Many people are sad. SBD is low (as it should be). STEEM is low. And as a result rewards on curation and posts are low as well. I am here to tell you that the low prices hold a bit of a blessing in them for us and for the platform.
The platform has abuse issues. There are crap posts that get self-upvotes and proxied self-upvotes (through bidbots), not only raping the reward pool. People using dozens of pay-bots to get upvotes and interaction on their posts to artificially boost their reputation and then there are those annoying spam comments. We can always ofcause flag abusers, but as doing so will cut into our curation rewards, very few of us actually do so.
When the payout on curation is high, so is the cost of casting a downvote, of giving a flag and helping to clean up the platform. Today the curation rewards are low. As such though, so, implicitly, the cost of casting a downvote has come down to a real low.
So what I would like to propose: Forget about upvotes for a day, maybe two, find yourself the worst abuser of the platform you can find who has a lower rep than you have and start flagging. Start flagging and don't stop before you have exhausted at least 50% of your Voting Power. See if you can flag yourself into the flagwar stats top flagger or top downvoter list.
Just think about it. What better way to use your Voting Power today while curation rewards are this low anyway. Flags have rarely been this cheap. Find yourself an abuser today and flood him/her with 50% of your VP. You can miss those two and a half days of curation rewards, right? Oh, and don't upvote this post either, resteem it instead. Don't waste your cheap VP on upvoting my post when you could be using it to downvote some asswipe platform abuser.
Oh, just in case you still do decide to upvote this post (if you have the balls to go flagging abusers, please do that instead), I'll delegate whatever this post ends up making to @pibarabot. I have some ideas for a simple low-powered bot that could go around doing some clean-up down-voting.
I could use help with this one:
abandi / best-strategy / steem-network / lucky-robin /
https://steemd.com/tx/adda0f696822eab45a5bfbbafc8e6539030e7ceb
https://steemd.com/tx/c9b79de7200ea8803e150c4c2974ddfcfe651201
https://steemd.com/tx/33c157793219640c533a3d4078ea0647886757e0
It is a spam bot that opportunistically buys itself votes in the last moment.
I have been flagging it in the last few weeks.
themarkymark did a little damage to it by removing rewards from a few of its threads.
littleboy downvoted a few of its posts that had no rewards, and by doing so wasted his voting quota, but caused no substantial damage.
abandi upped its spamming pace to cover for the lost rewards on its flagged posts and wisely refrained from buying itself votes on them.
steemcleaners and spaminator ignored my on record reports.
Spaminator ignored me twice.
Steemcleaners' owner, anyx, claimed that steemcleaners' goal is not to fight spam, but to fight frauds.
The steemflagrewards crew upvoted me when I brought it to their attention, but refrained from acting against this bot.
bernie sanders (both directly and through his abusereports account), drakos, gtg, pfunk, sneak, timcliff all ignored me when I brought it to their attentions.
adm made a pretentious token gesture of tiny downvotes that caused less damage than my votes and then stopped.
The only one that really hurt it long enough for it to switch its operations from its lucky-robin account to its abandi account was clvr, which is a bot that may be paid by smartsteem to fight spam.
This spam bot may have connections to high places.
Hasn't @cheetah picked up on this poster yet? There seems to be some automation going on there with fairly similar posts.
You might have checked, but if you look at the top downvotes, some of them are policing bots (RoboCop icons) and some of the other ones flag for what they consider to be the greater good. (Rohttps://steemit.com/stats/@pibarabot/flag-war-stats-for-posts-made-on-2018-06-28 You could consider tagging in their associate accounts to see if one of them gets triggered.
You know better than I that it did not.
As I wrote:
I may check later due to your suggestion.
Very few flag for the greater good.
Good to see you joined me, and do not underestimate you power, even if we will fail to zero its rewards, we are still reducing its profitability and slowing its growth.
Good idea, even if I bet that it will not help.
At least it will be another opportunity to reward myself.
You mean to comment on this spambot's thread and tag these accounts?
Can you be more specific?
It will not be wise for me to iterate over the entire list and speculate what is a policing bot.
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Used up a few days worth of cheap downvotes on abandi. Hope it will help. You should find someone with a bit higher rep to look at the flagging part. I think its a big problem with vote bots that they allow asswipes like this abusing spammer to build up their rep without any real social interaction at all.
Personally, I feel the platform should add a "drop reputation" argument to the voting API call that defaults to true but is explicitly set to false by the steemit UIs, GUIs and WUIs. That way vote bots would implicitly drop their reputation and thus not add to the reputation for of the owners of the posts they upvote.
2018-7-7
Assuming growth of SP, which is almost guaranteed to happen even if only due to interest on vests, votes should be ideally cast when the quota is as close to 100% as possible, roughly every 2.4 hours because otherwise it is a waste of voting power/influence/rewards.
If you scrolled through my comments section you may have found that I contacted most of the preminers, a few other witnesses, and at least one senior staff member of STINC, and then a few more about this abandi issue, and got mostly failed results.
For some reason it is more commonly acceptable to self upvote or buy votes on threads than on comments.
This is where the majority/self considered ethical bloggers which I feel like you belong to counteract with the human interaction part.
There is a trend of considering dan's whitepaper and bluepaper as the old and new testaments.
No clue about what you wrote here, and I would have probably opposed it if I knew what you meant.
I grew my reputation and SP while under fire, then while under fire and while powering down, and later under sporadic fire while accelerating my power down (forgot to accelerate it for 2 weeks, but still powering down, and I posted a thread about why it is beneficial: https://steemit.com/power-down/@stimialiti/you-should-always-be-in-a-state-of-powering-down)
I owe my growth here to honoring a bet on STEEM price that I lost.
Bidbots are not bad, and bidbots abuse is negligent in its harm compared to the STEEM premine that dan allowed.
If it was only him, the house accounts, and a select few of strategic developers and service providers (think roadscape's steemd.com, penguinpablo's (not a preminer and not even a witness steemblockexplorer.com) and busy.org), then it might had been fair, but this is not what happened, and premining itself is the worst kind of abuse due to the multitude of preminers, their actions and lack of actions since then, and the lack of justification of the stake in most of the cases.
If steemit.com was a sound platform, with even partially competent/decent developers, there would have been no need for a centralized stand alone blockchain explorer service that is offered as a sort of donation.
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2018-7-10
It seems that after 3 comments on spaminator's threads and 2 months of waiting, the ultra crooked patrice, whom used to participate in the crooked steemcleaners project (belongs to anyx) and reigns over spaminator, mack-bot, prowler and probably another one which I forgot, put abandi on her target.
I would never vote for her, for anyx, upvote any of their content or delegate anything to them.
She may as well let abandi "off the hook", as adm, steemcleaners' main source of delegation did with lucky-robin before, until clvr sat on his tail, probably being paid by smartsteem to do so, but smartsteem/therealwolf ignored my question about it.
One needs a reputation of at least 72, or at least 150,000 SP in order to get answered.
If I had this size, I would have probably dealt with spammers myself, while treating cheetah's, spaminator's and steemcleaners' report thread as spam with the official reason of "disagreement on rewards", which they do not deserve.
This is not the first, or second case that I got ignored or at least essentially ignored by them, and I believe that the reason to why patrice eventually did anything is because the pressure grew on her.
themarkymark reported lucky-robin to her roughly a month or two ago, and even his report was ignored.
He zeroed a few of its threads with his own power, and put it on his blacklist, but stopped downvoting.
best-strategy probably has other side projects for weeks, giving plausible deniability to their puppeteer.
I have my suspicions about what these accounts are, but I doubt them myself.
To find spammers one can look into the accounts that buy votes.
Not all of them are spammers, I love buying votes myself, and there are a few more legit and semi-legit vote buyers, but it is how I find them.
There ya go.
Ive known the et al of stinc et al has been crooked since a few months after i joined.
Its an open secret at this point, but nobody bought enough stake to fix it when the price was low enough.
Now, no bigger fools are biting, and the price is stagnating.
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