THE DATA
Since the start of the successful funding of Hivewatchers proposal in August 2020, we have accepted 11677 reports of which 10844 reports have been accepted as valid abuse which falls within the scope of Hivewatchers' work.
We have helped to return Tens of thousands of Hive Dollars to the reward pool from these abusive posts.
- 6155 reports for Plagiarism
- 156 reports for Identity Theft/Deception
- 812 reports for Photography/Art/Image Plagiarism
- 742 reports for Copy & Paste
- 2247 reports for Post Recycling
- 566 reports for Unverified Identity
- 131 reports for the category "Other Abuse"
During this period, we have also verified the identity of 687 users and have given them @hivebuzz verification badges.
The break down of downvotes:
Spaminator
- Number of downvotes: 471220
- VP: 83527.19%
ADM
- Number of downvotes: 14462
- VP: 195988.34%
THE HIVEWATCHERS
Hivewatchers provide consistent and scope-based anti-abuse services to the Hive ecosystem. Our prime focus is fighting fraud directed at the Hive Ecosystem and its communities.
Fraud includes any form of deliberately misleading activity or deception aimed toward monetization or other malicious goals.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Fraud can be defined as:
1a: DECEIT, TRICKERY
specifically: intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
was accused of credit card fraud
b: an act of deceiving or misrepresenting: TRICK
automobile insurance frauds
2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be: IMPOSTOR
He claimed to be a licensed psychologist, but he turned out to be a fraud.
also: one who defrauds: CHEAT
b: one that is not what it seems or is represented to be
The UFO picture was proved to be a fraud.
In relation to Hive, Fraud refers to any and more of the following:
- Identity theft
- Identity deception
- Plagiarism (text, image, art)
- Malicious deception
- Phishing/malware links
- Reward pool abuse
What are Hivewatchers?
Hivewatchers project first and foremost aims to fight the fraud and the exploitation of the Hive Ecosystem. Users who engage in one of the above activities get a comment on their posts. The comment usually links to the original source of the content they have presented as their own. The comment offers a very succinct educational point.
Users who engage in identity theft or identity deception are immediately added to the ban list (also known as a blacklist). This is because, in identity-related cases, there is always an innocent victim who may have severe personal consequences if the perpetrator isn't stopped.
Users who either refuse to acknowledge that fraud is wrong or continue to carry on with it, eventually get added to the list as well. That time varies depending on multiple factors.
For many users that ask to come to talk to us, it is the only time they get to chat with other Hive members. Often, they themselves have been victimized by those who have scammed or misled them and ask for help. Many stay in touch long after their appeal is up or questions are answered.
Hivewatchers rely on the community to locate instances of fraud and report them. Community members submit their reports anonymously on our website at http://hivewatchers.com and, should their reports be accepted as valid and correct, receive a small payment of appreciation. We manually check every report to make sure it is within our scope and is accurate. The comments from Hivewatchers are all manually published (although they are templated for consistency).
Background
Hivewatchers were originally Steemcleaners. The project was started in 2016 by @Anyx who, as a PhD student, was troubled by all the plagiarism and fraud he saw on Steem. He created @cheetah, a hands-off similar content bot, and then formed Steemcleaners. Many people have joined in along the way and have spent time in the role of a Steemcleaner. Those of us who are part of Hivewatchers now are not the founding members and cannot speak of the project's full history as some of it is beyond our knowledge.
When the Steem blockchain was lost during the hostile takeover that gave birth to the Hive ecosystem, Hivewatchers was born.
Infrastructure
The Hivewatchers service is more complex and robust than it looks. This section is here for general information and is not related to this proposal.
http://hivewatchers.com is a ruby site hosted alone on a VPS. It has a bridge that allowed it to post directly to the Hive chain.
Additional server and script exist for Spaminator but are not related to this proposal.
Risks
You may guess that fighting fraud is not always popular. We have gotten every type of threat and form of harassment. Most users are good people and the educational part of Hivewatchers is perfect for them. However, organized scammers are different. They enter the ecosystem with a clear intent to exploit, scam, deceive, and steal and they create approaches that can rival some corporate business plans to do so. When caught, they fight tooth and nail and resort to everything under the sun. Being a member of Hivewatchers is a thankless and dangerous job.
Proposal
Type of Proposal: Hive service, non-tech operational, and labour costs
Technology: Partial OS
Time and Commitment
Hivewatchers is a part-time job at best, a full-time job during peak times. Complex investigations, particularly ones involving multiple victims and accounts, can take days. Helping users can take anywhere from a minute to an hour per person. Assisting another project can take an hour or over a day. Processing reports always takes hours. Maintaining the infrastructure takes time. It all adds up.
Average time commitment per 7-day week: approximately 49 hours divided between three people.
49 / 7 = 7, rounded up to 7 hours per day, every day of the year ($19,28 HBD per hour).
There are 3 members:
@guiltyparties
@hivewatcher
@nuttin
Current Ask
We are asking for 145 HBD per day. This ensures that our three members and daily reporters are paid for their time and dedication, and the service can be supported (140 HBD per day), and also cover operational costs of The Spaminator (5 HBD per day).
Project Maturity
Phase 1: Establishment
The project is 6 years old and this phase has long been completed.
Phase 2: Technical Maturity
The Hivewatchers reporting frontend platform, backend processing platform, list servers, and all supporting technology have already been funded, paid for, and donated by the team.
Phase 3: Evolution and Ongoing Operations
Hivewatchers must continue to operate as per normal while completing this phase. Included in this phase (but excluded from the above funding request) are:
Documentation development hours (documentation is ongoing and will be released shortly in due course)
Liaison hours
Server, script, bot, and site upgrades
Related servers
This proposal is to fund the ongoing operations only. All additional task hours or costs will be donated out of pocket by the Hivewatchers team.
If unfunded.
If unfunded, the service may explore alternatives for funding.
We are aware that many organized, malicious scammers are eagerly waiting for Hivewatchers to lose funding. We will never let anything prevent us from stopping an identity thief, among others.
Final Thoughts
Hivewatchers have been around for years in different forms and are always evolving. We appreciate your support, your feedback, your criticism, and your collaboration. Thank you for considering our funding proposal.
SPAMINATOR
Spaminator is an anti-abuse and anti-exploitation project designed to warn the community about abusive accounts.
Financial Ask
- $50/year x 2 domain names (Hivewatchers and Spaminator, keeping them together for the sake of simplicity)
- $10/month for the servers that host the bots and API
- $100/month for maintenance of infrastructure and misc costs such as IP address(es) (including Hivewatchers infrastructure)
Total: $1370 / year
Notes
This is a no-usage labour costs proposal. The maintenance costs above are purely for a developer who is not myself to monitor and update the framework (backend bot, its database, etc). No frontend hours are included because frontend updates are non-critical.
The $100 monthly amount is calculated on average based on annual hours. It is conservative and includes miscellaneous costs.
My own labour costs (@guiltyparties) (my hours are always donated free of cost) or the labour costs of Hivewatchers members (investigating, entering data, researching, etc) are not included in this amount. This is purely to pay for the tech and its upkeep. It does not include any maintenance of the Hivewatchers site.
Thank you for all the support from the community that has been given to us throughout all these years.
Approve The Proposal with Hivesigner
Approve The Proposal with PeakD
Addendum
Hivewatchers and Spaminator are both scope-based projects. It is the official policy of both these projects that they are to focus on their respective scopes and not deviate from said scopes.
It is the policy of Hivewatchers and Spaminator that at no time is the account used selectively outside of its scope for personal or political-related ends. All content and subjects are treated equally under the Hivewatchers and Spaminator frameworks and their treatment is further restricted by the technical limitations set as part of the bot algorithms and the front and back-ends.
In extreme cases such as terrorism, murder, child pornography/exploitation, and similar situations of grave consequence will the accounts be used outside of their main scope. Those are extremely rare and in the entire history of these projects, there have only been a couple of times this was required.
The personal opinions of team members are not subject to regulation but may not be uttered on our professional project accounts. Where errors occur, we thank all community members for letting us know and will correct them.
Understaffed. Outdated. And honestly probably cost more than the supposed "abuse" they counter. They do not have consistency regarding equal treatment of users of various wallet sizes (look at how Bernie and Transisto used to get away with everything).
They do not receive criticism well as demonstrated by their dismissive attitude of branding them "trolls" when someone disagrees with their operation.
This service results from people hanging onto long-form content and unwillingness to be an active part of their own communities when it comes to curation and anti-abuse activities.
All the proceeds you give to this group will eventually become private assets when a shift in management or rebranding occurs like the old Steemcleaners accounts.
As Hive moves on to bring power and moderation back to each individual community, this archaic service becomes a stumbling block to its progress.
There was a point when this is a necessity, but any reasonable person understood this to be a temporary measure in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, like many "government-like temporary programs", they become entrenched in an ever-inefficient, ineffective, and unwanted part of everyone's lives.
0/10 would recommend.
Hivewatchers has been instrumental in the "no fun allowed" attitude on Hive. I'm not sure what the solution is to fix this, but long form sourced content is antithetical to social media fun.
I think the problem fundamentally is Hive tries to be too much, and has no real identity, so it's a mediocre blogging site, a shit social media site, and honestly the reward pool just makes everyone fight all the time.
It's the influence of narrow minded, authority-worshipping fools like Hivewatchers' employee-of-forever (until he gets fired) that reinforces crap like that, and one of the principle reasons I am speaking out against funding Hivewatchers. This is my stake talking, I wouldn't bother if I just disliked him.
I still have fun.
Impossible, there is no fun allowed.
I like your nose.
It's not mine, I'm just borrowing it.
It doesn't need an identity. The decentralized nature of the platform allows for someone (like me or anyone else) to represent themselves, not the platform. So I do things my way, and some people like that, and that's all that's needed. No more, no less.
People run into problems when their main focus is to simply post content in order to collect or mine rewards, with no desire to attract and maintain interest in their work. In other words their content is just filler, not attractive, the producers often coast along collecting auto votes; hardly a sound under their work and the view counter doesn't budge.
At the same time, the platform as whole focuses too much on attracting creators, and pays no attention to attracting consumers. That's a big problem. It's something I've been talking about for years. Most recently back in January, inside this post
https://peakd.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/one-of-those-hive-stories
The reason why my work, and a few others, is always jammed with engagement, is because we don't focus on the money. We focus on creating a product that attracts consumers.
That product can be anything, and would be successful. Long form, short form, any form, doesn't matter. As long as it attracts attention. The decentralized nature means there's no need for guidelines. The platform works fine by design. It's up to the people to use it, however they see fit, but also attract consumers.
It is wasteful to simply pay people for showing up and creating content. There needs to be a push to attract consumers, and focus placed on consumer perks. Read the post.
I have fun too, but hivewatchers hate memes. So that removes the fun of sharing funny memes i find on the internet.
Share a relevant meme here and now and watch how nothing bad happens.
That's the way it should be and even the one downvote would be fine, but instead one has to worry about getting "Attacked, called names, having your account ruined or forever downvoted". If you ask a question or question the rules, or stick up for someone getting targeted, suddenly you are a "spammer, scammer, milky, troll face". It's insanity really.
I love what you said, but for many users just trying to learn our new rules, it results in account death.
I cant meme on command.
I blame the reward pool as well.
Personally, I'd rather see more community and tribe focused moderation, with a polite and professional teams put in place by each project.
If a proposal is funded and I assume it will be, I'd suggest a published protocol including definitions "Reward Pool Abuse" is subjective and absolutely isn't enforced in a clear and defined manner. What exactly is abuse? If you can't define it clearly, you can't enforce it fairly.
Also please focus on education vs. labeling everyone names that don't mean anything, like spammers, farmers, etc.
Good Luck on your proposal and while I disagree with some of what you do, I also acknowledge that downvotes and some moderation are needed, however, it can be done in a polite and professional manner or it so shouldn't be funded by the Hive Development Fund.
I agree with you 100%. It is way to subjective and always a personal thing.
Personally, I am always confused about how something can be " reward pool abuse" if it's not a self-upvote.
So other people decide to value whatever.
And if someone disagrees, simply downvote. The Blacklist thing and all that stuff makes it confusing and removes the right of the stakeholders to vote/downvote whatever they want.
Phishing/malware links is good to fight against, but there are other too that are behind this.
I see the spaminator downvote on so many good user accounts, back in the day, if I saw that downvote, I wouldn't have touched the post. However, now I just assume "someone did something that 2 or 3 people decided was a new rule".
It used to be you had to really do something harmful to attract attention from Hive Watchers, but now I've seen team members telling people what language they can post in, how many times they can post and even using too many tags, and while I know being politically neutral is mentioned, there is clear evidence on the chain, that might be a goal, but not a reality.
The scope is ever increasing and the result is a community that doesn't understand the "rules" and feels "worried" about posting in case they break some rule. Most well adjusted people aren't interested in being micro-managed by a small group of people, thus we run off middle class casual users and attract those who are "hungry" enough to put up with it. It's a complete "fun sucker".
I'm fine with individual users using their stake how they want, even when I disagree, but a community funded operation, should hold it's self to the highest standards.
Because of his net-negative effects for the value of Hive and his narrow, limited view of what Hive is and can be, combined with the influence he exerts with his position: Hivewatchers needs to fire @logic, or Hive needs to fire Hivewatchers. I emphatically do not support this proposal.
rewards for this comment sent to @null
Hive needs to fire Hivewatchers
Hey @pfunk...remember me!
I always knew you were a smart guy... Lets not forget they choose an occult owl for their logo. Tells me everything you need to know, the spaminator logo is children holding white flags. Sausage !pizza anyone? This entire platform is a sesspool of corruption and worse, frankly much worse.
By the way, it s still way better on Blurt. Everyone speaks their mind there with no worry about down votes and BS. They have a real professional that scans the platform for plagerism and the minor costs for posting elimnates basically all spam. So it s better on Blurt, and the place is growing.
Too bad things ended so shitty here for me at the hand of Hive Watchers, but thank you for supporting my efforts here for years. Meant a lot. I ll be continuing to pull away people and money from hive for a long time to come, but don t blame me for that...blame hive watchers.
There was never a need to drag so many others down who were not involved and try to ruin so many lives just because you have a beef with that group. The issues will be taken care of professionally, and Hive will continue on. You might be the only one around that thinks Hive Watchers represents Hive. They don't, never did, and everyone knows that.
Your approach is more like going around burning down every Burger King just because someone spit in your fries.
You'll always be a psycho thief and a liar in my books.
You ll always be a satanic freak in my book and many many others.
Your book is fiction though. Your lies will haunt you for the rest of your life.
How's Blurt going? Still better?
You ll always be a jesus freak in my book
No. No threat. Especially if you're the one doing the mobbing.
https://peakd.com/me/proposals
Found this post there. Didn't know Dan was here bullshitting.
Try to be professional. That's my advice for you.
You're just being sassy. Have a good day.
no thanks.
Punishment is needed for cooperation to prevail. - by Nature
However, it should not and cannot be a three-member subjective judgment, and should not be done for the sake of downvoting. Perhaps, considering fairness, there should be a machine that learns the malicious patterns and punish those who ought to be. Also, voluntary punishment from the crowd may be more convincing.
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STOPI haven't been active here for a long time, but only posted twice when I was active again, my post was downvoted by @hivewatchers and friends. Is there a policy change on hive now?
It's sad this is even supported by @blocktrades :(
Please my account was restricted on hive due to plagiarism I have read the rules here and I have discovered much about the platform please I wish my account is been restored back I will be greatfull thanks
This has cost the ecosystem tens of thousands of users due to the real reputation damages outside of the Hive Sphere. Good fucking riddance.
Good day. You're downvoting me and I don't know why? I make my posts with a lot of effort and care and I don't understand why you believe and take the right to do so, there are many people who live and eat with what they collect and you think you are God?
Hello.
You do know as you read all our comments and checked up all the sources of fraud that we provided in these comments.
Unless you did not check them up as you have almost no engagement with the community in your "blog", and seem to be here only defraud the Hive Ecosystem with stolen photography. With the help of done/pbu/pdq circle-jerk farming ring.
Good day.
I was informed of a post I made which part of the research I didn't give credit to the original author. I accepted the fine and ever since I've been getting down votes on my post and engagements. Can you please look into and stop the downvotes?
Hello.
For appeals, please go to our Discord:
https://discord.gg/p9DN3D5