So I am posting through Utopian.io today in the hopes of getting more exposure for this post, and to get it in front of the eyes of people who can do something about the issue as I see it. Frankly, I do not know if any of the projects I am asking to make changes to their offering are open source, but they are relevant to our daily Steem experience, so I figured I would take a chance.
We've all seen the recent rash of posts regarding "Reward Pool Rape", Part of my work with @newsteem has been to talk to people who are fighting to protect the reward pool by closing down some of the avenues by which people are gaming the system. But there is a problem that I have not seen addressed by anyone. And maybe that is because it is something that the dolphins and orcas don't want to see addressed, because it is benefiting them. What I am talking about is Auto Voting.
The Issue
Auto Voting in and of itself is not really a problem. There are people that you want to follow and support, even if you miss their post. You know that they ALWAYS post good content, you trust that they will not take advantage of your generosity, so you sign up to one of the big auto voting services here on Steem and set things up. This is fine. This is an acceptable use of your Steem Power. In fact, this morning, after 4 months, I set up an Auto Vote through steemauto.com to become a "Fan" of a couple of authors I support, and to make sure I am using the SP that has been delegated to me to upvote anything that my delegators put out.
I'm still not convinced that auto voting is a good and wonderful thing. But I can get on board with it as a tool when used appropriately. I do have to say, as I set it up, I kind of got this feeling:
But I digress.
If Auto Voting is fine, what am I proposing?
The problem, as I see it, is that there are sleeping whales who set up auto vote schedules A Long Time Ago, on a Platform Far Far Away. At the time, these whales, who, lest we forget, are also human beings, probably had the same intent as you and I do. They wanted to support content creators that were putting out the best stuff.
But over the course of time, many of these people have gone dormant, no longer posting, commenting, or doing anything on the platform other than automatically voting every single piece of content put out by the people that the auto voters are programmed to take care of.
Whether those content creators are good or bad, these auto votes have continued to pour in over the course of a year and a half, and given a large share of the reward pool to the same people over and over again.
Keep in mind, the amount of reward given out on a daily basis remains the same regardless of who or how many votes are given out. If we eliminate "dead votes" and return Steem to the reward pool, we disperse the rewards over the people who are getting active votes.
Proposed Solution
To my knowledge there are three major players in the auto voting field, Streamian, Steemvoter, and Steemauto. Again, to my knowledge, Streamian is basically no longer supported, so that makes implementing a solution with that service difficult, short of shutting it down entirely. However, it seems to me that a simple fix could be put into place for all of these services that automates the process of shedding sleeping whales.
We'll call the fix - "Check Activity"
It's as simple as having the system go in and see if a user has Posted, Commented, Replied, or voted (for someone other than who they have set on auto vote) in the last 30 days. If a user has done none of these things, that user should be pinged with an "Are You There" command. This could be a wallet transfer message, an email, whatever you might prefer to use to get the person's attention. On each 24 hour cycle that the system checks and has no response it repeats the "Are You There" request. After 3 consecutive failed Are You There queries, the service temporarily shuts down the voting pattern of that user until such time as the user logs in to the service and reactivates.
It Hurts!
I know some people who are reliant on these Auto Votes to make their income, and I know a move like this would hurt some people that I would prefer not see lose that income. However, I don't think it is asking too much for auto voters to "check in" once a month to click a box that say "Yes I still want this voting to be active". And if they don't check in, then their voting rewards should be dispersed to those who are not on any big voting trails. Ultimately, this helps everyone, even though it may hurt some dolphins and orca in the beginning.
Conclusion
Look. I know this proposal is going to fall on deaf ears. Those who have the power to change these policies benefit from the very thing I am asking them to change. And those who would benefit the most from these changes do not have any power to change it. That's the circle of Steem.
What I want to do here is to point out that there is another method of reward abuse going on under our noses, that we tend to forget about. I wonder what Reward abuse fighters like @berniesanders and @transisto think about the old sleeping auto votes? I'm pretty confident that Bernie for one is not the recipient of much in the way of autovotes from the old guard being sent his way. I'm not asking these guys to flag away rewards from people who are getting these votes. But if there is abuse..... maybe that's how you stop it. I dunno.
It's something to ponder anyway. What are your thoughts? What do you think about accounts that have not logged in for months dolling out huge votes to people who post a meme? Sound off and let's talk about it!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Excellent idea, and one that I think should be coupled with another that I came across recently.
As a brand new steemian I am finding the landscape here to be fairly off-putting in terms of what it would take to turn involvement with this platform into anything that experienced true growth, regardless of the quality of your content. This is largely because of the issue that you're highlighting here. There is true cronyism developing within the platform, and the situation is exacerbated by this phenomena of dead whales. Frankly, I didn't know such a thing existed before reading this post, but having read it I now have even less respect for the trajectory that the steemit platform is on.
I tend to be a big picture kind of guy. I look at overall trends and see patterns as opposed to looking at the nitty gritty detail of the world.
The pattern I see being replicated here on steemit is one of insularity and self promotion, with touches of clique behavior and, in effect, class segregation and disenfranchisement.
Your idea in this post should be coupled with a diminishing return algorithm that continuously reduces the reward given to an author for repeated votes to the same author over and over again.
I don't know what structure that would have to take mathematically, but it would encourage the use of steem power as a tool to help new material, quality material, to be discovered.
Hey @serapium! Thanks for the in depth comment. You are right, the system cannot survive indefinitely in it's current state. But, part of the problem with a decentralized platform is you don't leave anyone in charge to mend the issues. As long as Steem Inc do not address these issues with the overwhelming SP they have at their disposal to crush the evildoers (an action they show no inclination to take) then there really isn't anyone with the power and incentive to change the system.
The diminishing returns theory you put forth has been brought up before, with a couple of people actually going to the length of writing the code which would cause votes to provide diminished returns.
Two good follows in this area, if you don't already follow them, are @timcliff and @rycharde. They have both encouraged this sort of amendment to the reward pool previously.
As for us minnows.... we just have to do the best we can with the tools we have on hand. I will say, I pull my SBD rewards out of the system instead of exchanging for Steem and powering up because I feel the need to diversify my holdings into other crypto in the event that Steem were to crumble under the weight of the current system.
Every activity that can be performed by an End-User can be performed by a bot. Excluding of course Capitcha.
They will just rewrite their bots to make a post and upvote it.
I don't say it to be snarky, I am just saying if you close one avenue they can open another.
But if the whale is truly dormant, then someone has to have their key to reenable the vote. This isn't about people who are active and gaming the system, those are being addressed elsewhere, theoretically. This is about people who have set auto-votes up and then they disappeared from the platform. But their auto votes still tick along, upvoting every post for people months after the user themselves stopped being active.
Yeah, I would guess Steemvoter and Steemian have a lot of users signed up that aren't still in the game. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
Best of luck in pushing an idea through.
This is a good idea Mike. I am also against auto voting to a certain extent. I do follow a few curators and allocate 10% of my vote when following them, but the vast majority of my voting is done manually, as I feel other people should also do. I don't think there is a perfect solution to the issue, but this one seems simple enough to put into practice and good work nicely
The proposal? I copied it below for the TLDR people:
I'm absolutely for it. Reverify if an account has been inactive (except for autovoting) for over 30 days, maybe more like 90 days. I think it's brilliant. Will it be implemented? Probably not. But it's a good idea. I hope a developer sees this. @ironshield
30 days, 90 days... 9 days.... wherever you draw the line, all people have to do is do one active activity to keep the voter going. It isn't that big of an ask I don't think.
But you are correct, probably not going to be implimented anytime soon.
That does sound like a great idea. If someone is just automatically voting and they're giving out huge payouts and they aren't invested in Steemit anymore really by not commenting, posting, etc., that does sound good to ask them if they're still there and wanting to submit that upvote. I hadn't ever thought of this happening. Thanks for opening my eyes to another layer of automatic upvotes.
Finding a fool-proof solution is difficult. People will always find a way around it. I have yet to understand how everything works here but I appreciate people trying to fight abuse and I'm always with "giving the money back to the community" ideas.
Good article @mikepm74
i would personally find "checking in" with a tick is troublesome, it might as well just make a proper post once every maybe 90 days, in case some people are "engaging nature" retreat that has no internet.
Even standard non Visa application countries had a threshold of 90 days.
upvoted
I think it's a fair solution, and gives plenty of time for someone to respond. Maybe another possibility would be to have a time maximum that would need to be redone by the voter once per month or something.
No doubt someone would find workarounds, and the people who need to do this are some of the "offenders". Which is kind of ironic when you think about the purpose of decentralized transactions. Luckily, not all whales are the problem. Hope someone listens who can give it some traction!
True.... people who want to game the system will always find a way to be one step ahead of the people trying to protect the reward pool. However, if steps were taken to require some sort of action from the person doing the voting, then at least someone with that user's posting key would be required to take some action to ensure that the whale account continued to vote.
We'll see if the idea gains any traction... maybe... maybe not. haha Either way, thanks for joining the discussion!
that dog with the burning flames lol
hahaha
He's my buddy.. LOL
😂😂😂
He should teach me how to be that chill xD
There's a chance it might not fall on deaf ears. One of the people that runs one of these sites could see it, and consider implementing a similar feature. Though perhaps 3 days isn't enough. There's a habit of some to forget that not everyone checks their email every day, or even every week, or it can get lost in the weeds. I think once a week for 3 weeks would be fine as well.
There's also a chance someone that will eventually implement a service in the future will be shaped by not just your post, but the entire discussion around such things. I myself have commented before on there being a problem with auto-voters, and neglected auto-voting.
I have considered alternative ways of dealing with it. I believe that votes, and their rewards, should be weighted based on voting habits. Someone's vote that votes for every single post by someone should mean less than someone that only votes for that person occasionally, if they have the same or close SP. Similarly if they only vote for a small handful of people. In effect, it would be rewarding people that take effort to go out and vote new people, and rewarding those they vote for for standing out.
The auto-voting isn't the only issue of course. It's just one. Discussing these things makes a real impact, because it gets people talking about them.
Edit:
Forgot to mention that this would be less of a problem in the future if we had some other way of rewarding authors we like, built-in. Like maybe a subscribe button that would pay them weekly or monthly. If you could choose to take that out of your voting power, or pay directly in steem or SBD, then it would be the same for whales, without the issue of voting for crap, and a bonus for minnows, who might not have a ton of SP, but might be willing to put some money aside every month for their favorite authors.
What you are describing falls right in line with the voting algorithm proposed some months ago by @rycharde, and I believe @timcliff has written about the same idea.
I wonder if there will be some redistribution of the reward pool implemented with communities... like each community has their own reward pool versus one big shared pool.
Finding the best ways to ensure that content is rewarded appropriately will likely be the raging debate for the life of the blockchain. hhahaaha
It seems like a lot of people have some of the same ideas in regards to what should be done on here. Hopefully they'll actually implement some of the better ideas, and we can start improving things.
I wonder if during every hardfork some code is put in that pauses all autovoting. If you're still keen to autovote then you go in after every upgrade and reenable your rules. Sure it's a hassle, but it's a 3 second hassle and it would force people to reevaluate who they are voting for.... and hardforks don't come along that often.
Ultimately, we cannot rely on the developers to fix these sort of issues. Ned has made it pretty clear that it is up to the user base to self police. These auto-vote and bot vote programs are (to my understanding) putting their vote directly on the Steem blockchain independent of the UI. I suppose the Steem team could close that door, but I don't know if closing that off would also close off other front ends like utopian and dtube.
I'm not smart enough in the ways of the code to have any real answers here. hahaha
Interesting read. Im still very new and learn more everyday. I have seen a few items on automation and bot votes and it all sounds super confusing.
I agree that you should have some sort of active filter to ensure fairness of the system but still am dubious about the use of them at all.
Side note: I love Steemit but in the last two days I have witnessed some name and shaming within higher ranking members which puts some doubt into my mind about the longevity of Steemit if we continue to fight one another.
Spend the energy where necessary and share the love!
I noticed the same thing! There is some struggle going on at the top..
@mikepm74, never knew there were Auto Votes. But keeping everybody engaged is allways a good thing!
engagement is the key! the more we engage with each other the more we all benefit. We have to keep in mind the social aspect of Steem is what sets our blockchain apart from any other system!
The infighting has always been here, as far as I know. Just part of human nature. At least we aren't hitting each other over the head with rocks!
Haha cave man style! I'm glad we have moved on from that way of life... although now a days we don't even have to see the person we are hitting... so I'm not sure many understand the impact and damage they can do.
Lol!
Well the idea of decentralization is that there is no real central governance, so we have to police ourselves. In policing ourselves there will be some name calling and bickering between users. The level of infighting on this platform doesn't really strike me as much better or worse than any forum or bulletin board type service.
Very true @mikepm74, it happens everywhere. I'm not sure why I decided to hold Steemit it a higher level than other forums. It just seemed better I think.
Not that I'm now saying it isn't, just that I questioned my faith it for a moment. Epically seeing it for the first time. I truly hope it all gets sorted, so we can get back to a happy ocean. Thanks for responding and explaining it a little more.
I'd upvote but I just learnt what voting power is and I'm now in recharge mode. It's so hard not to upvote. Lol...
Then I upvote for the both of us ;-).
Couldn’t agree more. Thanks for your time @mikepm74. It feels a lot calmer now.
Thank you, It's good to know that some people are actively seeking to make steemit a better place for all. And maybe there should be caps on any 1 account from taking so much without participating.
Happy Holidays
That's certainly a big part of the debate isn't it? with over 500,000 accounts and 30k daily active users, having one person claiming 7% of the total reward pool seems obscene, regardless of the value of their content.
We'll see how it all plays out!
@mikepm Word! It's as obscene as overpaid footballers, but without the public fame. I don't know how much 7% of the reward pool is, but I bet I could live really well for a good while on 7% of one day's worth of the reward pool.
It seems to me that the sleeping whales' auto vote is only a small part of the drain on the reward pool. Is it not clear, when we see regular top daily or multiple daily trenders with very poor formulaic content? So poor I wonder if it could perhaps even be produced by a bot?
Can a truly decentralised platform ever be a truly decentalised platform, a fair place for all, a level playing field? Sadly, I don't think so.
Power and greed rear their ugly heads everywhere when money is key, and corruption, in the world we now live in, is "where there's a will there's a way".
It seems quite clear who some of the offenders are that are creaming a fat month's pay every day are, and although it's clearly obscene, they still live within the rules, and can simply stick a finger up to anyone who's brave/stupid enough to call them out. To wage a campaign against these fat cats lapping up the cream would be suicidle though.
It's clear though that you can survive here though, and do quite well for yourself if you work hard at it, have the value, and to some extent have some luck, but like any other society it can ever be a very fair place.
There is a wealth of good and tallented content on steemit that is seen by very few eyes, and although there is some really good stuff trending, there are so many crappy tallentless 'content' providers circling like vultures at the top, which makes steemit seem unreal and a joke to many onlookers/new steemians, with just as sickening human behaviour that we see in the corporate centralised world.
That's life for you though.
I've spent all my life observing human behaviour, albeit mainly through a lens as a street/social documentary photographer, I see steemit as a very interesting social experiment. ;)
Excellent comment. And yes, the sleeping whale auto-vote is only a small part of the problem. But it was a point that really had not been talked about which is why I wanted to highlight it.
Yes, I think sometimes one of the best things to do is to just ignore what's going on at the higher levels and just worry about what I can control. But just allowing abuses to continue without comment doesn't seem right either.
I don't know what the solution is. I wish I did.
After some big downvotes, the percentage of rewards on the one account is down to .8% over the next week. Which is good for the following per Steemworld.org: $ 4,360.68 ( ~ 21,641.06 USD )
( 0.828 % of total reward fund )
Thanks for replying Mike. Re your last comment, that is good for the reward pool so long as those who are downvoted are deserving of it. But can't the big guys put a stop to anyone they take a dislike to? I wrote a post about some of this stuff, the tallent less trenders etc, but thought it'd be a bit stupid of me to post on such things, being so new here.
I think, perhaps, if we had the solution, we'd have cracked most of the problems of the world, lol. :)
Honestly.... you are new enough that it is highly unlikely that the big guys who would flag you for voicing your opinion on the matter would notice. There are many whales who share your view, and post about it. So they are doing more infighting at a higher level to notice us peons. LOL
Bottom line, Be true to yourself, if you write a post you think is valuable to the platform, post it! don't delete something in fear of repercussions.
I don't call on favors lightly, but if someone I know gets flagged into the depths because they posted something a whale didn't like, I do have resources to call in to reverse the effect of the flag if needed. There are people here who look out for the little guy, as long as the little guy gets in touch with the right people. LOL
Let me know if you decide to post something along those lines. I follow you, but there is a lot in my feed that I don't always get to, and I would surely want to make sure I read that post!
Hey @mikepm74, sorry for the late reply, festive commitments etc. I've been thinking long and hard about this, I had a long reply typed out, but, if you don't mind, I'd like to reply in private, to seek a little advice on one aspect before I go ahead and publish my thoughts and reasoning
on my blog. I looked for you in discord and steemit chat, but I couldn't seem to find you there. Happy New Year Mike, may you continue to steem on!
Hot damn! I just noticed your upvote of my comment @mikepm74. That's very much appreciated, thank you.
As a newcomer here to the steem blockchain, I was put off pretty substantially by the realization that there's such a tremendous amount of automation happening. I find the idea of 'autovoting' to be very similar to the act of 'subscribing' to something on youtube. I think you're correct in your assessment that the act of autovoting itself is not the problem, but the way in which it is used.
My initial take on the matter is definitely not in favor of stagnant accounts that exist only to extract from the reward pool, rather than refining the quality of content. It would be silly to not acknowledge that there is a pretty extreme centralization of power and resources on steemit / steem. Perhaps adding some form of auto-refresh of a public key for each individual account you're 'autovoting' for would disincentivize / make it more difficult to just 'subscribe to everything forever'. This may allow things to form groups / communities / networks on a more fluid, organic and cohesive manner while making it harder for individuals to form a 'dynasty' account. The more engaging content producers will be able to capture more attention than those that don't produce as much content. And those that post sporadically, but still garner attention from interesting content would still be able to drum up interest with their strong content, or be wise to invest in promoting their content.
The thing is, I am giving people the benefit of a doubt in assuming that these stagnant accounts didn't intend to become stagnant accounts. Just over time apathy sets in and now here we are.
1% of users controlling the majority of the Steem Power sounds an awful lot like the society we are so intent on freeing ourselves from.
We keep hearing about upcoming "Communities" so hopefully some things will be addressed when those come up. Who knows.
We are still the early arrivers on the platform, so we will see what the future holds and one day all be whales!
I agree that this platform is still in its infancy and has a lot of capacity qnd potential. The voting bots, etc, struck me as a bit of a necessity while the user base grows, and hopefully they will get phased out over time.
Either way, it should be malleable and and tp be changed as time goes on. I'm interested to see what we can all build together.
It sounds like a great idea actually. Now that I better understand that the reward pool is finite every day, we should aim for better distribution of it.
Right. This is what people tend to overlook and/or willfully ignore. The pool is the same regardless of how many votes go out. That is why you will see the amount of your reward for a post fluctuate throughout the day. It's all sorts of maths that go into it, but each vote we make says "This person deserves a part of today's reward pool".
in theory, the quality of our content should determine how much of the reward pool we earn. But that is not the practical case, at least in the current iteration.
hmm i never used an autovoter and i probably never will ( never say never), ok maybe if i have no time and do as you said so. In general i try to upvote post that like and i take some time to read those post or at least read the most of it, i think that's what is supposed to be steemit about. interact with other and learn new things. If we just use autovoters it not only drain the reward pool but it will become a dead community.
I completely agree with what you are suggesting
It is an odd balance to consider. you want to engage with everyone. Of course you do! that's why we are here! But the longer we are here, and the more people we want to follow, the harder it is to have time for everything.
I think autovotes can have their place, but there should be a check and balance system to ensure that it is not being abused.
yes you are right, you can balance it somehow with 100-300 max followers if they make a post 1 per day (at to least to check most of them) but steemit isnt about 50.000 any more, we got more than 500.000 so that's why i totally agree with your suggestion. It's the best possible way to try and keep some balance
I doubt very many people that would fall into the category of a sleeping whale or even dolphin have their auto votes set up through one of the services you mentioned. Much more likely to be a vote bot they set up, particularly if (as you suggest) they were active early on the platform before these services even existed!
Incidentally, I can tell you from experience with Streemian that my auto votes would stop working every few weeks in any case and I would have to go and re-enable them - so just kind of out of sheer crappiness of the platform there is already something like what you suggest in practice LOL
This is a good point, some people are/were capable of creating their own "bot", though I am taking for granted that some of them were not coders. This doesn't mean that they didn't have someone build something for them, just that there may be more people using services like Streemian than you might think.
interesting.
And built in crappiness is solving the issue, too! LOL
Fully agree with everything said, although I think 3 warnings of 1 month each is too lenient, I'd say 3 warnings of 10 days each. I would say this is still not going far enough with curbing the autovoting, but since it's so hard to get some people to listen to this kind of proposal, you might have come up with a good compromise.
Resteemed!
I've wondered about this too and, as a new minnow, it can be pretty discouraging seeing the number of ways the rich get richer which are not open to newbies.
I hope your post gets in front of the people who want to make the types of changes you suggest. Thanks for putting it forward!
I'm new enough, I knew nothing about autovoters, but you seem to make some really good points. At any rate, this was a very informative post, but I don't feel like I have the experience to even voice an opinion. I do, however, really appreciate posts that spell things out so clearly for those of us like me who aren't technically savvy.
You got a 5.21% upvote from @upme requested by: @mikepm74.
Send at least 1.5 SBD to @upme with a post link in the memo field to receive upvote next round.
To support our activity, please vote for my master @suggeelson, as a STEEM Witness
gaming the system on point
upvote and follow @mikepm74
Your contribution cannot be approved because it does not follow the Utopian Rules.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
This post has received a 6.44 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @mikepm74. Send at least 1 SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field for a portion of the next vote.
To support our daily curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness
Im not sure im on board with regulation but some checks in the system would be appreciated so its fair to those who work hard to get the upvotes!