Delegations are not the problem, neither are upvote bots. If neither of these existed, you'd still see the same problems with self-voting of bad posts.
The primary problem is the current blockchain rules combined with the rise of SBD above its intended value has skewed the incentives drastically towards self-voting versus voting for content you actually like. I wrote a post about this some time ago: https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change
I disagree with this statement:
Minnows self-voting themselves would never be able to move the same amount of VP as voting bots and delegations are able to do on their behalf.
Please consider the following chart as evidence:
Source: Steemit Statistics by @arcange
This graph shows the cumulative distribution of the voting power on this platform and proves that minnows have effectively very few to no influence.
I know that you have a personal interest in keeping the image of voting services high, but we should be honest about the correlations.
Also, it's not to say I don't think there are some problems with vote bots. This post is actually representative of what I consider worst about them: they cumulatively allow someone to upvote a post to the top of the trending page without much if any support. I'd like to see the bots put more limit s on how much they will upvote any one post. Lately I've been thinking that I should downvote posts like this that hit near the top of the trending page and just seem to derive most of its rewards strictly from the bots.
I fully agree with you on that point!
What's completely missed here is curation. We have no control of what gets trending anymore, and then high amounts of downvotes are needed to balance the rewards out again. That's a lot of lost energy, time and money after all.
I'd love to see content and quality becoming a priority on this platform again!
Well said!!!
@surfermarly SOO well said!
💖
:-)
This is exactly the solution that the Steem blockchain intends for these situations. If an author pays for upvotes and then receives a large amount of downvotes they will lose a significant amount of money, which in most cases would discourage the behavior in the future.
Steem is supposed to be a self-moderating community and downvotes are the primary tool for that. Unfortunately there's a number of downsides to downvoting that cause it to be used much more rarely than I think it ought to be.
Actually, down voting is like putting a chainsaw into the hands of a 6 year old. I've been following the flaggers and their flag wars. They follow no one, have massive SP, run bot farms for upvoting and generally degrade the quality of steem. No quality value is added. Only massive amounts of money flow their way.
Somebody took a lesson from Goldman Sachs with them stats
Yup. And to prove them stats, I just upvoted you for an entire .24 cents. Wooppeee!!!
Haha thanks! Welcome to prove it any time ;-)
I haven’t come up with any solution except to work towards becoming a whale myself and support those who prioritize a smaller wealth gap.
Let me drop a little tuna upvote for you too :-)
I do think voting bots have a useful place on the platform and I do profit from them, but I watch the value of my account pretty regularly and I can say that I'm much more interested in the price of Steem than I am in profits from vote bots. I just don't think that getting rid of vote bots would really improve the problems with good curating right now.
Hi surfermarly,
Thank you for sharing the graph. We all have visions on how this will develop. Personally, I am happy to see new end-users getting some of the Steem as I would like to see a better distribution of Steem. I see this as a good thing even if some of it is sold it at least has the possibility of ending up in some different hands. I realize this is not a popular vision.
Hey @whatsup good to see you again! :-)
If that Steem was really ending up in different hands, I'd fully agree with you. But if you do the maths the people who spend hundreds of SBD in order to promote one single post, lose money and don't win at all.
Minnows buying votes is not the source of the problem, and whales selling them neither. Minnows not being seen is the source of the problem :-)
The demand and popularity of the voting bots IMO is a direct result of the lack of a wider distribution and inability of other users to get views.
The amount of spammy posts are a direct result of "fear of using flags" and more human eyeballs on the site can help correct this if we provide either safe reporting or safe flagging of questionable content. (obviously it is going to be arbitrary)
Per the white paper the large stakeholders are going to have to "police" the large-stake holders or backup those who are actually trying to use the site to find, curate and post.
I don't agree. The use of bot come from human nature wanting to get an advantage and human nature wanting something easy. If we want to get attention, let's just pay a bot for votes... But what about quality posts that add to the community. Many of the flagging fools follow no one, run upvote bot businesses and then downvote those who they think are taking too much of the rewards. No added value at all.
Yes. I have considered going back to using bots just to get real users to actually see my posts when someone like you doesn’t need notice them because not everyone spends 24 hours on their feed and only 20 of my 1400 followers have any real weight.
Agreed. Most people aren't on the trending page or feeds. A lot of the weight comes in bot votes.
It is the whole "I don't wanna get caught flagging" thing going on. It would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a way to program in a kind of deflector shield that prevented against retaliatory downvoting. It would be tricky to implement, but theoretically worth discussing.
Incentivizing the good content and curation is one thing, but bot votes aside, we are still left with the problem of self-voting at a whale level. And I think @blocktrades says it best. Incentivize curation of others bringing it back to a 50/50 split of curation rewards.
At the VERY least, it will break up the earning capacity of the bigs, and leave more for us littles to swim in. If we can take a breath and see the bigger picture, we won't be annoyed by our lack of self-vote points.
If the wealth were distributed well, we would be able to regulate self voting and upvoting bots and counter delegation that we didn’t agree with as we saw fit, as a community, and neither would be much of a problem because the many peoplple with a real stake in the platform would act to prevent abuse or selfishness, if not by downvoting than at least by not upvoting, which would make a bigger difference if the distribution were fair . But don’t talk about that, let’s only talk about the problems which allow those at the top to stay firmly planted at the top ;-)
Sure minnows couldn't upvote themselves or sockpuppets for much, but certainly whales could and did. I stand by my statement.
Whales do not use vote buying services, do they? This discussion is about whether vote buying services are abusive or not.
There are minnows burning thousands of dollars in SBD to promote their posts and to be seen at least for a couple of hours. The only winners in that game are those who sell their votes to them.
Attention - our most valuable good in this economy - is no longer earned, it can be purchased. Also quality doesn't matter anymore, since visibilty is provided to those who are able to pay for it. That's how the currency attention will constantly lose its value, and the vision of Steem to give value back to those who create value is no langer valid.
Attention was always available for purchase under the rules of the Steem blockchain. This idea, whether you agree with it or not, was one of the fundamental design elements and its use for things such as advertising was intended.
The idea of selling attention to advertisers (which was presented by Ned Scott at the first Steemfest in Amsterdam) is a completely different scenario. That has nothing to do with the eco-system as it is designed right now. Selling my attention to a product advertiser (which has never been able so far) is a completely different thing than selling my VP to a minnow who wouldn't be seen in the network otherwise.
From my point of view the future design of Steem shouldn't support these trades.
I don't see what you think is different from a regular person buying steem to get attention versus an advertiser buying steem to get attention. Maybe you're arguing that the "regular person" is only doing it as a way to get additional rewards, whereas the advertiser isn't. While this could certainly be true, it certainly isn't necessarily so.
And in any event, both scenarios were considered in Steem's design.
When the advertisers buy themselves in it's contributive to the whole network. When a vote trader sells VP it's only contributive to that one vote trader. That's where I see the main difference.
No, the post was claiming that vote buying services and delegations were the root of steem's problems. I don't think it's the root issue, I think it's a problem with the way rewards are handed out currently under the blockchain rules, and I think the only realistic solution is a change to those rules.
You mean, to the 50/50 curation share, and the 5 minute idea? That makes more sense to me, for all of the reasons you have gone into.
Oh, and yes, whales certainly do use voting buying services. I've seen a number of such posts...
We should ask @aggroed to invite us to a panel and discuss this explosive topic with a couple of more people in detail. I'm losing track of the comments thread already :-)
I just don't see more discussion really achieving anything. In my opinion, the only viable solution is a change in the rules, and there is already a plan to make some changes (I'm not in full agreement with the version of the changes proposed, but I think it will be better than what we have now).
Unfortunately now it's a matter of waiting for the new rules to get implemented, and they're delayed by other coding issues that are arguably even more serious (e.g. bandwidth issues).
Yep. Cut the chat. Change the rules. Bandwidth shmandwidth. :0)
Well by talking about these issues we make clear where we see the priorities.
I'm off, thanks for the valuable conversation! Appreciated.
I actually love the discussion. This post -- this thread in particular -- is vital for Steem and necessary to explore now, while this platform is small. This is a really an existential question. And one I'm wholly unqualified to offer an informed opinion.
I would only point out -- as long as you allow people to buy votes, you will always have a market for upvotes. Votes are a commodity on Steemit. @zombee has proposed a solution. The upside is, this solution will almost certainly curb the use of bots. The downside is, this solution will almost certainly curb the use of bots. Bots do good things -- for whales and minnows. But they also create problems.
I would ask how you can achieve the goals of Steemit by allowing bots to exist. By their very nature, they're antithetical to the idea that "quality content" will organically get the most rewards.
I totally second this
Which is basically the whole point of this discussion.
Ban self-voting and revenue from delegated SP (that is, make it a voluntary DONATION) and watch these problems disappear.
Oooh. What a great idea!
This makes sense, like congress won’t change the rules that benefit the people with the true power.
No it would just go underground and more secretive. You really think it would stop selling votes? If so I got some lake front property for sale, interested?
I agree, some loopholes will still exist, but buying votes is not half as bad as what was described above.
I personally try my best to make good content and I only ever upvoted myself when I originally started, my vote carries no weight, my voice is often not heard and it seems unfairly to watch memes get hundreds and something I put a lot of effort into go without likes because there is no real incentive to upvote a minnow other than site expansion and keeping people involved just enough? Where do we go from here @blocktrades @berniesanders @zombee
@dizzyjay This one of the problems; the platform wants to be both an investment and a social platform, so how can it be fair to both the shark that came in with $100K and the Minnow that started with nothing? Since some Whales give themselves $100+ votes for a 5 minute blabla video that took all of a half our to make, I refuse to feel bad about my paltry $0.03 self vote for a video that took travel, 2 cameras, 4 microphones and an entire day+ to record and edit.
I understand that. But one whale is also all it takes to destroy many of the minnows, all it would take is for one of them to see you bitch or downvote them their bad behaviour and you’re done. Upvoting is only the tip of the iceberg so far I truly hope SMT make a difference in the delegation aspect. I love this site it would devastate me to not be able to use it. I check everyday for comments and been interesting stuff. All this makes me sad and really it’s unfortunate that the way we want to decentralize wealth but are unwilling to give an inch in solidarity to that.
I know of this German guy that took on Hey-Dginn who retaliated with $90 flags on his posts right away. I made it a point to follow him and up vote him whenever I can. I have some ideas, but they would require the solidarity you mentioned and some privacy.
No.
The rise of SBD has nothing to do with this problem.
As a user of upvote bots I admit they help promote spam.
Another problem is that curation does not work:
https://steemit.com/curation/@stimialiti/what-you-need-to-know-about-curation
Curation is a donation and yields little to none benefits to the curator.
This comment has received a 20.75 % upvote from @steemdiffuser thanks to: @stimialiti. Steem on my friend!
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Get Upvotes, Join Our Trail, or Delegate Some SP
Yep. Curation rewards are designed to be pretty comparable to author rewards, but with SBD being what it is, they're pretty worthless. If SBD were $1 people would have a renewed interest in curation trails and the like. Right now, there's no point in voting for anything, far more profitable to sell your upvote to a bot.
Thank you, new follower and upvote from me
i read youre post and you are right in everything you say
Your old post is great!
Says the account obviously making tons of money using them.
I read your post. Impeccably written. I think it is by far the best proposal I've seen, and easily implemented. Give the first five minutes the same curation points, take the 30 minute standard away and make it 5, split the rewards 50/50 so curators are more inclined to upvote OTHERS, thereby incentivizing some of the money back into the community rather than self, which is essentially the ticket to keeping this thing going. Bravo @blocktrades. Bravo.
I think it comes down to high value accounts/users getting a bit greedy(if you can even call it that). I mean it’s natural to like your own posts and such but what’s self promotion and what’s too much?
Voting bots are contributing to the same problem though. It is providing upvotes people would otherwise not be getting.
With the current system, these voting bots are encouraged given many can only afford a few dollars, not a lengthy investment in the platform through steem power.
I don't know of a proper solution, though pinning the price of SBD would not change much. It would only lessen creators rewards, it wouldn't create new demand for better content.
Right now, there IS good content on this website that is being ignored, while shittier content is favored from self voting and voting bots. If SBD was lower, people would still self vote and use bots, taking away from better content.
The system needs to be self moderated better, having more upvotes for good content and more flags for bad content.
Voting power going down based upon the number of votes is a hindrance to the idea, as this keeps people from both flagging and voting. Many people choose to not upvote good content because they know it will take from their future rewards, should they want to upvote their own content.
Perhaps increasing curation rewards, decreasing author rewards would help solve this?
I cannot think of an excellent solution, though I hope I am adding to the discussion.
Cheers
How ironic, I make a comment against voting bots and get spam flagged by voting bots.
Voting bots have the potential to be a good thing, though idiots like bernie, marky, grumpycat etc are the ones who are using them.
We need decentralized bots, for the good of the community, not used for profit like these scumbags that use them.
Same thing here. Although, I didn't make a comment directly against bots. Just for splitting the rewards 50/50 so good curation was a little more incentivized and the pool had a little more to go around for the littles.