@desmonid This post is seriously well thought out and WAY underrated right now.
Excellent and thoughtful analysis, just a couple of points.
The devs here didn't boldly go out and form a new blockchain, it's graphene same thing behind bitshares, because it's team bitshares behind it. However it is on it's own chain so maybe the point is moot and we're both right. Anyways they had the tech before the network and more importantly they already had the critical mass to make it work.
Secondly, the rise of the swarms, isn't going to be impacted by the changes proposed. Any more than limiting people to 4 posts a day, and delaying the time for curation awards to 30 minutes has helped with any of these problems.
Changes of this nature only hurt the people trying to use the system fairly.
As I explained here changes of this nature are addressing a symptom and not any of the causes.
Changes directed at punishing normal behavior aren't going to fix it, but talking to the people who are doing this, asking them nicely to stop and giving them incentives to build the kinds of bots that are useful and helpful will fix this problem.
Remember, what got that swarm to stop wasn't rules, it wasn't starting a counter swarm. It was someone who I won't mention by name, explaining the situation and asking the swarm owner nicely to stop, while trying to give his side of the story too.
In fact I popped in here wondering if I could get permission to feature your "help I'm getting stung to death" post in my next blog where I try to explain the formation of hives and hive queens within steemit and how this is going to be bad and how the proposed changes are going to make this worse, not better. As well as how we actually do stop it.
Back to the topic though, yeah if we have to spend money to upvote we'll upvote less. One possible option to kill the swarms is to charge a small fee per upvote, say 0.01 and a large fee for flagging, say $10.00
This is enough most people aren't going to think twice. But it would drain the accounts of every swarm in a day or two.
So maybe these guys are onto something. However...
They aren't steem and thus there's no reason to bother going there instead. They have nothing to offer that we don't.
Yes, I'm actually aware that steem is based on graphene but that was more technical than the intended scope of the article so I (over?)simplified it to the devs building their own blockchain.
I'm progressing through reading your article on one of my alt-monitors and am actually finding you are making some strong points.
Yes of course you can link to my article(s) either in comments or in your original posts if you feel it is relevant
@desmonid
Sorry wasn't sure if you knew the difference on that graphene thing.
I tend to get a bit technical and prolux sometimes. Apologies for that.
It's not just relevant, it's actually central since you're effectively patient zero.
FYI I'm going to do something different for my next blog post, but it will be the one immediately after. Right now there is a lot of bot hate swarming around this place and I think the bot thing has been done to death at this point.
I am discussing it with @dana-edwards over here though...
https://steemit.com/security/@dana-edwards/artificial-immune-systems-intrusion-detection-and-disruption-tolerant-networks
I'm glad you're enjoying my posts though and keep up the good work!
No need to apologize for throwing out some fatty knowledge bombs :)
My degree is in Management Information Systems so I'm definitely into the technical details, I just wrote this article to a slightly broader audience than techies :P