#project-smackdown - the project reporting weekly on the top self comment voters and flagging the top 20 self voted comments every day.
Now in it's 2nd week of a changed algorithm v2, we look back on some of the trends for algorithm v1.
This report look at weeks 2, 3 and 4, from date 19th July to 8th August. In week 1 not enough stats we kept, though the same algorithm was used.
Note about information
This report is based only on comment self rewards for self voted comments with self voted reward above $1. We saw in the @sadkitten project countering bot net spam up votes (which included self votes) that rewards can be hidden across multiple accounts and at smaller levels. These while they do add up, would not have come to the notice of the v1 algorithm reported on here.
Summary
Sum of self voted comments rewards above $1
We see a general downwards trend which seems to level off at about $130 per day.
Sum of self voted comments with reward above $1
Again, a general downward trend which levels off.
Thoughts
It is of course impossible for us to know what effect this project had over this time. I am confident that we did have some effect in persuading people to self vote less, and I believe some of the downward trend is due to us but we can't know by how much.
One of the things we were criticized most for was that #project-smackdown would force people who wanted to gain directly from their stake to defect to using sybil / alt / sock puppet accounts, and possibly spread their votes out between many such accounts. I cannot say that that has not been an effect, but what I can say is that we are involved with other groups that look for voting rings, such as @sherlockholmes and @spaminator, and are not only doing this self voting intitiative.
To our critics, on this point I want to underline that doing nothing is not an option. We cannot in good conscience sit by with others attempt to "print money" based solely on their stake.
I hope to see this downward trend continue regarding self voting.
Top 10 users by reward amount
| User | Amount | Number of days self voting comments |
| @sigizzang | $705.562 | 9 |
| @adsactly | $640.375 | 9 |
| @jejujinfarm | $288.666 | 2 |
| @damarth | $279.280 | 12 |
| @grognak | $237.769 | 12 |
| @johnsmith | $211.812 | 12 |
| @surfyogi | $189.702 | 11 |
| @oldtimer | $135.450 | 3 |
| @danlupi | $132.665 | 9 |
| @musicholic | $124.196 | 3 |
All comment self voted users
with at least one comment self voted to value above $1, for comparison
Some users in detail
@sigizzang
At or near the top of our lists since the project started has always been @sigizzang. Here is an overview of their self voted comment rewards during this period.
@sigizzang is a Korean who seems like a crypto enthusiast. They currently have nearly 125k SP and 7.5k SBD in their wallet - quite a sizeable investment.
I don't read Korean so I translated some of their posts and was surprised to find their second last post made on the 8th August (which happens to be when this report ends) and is an apology for self voting! You can read it here.
Here's an excerpt (picked the most relevant and sensical parts) of it very very badly translated using Google translate. If anyone wants to correct me with a better translation please do.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by the comment self-voting.
Last week I was informed by some foreigners about self - voting that I came to the top place in self - voting.
I was thinking that it was not a big deal.
[...]
At that time, I was not in a good mood to see such an article.
I've been working on it for a while now and I've been misunderstood by myself.
I personally did not know the problem of self-voting and I do not even know it.
[...]
If my self-voting prevents such growth, I will not do it because I am an investor ...
I apologize and apologize for what happened in my ignorance.
I would like to pass on the first place of self-voting to another person soon .. ㅠ
In the future, I will do my best with a better job.
[...]
This is encouraging. While I feel torn about the tone (perhaps it is simply the cultural style) I am happy that we led them to think about their policy of self voting in the context of the over all project of the network and thus the coin, and furthermore - their investment. We at #project-smackdown do consider our work to be an aggressive defence of our investment and that of others.
@adsactly
A.D.S.A.C.T.L.Y = Autonomous Decentralized Society Acting Cooperatively to Leverage You!
From information gathered here and here, @adsactly appears to be a community of investors who back various projects and speculate on a wide variety of coins. Kind of like a hedge fund.
@adsactly have 638k SP, nearly 5 times @sigizzang, and 2.5k SBD.
One of the ways that they generate value for their members is self voting comments. You can see that they were self voting to huge amounts early in our report keeping, which they are quite able to do considering their significant stake. However since the report their comment self voting has been smaller, though it continues.
For example this comment was generously self voted to $10.89 4 days ago:
We at adsactly love blocktrades infact whatever SteemPower that we have right now was bought from Blocktrades thank @blocktrades for creating such a wonderful platform. discord.me/adsactly
However before that it was 8 days ago (under $3), and before that 15 days ago at around $3.5, so much less than before, so I commend them on their self voting restraint of late. Keep it up 😽 👍
Regular high self voting investor types
@damarth is typical of this type of user. A lot of value locked into the platform as SP (they have 132k SP), posting a lot about crypto currency and - critically for our report - regularly up voting their own comments.
Their amounts are not the largest, but large, and quite regular, as you can see from above. Like nearly everyone on our lists, all this is done manually.
Though not as active in the last weeks, they are still commenting with large self up vote, most recently "Congratulations, it's only the beginning, with great content comes followers." [link, $18.57 self vote] and "Wow i like it :)" - [link, $15.28 self vote]
The same kind of thing from @johnsmith and many others outside the top 10.
"Power users" who happen to self vote comments
Some other users who end up with a lot of rewards from self voting comment also have high stake, and are very active commenters and posters, generally well connected in the community.
For example @surfyogi, @oldtimer, @fulltimegeek who have 71k, 114k, 353k SP respectively.
@surfyogi
@oldtimer
@fulltimegeek
Most comment self voters are in this category. I haven't looked very much at the ratio of self votes to out votes because that's a part of the new v2 algorithm, so it's hard to say anything generally about these users as they vary in stake and activity. However in order to get large absolute rewards, you have to have a somewhat sizeable stake (say 50k+ SP) so they are at least heavily invested.
From my interactions with users I'd put in this category though, they seem to feel they are due the self voted reward because of their not insignificant investment in the platform. It is justified variously by way of their ratio of out votes to self votes, that their comments do have value and so should be rewarded, or simply that they are entitled to do as they please with their stake.
For some it is also "required" by the interface - in order to bump up comments to a higher place in the order, as order is by reward value by default in most (all?) Steemit front end UIs. @Transisto has a great alternative to this (no reward for comment self votes) that would require a hard fork, but while it is still the case, I beseech users to restrain themselves from this. If their comments are seen as valuable, they will get bumped up by other users.
I think this group is harder to reach because it is genuinely felt that there is no wrong doing here. And there is none - it's just not great for the platform. At least that's what we think. We think this because, as has been stated many times now
- reward actions should be outward, toward other users
- outward actions should be well rewarded via curation rewards
And as these smart, invested people know, it makes sense now to self vote. That's why we flag, to contribute to the realignment of incentives. It will require a hard fork to fix the incentives and if you agree please share related posts and make your own contributions to the conversation. Do not let the issue fade away.
Uncooperatives
@grognak
Here's the text from one of their posts, Weekly Steem Burn!
I know some people will have issues with this post, and this is not to offend or upset anyone. This is just a place for others to use up extra Steem power that they have left over or don't have time to Curate with.
Some of us have invested pretty heavily into Steem and don't have the time to Curate articles all day. I usually do a couple of posts in the morning, work all day, and then come home late and go to bed. Not much time to browse Steem articles besides checking out some people i follow in the morning. I usually end up with a little or a lot of extra Steem power every day and it just disappears. So I wanted to start a post everyday that would allow you an area to post some comments and up-vote yourself guilt free and burn off some of that extra Steem and get some return on your investment. So post away below, burn off some of that extra Steem power before the refresh tomorrow!
We automatically flagged some of the comments there, but it's the same behavior as you see in bot nets, just on a smaller scale.
We're really against this concept of "extra" Steem Power (voting power is what they mean) and no time to curate. This kind of thing does not work towards Steemit as a social media platform and is again just printing money.
They seem to be powering down and cashing out, their last comment was 17 days ago and in the last days the only activity is reward claims and transfers to Bittrex.
I think some people will see this as us chasing investors from the platform and ultimately hurting Steemit. I respectfully disagree. I see investors that will just post literally meaningless comments of letter of the alphabet and then self vote them do not Get It ™, that Steemit is not just an investment but a social platform. It cannot be one without the other.
Bots
In general bots and bot nets seem to exist on the lower reward spectrum, for obvious reasons - to fly under the radar. A high SP account will be noticed an under scrutiny more easily. And unfortunately since HF 19, the linear reward curve removes the penalty for not shoring your SP into one account, so for anyone with a sizeable stake there is an overall benefit of splitting it up a bit if you which to do collusive, circular voting.
We did see one known bot account from @patrice 's work on @spaminator / @sadkitten on this list - @tard. We only picked up on the larger comment self votes and probably missed out on the bulk of these accounts activity, but we did see some of it.
A quick look at their comments and posts shows the familiar pattern of a massive Russian language ring we were able to target with @sadkitten.
What to make of all this!?
That's a long post! I wanted to take the time to present some of my work in the first phase of #project-smackdown. It takes really too much of my time, I need to automate it better, but it is certainly interesting looking through the accounts and getting context. While the behavior speaks for itself, with context we can begin to understand what happens to the humans involved.
Next?
As I mentioned in the last report, the algorithm has been modified to adjust for net (available) SP, which turns the metric into a kind of self voted return on investment, or svRoI to make something up 😅
More on that next time.
Until then, stay frosty! ⛄️
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.
https://github.com/Steem-FOSSbot/steem-fossbot-voter/blob/master/docs/algorithm.md
Thank you for your work. You are one of my witnesses.
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:
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 🙂 👍
sigizzang thought it was not bad to selfvote his comment himself first.
But one of KR users told him that he listed on foreigner's selfvote report, and then he also told him about why selfvote is not good for steem.
He thought he invested to steem, and price rise of steem will much more better than getting reward from selfvoting. So he stopped selfvoting. That's all, and good conclusion.
Sorry for bad EN writting XD
Thank you for this 🙂 That's what we think too, I'm glad it makes sense to others
Thank you for your dedication to steem, too.
i admire your dedication to Steemit very much. You do so much hard work in lifting all the heavy weight, i hope you get sincere appreciation in the long run consecutively.
Thank you for the comment and support 😁
Hey, what's with @randowhale that recently started upvoting his with his @danknugs and @nextgencrypto accounts? Ha? Let's see you starting up with him.
@emble I'd love to see you try to come after @randowhale. This is being done to increase the rep for 2 reasons: 1) deter morons like you who want to flag to reduce rep 2) increase rep to provide more benefit for the users.
I'm actually going to continue this and may actually step it up a notch or two. When we're talking about 50 SBD per day or less in rewards I'm happy to tell you to go fuck yourself for making a stink about nothing.
P.S. - I'm going to upvote the shit outta this comment.
I don't have a problem with self-voting as I already stated in one of my comments here https://steemit.com/steem/@benjojo/my-perspective-on-the-value-of-steem-power#@emble/re-benjojo-re-marillaanne-re-benjojo-my-perspective-on-the-value-of-steem-power-20170811t161255178z
As long as the system is broken, you can't ask anyone to comply. I just told @personz that he can't discriminate, and he has to give equal rights for all self-voters including @randowhale. And I know that nobody wants to start with you because you are not the type that doesn't take revenge and with 1000% more, so he should stop his project unless he really means it and would treat everyone equally
Actually @randowhale isn't "self-voting", @randowhale never votes on posts or comments by @randowhale. It is other accounts not directly tied to that service.
What's a difference? It's the same owner or group that use 1 account to upvote another.
@emble, first, i'm over it. I'm self-upvoting without explaining anything to anyone because these peeps have no idea whatsoever how important it is to self-upvote in many circumstances.
second, I have the impression you might be slightly misled.
... but hey, if i've managed to make a list somewhere, I'm all for it.
I am aiming to hand out 1000's of upvotes in the next 10 days. I really don't have time to chat about this.
I reject that I "have to" do anything, but show me how I'm not treating everyone equally.
I didn't say that you don't treat everyone equally. I didn't check that, but I will the last few days @randowhale upvotes himself using other accounts, and I didn't see any action. And that's nothing, just look at @berniesanders comments. I don't see there any action either. https://steemit.com/@berniesanders/comments
Please prove me wrong. I will state again that I think that unless Steemit fixes their system, there is no reason to punish self-voters.
We do not "punish" anyone. We vote against their up vote, simple as that. And we only do it for the top most comment self votery voters per day. Previously that was measured by their self vote reward but now we are adjusting for SP. If any account meets this criteria then they will be flagged.
We act in order to affect change on the system. There would be no reason to act against self voters unless the system was insufficient in this area, so you have it backwards.
We're going to keep evolving the algorithm so perhaps the better way for you to go here is look into it and make some suggestions for improvement if you think there should be some. I respond to everyone.
No comment 😶
If you can't fight with the big boys don't start with anyone. If you can't enforce your policies on everyone, you shouldn't enforce on anyone.
I won't discuss future plans here, but I reject your implication that we shy away from the "big boys". The algorithms are indiscriminate. This report shows exactly how big the boys are that we "start with".
Side note, we are not enforcing anything. Flags are votes, and in the free vote on every post we make our contribution.
Hey Personz, I just called out @andyluy in my most recent post for spamming the posts of introduceyourself with self-upvoted comments.
@tarazkp told me you were a good person to talk to if I want to do sth about it. My SP alone is not enough to downovote the spam.
Thanks for thinking of me. By the time I looked at it there was a good discussion going and I feel like you've sorted it out. I did comment of their post which was basically a rebuttal, because it seemed like they had not really rethought the situation.
Yeah we did, ats-david talked to him and @andyluy promised to better his habits.
Oh thanks for noting me about the new andyluy post. Some of what he said is OK. I mean he is praising my structure, but in the last sentence he is accusing me of distorting facts about him just to get self promotion. But then I watched the Dalek meme and I laughed so hard that Im not really mad. I am actually a pretty huge Who fan myself. ^^
My text was very ticky torchy after all and him acknowledging that is was good work at least in some respect is clearly a signal for peace.
Not sure what and if I want to comment on his post. I mean the copy pasta style comments on his post, instead of loyal followers agreeing on how helpful his spam comment was, speaks on his own, doesn't it?
I guess it does. You sow what you reap after all. Probably best to let it fade into Steemit history 😉
I really wanted to bury the hatchet, but his response to your comment...
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STOPIt is funny how I didn't read your post because I was too busy with myself. It was actually a complete coincidence that I commented underneath this post in particular to call out someone for selfvoting comments :D.
I am following you to be part of the general discussion here on Steemit - as you might have realized, I care about this stuff.
As much as I am sad about the huge gap between whales and minnows, I dont think targeting only high SP accounts is the right way to go. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility, but that does not mean you got no responsibility when you are under a certain power level.
We came to that realization too. That's why v2 of the algorithm works on self vote return on investment instead of just the reward amount to order the most comment self voting users on a daily basis.
I'll hopefully have time to write about it very soon. Thanks for reading 🙂
Maybe a fair warning that I have a passion for conspiracy theories, but @johnsmith is the (human) name of the tenth doctor that @andyluy is frequently including into his memes and the recent popular version of @sherlockholmes is written by the same guy who writes modern Doctor Who -Steven Moffat.
I will get out my cord board and red wire, and send you a picture so you understand what I mean. :^) I like the note by andy that i can be his antagonist and still be his friend, me being the doctor that helps curing Steemit and him being the master which methods I despise, but I can't bring myself to truly hate him.
TL,DR: I am hugely in favor of criticising the actions of a person, but not his character.
check these abusers:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@simoneighties/welcome-bot-proxy-self-vote-abuse-in-introduceyourself