profit.
Very turely said but it doesn't means this is a abuse. This require a different kind of thinking. If we grow all people together, I will grow automatically. This things has to be understand by all. But i am sorry to say that most of the user not doing so. It is not only @haejin. But again it is not an abuse.
Can You provide your reply on my comment no 1 to 9 on above? This clear me how you think an abuse.
We already talked on downvoting too much, so i didn't favor free downvoting OR say different voting power. What you say about system providing abuse facilities for top 20 witness earning others very less?
This is not entirely true, because we all share one reward pool, @mehta. If one user would reward himself so much that there are no more rewards for other people in the pool, do you think it would be a fair practise?
On top of that, there are users who create many posts automatically with a bot, upvote them and sell the weekly rewards to buy Hive tokens. This does not benefit Steem at all. It puts pressure on the price and shows to external investors that we are not able to create a fairly rewarding environment.
The rewards for all Steemians (also yours) will increase, if we get rid of those pool abusers.
Right, and for sure we won't grow if too many new users, who barely earn anything, at the same time are getting discouraged by observing this shameless kind of self-enrichment.
Brother, how you doing?
Sorry for using this off-topic comment to contact you.
I want to make a suggestion for steemworld: could you include in the visualization of rewards to come, the payments that we will get for having been added as beneficiaries in some publication of another user?
Only that. Thanks for your attention.
Thanks for your idea! It is currently not possible to retrieve those rewards directly from the blockchain via regular RPC nodes, but they should be displayed in the Coming Rewards indeed (maybe in an extra tab).
I'm currently very busy with other things, therefore it may take a while, but I will put this on my list ;)
My pleasure!
Go ahead buddy, great wrok.
I think that you don't understand my point. This is not an abuse. It looks like abuse to you but not me. They have the power to upvote and they use it and this permission is given by steem blockchain code. How this can be a abuse. That is not abuse to me.
Most of the people uses power they have. Why we have given power to them? Take power from them. The power is given by system, if system is wrong then modify/change the system.
Are you want to give power in reverse order? Those have more SP having less vote value and those have Less SP get more power. Or any new concept.
We invite you to read [The Steem White paper, page .14 for referance].
Abuse is defined by the opinions of stakeholders. You may consider something as
not an abusebut other people might think otherwise. It is a democratic-like system that is based on stake. If the majority of the stake considers that doing X should be considered as abuse, then no one can do anything about it since this is also code. The only way to influence such a decision is by buying more stake and invest to influence the consensus.The code of the blockchain also allows them to downvote. It does not matter if you do not consider X as abuse, such a definition can only be defined by a decision that will be based on consensus.
Thanks @symbionts for information.
It's amazing to see someone with a brain sticking to Steem. I wish you had voted for real witnesses and would have a stake on Hive too. You're currently voting for sham witnesses that are arbitrarily restricting multiple people's honestly purchased and earned stake. Please reconsider.
Thanks for your consideration and suggestions. What you looks now is replica of 2 and half years my experience. I have very different thoughts from general people.
Fundamentally [ignoring witness rewards] both steem and hive are POS type systems, only with an option to share rewards. The ability to share rewards has lead to the delusion called a proof of brain that the community values, but steemit inc has acted criminally and destroyed the community and it appears some users have allegedly ended moved to pure POS while others are having a tantrum that their delusion was shattered or that they aren't getting the big votes. Some old complaint, different actors
Even if it wasn't an option but a mandate to share rewards, nothing stops them from creating a second account and thus still sharing the rewards with themselves. Proof of stake is the True nature of Steem,
And even if steemit inc was to continue abusing their stolen stake only to downvote those treating it in it's purest POS form, they are discouraging people from holding and would hurt the supply and demand, and the value of the rewards. So said alleged "abuse" isn't a bad thing-at an economic level it is a positive thing. There may be one way to make everyone happy, but I'll leave the debate for hive should the need for a debate arrive.
The CCP is all about controlling people, and as Tron shows us controlling the market too with fake users. Control is not the ideal way to entice and maintain users. Letting them invest into your projects, let them explore new uses for it, let them criticize positively or negatively about your products, and enhance it. All steemit inc wants to do is destroy a product, Steem, which they criminally stole from the community.
Certainly Tron has excelled in using bots as marketing tools to inflate the number of users and transactions to promote Tron. But you notice when real users, and speech is involved, it is no no no, we don't want you. One of the most important people Ned Scott shooed away was Dan Larimer. Dan has since gone on, without the incompetent Ned Scott, to create EOS which is a top 10 crypto. Similarly, the leadership of steem have shooed off the other top true holders/investors. Certainly after all the criminal activity he commenced to take control of steem, it feels as though he wants to professionally distance himself from it and leave the old clowns in charge as it is being prepped for the Chinese market.
All they have left is to gift and reward asskissers to keep them going. You notice they can't argue against the hive people-they don' have the ability. They hide them, they delete them, they censor them. Steemit inc knows it is a criminal syndicate and cannot defend themselves, and doesn't want new people to know their background of stealing from the community. Stealing from the community-this is what Tron did to dlive also.
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”-George R.R. Martin.
Hi, I think Steem is another better social media than those facebook,instagram,twitter alike because we the steem users get paid just by using it as we do with those mainstream social media. Many people still using those centralized social platforms, without getting a penny out of it. Hive is for those crypto people who dislike/cannot bring themselves to trust Justin Sun and Tron. I wish Hive can manage the decentralized elements of it, listen and consider all the voices from all small to big stakeholder and develop the graphene blockchain technology to it full potential.
Thanks for giving your thoughts on this matter.
That being said, there absolutely is abuse on the chain. It is just how you look at it and IF you want to see it.
I never see an abuse. If i see abuse then whole things going on steem is abuse including all as i mention in my first comment.
Interesting idea, but many users own multiple accounts which mutually upvote each other ...
SteemIt was down for 20+ hours over a simple bug. Yeah I am going to say SteemIt wont add shit. Lol
What is with the idea to take out the worth from selfvoting ?
If a vote was only a worth if you vote somebody else post or command - would this be a solution ?
Please see my reply here.
OK it's a good reason.
But: Correct me if I am wrong ... if users have multiple accounts they claimed this accounts with ressource credits from the main account. So in the end their will be one "mother-account" and as the blockchain save all I think you can also sort this out.
So what about the possibility to group the "mother-account" and all "child-accounts" together and take away worth from voting between all this accounts ?
There are ways to create accounts completely anonymously and I think in future there will be more account creation services, which offer to directly create an account via BTC or LTC payment for a small fee.
In this case the service's account would be the 'mother-account', so it's not really possible to solve it by watching the connection between creator and created account.
And of course, the account 'steem' is the 'mother-account' of all via Steemit created ones. Even there it would be possible to create multiple accounts.
"And of course, the account 'steem' is the 'mother-account' of all via Steemit created ones. Even there it would be possible to create multiple accounts."
I thought that you are allowed to open only one account the "free way" over steemit ... but probably they are not really able to check this.
I think allowing or supporting Steemit to be the judge is a big mistake. You know that they have proven themselves to be incapable of impartiality. You experienced that first-hand. For you to support such a thing is irresponsible in my opinion.
They have also shown blatant disregard for the will of the community, unless you would allow them to redefine who the community actually is. In that case, they would again be unfit to be judge.
This is a big mistake.
Dear @steemchiller
We're clearly on the same page here. STEEM won't survive if STINC wouldn't get involved. That's my strong belief.
Yours,
Piotr
How to end abuse on the steem chain: Kick the CCP ransomware overlords out, and criminally prosecute them, then swiftly execute them.
image: punch magazine.
America is no place for the CCP, it is time to overthrow and destroy the ccp in a swift targeted military strike.
I agree it will be impossible to design a code that will make it abuse-impossible. Humans are designed to find loopholes in the system. This problem just needs common sense.
Steemit would also get my support if decides they are going to take up this role and task. I am just afraid this will only give fuel to the haters and could give Steemit a bad name. A delegation or a community account, just like the Steemcurator02-07 would solve the problem without Steemit being put in the spotlight.
Such account, or delegation is something we know for years and is completely accepted by the community. It worked in the past. The ones running those accounts left, so its time for new community members to step up and continue.
If you have time, I made a comment on this topic in here, and would love your thoughts on that.
KR Ciska
LOL
One of the most fascinating things I have experienced on free networks, especially here on Steemit is how the community takes responsibility for fighting abuse. In the end it has to be done by real people... I have had a lot of fun being digital art sleuth...
Now there's a new law in Megacity 1.