Most of you have seen @hivewatchers reports or @jaguar.force investigations. I figured it's my turn to write about a day in anti-abuse. This is going to be an atypical post, but I hope you might find entertainment and popcorn in this story.
The Background
Several weeks ago, a memo came into the Discord where dozens of people in anti-abuse hang out.
At the time, I didn't think too much about it. I recall the group back on Steem. They came well prepared. By well prepared, I meant they jumped on @dlease right away. And they seemed to get around as if they have been on the platform for a while. The funny thing was, the moderators at @BuildTeam found abusing an memo exploit. The @huaren.news group abused their delegation services. But hey, that didn't earn them a permanent loss of privilege of using @dlease.
In addition, they also created their own fake downvote trail on SteemAuto, now Hive.Vote. Their trail carried over when @mahdiyari ported his services over to Hive.
They knew about @steemflagrewards and they targeted every user who bought a vote from a bid bot. At the time, SFR had a policy against certain vote buying practices, but not all of them. It soon dawned on me that something was off. They were upvoting every one of their own comments with multiple accounts. This is while they warned people of purchasing votes. This led to a conflict, but it subsided after a short while. It wasn't hard to see that a number of the accounts belonged to one person.
It's evident that those accounts belonged to a single entity. There are most likely more, but the rabbit hole only goes so deep for now.
The Woods Today
I recently received a flurry of downvotes from this group. It would appear they have more accounts than I thought. If there's one thing I dislike on this chain, it's someone pretending to be a community. This is usually carried out via controlling dozens of accounts. The anti-abuse initiatives have dealt with several people who operated like that. And let me tell you, it's infuriating.
They knew the community would frown upon their behavior, but they chose to hide it behind a facade. The likelihood of a bunch of "near zero stake" accounts joining a single downvote trail is dubious.
Now, looking at their comments, never mind of the insults back and forth against people. Most people do that to some extent. What drew my ire was the bullying behavior demonstrated by @huaren.news.
In short, @engrsayful joined downvote trails to contribute his part in community moderation. Unfortunately, he caught our perpetrator's attention. He gave the minnow a choice to either follow him or not. But, in the case he chooses to oppose him, the bully would downvote him harder.
What emboldened this person to proclaim such nonsense?
What's happening here is someone threatening a small account with LEASED stake. Let that sink in for a moment. We have subsidized downvotes and we would like the community to moderate themselves. But, at the end of the day, small accounts are always targets for retaliatory behavior.
Enter @dlease
Many of you are familiar with this particular useful service. I don't use it, but plenty of people on Hive love it. It's a great way to earn passive income by leasing their HP.
There's one problem: @dlease allows anyone to use it with little oversight on how the service is being used.
To paraphrase @buildteam's stance, @dlease only pairs up delegation buyers and sellers. I guess I can't ask too much from them. What else could they do besides barring an account from using their service? One could make another account and start again. You can't blame the users or the providers. It's impossible to know the context of a person on @dlease unless you dig in yourself. All anyone sees is a ROI percentage.
The troubling thing is, that means there is nothing in place to prevent malicious uses of leases. In this case, @huaren.news felt justified to bully a minnow because he has over 100K in delegations.
In Contrast with @dbuzz
How did I get from @dlease to here?
Well, I was telling you a story about my day.
Dbuzz is an upcoming microblogging dapp on Hive. It's reminiscent of @share2steem. I know, it left a bad taste in some of us and the fear of spam potential is high.
Unlike its spiritual predecessor, the @dbuzz team is proactive. They reached out to anti-abuse groups for consultation. We exchanged ideas on how to curb abusive behaviors on the dapp. It's a work in progress, but their eagerness was a nice change. As you can see, most people involved in anti-abuse are pretty jaded by this point. But, it does bring a little bit of faith back in the people of Hive for me.
Point being, one allows almost anything goes and trusts that people wouldn't find ways to abuse it. The other, actively trying to find ways that would disincentivize bad behavior.
Back to the Story
And what saddens me further is the number of people chasing a minuscule amount of ROI. Had they chose to fill @nealmcspadden's orders, they would only earn 0.1% Hive less. Instead, they take no thought in the matter. So much for being your own bank, eh?
The following people have enabled @huaren.news' behavior unknowingly. If they feel okay sponsoring poor behavior, so be it.
Hive has been a place of automation. People not consuming content to people autovoting away most of their stake. Some even set their proxy to questionable characters that lead them into trouble. Does the Hive airdrop reminds us of anyone?
The community is only as good as the worst type of behaviors we tolerate. Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult to believe anyone who would go to this guy as a good apple. Take that crap back to Steem please.
We can do better than this.
And this is live on Hive. Thanks for reading!
I keep control of who I delegate to and where my votes go. When I followed trails I found my votes going to some dodgy accounts. I really don't care about what I earn from voting or delegating. It is more important to build a good community that supports worthy people. Greed will get us nowhere. This idiot can flag me if he wants, but we outnumber him by far and have more HP to use between us.
I am completely agree with that. When i have power, i should not misuse it. I should make money but keeping the community values
That’s good to hear.
Cheers! Someone had to say it! They are mostly annoyance than anything else.
I needed something to write about today anyways.
I am in a buffer zone of massive war between two strongs
Did you talk to @realzuliqbal?
Name me one example of a positive use case for HP leasing
I'll wait...
Pass income for some I guess.
Yes, but...
I meant what the lease is actually being used for.
Same thing everyone else does, clicking buttons. Some more automated than others.
A positive use case would be giving yourself a boost when you're more active than usual, or when you're launching a product/app/service/project.
Very interesting! At lease the downvotes didn't have a huge impact on your rewards. That could have been very bad!
That’s always a silver lining.
The scammers scamming the scammers, that's what I liken it to. In all honesty what are you going to say about a system that is set up whereas people set up bots for a rate of return when they realize no one's going to respond to a word they have to say/write about. It's like sitting there writing "Dear Diary" cause ain't nobody but you going to see it. Once you allow anything to flourish there will always be those who abuse it. Not that it should have been allowed in the first place.
There’s not much to say but to extract the drama value.
There isn't much drama here on Hive that I've seen, none that come close to Steemit's hey days during the Bernie and Hijin (or whatever his name was) wars and Steemit was swirling with people back then.
You are actually right about less drama.
....and people love drama. If you go to blog sites you see the one's who give people the ax for not being similarly minded in opinions are one's that operate much along the same lines as Steemit and Hive, it's more like a email system, you leave me a comment and I'll leave you a comment. (Hopefully, that might be a bit of a stretch the majority of the time)....compared to going to the ones who allow open debate from all sides they are quite active, especially in the morning hours when new stuff is posted for them to debate about. If you want something to thrive you got to build up excitement whether it's about an issue or trying to sell a product. If you are informed, researched and fast with your fingers I call it going in for the thrill of the chase. Though I have to move around a lot now that Disqus has shut down their internal blogs where conversations taking place in real time happened more frequently than other sites. For that I have to go to the local or national blog sites to find now. In that regard Steemit and Hive are like operating your internet off the old AOL dial up.
I like the aol comparison.
lol, what can I say.
what's do you call a french pastery you buy with your ROI?
I’m scared to know. What is it?
a ROI-ssant :D
But what can I do now?
I don’t know the steps to recover my account