I was reminded of an activity between a couple of accounts today that kind of made me a little sad. The things that people do to earn and what looks like extract extra from the ecosystem at the cost of others. Feels like we forget that we're all in this together but I guess we don't all share the same longterm vision.
It often makes me wonder what goes on in people's minds where not only do they choose to do this but to continue for so long, something that looks quite literally like stealing returns from another account due to their ongoing negligence.
Now I'm not trying to just paint people in a dark light, but so much time has passed that it's become a bit weird and at this point other stakeholders have noticed it and since the negligent account isn't fixing it to avoid this to continue from happening, downvotes have now started occurring which just makes it bad a bad user experience overall.
Let's imagine this scenario for a minute instead of me pointing out who the accounts in question are to give you a better picture.
Let's take @ocdb for instance, it's quite a big account but the stake isn't mine.
Now let's assume @theycallmedan has asked me to help curating @threespeak content and authorized his posting key for me to use.
Knowing how the curation reward window works in the current stage, I would then decide that I'm going to create a list of the accounts that I'm going to vote, vote them with @ocdb within the 24h window, but then vote them with theycallmedan's stake a day or two or three later.
To outsiders this may not seem like an issue, but over time this means that ocdb's curation rewards would increase while theycallmedan's returns would decrease. Ocdb would quite literally take a large portion of his returns because he's been voting late.
People may go to Dan and be like "hey mate, we've noticed you're voting on posts super late and it's costing you quite a lot, would you mind voting on the first day instead to prevent this front-running?" to which he'd say "nah I don't care" or something of the likes (not sure what exactly the position the real account is taking here).
The thing is, I wouldn't do this personally because it'd be quite immoral to purposely take returns from another account this way. It's even worse considering ocdb's stake isn't mine so I'd be lowering the returns of a stakeholder who quite literally has bought his stake which is the same as what's happening in the real scenario today.
You may ask how this can get any worse? Does it matter that the account that's taking returns from the account that's purchased hive is constantly selling them? I'm not even going to get into that.
Since no attempts have been made after many years to fix this voting window issue so that the 2nd account can't "take" rewards from the previous, other stakeholders are now using their downvotes to combat this unfair APR the 2nd account is receiving. This is now leading to authors asking why they're being targeted by downvotes and generally leading to quite shitty ux.
You may think that "ugh the downvoter is the bad guy, he should just let it be if account #1 doesn't care that account #2 is "stealing" their returns", but there's more to it than just that.
Since this is something that's been ongoing forever, it also causes other accounts to go in the same position as #2. For instance, if I was someone who'd only be interested in increasing my APR no matter the cost, I could simply trail the votes of #2 to get a piece of the pie at the cost of account #1. Furthermore, it leads to a lot more rewards going to posts chosen by accounts #1 and #2, to a point where you start to suspect account #1 doesn't care that their returns are lowered as long as their community is getting more author rewards by sniping their votes with more and more stake.
There's a lot of other things going on but just thought I'd share my thoughts on this real quick.
For instance there's probably a lot of stake that's simply not voting at all anymore cause their bots went inactive or a service stopped operating, this leads to everyone active here today and not sitting at 100% voting power getting higher returns from curation rewards because of it.
I just don't understand why after many contacting attempts even from my side this is something that's been left to occur, especially when the account being taken advantage of has mentioned that they could use more funding for their product on this chain. I hope they'd listen and fix this to prevent any more downvotes or advantage-taking from happening in the future.
I don't mind doing it.
This is related to @zaku's voting with @bdvoter which is mostly @freedom stake where he takes a massive 20-30% cut. @freedom is hands off and doesn't know/care how his stake is used.
They elusively vote Splinterlands content and has his community trained in posting Splinterlands content taking advantage of the late @steemmonsters vote, resulting in a much higher than normal ~14% APR on curation rewards, almost 50% higher than other curators. Add in the massive self voting, it was a very large unfair advantage getting both sides of the reward pool.
I've been downvoting a lot of this over the few weeks for this reason as well as other related bullshit going on.
But as usual, I'm the asshole here.
It's especially annoying seeing this:
While seeing the SPL community do their best to get the project more funding thinking of ways to add ad revenue and other things I've been reading lately in some posts of the stakeholders without knowing that another project here is taking half of their curation rewards weekly (1000-1500 HP) while SPL is struggling and even receiving funding by the DHF.
me telling aggroed about the issue more than a year ago
Same mate, it's quite ridiculous to keep it going this way, doesn't matter if it's contests or whatever, there's very little reason/excuse to vote posts that late. There are times we do vote them as well but those posts are usually overlooked and in our scope for curation so we don't lose out anything and in the odd cases reward random curators who've put in time and their stake to go out of their way to vote posts close to 0 to a couple bucks. This however is a pattern that people could've easily abused for years and they've let it go on. And now they're facing the same loss on 2 different accounts and putting their authors in the crosshairs of downvotes just so the leeches will lose a bit APR.
I did some math the other week, at their current APR they are leaving ~78K/yr on the table, and bdvoter is scooping it up.
But it's not black and white, the 24 hour window is difficult without being dedicated 8-16 hours/day watching the chain. This has a direct cost as well.
Not sure how their curation is set up exactly, all I know is they leave gifs with this account when they upvote the posts (I think): https://peakd.com/@steemmonsters/comments
but since many of them land late it leaves room for others to predict which posts are going to get upvoted. Who knows if those predictions are only a guessing game but metrics show that they're pretty good at it to the point of taking 50% of the curation rewards of one of our biggest projects in the ecosystem.
Solution is to simply have more curators actively curate content as it's coming out rather than try and play catch-up later. Voting on posts purposely late also doesn't make a lot of sense since they'd want good SPL posts to get hot/trending attention to bring new users to the game.
The votes seem to land as the comment is placed so I'm guessing the curators have posting authority to cast the votes. If other curation projects can easily get to most posts before the 24h window I don't see why they can't.
Same fate here too. So this is costing SPL even more returns I'm sure they could use for various things...
wouldn't the easy way of fixing this is to make no curve and just that voting on it within 7 days nets the same no matter what? Nothing to game in that case right? I could be totally wrong though I don't understand the whole curve very well.
This would open up other issues and make it more difficult to fight abuse. Also, steemmonsters can easily fix it on their own in 2 minutes.
Honestly I don't think you're that bad this time. :D
Even the few spl content creators who asked me privately why the downvotes were occurring understood quickly the reason and didn't seem that against it. I just wish spl had changed things around sooner to avoid this curation sniping and potential excessive rewarding of a few curators. I've bugged them many times personally about this.
All my votes (up and down) are for the better of Hive, not myself or emotions.
I think that big stakeholders need to join forces sometimes and don't let one big guy fight by themselves! What is happening there is crazy! you would be crazy to see how much hive disappeared from the blockchain just in this case...
Not sure what u mean exactly, help join forces how? I've pointed this out to people in charge of splinterlands many, many times. Even offered help with copying how we curate posts to avoid voting on things late but nothing has been done to avoid the leakage.
I am not pointing to you hehehehe sorry if it looked like! I am just saying that in this specific cited case I didn't see much done by other people...there was a trial to make it public in hive watchers server(not by me) and it looked like that no one cared...
I guess it's quite a special case since they insist on doing their voting late for unknown reasons. So there's not much we other stakeholders can do aside from asking them to vote within 24h so people don't leech rewards off of them. Now as what seems like a "last resort" to bring down the leechers APR is downvotes but that also hurts authors so it's not a great solution. Instead they could just start curating more often throughout the day by with more curators.
The best solution in that case is stopping that crazy delegation, it looks like the person died not sure, that would be my guess! There are tons of big zombie accounts around...we were talking one of these days about some of them... their activity is just random curation no other transaction happening...
Ah noticed now first you replied to my comment here and not my post
yes!! I saw the post ...I was going to comment it but then I saw the comments...bad habit to be anxious to see the comments!!
However I doubt that the dv are the solution, these dv in repeated "post" of the same author, without any explanation could cause a negative influence to the authors, since it could lower the morale thinking that they are doing something wrong, when in reality it is not their fault for what is happening, which could generate the demotivation of this to continue publishing giving a bad experience and not wanting to return to the hive platform anymore, I do not agree that the random negative vote is the solution because the biggest disadvantaged is the author because for many obtaining a significant reward and seeing a negative vote lowers our morale thinking that we are doing things wrong and that they do not even tell us what we are doing wrong, it's just my point of view.
There is no solution, we have a whale delegating blindly to an abuser with no one willing to do a damn thing about it. It's gone on for far too long and this isn't even the only issue with it. No one posts explanation on why they upvote and upvotes are far more of a problem here than downvotes, by a factor of 1000:1.
I understand, however, what I am looking for is for the authors to be the least harmed, so a suggestion is that if you are going to continue giving negative votes (the ideal would be that you do not give negative votes if there is no direct reason for the post, it is just a suggestion) is that the votes be more random so that the authors will be the least harmed, since I have read in the discord the discontent of these and the lack of motivation for receiving these, and it would be sad if some of these left the platform for being the cause of collateral damage.
Well, you are sort of a bad guy here :) Just like I am. Because we both use DV. I had to counter a few of your DV myself but I did understand your view point and I have personally requested users who produce good content not to be bothered by your DV and not to demonize you
Pardon my joke Marky. However, let me make one thing clear regarding SL curation: due to the nature of the contests and participation it is impossible to vote posts within 24 hr window. There are multiple curators manually vote the contest and they are all unrelated to bdvoter. Hope this helps. If you have any solution in mind I am all ears.
Anyway, I never liked the 24 h window at all!
Manual curators are in general slower than autovoters, because they need to search, find, read and evaluate posts.
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Yeah I don't either but that's what we currently have
There is more to it than SL vote farming, like his 100% self voting across multiple accounts like zaku and bdvoter.cur and some other sketchy stuff.
That is beyond me. I can only somewhat influence SL curation stuff. So I made that position clear. There is no conspiracy or internal understanding between SL curation and bdvoter.
I think maybe I don't understand, but I'd like to know more?
So the downvote hurts the author or the curator - or is it both? Is this happening for "co-consipirator authors", or just random authors that are posting honestly?
From markymark's description, it sounds to me like regular authors are just being downvoted because of the behaviour of a "parasite" - I don't really understand the 24 hour window or how it works, but from the above it does seem like the downvotes are probably hurting the author 90% and the guilty party 10%?
(Downvotes create some interesting discussions, I'd love to learn more about them but probably a discussion for another day)
Anyways, thanks again for enlightening me on the subject :)
So finally I will comment the post:
Once I read someone writing why people don't question a good upvote? only downvote? I think it was you that wrote? If not perhaps you think about this as well... When that question was important to read and I learned a lot about it. Downvotes are part of the ecosystem, you can see @smooth strategy of trying to equalize rewards in any post that achieves a huge amount of reward. Downvotes can be used to say that you are doing a bad thing, but also it is just a fair equalization.Two years ago I started receiving DV everytime that I received a curation from a specific project, the DV was matching a UV of a specific user. The first human thought is "Oh crap my 5$ reward now is 4$". It is normal to think like that. Especially when you are trying to grow here as a content creator. But what many people don't see is that the hive ecosystem needs a balance, and maybe that extra 1$ is somehow hurting this balance. I talked to the person downvoting me and they explained "Nothing personal just equalizing rewards" I accepted that and appreciated the explanation. Maybe it is time to see that Hive isn't just about reading and liking content...there are lots of things happening. It is a world and it is unbalanced for sure, but if each one of us does something to do something good here, it is the same that we think about recyclables in our homes. Hive is the only place that I express myself if it ends, maybe it will be just a memory in my past...
This is interesting. I follow the curation trail of both OCDB and SPL. I was ok with the lower APR on my votes in SPL curation trail since I wanted to support the community. But I didn't realize that it was being taken advantage of by other people like that. I guess I'll unfollow the curation trail and vote SPL content manually.
Does OCDB vote within 24 hours?
yeah most of the time, there are times we don't get to certain posts within 24h but they're usually overlooked by others anyway and not sniped so it doesn't matter much.
Very interesting. I know that the whole curation rewards thing can be a bit of a game if you really want to try and play at it. I've never really been into that though. The stuff I do manually I do whenever I come across it. The auto votes I have all hit at the four minute mark I think.
Myeah, I know there's people unaware of the changes and don't mind voting after 24h now and then, I do that too. But it's different if you don't expect it and it's a bit random, compared to knowing every post that will get the late rewards and turning all your votes into 2x+ returns at the cost of the other.
Sorry, I don’t get it. Do we earn more curation rewards if we vote early ? I thought the first one to vote had a kind of a bonus, but the system was not built to incentivize instant or early voting, at the same time. I am able to make 9.4% apr with manual curation , is this too much or expected?
It's expected around that I think, you can track your individual votes' returns on hivestats.io/@username.
You could see that some are returning more than 100% efficiency which may be due to stake voting after 24h with you being within the 24h window.
Yeah, that is definitely a bit sus. I used to try to chase the curation rewards a bit more, but after that last hard fork where they changed the metrics a bit, I decided to just let it go and have fun.
I can try to get this fixed by raising awareness in the Splinterlands community. Can you please explain the issue in the simplest terms possible? Most of the people in Splinterlands community just don't understand how Hive really works (me included and I am trying to learn). The way I understood it is that Steammonsters account would earn a lot more curation rewards if they upvote post in first 24 hours?
people post in the splinterlands community, for some reason the @steemmonsters curators don't vote the post within 24h, this opens up an abuse factor where big accounts swoop in and vote the posts they think SPL will vote later. Spl then votes those posts 2-3 days late which results in that one big account that voted within 24h getting 30-50% of splinterland's curation rewards.
Changing how spl votes (to vote before posts get past the age of 24h) would eliminate this front-running, or if that other big account wasn't doing it for the rewards but to support spl posts they could just trail the spl votes to vote at the same time, then they'd share the rewards equally.
Since this has been going on in forever, a big account receiving close to 2x higher curation returns than anyone else at the cost of splinterlands losing hundreds of thousands of hive in curation rewards, people like marky are now stepping in to downvote those posts slightly so both the big account taking advantage of this, splinterlands and the author lose some APR.
I see... Well I will raise this issue with a few people though I see Azircon is already aware and I see that Splinterlands curators are much better voting in the first 24 hours on their latest post.
I think what is going on:
This rule creates a problem where I think curators are waiting on purpose to vote for the post because:
Example: In week 1 I make a post on Friday and Saturday (Deadline for this week is the following Monday and Tuesday) This means that I need to wait until next Friday and Saturday for curators to be able to give me another vote based on the 2 upvotes a week rule. If I post on Wednesday and Thursday in Week 2 the curators have a choice:
The solution could be to spell this out in Splinterlands rules very specifically that it is not just based on the week but also on 7 days between posts.
I could be off, but that is my understanding of what is going on.
yeah we have similar restrictions in certain places in ocd and doing things based on active posts rather than days of the week generally works better.
The DVer is 100% the bad guy here. I don't care and I don't want to be caught between these politics. And yet, I'm caught between them anyway and I'm the one losing out. My "regular" posts barely get 1 hive in rewards. These 2 posts for the weekly contests are the only ones where I get a bit more. 10 hive each, sometimes less than that. Well, this week both posts got over 4 hive in downvotes (each!).
Why would anyone think these DVs are good for the ecosystem? They only drive people away and make users feel bad and less motivated to post.
Even the reason for the DV doesn't make much sense for the consequences caused. The DV hurts the poster the most and it also hurts any upvoter. To hurt one person you're hurting many more people and that one person isn't even the most hurt one.
the sniping for curation rewards has occurred for years, they've literally taken hundreds of thousands of hive off of splinterlands, a project what I assume is in need of any funding they can get. the downvotes are more of a last resort to get them to change their ways since all this hive that's been stolen from them has also what seems just ended up as additional sell pressure on hive.
I know it sucks for the authors that's why I made this post to begin with since that's a new development in this thing that's been ongoing in forever.
I understand the issue, however, after reading Zaku's comment, I don't think it is quite as you described.
Even ignoring that, from the poster's point of view, bdvoter is giving us a nice upvote, bigger than any other upvote for most of us. On the other side, there's someone who we don't know and have never seen give us a single upvote, who just downvotes our posts without any explanation. We had to find out the explanation ourselves and it honestly doesn't get better after knowing the reasons. This type of stuff is done by people who earn more hive than most Splinterlands players combined.
Anyway, I don't think this is an exploit by Zaku, nor something the Splinterlands team can easily fix, unless they moved from manual curation to automatic curation, which would have several different problems. It's more of a problem of the system. Even if you believe Zaku is exploiting the system, getting a higher APR from their voting and Splinterlands getting a lower APR, this is a 0 sum game. Splinterlands lost out, Zaku won. The DV now hurts Zaku but also hurts Splinterlands and all other voters, and hurts the content creator the most. Why not give a similar-sized upvote on a post or comment to compensate for the downvote?
And I don't understand the "additional sell pressure on hive". Any hive earned can be used for whatever we want. If we want to convert to HBD that's ok, if we want to power up to have more hive power is also fine, but so using that hive to buy some other token or even get crypto from other chains or fiat. This part should have no influence on the decision. Would it be ok if I stole 500k hive and just didn't sell? Would it not be ok if someone earned 500k hive legitimately and sold?
That's up to @marky, splinterlands could also just upvote a comment to prevent rewarding sniping taking half of their returns.
It is what it is, it's easy to try and find reasons to side with the person rewarding you so this comment is quite loaded. I personally think it's quite disgusting to take advantage of how the blockchain works to take rewards from a project that has carried the chain forward in many ways for your own gain, especially when they are struggling and then pretend like they didn't know any better.
If they didn't want to continue doing this they could just trail splinterlands to vote at the same time/on the same day as them so the rewards would be equally shared among them.
Very old issue. Ongoing for 2-3 years...
Also tried to talk with people, i think it's all very intentional, and they completely ignore problem.
With great power comes great responsibility, especially here on Hive.
I haven't even had a slight thought of this type of scenario happening, because I don't put almost any thought into my curation rewards, but for higher stake accounts it's actually a pretty lucrative earning spot.
We should have like a community court or something, where we can vote to place certain people on cooldown to think over what's actually happening :D
With a big majority approving ofc
Haha myeah, any changes to curation would require consensus changes, i.e. hardforks. But maybe in a far away future we could give witnesses more work to adjust things
That's some real problem for the platform and it's causing a whole hell lot of trouble. I'm sure if intelligent heads on hive work together they can find a way past this problem. I think it's worsened by people who are mostly here for the profits. For me I have no ready suggestions but I'm sure it's a completely solvable problem. Thanks for bringing it to mind that's the way we ensure the growth and betterment of the platform.
It's quite a simple fix tbh, we have very few curators voting on holozing posts and they easily manage to get to them before they hit 24h age, I don't see why the other one can't or won't.
I was one of those that have been a target of dv for quite a while now and at first, I have no idea why it was done to me when all my post were genuine and was doing everything to improve it's quality from using markdowns to creating my own thumbnails and dividers. It even becomes harder when the dv comes 2 times in a row that I have to wonder if I did something to pissed that person but when I learn that it was also happening to others, I decided to just shrug it off and when I finally learn the reason behind it, I accept that the dv is not going away anytime soon unless I stopped creating SPL content. That said, I believe one of the reason why Spl curators cannot curate within 24 hour window was because they want to keep their Vote Power at certain level to bring bigger amount of vote and with 3 different contest to curate, its hard to vote every entry that comes within 24 hours and at some point, they need to pause voting post.
That's not a good reason at all, voting power is quite flexible, it's not that important to always vote posts at 100% voting mana to give them as "much rewards" as possible. There's plenty of other voters who vote spl posts, I do some times too, voting posts late actually affects the authors for the worse as they won't get hot/trending time at all which makes other random voters not see those posts.
I can only guess the reason for their late upvote based on their activities. There was also thier automatic HP delegation to players to continue their transaction to the game and if im not wrong, they also previously run giftgiver but now, it would not really affect much on their vote given the current player base. Either way, the votes and dv's are both out of my hands and its the creators that becomes collateral damage.
via Inbox
What's your stand on self-voting?
should be okay in moderation but also depends on the votes you get in general and the content you produce in terms of effort.
That's a bit vague though, and not coded. Some might (and some do)/take advantage of that i think. (Not talking about you, i've not looked)
Personally i don't self-vote and think it would be best to dis-able self-voting
Sorry but when saying things like "disable" self-voting, it is hard to take a discussion regarding selfvoting/votetrading abuse serious. Even newbies I'm sure would think "oh I'll just create another account" after a little while in this space.
Thanks for replying. i understand that, and am not saying it would be easy to implement, but i do think it could be achieved. How is a deep subject however, but the potential method i have in mind could have many other benefits to the chain (or community in which it could be tested). It is a big subject and would take a lot of work. We did touch on the subject about four years ago and i would be happy to discuss with you if it's of interest to you.
I agree with you. And it's actually sad to see that good authors end up paying the price for this behavior by receiving downvotes 😔
Interesting to read how it works when gaming a system, prefer to support folk and share, keep it real.
This post once again shows that I am a caveman. I had no idea that account that upvotes posts first gets more rewards.
Only if they vote within 24h and large stake votes after 24h.
It also depends on how much stake votes after or how much rewards a post had in the first 24h.
For instance, if you vote a post from 0 to 0.10$ and then a whale comes and votes it after 36h to $10, you're only going to get like 10-20% increase on your 0.10$ vote, but if he votes it after 48h you get a higher %. I believe each day's window increases your return but to a certain limit like 300% max or so. So for the whale it may not matter much if he gets a post from 0.10 to $10 on day 5-6, but if the voter in the first 24h was also a whale then the 2nd whale is going to lose out a lot more returns which is the case of my post above.
I see. this is more complex than I imagined.
Hmmmm u know with this post i now have a clear picture how the voting system work, more so I've seen how .members of hive literally do anything to prevent hive from falling apart
Hectic!
I was about to say that reading this only made me nosey... then I saw Marky was informative in chat 😅😅😅
I didn't know about the upvotes. Thanks for bringing us a very deep and interesting article to continue learning how this blokchain works and the rewards.
As I know this is not working anymore
their current apr says otherwise as I shared in a couple comments here
Can't find it do you have an example, where can I see it?
Check the APR of steemmonsters and sps.dao
About 4% my is nearby 8%🤔 so mine is nearly double of their.
I don't know the whole in's and out's of any of it really or attempt to really understand it. But when I first got wind of it was Splinterlands posts in which BDvoter would snipe it towards the end and get massive rewards for it. I think they still do it to this day but I could be wrong.
However, I also don't think they are wrong for doing so being that Hive coders build the rules and if someone finds a way to maximize the rewards with that rule set then really they are not in violation of anything and it's up to the hive core team to correct it if they deem it necessary. I mean that is legit their job and what they get paid legit thousands of bucks a day to do.
dunno man, I'd have a hard time justifying doing something like that to splinterlands with such a big account and on top of it knowing they are struggling while at the same time being an active member in their community?
that said they can easily fix this, no other curation project has these issues so dunno if you can blame the curation rules of the blockchain on this.
I noticed there are big curation groups that vote later than 24 hours but I thought it was intentional or being done for a purpose... if the purpose is to front-run high-HP accounts (without them knowing) then there's a conflict there.
It's funny that in some comments, they're pointing the finger at @bdvoter , I haven't posted on Splinterlands and I don't even like that game. But in fact they who are supporting almost more than 60% of the curation for these players and content creators, without them the vote would be a bit grotesque.
It's easy to point fingers, after all, at whales that barely curate, just follow a trail (hi trafa) that barely get involved with the Hive ecosystem.
We all have to thank the curators @ocd, @bdvoter , @curangel and those who really support the creators. The rest can be scandalous
👏
!PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@danzocal(2/10) tipped @acidyo
There will always be those who, having the opportunity due to the place they occupy within the #Hive ecosystem, wish to obtain some extra economic benefit
These are things, my friend, that the different users who have the possibility in their hands use to their advantage; You know it must be difficult to have that trust of a great curator and in some cases damage it to get a little extra money
Talking about abusing somebody else's stake, just wanted to let you know the favoritism based curation is still going full force on Actifit. Many examples, but blurry selfies and food pics seem to be among the favorites.
sorry to hear you think so, we haven't really noticed any favoritism but if you have any valid proof we'd like to hear it.