It has come to my attention that you can exploit @randowhale to simply print your own money. Simply create a new post, send Rando your $2.00, get $3.00-$8.00+ for the upvote, rinse and repeat.
Each one of these posts in the screenshot below has no content or value. Just a title, no text and a couple tags. Someone is posting generic questions dozens of times an hour just to get upvoted by @randowhale.
Is this what we want content on Steemit to become? What happens when hundreds or thousands of people join Steemit just to create spam for exploits like this. Eventually @randowhale's voting power will be depleted making it pointless for anyone to use.
I have been pretty vocal about how paying for votes is a hack and complete misuse of the intention behind the upvote feature. This exploit completely proves the point why paid upvote bots are bad for the Steemit platform.
There's no reason this should even be possible. All this does is create spam, misuse and exploit the platform, encourage behavior that Steemians would agree is inappropriate, and encourage others to not invest in creating valuable content.
This needs to be fixed.
This post received a 1.3% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @britt.the.ish! For more information, click here!
I've already discussed this - A Summary of @randowhale: Statistics for Dummies - with detailed statistics on the total profit from his service. This was before the hard fork, when he had more voting power.
You are right, it is like printing money. And if this worries you, how about upvoting your own content? It is also like printing money.
In fact, every time you upvote anything, you're are giving away money, which have been printed and given to you for free.
So what you are discussing here is that Steem is printed without a cap, which means that inflation is embedded right in. And, of course, inflation means that Steem will drop like a brick, once the folks behind WannaCrypt stop laundering their Bitcoin.
I still find it amusing that there are people on Steemit, jumping from joy from becoming millionaires, after investing their life savings in cheap Steem some months back, now intending to become even richer by holding on to Steem.
Greed and common sense don't go together.
Good points. Still, I would like to see some competition. Who can do randowhale better for less? Better means whatever you want it to mean; a bot that screens for content first, checks the authors reputation, start date and then of course a whale could flag abusers into oblivion to "fix it."
As a newbie here, I use randowhale to help promote talented minnows. We need it. But it could be so much better and more powerful...for less money, imho
Magic :)
LOL competition is the foundation of a free market/capitalism, no? :P
This platform has little in common with free market economic and thrives on supporting each other.
There is no need for competition in this venture, except inasmuch as we compete in the contribution of value.
Competing with others is the opposite motive here.
Here you earn by helping others through appreciating their contribution and providing useful content.
These actions create grateful reciprocal action from others, which provides all your benefit.
I say again, all our benefit is derived by helping others.
I agree with you 100%. My little contests help minnows everyday free of charge and I ask for nothing in return. :-)
I think you are taking apart one thing. Sure we compete for favours, we all do, but we can't all be at the same time in the same place.
Hmm, you seem on point with this, but i believe, not super sure yet as um reading about itnfor my next post, that steemit has a way to curb inflation.
I do agree that randowhale looks like a money making venture, but uts mutually beneficial, send 2 and get 8 or 4 or 0 doesnt matter. But where U draw the linebis when lazy as* people use the process as a money making machine without any content
You are talking about morality in a purely capitalist and free market situation. People see profits to be made, Steemit allows it, and they take the opportunity.
Is it now full with people from developing countries, who can't use proper English and copy paste from the Net? Yes! Do Steemit developers care? No.
But why don't they care?
The reason is that as long as Steemit is becoming more and more popular, so is Steemit's rank as a website - making it worth millions, so it's likely to be sold to someone in the near future. Also, as long as there's demand for Steem (there are people actually investing their own money now that the price of Steem is up, which I find silly), the developers will be happy, as demand for Steem means its price should go or at least stay up for longer.
From what I've seen so far, the developers are excellent marketing people, but don't understand much about economy. Hype seems to be a good driving force, though!
This practice may seem rewarding but will ultimately destroy the platform which I am certain we want to protect. I agree that this should be permissable only on merit.
The postulation that it has merit in that it brings attention is not a sound argument as attention should be based on garnered support through the expression of appreciation of the content of others.
That mechanism is in place and functional and effective in separating the worker, the selfish, the exploiter from the supporter, the considerate, the worthy.
I have used this bot and will hate to lose it but recognise it as a threat to what we cherish.
Dude, did you eat a dictionary today?
lel
followed.
Very well said.
Nice catch!
We would obviously not want this behaviour on Steemit. We don't want spam and we want high quality content. Not just a bunch of garbage to reap rewards. - That being said, even @minnowsupport could be used for this exact purpose too. - And that's without investment on your part. Although the profit would be less.
However, I do think both @randowhale and @minnowsupport are great for the community. - It makes it easer for people to get recognition, to reap some rewards and to increase their reputation. - That being said, I would obviously prefer manual votes only, but that will most likely never happen.
The best thing I can come up with, is that randowhale started to check the content before voting, to ensure it's quality content. However, that would be impossible and the whole purpose of randowhale would be gone.
I would say that self-voting is a way bigger problem at this time, as several people upvote their own comments instead of other people's content. - But what you've mentioned here is obviously something one should try to find a good solution for, so we can prevent spam and prevent low quality to be rewarded. With or without the use of randowhale or by any other means.
Good job. Upvoted & Resteemed.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I can understand people using rando and minnowsupport legitimately, but those services shouldn't enable this kind of behavior. It simply makes the platform look bad and will attract the wrong type of 'authors'
I hear you. I am not a coder or anything like that, but I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to create some sort of "hidden" algorithm, so the bot/bots doesn't vote in case it's a more or less empty post..? - You should obviously leave that part hidden from the users of the services too, so it's harder to exploit it.
I think the root of the problem is the classic conundrum of the commons. It would not be profitable to @randowhale to vote for content if the rewards drew from the wealth of the account. It is profitable for @randowhale and those that pay for the votes because the rewards doled out come from the rewards pool, rather than @randowhales pocket.
Delinking vote power from personal wealth would also solve this problem. Give everyone an equal vote, or one weighted by reputation, and all of these scammy tricks just go away.
I still don't understand why that wasn't the go to condition to begin with. HF19 seems to have mollified a great many people that were quite upset at 99% of rewards going to 1% of accounts, but, as this post indicates, there are still problems that need fixing.
This problem also is found in self-voting, and that creates the concentration of author rewards in a tiny fraction of accounts.
Perhaps merely changing self votes, and vote selling, to draw from the voters account, rather than the rewards pool would end all such shenanigans. I recommend the same for downvotes, as that would ensure that hurting someone else would require strong enough motivation to take the pain yourself.
Not sure about curation trails and minnowsupportproject, really, although they are the same in principle.
I've used none of them, and do not vote my own posts or comments, because reasons.
Here's the problem with giving everyone equal votes. If there's no incentive to hold STEEM POWER then everyone will dump their STEEM for BitCoin once they earn it and devalue the whole thing. You have to have a mechanism for making people want to hold the STEEM and currently that SP.
SP is an incentive to hold Steem. I am unsure it is necessary. I know it is regarded as unfair by many that self votes cause the pool of newly minted Steem to accrue to a handful of accounts almost exclusively, and that, as stated in the white paper, this causes a crisis of confidence that threatens Steemit's long term success, and thus Steem's value to investors.
I also have noted a great deal of effort that is expended trying to make the system less obviously unfair, and also how SP weighting affects curation negatively. These are plain and simple to understand problems, while the possibility that SP is needed to encourage investors to hold Steem is speculative.
Capital markets provide a mechanism to attract investment. As assets appreciate in value, so do investments. Steem is no different. However, if Steemit fails, or does not perform well, no gimmicks such as SP weighting of VP will cause investors to keep Steem, because the price of Steem will not appreciate.
Steem has significant advantages over BTC. It has a use case that generates continued possession of the currency, which BTC does not. While BTC has the first mover advantage, a cursory glance at charts shows that this advantage is rapidly eroding. Steem has zero transaction fees. BTC is being crippled by transaction fees. Steem can support orders of magnitude more transactions per second than BTC.
BTC is about to be abandoned (at least temporarily) by masses of holders prior to Aug 1. There will likely be at least three BTC chains on Aug 2. Were Steem less impacted by the problems I have been discussing, Steem might well be where that value was held, while people wait out the soft and hard forks that are about to impact BTC. It is the perceptions of Steemit users that financial manipulation of VP makes Steemit unfair that most degrade Steem as a store of value, as Steem depends on Steemit's success.
VP weighting by SP cannot be made fair. As the white paper points out, this causes Steemit to suffer a crisis of confidence, and as new users discover the problem, and that it cannot be fixed by pandering to whales, that crisis will mature.
The key to keeping and attracting investment in Steem is the success of Steemit, and SP weighting of VP directly threatens that by discouraging users who see it as unfair. Worse, it negatively impacts curation, and this is exacerbated by VP decay.
Anything that degrades curation, which both VP decay and SP weighting of votes clearly and obviously do, directly affects the quality of content produced on Steemit.
In the final analysis, either Steemit will transform social media by creating a robust and broadly adopted platform that is driven by high quality content creation, or another platform will. The potential of social media to succeed is not in question, nor is the principle behind Steemit, of rewarding people directly for creation and curation. Steemit has shown the transformative power of that concept, but failing to capitalize fully on that power by crippling curation and rewards distribution will just provide an opportunity for developers that correct those defects - on a competing platform.
Minnowsupport has a cool down period. It's one post in an hour, for second bot upvote you wait a day
Thank you for the information really spam is more.
I have used the service for legitimate reasons but i think the it's ok but should be manually done with the vote weight based upon the quality. HF19 was a good improvement and there will be more to come
Yes, the automated aspect of these voting bots is what creates exploits like this. This should not be acceptable.
This makes me remember the song from The Apprentice
Money, Money, Money; Money!
Money, Money, Money; Money!
Β
This has been the ugliest human nature isn't it? Most of these people will only think of the outcome in their wallets, and many of them are not aware every post (or _garbage in garbage out) they make will stay forever in the blockchain.
Just like our poor beautiful planet. Only a minor percentage of people are actually effective in their GDP so to speak.
Is there a way @randowhale can validate and reject post updates? Or is it actually an automated system that just responds to the one who invested?
Right now, the bot isn't very smart. It would be easy to filter out posts like this particular persons because there is no actual text content in the post.
The bot is smart enough. It just doesn't care, as long as you send your 2 bits... I really don't see anything wrong with this. It is a free market, and the word "should" should not be used.
I use rando all the time, and it's usually at least 100% profitable.
It's really just another way to mine. Some buy graphics cards, and I choose to sometimes use some entrepreneur's innovative robot. As we've seen, there are other bots being dreamed up all the time in order to generate profit for their creators. They provide a service, and people pay. As long as that is the case, everything should be fine. There's that word again. :)
Cheers, lets have a @randowhale vote contest then. Highest upvote wins :)
This post received a 2.2% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @britt.the.ish! For more information, click here!
I am so in. Posting that contest now. I will edit it into this comment.
--
Alright. It's up. Enjoy! https://steemit.com/humor/@thomasaquinasftw/contest-to-find-a-less-vulgar-way-to-say-something-really-vulgar-yet-with-the-same-meaning
Cheers, sounds good. I just sent you a tip/question, thanks for stopping by.
following you now :)
No, thank-YOU!
My strat has been to lurk in good threads with whales. A couple of weeks ago, I commented on a comment in a whale's thread and he threw me a huge upvote... like $99. It blew my mind. So I kept it up, and then started lurking in more threads like that. I have made a whole lot more from comments than from compositions. However, my posting method has really been helped by the fact that said whale and 11 of his buddies are now set to automatically upvote me 20 minutes after I post. After I post - ANYTHING.
So I am now honor-bound to not post shit.
That is it. :)
So now I try to participate and contribute to all their threads. Reciprocally.
This post received a 3.3% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @thomasaquinasftw! For more information, click here!
This post received a 2.8% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @britt.the.ish! For more information, click here!
Agreed 100% .
Bots are being created for the benefit of the community & spammers are finding ways to exploit it . Members who are actually creating content are getting lost somewhere in this whole process.. If you see such spam posts just highlight to @steemcleaners & keep flagging off
Thanks for the highlight recommendation, will look into it and do so accordingly.
Agreed. I didn't like idea myself, you can't bash people asking "follow for follow" while encouraging things like buying votes. Doesn't make sense
.
Or if they still want to continue, I'd suggest making it usable only on posts with already 20 upvotes, so people can use it if they feel their posts are undervalued
great article
what will happen when millions of people are on here there will be a few bad eggs that will sell there upvote
It's one thing to sell your vote personally to someone willing to pay, it's a whole other thing to create an automated bot that can be exploited just like this.
i know what you mean, but if someone was paying me 2 or 3 quid for a upvote and i needed the money. i would be doing it
And that's your choice, and I respect it. But nobody could write an automated script to exploit your upvotes, it's possible with these bots.
maybe they will outlaw bots in the future
This should be reported to @randowhale bot owner. Upvoted
That's so dodgy. The person who is doing this should be flagged in my opinion.
I totally agree, I don't know the best way to approach this behavior and flagging the person as a community so I opted to protect them. Smart people can find him/her pretty easily if they wanted
Hmm, well, you could just out them to @berniesanders, and tell him it's @krnel. He'll take care of it.
Old news, it's a useless service anyway. Hardly any benefit, huge exploits. No thanks.
Old news as in people who could fix this know the exploit and don't find it a problem?
You can't prevent the exploit, people can always create multiple accounts. Randowhale is just a useless bot that only makes SteemIt worse imo.
True. Actually, as more people will use it, the less useful it gets.
It surprises me how @randowhale has gotten so popular so quick.
Almost everyone is using it.
Including me.
Then again, abusing it is a concern.
If its power is depleted, so will be the interest to use.
i have use this bot sevice. if it is being exploited for that kind of spam post, i am hoping that the developer or someone who hold control over steemit and account could make an improvement, so that it could prevent that kind of exploit.
self upvote is kind of a bad effect of the HF19 iguess.
HF19 dramatically reduced the imbalance. Things were actually much worse before the fork. The fork made an incremental improvement, but did not address the underlying problem, which is linking vote power to personal wealth.
This spamming of @randowhale vote buys is just another symptom of that problem. The worst example of that problem I'm aware of is the interaction between @berniesanders and @krnel.
I have proposed changes that would rectify this, and, I believe, improve the curation of content, but HF19 has just happened, and I posted my thoughts just the day before the fork, so time needs to show that problems, such as this, can only be addressed through solutions that address the underlying problem, rather than the symptoms.
What the hel*? How can people exploit the forum so, bro you need to unsensor those IDs so these people can be flagged. I suspected this was going to happen sooner or later.
@aggroed @acidyo @pfunk, there are people exploiting @randowhale
I knew I followed you for a reason. This post is an example of why it was a good reason.
Thanks!