RE: #project-smackdown - trends report for phase 1

[camb]

At the moment we need all the spamfighters we can get. The "printing money" is an issue we seem to face with any currency in one way or another. Money breeds money.

I believe Steem can stay basically spam free if more than 50% of Steem power is in the hands of accounts that actively control spam.

Delegating SP to spam fighters is necessary for now but in the long run every user should be running their own spam fighter instead of centralizing around delegates. I like to decentralize as much as possible. :)

I'm not much of of a coder so I have been playing with your FOSSbot for a few days. I haven't been able to wrap my head around how the algorithm weights work, but I have been testing with one of your premade algorithms @irbot.

I wrote some step by step instructions for beginners with images that will hopefully make it a little easier for others like me to get started. I didn't even understand what Heroku was in the beginning :)

https://steemit.com/voting/@camb/fossbot-free-open-source-steem-voting-bot-instructions-for-beginners

I would love to read your comment.

I hope you don't mind answering a few questions. about FOSSbot.

1. Can it also be configured to flag blacklisted authors?
2. Can it also be configured to vote/flag comments?
3. Could you please recommend more reading material about how the weight and boundaries work in the algorithm. I have read your Algorithm and metrics page on github, but I guess I need the dummy version :)
   https://github.com/Steem-FOSSbot/steem-fossbot-voter/blob/master/docs/algorithm.md

Thank you for your work. You are one of my witnesses.

Comments

[personz]

Delegating SP to spam fighters is necessary for now but in the long run every user should be running their own spam fighter instead of centralizing around delegates. I like to decentralize as much as possible. :)

Interesting point, I'll have to think about it. On the one hand I think that not everyone can and will be able to identify spam, simply because the worst users do everything they can to hide it. There's the idea of sybil accounts having a "small cut" with the larger network, which means that they do not interact with the majority in normal behavior and so we do not see them. We need specialized software to do this.

But why couldn't everyone have this software, like FOSSbot? Perhaps. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of making a flagging bot for inexperienced users, since flagging can have consequences for the user's real reputation (i.e. what people think, not the number beside their name).

To answer your questions:

1. No, it only up votes, it doesn't flag, though it would be trivial to make that alteration
2. Not in the current form. It could be done though. If you want it people add it as a feature request here
3. Not really, that's all I have. Do you think I should write a post about it?

Thank you for your witness vote. I know you're a new back up witness too, good luck with it. Once I know more about you I might vote for you too 🙂 👍