People claim to not like bullies... until they show up with a bag of candy.

in #voting7 years ago (edited)


This is a steem/steemit community related post. I've been here almost 13 months now and I've seen some cycles. I have noticed something though, and I want to approach this subject in what may seem a bizarre way.

I want to tell you a story before I dive into the purpose of this story.

In a schoolyard in Steemville there were children running around and interacting. There was the normal pushing and tugging on hair that children do and the sticking out of tongues. There were some children that had some advantages that they acquired somewhere. They had spent some money and they had some gadgets to make giving wedgies, and to shoot someone across the room. They had advantages. These advantages primarily existed due to the fact they could afford to purchase them and others could not. Having these things does not mean they would use them.

Occasionally one of these kids would hear some child talking about topics they didn't like and they would go to town using their wedgie and spit ball tools to attack the child. If someone complained they might reach into their pocket and hand that complainer a couple dollars and suggest they go buy themselves something from the vending machine. Soon there are people standing around saying how great this guy is in the hope that they too might get some dollars.

The guy smiles. Nods. Hands out some occasional dollars, and continues to give wedgies and hails of spitballs upon those that talk about things they dislike. Occasionally they need to refurbish their tool, or get some better and slimier ammunition for their spitball gun.

Sometimes the complainers come out talking about how people should be able to talk about what they want, and if the bully doesn't like it they can simply choose not to listen. There are suddenly more wedgie and spitball targets.

Eventually the persons activities are noticed. Someone else that also had such devices but hadn't been using them might suddenly start using them against this bully and it becomes a contest of who can spend the most on bully assisting tools. There also might be more complaining from the original bully talking about how the new guy is a bully.

One day the bully came up with a plan. It was a plan that could get them more tools. They tried hard to keep themselves in check and do less of the wedgie spitball assaults. They bought themselves a new shirt that they like to wear that shows a smiley face.

They show up at school with a bag full of pieces of candy of different sizes and quality. They tell people they can reach into the bag and take a piece without looking if they pay him a quarter per piece they take. Some of the pieces are worth more than a quarter in terms of how much they cost, but overall this is a profit making scheme.

The process continues until there is a nice pool of money to spend and then the kid goes to upgrade their tools. They may be able to out perform the other guy that attacked them. This is the wedgie spitball weapons race.


So what was that all about?

We have had cases of people pseudo-censoring topics they don't like whether by hiding them, or perhaps down voting them so the target person cannot earn anything no matter how many people up vote them as long as the person down voting them can cancel out all of those votes.

This has been frowned upon and there have been discussions about how the down vote should only be used for spam, plagiarism, or abuse. Later they added disagreement about rewards.

This doesn't stop people from doing it simply because they don't like a topic or the author of a topic.

There is a lot of outrage over this and occasionally negative PR flagging wars can arise. There is an occasional discussion about how some of these people only have the power they do due to being in the right place at the right time before steemit existed and mined their power.

This brings up the issue with consolidation of power and how the curation algorithm and other things continue to further consolidate that power within these same people. This was even more disproportional prior to Hard Fork 19 when the voting curve was exponential rather than linear.

After people created other accounts, shifted power around, and created a new costume interesting things occurred.

We had accounts arise with a lot of power delegated to them that would offer to vote on ANY link you send them if it is sent to them as part of a payment in steem dollars. This is similar to reaching into the bag in my kid example above.

You earned the steem dollars and then you are sending them to the person so they will vote for what you want. This voting amount is randomized and sometimes it is worth less than those steem dollars and sometimes it is slightly more. It is essentially gambling.

It is however, further consolidating power within the voting service account holder. Sometimes these are the same people that have no problems with subjectively down voting anything they want to even if it is not spam, plagiarism, or abuse. They change their account, they offer a service (which I initially thought was pretty cool) and then they further consolidate their power by getting you to spend what you earned back on them.

Alternative


I like the idea of people being able to spend money to increase a post. Why don't we try to get steemit inc. to add a way so you can SPEND money on a post and that will be DEFINITE EARNINGS. People would still vote and that would still remain POTENTIAL earnings as it is now.

So if someone wanted to down vote the post to oblivion they would still get what you PAID them directly. This direct payment would also not be factored into curation.

We can do this now simply by doing a transfer in the wallet with a comment. You can tip. Yet there is something to be said for the dollar amount being VISIBLE. It shows someone liked it and was willing to pay for it. it also does NOT tap into the reward pool at all since it is people paying directly.

Essentially I am proposing a Tipping system be built directly into the monetary visibility aspect of the post, and that the tip be SAFE from the subjective down voter.

If we did this then you could spend your $2 (or $1, or whatever) SBD directly on a post and you would be giving that person $2.

This will provide a similar but known service without further consolidating the wealth and power in the hands of those that people were already concerned about the power consolidation.

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The consolidation of power is most definitely a problem, this topic will be the thing that either makes or breaks steemit. The people here want a decentralized platform. They want a place where they can express themselves, and not worry about reprisal. I'm sure there are many people that have left Steemit cause they have been flagged into oblivion, and not for spam, plagiarism, ect.. There are people on this platform that do not create content, but find ways to game the system as much as they can. Those people will end up screwing this platform completely up. I want to tell you about what I found but I don't want to broad cast it on this comment. You seem like a person that might be able to help fix a very big potential problem. It is insane the amount of power some of the people have on this platform, and I don't know how to decentralize this power. The one or the group with the most money invested in this platform wins, kind of like life itself. I want to keep doing steemit, but if you piss off the wrong person you are done for! I am not free to say what I want, this is the example. If I told you right now what I have found, and that person reads this comment then they would prob shut me down for good. I don't want to be shut down I want to keep doing this, so I have to keep my mouth shut. THAT IS CENSORSHIP! THX for the post.

I posted a proposal how to make steem grow. I need to get the message out https://steemit.com/steemit/@emble/will-steem-succeed-or-commit-suicide

People think it's consolidation. There is nothing wrong with consolidation, that's also how reputation works. But a bunch of the bullies started out with so much more money to buy candy and spitballs with, that to describe it as 'god mode' would be quite an understatement.

My candy reference is that Randowhale is essentially buying a lottery ticket. Yet it is like buying a lottery ticket from the Mafia or a Dictator. How much is your soul worth? So they may not LIKE these people or their activities, but they'll gladly buy their products which gives them huge power.

Tapping into greed is a lucrative business, and they are SMART in that sense. It isn't good for steem, but it is good for them. People need to stop taking candy from them.

They are learning but somebody needs to take steem away from these pigs first. Then they can play chess with each other, or, you know, like BS likes to say 'get a real job'.

LOL, good point.

With the exception of when a small group of whales was downvoting posts because they had some other whales upvoting them over a certain amount... or whatever their reason was for their 'experiment', I have rarely seen large stakeholders downvoting maliciously.

Even that is a stretch to call that malicious because the whales intent was to try to distribute the reward pool more.. it just had the unintended consequences of hitting some people who had rarely had a good potential payout and they lost some or all of it.

I have seen them take down some nasty, lying scammers which is a public service.

I can think of one person who was being regularly downvoted and some behind the scenes discussion ended that. The person being downvoted wasn't a bad dude.. just the two didn't know each other and had a misunderstanding. Crap like that happens.

As long as you behave like a reasonable person, respect others and don't try to scam, you can pretty much post what you want.

I think most of the activity of the other kind was many months ago now. I do think it is improving.

Perhaps I spoke too soon. :) Though I've been waiting to be down vote dogpiled. I finally had it happen.

I don't recognize the names that downvoted you.. who they heck are they and what is their problem?

A down vote trail... bot action. I'll provide more info in the future.

I want to keep doing steemit, but if you piss off the wrong person you are done for! I am not free to say what I want, this is the example. If I told you right now what I have found, and that person reads this comment then they would prob shut me down for good.

I just avoid naming specific people when reporting information. If I am going to name a person I try to only state the facts and avoid just writing my opinion. I also try not to call them a jerk or otherwise ad hominem attack them.

I've found they don't usually down vote someone to oblivion if that person didn't actually ATTACK them. If you give them nothing to latch onto other than facts which you are not stating opinions about, then really they don't generally flag someone to oblivion.

This has been my observation. So it is all in how you go about doing it.

@ats-david did some investigative reports long ago, and not only is he still around he is thriving. @bacchist did some investigative posts long ago and he is still around. @klye did some investigative posts and not only is he still around both he and bacchist are witnesses.

I called out berniesanders on one of my posts but I didn't bash him. I just did like an information dump. He didn't attack me. He had some verbal comments, but I was careful not to take the bait and resort to name calling or ad hominem attacks. He didn't flag me, when I've seen him flag other people into oblivion.

The key is can you show that you are doing it because you care about the community without turning it into a finger pointing rant?

OK very good advice, and ya I have facts but still it is prob not a good idea to post about it anyway. I might not understanding everything I have found out as well, I don't want to be one of those guys that post something and it not what I think it is. I just have a feeling that Steemit will be like the real world, when it comes to making money and business. Corrupt! Human nature, there is nothing we can do about that. I will just keep my head down, and try to make content that is honest and kind. Thank you by the way for replying, I really enjoy how throw you are.

You can email me the info if you want to dwinblood @ gmail.com

I am looking into some of this as well. They thought I was butt hurt and came after this post with a big horde of down vote bots and accounts that down voted all at the same time. Mining those accounts for information has revealed an interesting web. I will turn that information into some hopefully nice investigative reporting, so if you don't want to say anything but have information feel free to email it to me if you want.

Yes that is what I am talking about, it is web of crazy stuff I will email you what I have found.

You're just a butthurt old man. There's nothing here worth downvoting. You can see just by the number of followers and users how many people LOVE @randowhale.

Oh I know they love it. I even used it a few times. :) I don't even KNOW if the person I was responding to was even talking about you. They didn't say. I would kind of doubt it though.

I agree with you I'd rather see people using it to promote other people, and policing that would be difficult as they could just use other accounts like you said. Most people don't have other accounts, but it might spur them to create them.

Fuck you, sanders, you fucking grub.

Welcome to the preminer-haters-club :) It's not just him. and btw, he is also @nextgencrypto - either that, or when bernie gets butthurt, nextgen flags.

like magic

Oh he is A LOT of people. I'm actually glad they down voted me with 100+ accounts. Do you have any idea how revealing it is to go through these accounts and see who transfers money to where? He is A LOT more accounts than that, but yes he is definitely that one and that is the one he seems to send most of his Randowhale funds to. They go from Randowhale to Randowhalefund and from there mostly to Nextgencrypto.

Whether they are all the same people I cannot say for certain. Yet it is obvious they have an extreme level of collusion IF they are different people.

Clearly, such collusion is improbable, so, it's the same asshole. With all his SP and accounts, this is his dream. As a child, he was the awkward fat kid that never quite understood that being normal was not worth aspiring to, yet, he wasn't, and he got ragged on. He lived, for that day, when he could rag on someone else. He got his wish, a game, where he was able to rack up godlike XP, before anyone else joined the virtual world.

I would guess, also, that he is less than 25 years old.

He better hope no one ever doxes him if this is how he wishes to act. As more people join no telling what type of a loon he might set off. :)

And 25 years concept. Very possible since he called me an old man. :) Which I am fine with being called. I myself am 47.

A lot of people LOVE Britney Spears, that does not make her music any better.

From what I read of your @randowhale you are using a random number. I don't know if it is just a flat range or not. Have you considered making it even more lottery like?

Adjust your algorithm so maybe there is a 1% chance of a 10x as powerful vote as normal, 10% chance of a 4x as powerful, and then the remaining 89% or so doing what you are already doing? That would make it kind of like buying a lottery ticket.

Right now you can make more or less than your $1 SBD, but I suspect you keep that pretty closely monitored. It right now is a lot like buying a lottery ticket, but it is not quite as dramatic as a lottery ticket might be.

I do realize that to do this you'd have to recalculate percentages.

As to butthurt and looking for something to complain about. I just write about whatever comes to mind. That usually comes from external stimuli. You haven't done anything to me, but I'd been thinking about the growing groups of voting bots that get paid for their services for awhile. That inspired my post.

Now talking hopefully WITH you, but I'll be satisfied with AT you if that is all I can get also made me think of ways your service might be even cooler. So I shared that with you. If I was butthurt and jealous because I didn't get there first I wouldn't bother. ;)

I do KNOW you care about the community. We ideologically differ strongly in some areas, but that doesn't mean I think you don't care.

I do think when it comes to business and focusing on yourself and maximizing your potential you are willing to go further than I am. That also means you'll always have more than I do. I am totally fine with that.

So if you like the idea and it helps you at all... have at it. If not. Oh well, something else will inspire me to write about something else. It always does and it is actually fairly RARE that it has anything to do with you. :)

Wow, you came out cheap from this :)

There ya go. I had to go do some server work. I came back and am sitting at zero. All I can say is I can now make a note of all of these accounts that subjectively down voted and start keeping an eye on them. ;)

If you start with that bully, don't expect to go away with a bag of candies :(

Oh I came away unscathed until this time. Yet this time I am spinning to a positive. The 100+ accounts that down voted me all at the same time gave me far more data to mine than I was expecting. There is good information here. In that regard it was worth it. If he actually wanted my attention, he got it. :)

I didn't call him names. I didn't tell him he was butt hurt. In other words I did not do what he was doing to me. Two wrongs do not make a right. He also knows I care about the community though I disagree with him ideologically on a number of things.

There is something wrong with selling access to a public pool and it also means that the quality of content is questionable (especially for self-voting).

70k in 55 days according to @holoz0r is quite ludicrous.

I agree. I prefer the TIP idea I proposed. If you want to give yourself a TIP then you don't actually make anything. So it is not self voting. The voting accounts though are being used for people to say "See, I don't self vote my posts"... yet then you look and see they pay to have someone else vote for their account so they can then try to virtue signal about not self voting.

There's nothing wrong with self voting. If you don't think it's worth upvoting why would you post it in the first place? I haven't been a heavy user recently, but I usually upvote comments 5% or so and full posts more heavily. I use 100% votes for vote wars and if I think something is particularly valuable.

I am voting 3% on comments at the moment because I vote on a lot of them... I've been inch worming that up to see what I can get away with. I don't vote on comments that people already voted themselves. I want to encourage conversation/discussion and in your case your vote there is significantly higher than my current 3% which is about $0.08. I up vote posts a lot higher and yeah if I notice people flagged that shouldn't be I also tend to vote those higher. Since HF19 and 10 max 100% votes per day I don't always have 100% to go around. :)

I never did understand the value of the downvote thing, it seems to me that if a person don't like a post they probably shouldn't follow you. I guess it makes me think of freedom of speech, but I'm still pretty new here so I guess I'll just sit back and see what happens.

Downvoting is useful for dealing with spam and attempts to abuse the system, but can also be used abusively if it isn't countered.

See here for example: https://steemit.com/earn/@tuvokhl/shit-post-5#@troglodactyl/re-tuvokhl-shit-post-5-20170709t141555576z

Without downvoting, people could loot the community by getting payouts for self voting spam.

Congrats. The OP is currently voted back into the positives. We need a "controversial" tab to get more firepower into all these vote wars.

Yeah it does my heart good to see that we can reverse those vote brigades with effort. Yet not everyone that could have down voted it did. So they could still pounce on the last minute and make it zero ago. If they do. So be it.

wow.....I am VERY impressed with this post and have learned some VERY valuable points.
The post it self seemed pretty uneventful....But the comments made the contest of the post very powerful. I will be folioing you much more closely now.
Best Wishes~*~

I did some analysis on this very subject just a few days ago. If you'd like the raw data to do some of your own, let me know.

Here's what I found:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@holoz0r/a-brief-history-of-randowhale-how-it-made-70k-sbd-in-55-days

It made 70,000, how much did it take from the reward pool with it's votes?

Pretty bold move to down vote the very posts pointing them out. And I can't think of any clearer way of saying;

"Hey dwinblood! That's us! Thats us your talking about!"

I hope they do realise they are sawing the branch we are all sitting on... them included. An escalation into a down-vote-war is the last we need out of this though.

You have my support dwinblood!

I'll just try to be as objective and unbiased as I can. That will be tough, but I'm really going to try.

despite what I think of bernie and his mission, he attacked you for no reason and you are my friend. I will have your back in a conflict, but that does not mean I agree with you on the character of bernie or even on the use of downvotes.

If you dont have the power to shape opinions around yo

If you dont have the power to shape opinions around yo

Those who censor nations and people usually think that way as well. Where do you draw the line? (EDIT: Not an attack, simply curiosity)

I deleted parts (and meant to delete the whole paragraph, damn) because I am not sure myself.

There is music I love and support, there is tons of music that I dont really care about, I listen to it occasionally. Then there are some songs that I just outright hate and that make turn off the radio.

It is not cool to censor someone, but if that someone is just spouting toxic non-sense or even if you think it is "highly overrated" you should be able to vote against it. I dont do it and i dont plan to do it because this is not the etiquette of steemit.

It is not cool to censor someone, but if that someone is just spouting toxic non-sense or even if you think it is "highly overrated" you should be able to vote against it. I dont do it and i dont plan to do it because this is not the etiquette of steemit.

Anyone can choose to believe anything they want is nonsense. The down vote lists here spam, plagiarism, and abuse and they added disagreement over rewards which I believe was a huge mistake.

For example: I think caviar sucks and tastes pretty bad, does that mean I should be able to say people shouldn't be able to pay for it. Should I be able to state that because I dislike it that I dispute the amount people are paying for it and force it down to $0. Making posts takes time. It differs by person. If people choose to up vote something that is them showing they like it. Why does it matter if I don't like it? I simply ignore it and don't vote on it.

Yet, on this platform when you down vote and you have sufficient power you can cancel out the interests of other people.

They will argue it is not censorship, but then that starts to sound like the excuses youtube is making for things these days. They are not censored, you just can't up vote them, they can't be monetized, they will not show up as recommended, and people cannot comment on them. Yes, that is their latest thing and people are pissed.

Yet in reality when someone powerful down votes something because they don't like it here they can effectively cancel out ALL monetization... If the down vote had no effect on that then most people wouldn't give a shit about the fact their vote count was lowered. When you take away their chance to earn from people that do like what they wrote then that becomes a VERY hostile environment.

If you don't like it, don't vote on it. Pretty simple. That doesn't mean you should be able to tell other people the fact they liked it doesn't matter because you are bigger and can make it like they don't exist.

OK, two examples.

Trump vs Hillary. You don't want to vote Trump but you want to cancel out the opinion of people that voted for Hillary, hence you should be able to downvote Hillary, not because you want to censor Hillary, but because you are against the ideas Hillary propagates.

I have seen some people comment on my articles with straight up radical right comments. Now you know my position on nationalsocialism and such but i don't want to be associated with "actual nazies", so I would want to downvote their comments if I see too many of them or even downvote their posts. Not to censor their opinion, but to show that I and we as a community disagree.

The devil is in the detail. If I see a new User I dont like and auto downvote him so that he can never have a voice on Steemit, then that is bs. If you see content that has 100$+ rewards while you think it does not deserve that high of a payout since the content is mediocre at best, then that is something different.

I dont think Bernie ever planned on systematicly downvoting you. He would be insane to try. It would be a war and I would fight on your side. That is what I meant to say initially. If worst comes to worse, my ideas of voting are not as important as the well-being of my friends.

Not to censor their opinion, but to show that I and we as a community disagree.

As long as there is money involved in the voting process and it is visible then when a person down votes they are also cancelling out what other people wanted to pay that person. This can be perceived as a form of censorship, but if people do a semantic dance they can say it is not.

I don't think Bernie was necessarily the person that down voted me on that post. I am still digging, but most of the accounts I am coming across that are directly linked to him are not in the list of people that did the down vote. If Bernie had down voted me I'd likely still be $0. :) Whomever owns steemed and all the accounts linked to it is the culprit here.

I told Bernie I'd not accuse him of things without pretty strong evidence in my investigation and I mean to keep that word. As such, I still may be one of the few people he hasn't downvoted. My investigation will show more.

100$+ rewards while you think it does not deserve that high of a payout since the content is mediocre at best, then that is something different.

The problem here is the person gets to decide what is "mediocre". I think Caviar is a shitty taste so I don't think it is worth paying that price for. :) So should I now be able to drop it to $0.

I believe if we want to include reward pool as a justification for a downvote that it should only be tied to gaming the system. If someone is obviously exploiting something in the system due to us not having found a programmatic way to protect against it without introducing new problems then that is about the only time I'd support such an action.

I do have an idea, I don't think anyone would go for it, but I am kicking it around and may write about it at some point.

I'm new to steemit and still don't know how a lot of this stuff works. Something that would prevent malicious downvotes from completely ruining a post is a great idea.

It would be great if people had to explain why they downvoted. A post should only be downvoted if it is racist, spam, plagiarism, etc. Simply not liking someone's point of view is no reason to downvote.

Don't worry. As long as you don't do something that is far away from common sense like writing a psot with extensive cursing and live threats, extensive plagiarism (pretending stolen content is your own), or excessive spam - especially "follow for follow", you should be save from downvotes.

Most downvoters also give comments. they are also people you can talk with.

The problem with tips being added to post payout and affecting ranking is that all it would take is for people to cooperate and cycle those tips around. I could simply give someone a $4k "tip", nail them to the top of trending and they could return the favour next post..

Good point. Yet, I didn't necessarily say it should impact trending. I wasn't even thinking of it in terms of appearing in that algorithm, more as to show that there were people that supported this post whether some jerk decided to vote it to $0 or not. Making that support visible to everyone rather than having to go through the steps to transfer sbd, just have it there and easy. It looks like the TIP button is there already on busy.org.

damn I knew there was a problem with dwinblood's idea.

Schoolyard Capitalism. Same as grownup Capitalism. It's all fun and games until someone sells an eye.