How the Byteball airdrop is screwing over the Steem community and what can be done to stop it.
The more I see the aftermath of the Byteball airdrop, the more I reflect on the damage it has done to the Steem community. Sure we all made money, but do you understand the cost?
The cost of an easily exploitable airdrop
There are three negative side effects of the airdrop that will leave lasting effects on the Steem community.
Referral Sniping
The first is the epidemic of users sniping other users referral bonuses. This has become so bad that some users created bots to automatically scan the blockchain for new Byteball addresses posted and send the minimum amount to attest the account. This allowed them to receive a referral bonus equal to the new users sign up bonus 25% up front and 75% in one year. These referral bonuses ranged from $10 to $160, an amount that makes referral sniping irresistible.
Spam and Bot Abuse
Everyone knows the Steem rep system is easily gamed in both directions. Did you know a new account can get (30) rep with around 0.600 SBD and (40) with a little over 5 SBD?
The last few days we have seen a huge uptick in spam, plagiarism, and bot abuse creating new accounts to take advantage of the Byteball airdrop. A (40) account gets $20, $10 and $10 in a year, more than enough to cover the ~5 SBD to increase the rep on a fresh account to (40). Did you know they also get another $20 for referring themselves? A referral gives the same sign-up bonus as the user you sign up paid 25% up front and 75% in a year and you can easily get a referral bonus from your other accounts. This doubles the incentive to abuse the system (both Byteball and as a side effect Steem) to get a huge payday.
In fact one user, @dreamryder007 has done just that, creating hundreds of accounts using plagiarism masked with Google translate into Chinese to create a large pool of Byteball airdrop accounts and accompanying referral rewards for thousands of dollars.
The amount of plagiarism on the Steem blockchain dramatically rose to farm higher rep accounts.
Google Spreadsheet of accounts used to farm Byteball
The above spreadsheet is a list of 404 accounts created by @dreamryder007 and possibly others to milk both Byteball and Steem using plagiarism and spam. This isn't even remotely close to all of it created in the last few days.
(All these accounts have been blacklisted from @buildawhale)
Gateway Drug
I am a firm believer that spam, plagiarism, and abuse are one of the biggest issues on the Steem blockchain retarding future progress and ultimately the price. While the price is heavily tied to BTC performance, without the current issues, performance would certainly be better than it is today as would adoption.
The fact that the Byteball airdrop was so exploitable via the two above issues gave many users the taste of the good life and the life of crime. While many of them may have been bad actors prior, the success and rewards bring justification and empower them to continue further down the path of finding low effort ways for financial gains. We already have far too many users on this path, many of which are profiting quite well.
My thoughts
Minimum Reputation
There are a few things I would have changed in this airdrop, the first is requiring a minimum of (50) rep to take part in the airdrop if it is going to be based on rep. Byteball likely didn't understand how fragile our reputation system is, and how easy to game it is. While (50) isn't difficult to obtain in a very short period of time, it raises the bar to a level that you are more likely dealing with a legitimate user than a spammer.
Account Creation Date
I would have also used a genesis date on the account to be a member for at least 3 or even 6 months. These two changes would have drastically reduced the impact the airdrop had on the blockchain. These two changes issues were addressed in a recent change to the airdrop guidelines earlier this morning.
Getting your hands dirty
There is a lot of spam and abuse going on, you don't have to look further than the first or second page of New to see it. When a user sees another user or even themselves get rewarded with zero or low effort content it has a strong negative influence on their actions in our community.
If one user can make $175,000 USD a year posting YouTube videos when can't I? Why bother writing engaging useful original content when you can automate plagiarism and spam and get similar rewards? Allowing these users to thrive has a massive effect on the mindset and actions of others around them.
Thank you @therealwolf for the heads up and putting me on the trail.
Update
I feel this isn't the last airdrop on the Steem community, there will likely be more in the future. I hope future airdrops do more due diligence when releasing a large airdrop on a community. Most of this could have been avoided completely with a few very simple changes to the airdrop.
Do you care about the Steem blockchain?
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Thanks for yet another brilliant article. You are pretty much spot on in all your assessments. Needless to say, we were of course very well aware of all the exploitable details of this campaign. Particularly the cost of boosting a new user to rep lvl 30 or 40 was a carefully calculated risk. We wanted to make this an opportunity to all Steem users - not only the high reps. We were aware of the leaked private keys from user's misuse of memos and generally had a rather good and detailed analysis on the possible ways to abuse the system.
We were aware, that while some would use the opportunity to just buy a boost, others would perhaps feel a reason to start posting quality content and engaging more in the Steem community, no matter which Steem based community they were from.
We naturally monitored the situation and when the abuse got too high compared to legit use, we moved to make a change that actually implemented some of the suggestions you wrote here. There is now a check for creation date on users, only allowing Steem users created prior to the original announcement to receive the attestation award. The reward for lower reputation levels are halved to make it unprofitable to buy boost.
Then, why on earth didn't we set out with a much might tight and waterproof system from the get-go? Well, the main reason being the ease of use and a wider spread of the word. Having users jump through too many hoops and setting up various mechanisms preventing users from getting rewards would have caused a lot less visibility. The way we did it caused the word to spread like wildfire. I am not sure that would have been the case, had we done it any other way.
This was an awful “calculated risk.” In fact, I don’t believe it was “calculated” at all. Anyone with just a rudimentary understanding of Steem/Steemit knows that the reputation system is massively flawed, the account creation process/faucet is easily exploitable, and that bots, spammers, exploiters, and outright scammers infest this place.
So this so-called “calculated risk” was then deemed acceptable after consideration was given? Why? In order to sign up exploiters/scammers to Byteball? That doesn’t sound like a promising marketing/growth model. It actually sounds like a great way to look scammy and to devalue your blockchain and tokens.
The fact that reputation scores on Steem/Steemit were used at all is laughable when talking about anything to do with “calculations” and airdrops. There’s a reason why it’s not part of any distribution protocols on the Steem blockchain.
Why this was not part of the original ruleset for the airdrop is beyond me. If the consequences from this bad decision were not foreseen, then I can only assume that having a cut-off date was never actually considered - which means this airdrop was nothing less than completely amateurish. Has anyone on your team ever seen another crypto airdrop before?
Yes, it’s much better to have people spreading the word that your airdrop was very poorly done and negatively affected both participating blockchains rather than make sure that it was done properly with abuse/exploit mitigation. Because those with investment money and actual development skills/teams love to invest in a good ol’ crypto “scam.”
Likely in all the wrong places...like websites and forums that spread the word about how easily exploitable the airdrop was. Congratulations, I guess?
See, the first thing I need to underline here, is the fact, that this isn't just a simple airdrop. Steem users are now an integral part of the Byteball ecosystem. We needed the reputation level, how flawed it might be, as a way to allow ICO issuers, merchants, webshops, bot creators etc. to provide discounts and bonuses to a limited set of users. Users' attestations are posted to the DAG (yes, it's not a blockchain as you mentioned) and it allows developers to provide special services to Steem users.
One thing I can honstly say we didn't foresee, was the internal debate this caused in the Steem community. We definitely had no intention to bring focus to what some apparently believe is a broken system.
Whether or not you believe we knowingly set out to do things this way, I can just say, that to a platform allowing users to build and expand on it just like Steem, we definitely got some attention from developers swooping in to take advantage of things.
One final word on all this would have to be, that the network issues we experienced last weekend, was definitely not planned for! It caused all sorts of problems both to users and to us monitoring the campaign. That's definitely a lesson we've learned for the next campaigns :)
Exactly. Every discrepancy in effort/investment/income unleashes spammers.
I love that you took the time and read the post and provided an awesome response to it. Was happy to see the changes made although I wish they were done from the start.
I am amazed at how successful the airdrop was and how many people took part.
@themarkymark when are you going to after @therealwolf for running a instant vote selling service that robs others of curation rewards?
You know that @themarkymark is a vote bot merchant as well right? Peas in a pod, Dude.
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I believe I have proof that bots were used to scan the blockchain. That is a serious 'loophole'.
https://steemit.com/byteball/@em3/byteball-referral-theft-at-blockchain-level
Yes, it actually took 3 days for someone to create a script that read the DAG (not a blockchain) and "catch" users' transactions of amounts similar to that used to pay the attestation fee. Initially, only a single script was active, but after 2 more days, we saw 5 or 6 more. Today, we decided to end it and remove the fee entirely, reverting to a basic referral link. The scripts caused others to develop ways to "milk" the scripts by generating transactions resembling that of users normal behavior from different addresses. (The headless light wallet allows for that) It was quite interesting to see, really :)
Thank you for the reply!!
So my friend @public-eye is out of luck? $80 in Byteball (referral bonus) lost because of these scammy programmers???
My Post shows the addresses of these scammers. I hope these addresses are frozen or deleted.
If you can help my friend that would be appreciated....
Thanks!
Since I recognized pretty much the same by referring someone via discord (no address has ever been posted somewhere) I checked the addresses and they are the same as yours just a few seconds after the transfer I made:
That is so terrible.
I hope Byteball does something to correct this.... Punish this scammer and still rightly install the referral fees to the real referrers.
We'll see.
Hope so too.
Nice Blog
Thank you for sharing the news on the blockchain. We found this one interesting, therefore we featured this article on our Episode 8 of SteemTechShow!
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The only way it affected steemians is the referral abuse. Let's not forget, reputation system is managed by Steemit INC, not byteball, so if its exploitable, its too bad for 'Steemit'.
I love that they chose steem community for the airdrop. You may have gained minimum $80 too through this airdrop. Sure it may be nothing but it's free money, so it matters.
Where the spammers came from? Most probably from this thread, and the invitee of this pattern of abuse is also a steemian here. I'm well aware that once a method is posted on thebot.net, it will be raped to death. Same happened here. Part of the credit goes to this steemian "supermeatboy" for inviting people to abuse the airdrop.
Here's the thread link: https://thebot.net/threads/how-to-rape-the-gbyte-steemit-airdrop.407564/
Edit: Seems like you are not aware that they modified their airdrop rules already. Accounts created after 12th July can't claim the airdrop anymore, but can still refer others and earn. Also, the rewards of 30-40 and 40-50 are halved. Much better than before I guess, but they are yet to do something for referral exploits (mass transfer of tiny payments to hijack referral rewards).
Agreed with you and @princewahaj and even @themarkymark
There were issues with the airdrop but perhaps the benefits were still pretty good. This allows us and future companies see how an airdrop should perhaps be handled. This is a great test for us. This is how we learn and we can tell future airdrops in the first minute of them posting (or hopefully before they post) what they should consider for the airdrop.
So perhaps we should cool our reaction and maybe change the FUD title to say something like.
"How the Byteball airdrop messed up and how we can learn for the next STEEM airdrop"
I've seen that post, but it wasn't hard to figure out how to abuse it.
Exactly, I see it as a exploit from steemit's side and not from byteball (except for referral abuse).
It is, but education, before the airdrop started, could have prevented that.
Agreed with that. I think they might not even have an idea of how rep system can be abused so easily. I mean, just look at the invitee on https://steemit.com/@ supermeatboy (don't want to mention him), his rep points are 61. Wow!
On the other hand, we have some good members with great potentials and yet they are below 60 or even 50.
Also, are you aware that they already modified their airdrop rules? No more accounts created after 12th july and reward of 30-40 rep groups are halved.
But would education have been able to prevent the blockchain explorer bots harvesting new addresses to loot the referral rewards. It happened to me and my friend:
https://steemit.com/byteball/@em3/byteball-referral-theft-at-blockchain-level
nice
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I want to comment on this because I believe that more positive effect has done than negative. I know someone got interested to be in this community because of the airdrop and I believe this is just only a start of more airdrops to come in the future.
Maybe someone who doesn't believe in Steem has motivated because of quick bucks they earned on Steem blockchain. Although there are people who made their many fake accounts there is a possibility that someone created their real account and want to get their reputation higher because Byteball Airdrop based their airdrops on Reputation.
I agree with that, This should not be at top of trending.
While the criteria could have been a bit different to achieve a better result, I agree that airdrops like this have a net positive impact on the value of Steem as a whole.
This airdrop won't be the last of its kind. Once SMTs get rolled out, there will be tons of them for various projects probably airdropped to SP holders as well.
It is already.
Thanks @transisto there are also people who still can't believe we can withdraw real money out from here but the byteball token was the real test to them to get fiat money out of the system.
i am following you
Come on @ritushekhawat, this is not the way to get followers and upvotes. What you'll get are accounts going to your account and flag the heck out of your spammy comments. Focus on writing a thoughtful comment or don't comment at all.
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Yes we can think this way as well.
i am following you
Well, now I looked at your account and seems like I need to go find where you copied your posts! Reach out to others and learn to make good posts of your own content. ulog is a good place to start.
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well said
I agree with you, if this had any gateway drug effect then it was not mainly to cheat more (there is always some bad apples), but it actually helped Steem community who now hope that there will be more airdrops to Steemians.
What I noticed a lot was people asking how to get Bytes to their Steemit account because their never used Bittrex, UPbit or any other cryptocurrency exchange before, which means that there are many users on Steem who are not familiar with other cryptocurrencies.
There is no better way to boost some community/country economy than having some funds come from outside, import/export anybody? What somebody should do is make a bot on Byteball that let's users to convert Bytes to STEEM.
I think many missed the point of attestation too because the main function of attestation is to have a Byteball address in
steem/usernameformat, so others would not need to know any Steem user Byteball address, they could send Bytes directly to their username if they know that this user is using Byteball too.Yes please someone write a article about what Byteball is, how to manage to exchange it, etc, etc.
I have already written several blog posts about Byteball and I might write another one that explains what else you can do with Byteball, check them out.
I have not written anything about how exchanges work because I believe there are many tutorials how Bittrex works.
Okay, I'll look into those tutorials. This is turning out to be a lot of work for a few pieces of steem.
Completely agree with this. It will benefit all the parties involves- byteball, steemit and the users.
You are doing a lot of good things here on steemit. That´s why I can forgive your byteball shills. Despite you not even apologizing for it.
You guys (like witnesses) should have seen that. I have no clue about the technical things of steem/steemit/byteballs and even I understand your explanations. Is it really that hard to foreseaw what just happened?
Somehow you guys can see through the technical stuff of a scammy Jerry Banfield SMT despite SMT not even being released. But you can´t foresee that people will create low reputation spam accounts to grab the airdrop.
lol
No one of you guys who shilled this (useless shitcoin btw) cared about it. You were just greedy. Hoping to make some thousands of dollars of easy cash.
Now when others stole your not hardly earned money you suddenly turn mad and complain.
I don´t feel sorry for you at all.
And btw I think you guys should not give the responsibility to Byteballs. I rather have greedy witnesses than witnesses who have no fucking clue how steemit works. Because if you say it´s all Byteballs fault you admit that you are too stupid to have seen it coming.
I won´t unvote you as a witness. But you insult my intelligence with your behaviour right now.
To think that we had no idea exactly what types of abusive behavior we could expect to see would be quite ignorant. We needed this to make a huge impact and spread like wildfire from the get-go. That definitely happened.
Obviously, I have to disagree that Byteball is a shit project and GBYTE is a shitcoin. There are actually quite a few rather interesting use cases that people who take the time see beyond the "free money" would learn. I saw this one from a Steem user today: https://steemit.com/byteball/@teamhumble/88ya1df6 - interesting to see someone actually taking time to look at what some features could potentially be used for.
The campaign definitely brought the problem of plagiarism and spam into full spotlight. Needless to say, that definitely wasn't our intention.
I think you all did quite well. You made a huge splash. That much attention would have cost way, way more with traditional advertising. I myself am will be using your crypto sports betting.
Most people on steem have NO CLUE about business, just an fyi.
Are you a part of the byteball team? Just curious
It is not greedy to take advantage of a good opportunity. There was a clear advantage to both parties, users referred made a lot of money (for some as much as posting on Steem for a year), so I don't see it the same as "shilling a coin" as that typically is only for the shill's benefit.
My concern was l the fact users (who felt they were anonymous) went around acting as thieves. I researched users who did this on most Byteball posts, not only my own. While I am of course upset people stole most of my referrals, I was more upset so many users felt it was ok to steal from other people.
A witness is just another human Steemian, we have lives, interests, and want to make money. Anyone convinces you otherwise is likely lying or delusional. If I felt promoting it would have harmed users or only benefited myself, I would have never said a damn thing about it.
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Both you, and @themarkymark bring up some valid points, as I see it.
Big kudos @noobsin to "tell it like you see it". Steemit needs much more of this: people feeling free to speak their mind instead of fear to get flagged. And that says nothing about my own perception, whether I agree with your points or not.
Indeed @themarkymark is doing a lot of good things on Steemit, and despite a few "provocative words" here and there written by @noobsin , I think you guys more or less agree on a lot of Steem-related issues!
You could become best friends even! :P
Steem on!
One of the big problems of steem as I see it is that there are too many pathetic bootlickers who say what they think they will be rewarded for rather than maintaning moral integrity
So quite refreshing to see both that there are still users that say what they actually think and people with a lot of SP who stand and defend their opinion rather than downvoting the hell out of people for speaking their mind
As to the users abusing the airdrop as in stealing referals claiming the attestation fee multiple times we know who many of them are I dont think its right the let them maintain a high rep score simply downvote the fuckers into the ground
The trick is to maintain moral integrity without being a jerk about it. I think many people find that level of diplomacy to be impossible for them.
There is also a fairly large amount of people who will say just about anything as long as they believe others will upvote
Perfect response.
Good to see there are people out there brave enough to call out the bull.
Well done.
👍
i am following you
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Your comments about other comments being comment spam is itself comment spam. Please stop adding to the spam...then summoning another spam bot. Every time you do this, you add twice as much spam as the original spammer...and you’re being rewarded for it, which you are apparently hypocritically opposed to when it comes to the original spammer.
In other words: You’re not the solution...you’re in fact a bigger problem.
Hello @ats-david,
I somewhat agree with you.
I am the co-owner of this account with my wife @lovenfreedom.
We created it to be a downvote bot to support our team of minnow abuse fighters @steemflagrewards.
We are slowly building its rep and sp. We have one small delegation for this Admiral account now. We would like to never leave another comment on steemit with this account.
If you would help us find some delegations we could do that.
Then we would not have to leave any comments other than the first explanation to the account flagged.
All abuse fighting accounts on steemit leave a comment behind a flag so the account owner understands why they have been flagged. If you look on this post there are comments from spaminator as well that came after our flags and comments
Those comments appear above ours but they came after us and were upvoted above our comments.
If you can tell us a better way to fight abuse on steemit we are open ears.
We are investors in steem, all stake we own we purchased.
Fighting abuse is important to us.
I spend 12 hours a day most days of a week fighting abuse.
My wife and son make interesting posts about our homestead.
I hope you will work with us and help us find a good solution to this problem.
@iamstan you were flagged by a worthless gang of trolls, so, I gave you an upvote to counteract it! Enjoy!!
Hi @ats-david, we are working on making our bot only comment once per post. The comments are currently the mechanism for flaggers to receive rewards.
I do think we can devise another method. Maybe, the people can comment on the @steemflagrewards threads to receive their vote.
What do you think? Sound like a good solution?
We can make it happen. Thanks for the feedback!
P.S. I forgot that another reason for the flag comment is intended to educate, inform, and explain the flag to the user. With that in mind, one comment per flagged comment seems the better route but we can require follow on flags to reply to the original flag comments to keep them on their own thread.
@anthonyadavisii you were flagged by a worthless gang of trolls, so, I gave you an upvote to counteract it! Enjoy!!
Please stop telling the spammer to stop spamming the other spammer because this is infact spam and part of the problem.
"On a related note I would include the SBD pump here as another example where the community got high on free money and were blinded to the long term costs to the Steem Blockchain."
The real long term cost to the steem block chain is massive mismanagement and poor design. Who in there right mind designs a system and then punishes people for using the system the way it was designed .... and expects to grow.
For a fee I will tell you what can be done to make steem a top crypto currency :)
Also I do a free daily vote giveaway, drop by for some free $$$$
Exactly.
I think you really point of byteball developers did not understand steemi that when they announced the requirements to receive airdrop. Like you mention the developers should immediately adjust the requirements like taking into an account's age.
Thanks for the post. Hope this doesn't spread any worse than it is.
Or maybe they knew all too well? Have you consider that?
Original blog post stated very well that rewards for lower tiers would most likely to be changed.
You can't introduce too many restriction too early when it hasn't even gone viral yet.
tarmo888 you will find out most people and even whales have no concept of How To Business
Bingo!
As a relatively new user I was disgusted by all the abuse. However I don't agree that making the airdrop more exclusive would be better for the community in the long term.
I definitely agree that it would have drastically reduced the abuse in the airdrop, but people like me would not have been able to participate. And I'm sure there were at least a few real people gained thanks to the airdrop.
There will always be those that game the system. That just highlights the need for more people like you who spend the time to weed them out. You seasoned people understand how to deter these abusers, and you're effective at it, without having the tools of a fascist platform like failbook.
It was exactly because of users like you, we decided to start out as we did. Obviously, we knew exactly what would happen, but had we started out more exclusively, it wouldn't have got the attention it got. When the abuse became too much, we made the change. But hopefully, we got a lot of "real" users on board too by doing it the way we did.
I really hope that this airdrop is a huge success. It will attract more projects to organize such contests.
This is nonsense actually, even those abuser create multiple account to receive the referral reward, they still need to have multiple device to get the reward.
If the sponsor device address is the same with the attestator device address both will not get any reward.
will people waste his time buying more device just for the sake of 10$ bucks?
I know your concern about the steem block chain, but the airdrop not make any damage as you see, actually it gives more exposure to steem blockchain.
Actually, this is not true. You can create a wallet, do the airdrop, backup the seed, blow away the wallet, (if on PC you got to delete folder aftering doing the uninstall, on mobile you just delete and reinstall app) and reinstall the app and do the next one.
Possible but could be detected, again, the device information cannot be change, even they delete the folder the device information will still be the same as the first one. and I know byteball team is fighting the every possible abuse.
Not "possible", it's a fact. I registered both of my main accounts and I know others have done tons. Detected? Doesn't matter, abusers will dump the funds onto Bittrex almost immediately. Even if they lost the smart contract funds, they still make out big.
You are correct!
You are absolutely right. To think that this behavior was completely unexpected by Byteball is a bit naive, really. As I wrote in a comment to the article, we just might have put quite a bit more thought behind this than people gives Byteball credit for.
If you delete your wallet, the steembot gets rebooted with the new wallet on the same device and you can attest with a different account. I don't think you can keep your smartcontract rewards unless you go back and restore all the wallets in a year. There is no way of dumping private keys from the wallets.
i am following you
Reputation level 50 is a long way off for me.
There's always something wrong with airdrops, this is why I stopped participating in them. Plus, whenever there is free money, abuse follows.
You have certainly made the right decision. Quick money schemes always attract the worst kind of people. I have not participated in this airdrop and have no intention of doing so. I feel sorry for those that need to resort to cheap stunts just to make a couple of hundred bucks.
i am following you
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its the wild wild west
They change to "referral system" only!
You're back in?
https://medium.com/byteball/byteball-steem-attestations-now-referral-by-link-only-8ec6c79276b5
The coin itself seems safe. It was just the kind they handled this ref thing.
What we need at steemit is better control over ones own posts and feed. Something like a real "block" function to add such kind of spammer lists you've provided.
Nice, I think this is a good move. I also like the other changes they made.
I already get my Airdrop bytes @themarkymark
I can't believe the cheek in making all of these accounts!
@dreamryder007 you are an asshole and are leading a bad example for others to follow.
Voted for witness ..
Thanks, it was time ;p
Well said. It would be great to see the Byteball airdrop as a use case for Steem that we could hold up to the Crypto community of a successful airdrop where they achieved an effective distribution of their token to a community of potential participants, with minimal scamming. Given what you describe in your post I am not sure that is the case.
On a related note I would include the SBD pump here as another example where the community got high on free money and were blinded to the long term costs to the Steem Blockchain.
We are still feeling the effects.
i am following you
How many times do you think I will have to flag you before you stop spamming with your comments?
Flagged for comment spam @steemflagrewards
Pleasure is all mine. Even though it sucks to invest multiple hours into sh*t like that, it was quite entertaining to do it with you.
You run a service that sells instant votes to rob others of curation, tell me again how you are noble?
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@garudi - could it be that you just have crappy posts? like, really?
this is TOTALLY adding to the quality of steemit
I wouldn't say the airdrop did damage to the community.
What it did was show the real face of many of its members!
Exactly what i said. The people were corrupt before the #byteball airdrop.
i am following you
Should I be worried are u a stalker?
nice post,
Bots are the biggest problem in social platforms, they are a problem to facebook, to twitter, to steemit, bots need to be banished from social media with any sort of means
I have heard that there are one or two good bots but I agree with you that it would probably be a better social world without them. Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle and I fear we are stuck with them.
i assume you are right, it depends on the steemit or other social network developers and their communities, if they accept the bots, or want a free bot network, im sure defence systems could be developed to identify and ban bots
ofc a monetary system causes ppl to become greedy, hence the application of bots is so popular, it is difficult to answer, i guess you can only tell once you have a social platform (tokenized) up and running that is trying to block bots 100% and see what is the difference in user experience (i know sapien.network will attempt it) in the end, the user decides and not a wishful idealogy haha
Now steemit will have to be very strict against spam writers to protect genuine writers.
wow many make soo much money easy and me cant reach level +30
Haha. It was a matter of time. How long does it take people to find a way to game the system? Not long. But honestly who cares? Its byteball that needs to worry not Steem.
The only thing i see bad here is byteball posts taking up trending spots and referal link spam in my comment section.
But its always the same thing really. If you dont earn on Steem you resort to "criminal behaviour". Its really not "against the law" but its shitty and exploitative.
Its on byteball. At this point iitd be great if they shut it down and gone away.
Whats done is done.
Yeah.
And all these things that happens from time to time helps the network become more resilient and learn more about human behaviour. The ideal is that the reward pool share out works so well at giving everyone a slice of the pie that there is just no incentive to try to game the system. As we saw with Spotify. It made it so easy to play by the rules that little people has incentive to go download something illegally.
Congrats, you made the #steemitminute for today!
Click the Image Below to see the Video!
I will not blame this on the #byteball airdrop, rather on the nature of some people. They were of low morals before the airdrop. It was only a matter of time for something to make it show.
I think it's a combination of both. It could have been done in a way that most of this would have been prevented, it was short-sighted.
Another point of view is that perhaps the whales and dolphins lost their focus for a while too and a greedy mist descended in front of their eyes as they grabbed handfuls of referrals....you don't even need anyone to send you the bytes, you can attest yourself at a small cost.
Some may say, all the recent gripes about the airdrop is just moaning from people who had their referrals gravytrain hijacked...
It's a pity no one had thought of this when the first post was made by the Byteball team, but it was too late. Were there no background discussions between Byteball and Steem inc beforehand?
Is there an ethical difference between members taking the piss and creating millions of new accounts to make money to members desperately trying to get their hands on referral cash by offering to 'help' others attest their accounts ? Not sure there is.
It's a whole sorry affair that has again shown humanity at its worst.
After the Bitconnect desaster no one ever dared to shill any coins on steemit again I thought. Byteballs desaster is by far not as terrible as Bitconneeeeect. Yet the actual teaching of Bitconnect is to fucking properly research the shit that you promote.
My feed is full of shills since 2 weeks or so. From people who I thought are legit and good users. And the reasoning behind the promotion is like "I can´t guarantee that it´s good, but I really think it is because hurr durr".
Just another omen that steemit is going downhills.
What a great reply. Thanks for taking the time to comment :-)
Exactly, I am also seeing that people who complain most about the referral system are the people who profited most from these referrals, who made the referrals their "gravytrain".
Some even say big words like "they supported Byteball airdrop". I mean, what kind of support is that if you just making money from the referrals? Support would be if you explain the users that: "hey, you don't need any funds from somebody else, you can do it without my referral" and "here are ways how you can use Byteball with Steemit".
Most people missed the point of attestation too because the main function of attestation is to have a Byteball address in
steem/usernameformat, so others would not need to know any Steem user Byteball address, they could send Bytes directly to their username if they know that this user is using Byteball too.Totally agree mate, but Im just putting it down to a temporary loss of judgement in this particular case as @markymark is consistantly a great poster and top bloke who gives an awful lot of time and effort to the community and is my top witness.....some of the other whingers however.........
i am following you
Flagged for comment spam, follow me, follow you asking for upvotes and follows in comments is frowned upon.
@steemflagrewards
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Whilst I admire the work you do, It is my comment to which they replied and therefore my choice to reply. Instead of flaging people lile this who get no benefit and are nothing more than annoying,why not go after reward pool raping members who open multiple accounts with the sole aim of upvoting their own spam comments with their huge delegated SP? This is pathetic and you should only flag people who are reported. Lay off my posts ans comments. Youre only doing this to get rewards anyway @steemflagrewards @iamstan
my comment, my choice
You can choose to love comment spammers it is your choice.
I talked to @themarkymark about this spammer on HIS post. And he agreed it is ok to be flagged. If you will look he/she/it has totally spammed this post.
I don't think there is a thread rule where the first person on a comment thread sets some rules for that thread! Maybe you should make a post about it to your followers and they can follow your thread rules.
Comment spam will be flagged no matter where it is on the blockchain.
Congratulations, you're doing a fine job. The whole Steemit experience is so much better for your flags. So happy we have a gang of self happy flaggers wandering around flagging 25 rep 'comment spammers' who make zero difference to the rewards distribution whilst so many of the huge self upvoting dolphins and whales continue to autovote each other to riches and no one dare say or do anything....Do you not think if it so concerned people that anyone could flag a 25repper from view, yet most choose not to. I reached outto this one, anyway.
Like I said, awesome work. carry on, I consider myself berated.........
@nathen007 actually we give them a break if they are really new. But someone who has been on steemit for a bit and has only posted Plagiarism and spam doesn't need to be here. That account is one of those cases.
We hope to remove them or change them before they can build a rep that can not be punished.
I agree with you that we have many large stake holders that abuse the system and I would love to be able to stop them. Until everyone is involved in the process of flagging abuse it will never happen.
I cant do it alone, but what I do all day every day is try to clean our steemit of all abuse not just 25 rep accounts. We are working on things you cant see or dont know about.
Please dont think that what you see is all we do.
Come by our discord server and find out the truth before you frown on us for trying to make steemit a better place for investors of time and money to participate.
https://steemit.com/@ayustevanni12 here is one small example for you
Thank you my friend, welcome aboard :-)
Apologies for my tiny upvote!
The bot does not work very well! Maybe I was late.
My idea was just it is a good idea to help people asking for money! Nothing bad about that.
A bigger problem was the spam and all those greedy ref-hunters.
Latest news is they stopped the "Referral game" now.
I do not see any weakness or possibilities to hack the system itself! Your Money is safe and can be spent in a safe it. Guess it is my favorite Alt-Coin now.
You've had my vote a long time I believe. This article is why. I had no idea byteball was harming steemit. @enchantedspirit and I jumped straight onboard, as was our right. We, of course, are not part of the problem. Is there any way for steemit itself to enforce the rules you suggest in a future airdrop?
Trust me, I'm a doctor.
Hit the nail on the head again, the biggest, #1, by far problem here is spam accounts, people having thousands of them. Why not ad a captcha type system to have some level of proof of humanity. @abh12345 does an interaction league every week and his data and similar data is a great start to real interaction. Although based on his preferences at how he would like to see steemians interact, it provides a great deal of accuracy in how much people are on steemit, leaving legit comments, doing legit posts, interacting on other posts. To find a suitable algorithm to not take away an account but to cripple it if it meets certain parameters of looking and talking like a robot. I would be offended if I were put on that list, but I would surely prove my humanity very quickly to those that headed up the operation. Pretty hard to write 10,000 genuine reply letters for you account being crippled/cut in reputation, or whatever the method to fix this problem that is out of control here on the platform. Ask the byteball people if we have a spam account problem, they could likely give you a pretty educated guess on that already.
https://steemit.com/funny/@cartman/my-reaction-to-the-byteballs-steem-air-drop#@cryptkeeper17/re-cartman-my-reaction-to-the-byteballs-steem-air-drop-20180718t023455593z
sorry everyone because i am new here so i dont know
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sorry
@themarkymark Where can I reach out to you, want to ask you something?
Could you please explain what steps or solutions the steem witnesses are taking to fix this "fragile" and "easy to game" REP system that is currently in use? That would seem to me to be a sort of important issue for the future.
"Reklamın iyisi kötüsü olmaz" - There is no such thing as bad publicity.
This is the 3rd post about byteball from you for example. Few discord servers raided by byteball conversations and etc. If they choose to do what you are suggesting right now. They would accomplish a "successful" airdrop, by spending less but reaching lesser. I wouldn't bother to ask for an invite if I didn't see everyone was talking about it.
Yep everyone knows it so I assume they do too.
I'm not a writer but out of curiosity how many people actually earning something with their content here?
I'm following a few creators they keep writing daily, but even their earnings come from bid-bots, or self-votes with delegated powers. Such as this post.
Maybe people should stop presenting this place as "Earn with publishing blog posts", "How much did you earn from Facebook so far".
Come here, invest some, play the game, earn some and get out. Would be more appropriate.
Thank you @oups for your contribution...of a truth I don't earn anything on steemit. Great post
i am following you
You keep posting nonsense stop spam comment s
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i am following you
flagged for comment spam @steemflagrewards
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This is nothing but the truth.
More damages has been done to the steem blockchain as a result of this bytes airdrop.
One more thing to those solutions you mentioned up there is that no matter the age of the account, if an account is not active for certain period of time, it shouldn't be considered at all.
agree
i am following you
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The present form is only a down to business usage with a specific end goal to get the device out to everybody as quickly as time permits, yet after some time I would like to grow the site to be a far reaching asset for new and even experienced Steemers to figure out how to advance their function on Steem.
The byteball airdrop could only have allowed accounts created by steem. This would have solved the multiple account problem.
steem will recover :)
i am following you
You keep posting nonsense stop spam comment s
@steemflagrewards
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When it comes down to it, making money is #1 in crypto and technology is a far 2nd. Although many claims their motives are the reverse, it is almost never true.
Free money is free money if your local pizza store has a free pizza Friday, would you take advantage of it?
yeah bro that's true byteball has ruined our whole steemit community by spreading spam and fake accounts already ...
but many peoples have also earned something which will surely help them to succeed somewhere
@themarkymark
Byteball is not spreading anything, Steemit users are doing that.
I tired to keep up to date with many of the post about Byteball and most of them are really really bad, people just posting the same process of how to get the free Bytes over and over again (only difference, every body included their own referral link, everything else is same).
Only few actually looked into what it's about, everyone else were just blinded by free money.
Fake accounts were on Steem already before Byteball, also spam bots. I still keep getting messages from same bot advertising their service every time I promote any post. Steem is full of upovoting bots and reputation is a joke because you can buy it.
i am following you
flagged for comment spam @steemflagrewards
Resteemed and upvoted @themarkymark
There's always something wrong with airdrops, this is why I stopped participating in them. Plus, whenever there is free money, abuse follows.
Maybe someone who doesn't believe in Steem has motivated because of quick bucks they earned on Steem blockchain. Although there are people who made their many fake accounts there is a possibility that someone created their real account and want to get their reputation higher because Byteball Airdrop based their airdrops on Reputation.
Another point of view is that perhaps the whales and dolphins lost their focus for a while too and a greedy mist descended in front of their eyes as they grabbed handfuls of referrals....you don't even need anyone to send you the bytes, you can attest yourself at a small cost.
Some may say, all the recent gripes about the airdrop is just moaning from people who had their referrals gravytrain hijacked...
It's a pity no one had thought of this when the first post was made by the Byteball team, but it was too late. Were there no background discussions between Byteball and Steem inc beforehand?
Is there an ethical difference between members taking the piss and creating millions of new accounts to make money to members desperately trying to get their hands on referral cash by offering to 'help' others attest their accounts ? Not sure there is.
It's a whole sorry affair that has again shown humanity at its worst.
that's cool in some how. I don't like plagiarism but I like money like everyone. Shame that I get lost since I created this account! :(
We should learn from it and.... Let the past bury the dead.
yea, i might not be onthis blockchain too much longer as it seems to be for bots and self serving whales who circle jerk and nobody needs that.
I'm glad I didn't invest any real money until I did a couple of months on here, and so far, I really don't see any reason to invest any rwc for this. Yes Steem could be wonderful but right now it's just for those who know how to game the system and it's not helping the avg steemian......
I'll just keep doing more research on the platform but so far, I'm not liking the results, the platform is a great idea, the participation is lacking.
Anyway, thanks for reading this comment
Have a nice day and Steemon
I think bullying like similar to what happened with Banfield is a bigger problem. Reminds me of Facebook and that is sad.
I see some genuine problems with how byteball is organizing this. Why is there is no time limit mentioned about when will this end ?
Such issues can arise. I see that the people participating in Airdrops are becoming smart and thus projects have to be one step ahead to avoid abuse.
Whenever there is a loophole, there is bound to be people who would exploit it
I like the way they had added comment in updated rules that they will keep making necessary changes. So basically, the spammers will be dealt with based on what new approach they use now.
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We organically monitored the site and as soon as the misuse got to boot shrill compared to legit use, we stimulated to succeed a amend that in point of fact implemented a few of the suggestions you wrote here. near is immediately a inspection for manufacture engagement on users, lone allowing Steem users fashioned earlier to the first pronouncement to obtain the substantiation award. The reward for inferior reputation levels are halved to promote to it losing to believe boost.
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