When I invested and got involved in Steem it was because there was rules that were meant to enable Steem to achieve a valuable level of content discovery and rules insuring that people with SteemPower act responsibly (3 months vesting time / Reward curve)
These days it seems like most of the whales don't care to police the other whales that allow for opportunistic actors to circumvent the 3 month rule.
Modus operandi:
- Beg a greedy whale for delegation via a memo in a micro-payment.
- pay ~50 SBD,
- Receive ~100k SP delegation
- Spam and upvote your own posts.
- ... Profit
Now get ready for the large scale operation:
http://www.steemreports.com/delegation-info/?account=freedom
http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=%40elizabeth302&days=14
This is the kind of posts being "promoted" by @elizabeth302
Hint: They're not being promoted, votes are done just before 6.5 day as to go unnoticed.
https://steemit.com/trump/@elizabeth302/melania-trump-wears-gucci-cheongsam-china-state-dinner
Wow! Such money, no views ? Much abuse!
Are we made fun of by @Freedom ?
How infuriating is that empty content book GIF posted under every of @elizabeth302 posts?
Or the kind of post being "promoted" by @askquestion
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@askquestion/daily-cryptocurrency-report-bitcoin-ethereum-steem-bitcoin-cash-or-11-13-2017
(they are just static prices from BTC, BCH and STEEM, and ETH.) with 40$ for 10 views.
Big Thanks to @steemreports for providing tools to uncover these schemes so easily.
http://www.steemreports.com
Witnesseses and Whales, we need to seriously discuss a HF to fix Steem's content discovery incentive rules. The few good whales are tired of spending SP/money to make up for a broken system and the users are tired of operating within an unfair system.
Let's not rely on Steemit Inc. for a fork, they seems fully focused on communities and SMT at the moment.
@transisto i am just surprised to see i am mentioned in this post and sad to know i buy upvote from elizebeth302 only on my post to boost my bost what terms i broke ?please tell me i daily doing one post and selling all my votes and helping my friends and this act let me recover my fees daily for freedom i did nothing wrong and my account does not belong to any other delegation i have only 1 account the other accounts are my friends i can give their facebook link this is not good for blaming someone if they are exchanging votes?
I believe the idea behind Steemit is to vote on quality content and publishers for the betterment of the community, not game the system collectively. No hard feelings. Just my thoughts.
And I believe you are right @cryptocowgirl !
Same here. Thought the same thing.
Do you know who owns @freedom? How did you get to buy vote from @freedom?
I am new to Steemit, but just want to know whether it's good to buy vote? Can we trust anyone? I don't think that it's a good idea to buy votes.
@dhimanyog - many of the rules that apply in real life apply to steemit, such as being nice to other people and also 'buyers beware' when it comes to any transactions. I guess the answer to whether buying votes is a good idea or not can be answered by whether it is something that you would want the majority of the people to be doing here...
Good question!!!
and everyone who get delegations are paying for it so they need to recover something from selfupvotes ! otherwise what will be the profit of taking sp ? Indeed when some of the well known got that SP they were enjoying because they got SP in low price and now blamming others !
I do not know whats wrong with them we belong to poor family and freedom gives us opportunity if they are against selling votes then why markymark and nextgencrypto selling their whales if they are against self click they should contact to steem team to Eng self voting option we have to pay daily fees to freedom and we are trying to pay it with some selling and some with own pocket if they think we should not sell vote they pay our fees for delegation we wont do it again
You should put some commas in your paragraph there.
Yes bro u r right
Those who pay for delegations just to profit are gaming the system. The "spirit" of the platform, as explained by the original steem whitepaper, speaks of creating algorithms that would prevent gaming the system.
When buying SP, you're kind of expected to use it altruistically. It's not so YOU can earn more money, it's so you can GIVE more money, by voting on content that you deem valuable.
There's a big misunderstanding about the idea of "there are no rules here". Just because the system doesn't prevent one from doing something, doesn't make it any less rude.
And yes, self-upvoting by whales is a huge problem too, but that's not what this post is about.
looks like people are jealous because freedom has undelegated there so called VIP BUSINESS OF SELLING UPVOTES and now they dont want others to do it ! lol ! now they will downvote as there is no freedom of speech here !
Agree if there is no vote selling then first the one who was using since 5 to 6 months should get punished and they wont get punished because they are just blamming others !
That would be randowhale who belongs to the evangelist going around flagging everybody who uses the services that competed with his own.
agreed ! they will flag you and me for speaking the truth
punctuation?
Your telling is really good .but some one said this is cheating but i am agree with you
@lays you are right. Every stemian have freedom to sell or buy votes and upvote theirs own post or similar account. because if more than one account that is not spam. They want to make more work. blaming others it is not good. This is my personal thoughts. i do not want to heart anyone.
This is very interesting @transisto. I did a post the other day on @freedom, also looking at the data, but in a very different way.
I had noticed that @freedom had removed delegation to paid upvote services, but I did not look at how delegation was being use by the new people freedom delegated too. I noticed that @spaminator and utopian-io were on the list, which are worthy projects.
You might be interested in having a read of my post
https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/unmasking-freedom-what-the-data-can-tell-us-steemit-business-intelligence
Removed from two, added to another. Then added to a lot of spammers.
@utopian-IO is very worthy, not a single self-upvote, and the bot's code even penalizes posts promoted via booster bots for self-upvoting purposes.
I've been watching but not posting about the re-delegation, because I wanted a slice for myself - although not to self vote or offer a pay for vote service i should add!
Great detective work.
The trick is coming to consensus and agreement on what should be done about it. There are many different opinions on the motivational psychology and game theory aspects in play here, and it's not at all clear what the most ideal system is. Things will always be exploited, and those who care will always have to stay ahead of the arms race to do something about it.
There was once an idea (which got rejected) to allow some users to negate other users. Maybe we need something like this to stop abuse? Maybe a downvote bot we can easily use and more readily-accessible reports about payouts on posts with low view counts?
Yes, more open access for whales to countering bots would go a long way. It's one thing to be expensing SP to fight abuse it's another to spend so much time clicking little flags manually. @personz has done something great but it's still not convenient enough for non-tech savvy people to use.
So it turn out that @freedom might be more about money than freedom after all and thus something like @free-doom might have been more appropriate. Interestingly a lot of clues seems to point to Steemit Inc as being the possible owner of @freedom, not that these clues prove this but strongly suggest so.
I had noticed @freedom delegating his SP to some vote sellers earlier this week. I'd say this is a huge issue.
I was in favor of Dan's idea from the very beginning and I'm still am.
I also think that a none linear reward curve would benefit Steem. It might seems conterintuitive to think that none linear reward could help on this matter but in the long run I think it would.
None linear reward incentives people not to split their votes and SP. It also create a strong incentive for people not to sell their Steem. The price of Steem should in theory increase as the number of users increase and even more so if reward curve is greater than linear.
All of this incentivize people to empower one another more directly with votes creating more meaningful connections overtime as opposed to the current situation where people are incentivize to lease their SP as much as possible.
Dan has shared very valuable insights on the subject in his post "Evil Whales", more precisely under the title "The value of Consensus" and "Curation Reward".
Maybe a sigmoid function as suggested by @twinner might be interesting as it would make self-upvotes less attractive but at the same time would prevent the incredible high rewards for some trending posts which resulted from the n^2 curve.
Yeah I was looking into that @freedom account a week or so ago and I agree with you. It must be an in-house owned account. If not directly owned by the high ups it was given access to exist and feed from the beginning by the high ups.
SMTs have no hope of ever becoming mainstream when this crap exists. What do they think, that people are going to blindly throw money in and not exercise due diligence. Some might yeah... but a fool and their money are easily parted.
Anyone or any entity looking to invest in steem will not proceed when there are issues such as these. The players that do proceed will simply follow the same greed routine. Thus destroy the system even more. Ned needs a good rubber chicken slap to the face.. Wake the fuck up @ned.
First I advocate against the use of violence whenever possible even of the written form thus my opposition to any slap to anyone at this point.
I didn't say @freedom was owned by Steemit Inc but I tend to think so for the reasons mentions in @paulag's post.
The fact that the Steem are concentrated into the hands a small group of people is known and must be consider by all investors. Highly concentrated coins are a negative point when investing but other positive point can make up. Current investors who think this Steem is too risky are selling.
Come on man don't read so deep into that there. I do not advocate violence either, and what I said was more figuratively. Which is why I added the 'rubber chicken' as I was aware that just saying "ned needs a slap to the face" IS harsh in words, even if used figuratively.
It's baffling how they let these things slide. There is clear corruption. If the exploits only exist at the member level, it's bad and needs fixing. If there is a direct link to Steem employees and founders, then... something like that will bring the house down eventually.
I mostly agree to what you said.
It's hyperbole, dog.
HardF***k 19 , yeah that really did a lot of good right?
Interesting connections @teamsteem
a lot of people talk off the cuff and don't seem to realize that much like "The WIzard of Oz" there is a lot of bullshit behind the curtains
Hardfork 19 has made a huge mess in my opinion. It was better before it, but i wasn't as savvy back then, so I could be wrong. Sure seems like the "issues" have escalated to subscriptions since then though.
I'm thinking communicating better with our whales from Steemit, Inc. would be best.
Something like how when you get a comment reply, and it notifies you....
Once or twice a month, Steemit, Inc could put an alert on their GUI which needs to be read, which talks about "issues" such as this, and makes recommendations.
Socially, we're all confused on what is right and wrong. It's easy to find the obvious wrongs, but some of these services which are well intentioned do abuse the system.
For instance, maybe we need a hardfork which says, steem power delegation can't be used to upvote the same user more than once per 24 hour period. That would slow down some of the self-upvotes, and upvotes of your "other" accounts.
Do either of those resound as possible short term solutions?
The reason why this exists, is that it's a difficult problem. sigh.
Your proposed hardfork sounds interesting, but it sounds difficult to implement unfortunately.
I just made a comment over on the latest @steemitblog posting asking about the 2018 roadmap. If there is a way for every user to only self-upvote themselves or any account no more than 10 times per 7 day period that would work well.
...but I know exactly what you're saying. It would involve expanding the chain to constantly save and retrieve this data.
The only time it becomes important, is during the payout of a post or comment to do the calculation so you could nullify the votes automagically by the payout algorithm.
Perhaps this could be done by a huge account, like @ned with a bot which looks at posts "after no more votes are allowed" before payout and then does this research and adjustment.
Of course though, this is decentralized. A round table discussion by developers is necessary though to see if we could solve this in any number of different ways.
Thanks for your comment, you're right. What sounds easy, rarely is... when it comes to the decentralized and autonomous nature of the chain itself.
Banning or reducing self-upvotes sounds reasonable until you realise that an account can just create sockpuppets and upvote by proxy. Of course, with good auditing you can discover these voting rings, but it does take someone to do it in the first place. I'm keen on creating a bot that identifies this sort of stuff algorithmically and then acts on its findings.
You know about @Patrice and @steemcleaners, right? It has done exactly that for months and months. She busts her ass to find and defeat these voting rings.
Restrictions such as this will always be circumvent in some way or another. You can't get something out of someone by making roadblocks.
To change someone's behaviour you have to make the other legit options more attractive.
I'm sorry but I disagree. In the wider context maybe. But here we're talking about a small number of people whose behaviour probably won't change under any circumstances - more attractive alternatives or otherwise. We're stuck with them until they cash out, like it or not. But the least we can do is call them out continually for their counter-productive behaviour - a big thank you to @transisto for laying it out so clearly. I would like to think the whales, including Steemit.com, who are most vested in the platform, might take the lead here with those of us who believe this matters in support.
@freedom is effectively selling his votes, just like the dozens of bot vote selling scheme on steemit, he does it in a less conventional way which is why its more controversial but all the bots and people using them are doing the exact same thing so it's not a small number of people, it's a large percentage. Wait until we reach the mainstream, the situation with abusers is only going to get worse.
Have any ideas for other "legit options" ? I have no ideas.
The other legit option is to curate properly, unfortunately doing this will yield very little reward..increasing curation rewards would be a good start.
So essentially an abuser has to create 10 accounts (total 60SP or about $270 delegated SP and 2SP) then just spread votes amongst them.
If they have the knowledge to abuse the delegation system then they have this knowledge already.
A hard fork is not always the answer. At least not one that is trivially circumvented by the bad actors
It would definitely curb the "manual" abuser, who has 3 to 5 accounts and they manually click upvotes
What about a discord chat where users can post plagiarism/low quality posts/socs > mods will review and delete false reports and give a comment on the post > whales downvote the post > if mods made a mistake then user will appeal in the chat > higher mods will check it
What do you think? We can also make bots to route whale downvotes. I mean, discord bots.
What @transisto described above does not involve plagiarism. We have SteemCleaners handling that well already and they have channels where you can file reports. That hasn't been the main area of abuse for a long time now, largely because there is community consensus that something like SC is needed and worthy of support. What he's talking about in this post is spamming and sockpuppetry, which have been much harder to address. There's never been any clear consensus about whether/where to draw a line on the latter.
You nailed it exactly with this:
Without a clear consensus, it's not possible to program blockchain-level solutions or to even build bot-solutions. In many ways, we also have to consider cultural differences in opinion on what constitutes abuse, spam, and "valuable" comments and posts. There's a lot to figure out with regards to clear community-driven norms which stake holders and new users alike will support.
We don't have to define what is or isn't abuse to get a fix into the blockchain. We can have solutions that make it easier to counter abuse while still allowing it to be 100% down to subjective stakeholder opinion.
Consensus can't be built if we don't talk about it. Would join a discord chat for whales and senior users if I made one?
Nicely said. Maybe it's time to draw the line.
we need to have a community forum to discuss these matters, and we need consensus. all of the major players need to come to an agreement, not that we all need to agree about what we believe, but we all need to come to an agreement about how to proceed, as a community!
two thumbs up
I updated the comment. And all plagiarists can't be handled by SC. I recently outed one with 200$ payout, a lot of that from your SP and Neds SP.
Before that, I outed another with 70 per post. There is also a zerohedge copy pasta account that keeps on doing what it does best. It gets huge payouts.
It needs to be done on a protocol level, not bots. Bots just consume bandwidth, and it's an endless arms race with the advantage to abusers. Having negation at the protocol level reduces the cost of policing while still allowing accountability for those who engage in policing.
Another good suggestion!
Nail on the head right here.
What are your thoughts on the issue Dan created which ultimately got rejected?
This post isn't about countering flags, dumbass...
I was originally against the idea (well, to be fair, I don't think anyone had much time to fully think about the idea. It was proposed and on track to be implemented so quickly that I think the backlash against not knowing what the outcome would be, was what shot it down in the first place.)
I still think there needs to be a better way, fundamentally. Right now, regardless of implementing that design or not, it costs opportunity to fight abuse, and it leads to a tragedy of the commons (being more short term beneficial to upvote oneself rather than downvote abuse, or if that design is implemented, being more short term beneficial to keep your SP rather than lose it to cancel someone else).
The biggest problem with that design is that it assumes the targeted account only ever acts in bad faith -- you nullify ALL their actions even if some might be "good".
Sadly, I don't know a better solution. The only one I can think of to remove the opportunity cost is having separate voting power pools for upvotes and downvotes, so it doesn't "cost" to downvote (since you have, e.g., 10 downvotes and 10 upvotes per day to use).
The first thing to do is getting the whales together in a discord chat where we can talk about it. If some whales do something bad, we can just do a harkfork and separate the spammy steem into a new better steem. We would need devs for that though. If we can convince enough devs to defect then bingo, freedom's SP will be worth 10x less.
Do you think that it will take such a drastic step to counter this? I agree it needs to be discussed but don't expect the whales in question to involve themselves in the discussion - at least with our knowledge.
Back to 50/50 curation/poster rewards. Make it more lucrative to skillfully curate than to self upvote/sell votes.
This is something that I recently posted about (creating a downvote bot to target these self-vote rings). It's on the backburner for the time being, but it's something I will eventually get going.
It's also important to keep some perspective, I think. The sums involved (i.e. proportions of the total reward pool) are tiny, as far as I can tell. It's why I shuffled my anti-vote-farming bot project down my to-do list.
I completely agree with you @transisto, this platform has great potential because of the community and the basis of operation. We just need to make it that little more user friendly and have it so the bots and scammers have less power. In the literal and figurative sense.
This is a really important topic. You should consider attending this Saturday's "Steem Growth Form" to discuss it. Details here: https://steemit.com/steemitgrowthforum/@aggroed/announcement-steemit-growth-forum-saturday-november-18th-11am-nyc-time-1600-utc-held-virtually-on-mspwaves-radio-within-the
Upvoted and thanks for introducing this item for discussion. There are pros and cons to more regulation versus maintaining the freedom (little 'f') that we have now. It's unfortunate some choose short term greed over long term health of the platform, but I also understand that SP holders want to make a return on their investment.
Hopefully, moderated communities will curb these tendencies somewhat, and maybe a higher price will encourage people to use their Steem for more active investments to develop this ecosystem, though these problems always will exist on here at some level if we let them. I agree with @lukestokes that achieving consensus on this will be difficult, but it's definitely worth discussing.
As a holder of SP you are free to do what you want with your stake. If @freedom wants to delegate power to these folks thats on @freedom to decide. Your stake is your stake. If you want to allocate those rewards to others or even yourself for various reasons that choice is yours. As a stake holder in the STEEM blockchain by holding SP this earns you that right. You need to see the bigger picture here. In my opinion Steem is about much more than finding "good content" / just social media. Dont mix up Steem the blockchain and Steemit.com @transisto. Steemit.com is what needs some work with content discovery. I agree Steemit.com should update its content discovery rules. I agree with that. The trending and hot tab do need some work. With all that said, I believe this blockchain is going to really change the world brother. It has the potential to change everything, literally. The way people work, live and interact. If you watch Elon Musk we are going to be moving into a much different world in the coming years. Many will be without jobs...the concept of work I imagine will start to change. I believe we are at the front lines of something new. Time will tell.
❤️
I'm very glad to see this positivity alive and well. I greatly appreciate the support you've given myself and @sirlunchthehost over the past year or so. Seriously, it keeps my spirits up when things seem to be falling apart to know that there is appreciation for our contributions and efforts to build this network. You (and @transisto too) would be very welcome to join our new discord server for the voices of the underground. We have a growing community there of critical thinkers who really want to see this network succeed.
nods
good @thejohalfiles
upvote me plllllllllllllzzzzzzz :(
wow!!!
That's some deep insight you shared about work @thejohalfiles
This is true for sure.
I don't think that there will be a lot of manual work done by humans in a few decades. Dangerous jobs like firefighters are probably all done by robost - Just one example! But what will we do with all the workless?
On the other hand, we are gonna have to deal with new problems. What will those be? And how will we be able to deal with them?
As you said,
My idea to solve both spam and vote buying is to encourage those like @blocktrades and @minnowbooster, even @berniesanders if he needs a new direction, to change their business model. Instead, delegate to trusted curation teams like OCD, Steemstem, steemiteducation, some of the country-based ones and so forth, who will then do the quality curating with that SP, thus boosting the minnows and reducing spam ability/incentive
To get an ROI, they could offer a premium where any user can send a small payment to prioritize viewing of their posts (but not guaranteeing an upvote). There are enough people in these teams to cover most tags and can always recruit more.
Convincing a few whales would be a far easier solution than changing the framework of steemit via hardforks and the like, and they'd still profit if done right
I’m really glad you brought this subject to light and are exposing it . It’s not fair to the ones that are actually taking the time to research and create inspiring and educational content that me and a lot of others gain knowledge from .
What bugs the hell out of me most is the terrible message being sent out to new steemians - all that matters is the cash. No problem with these guys making money but to shit in the bed we all lay in - sad, sad indeed.
Us older steemians are disheartened as well, many great content creators have powered down and left.
I'm thinking once we get past these growing pains, things will smooth out. But yes, it's unfortunate some have left. However, once the value of Steem begins to increase, I'm hoping they will return and that they've held onto their STEEM to share in any potential benefit that comes with a climb in STEEM value.
I hope so, I miss my friends @brain-rhodes, although I am trying to make new friends all the time. The people that joined steemit at the same time I did, we bonded and they feel close to my heart.
It is Very sad , No doubt about that . It’s not a good look for the present or future of the economy , especially from the eyes of new Steemians .
So, why do I spend so many hours creating content?
I am not sure what the solution is to this kind of behavior but something must get done sooner rather than later as it is strangling the system and suffocating anyone trying to produce something of worth.
I took a 10 day break from steemit, out of sheer negative frustrations of seeing creators get nothing for their time.
It is totally disheartening.
Hang in there. The future in steem and Steemit is bright. We'll get through this. Steem is still a baby and these guys are starving it. It can be dealt with.
You spend so many hours creating good content because you've embraced the essence of the platform. Good on you.
It seems like Eli stopped using the services of Freedom or Freedom barred her from using it. It still going on though. Obviously.
@funny-gifs
Agree 100% mate. Steemit inc need to start stepping in to even things out again.
Great job shining a light on this abusive behaviour @transisto! :)
Among the comments I exchanged with other Steemians in my first few weeks on Steemit were discussions around pre-screening of submissions at the time the user clicks
Post. While this won't directly address vote abuse/farms it will reduce and make less attractive the submisssion of content that a lot of this voting happens on;At the time of submission content should be checked and matched against a short tree of criteria with suggestions|warnings presented &/or automatic submission action|rejection, eg:
Criteria
Advice|Warning
Xcharacters. Stimulating and engaging content attracts more attention, greater reward potential, and help Steemit grow into the #1 content platform!EditContinueYimage[s][only] [andXcharacters]. Stimulating and engaging content attracts more attention, greater reward potential, and help Steemit grow into the #1 content platform!EditContinueZ% match of existing content: [url_array(≤3)]. Steemit thrives on original content, unoriginal content may attract less attention, lesser reward potential, negative impact on reputation, potential copyright legal action, and reflect poorly on Stemit's reputation. Please consider re-writing your submission using quote markdown and credit original authors where necessary. Rewards for this submission will be reduced byZ%EditContinueEditContinueAutomatic Actions
Z% matchZ% match & URL list)Sounds like a job for RegEx :P
I love the regex meme, and your ideas are not too shabby either.
I am very fond of XKCD, and that meme is pretty good too, so's this.
There really should be some screening & mitigation done at submission time before block chain commit, right now that's occurring after the fact and the result is self evident.
Such measures are never expected to be a 100% perfect robot nanny (deference to blind faith is misplaced anyway) because they would need to be somewhat lenient and permissive to reduce false positives becoming an obstacle, but it would help mitigate some blatant plagiarism and tarpit submission of junk waffle posts while they are parsed & compared against criteria and again while the submitter considers editing and again if they choose to edit, consider:
URLI can spend upwards of 5-7 hours on some of my articles that require writing/testing code, cross-browser compatibility checking, fact checking, collecting & verifying info/resources, capturing images of steps/results then editing them, and finally composing in markdown. I wouldn't care if I had to spend a few minutes more at submission time. But consider:
Xnumber times per hour every dayThe article parsing will slow this, the system response (advice/warning) will slow this, even if they ignore it and hit
Continuethe article may be branded with the warning comment containing URLs of matching content & receive less or no reward.The practice becomes less profitable and enticing, it may even become a nuisance to those who practice it, the quanta of these types of submissions is reduced and more of the reward pool remains.
As stated above, such measures aren't regarded as a 100% perfect magical digital genie that will fix everything and relieve humans of custodial duties or responsibility for actions, but rather a helper tool that does what it's able to, safely within a given level of certainty and reliability and no more, that stems the flood a little, making the task more achievable.
Off to utopian.io you go to submit a condenser change req!
I'm not a whale (yet!) and i'm a very inconsequential witness at the moment, but I very much agree with your post and the problems you've identified. I'm not sure how we go about fixing it though.
If there is a HF to change Steem's content discovery rules, what would the changes be specifically? Are there potentially other ways to address the issues without a hard fork?
I think a lot of these issues can be "fixed" by organized downvoting, but as you mentioned it will take time and effort from the existing whales which may not be possible.
Interested to see what the other whales and top witnesses think!
I would say the ones actively participating on here trying to spread the wealth and make this place better concur with what @transisto wrote. On the other hand, the ones he called out and those like them, probably will be silent.
Why can't they just hire some someone for a couple bucks per post and at least post something decent?? or easier, take part in the community? just straight up pillaging wtf..
Makes me sick to see that. Seems like they know each other.
I actually tried to contact freedom regarding a lease for a serious project im working on. But it seems that people with broken englisch and 'please give me 100k sp i give you 50$ day' is what freedom wants.
Please, who play unfair game, wait outside of the house.
Well this is absolutely serious issue and we need to dealt with it on priority basis because such things drying up the rewards of deserving peoples and also hurting the steemit image, we have to create a huge flagging army which is ready all the time and immediately attack on such greediness, i think good whales have to look into this matter seriously because freedom just use only his bellyrub un-delegated sp yet and minnowbooster sp is still unused or come back to his account after 7 days and once he gets that sp he surely gives it to the bad guys hands and thus it creates even worse condition, well i have only 1k sp but i am ready to be a part of this army because we can't just sit and see bad guys drying up the reward pool and get's richer and richer every day and great writers and authors who are deserving candidates and also doing legitimate and great work just earn some bucks after spending hours and hours on creating a quality post.
Excellent post... Steemit has become a not very friendly place for people spending time creating quality content, when they see these ridiculous posts getting such rewards. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront, if not dealt with Steemit will be filled with nothing but these nonsense posts. Cheers!
I saw a whale get $80 for saying Good Night Steemit.
As for your point about nothing but garbage posts ending up on here, I agree totally. People often write from the heart and with passion. However, when lured to a site like this with compensation, if that does not come, people will leave. It really is that simple. In the end, blogger and facebook would win out over steemit all other things being equal.
I am new here at Steemit, one thing i have noticed is that unless you have a lot of followers and if you haven't purchased power, you will go unnoticed and the articles you write will go unnoticed as well.
And yes, there are a lot of people who uses some sort of bots and gets like 40 plus upvotes with less than 10 views for their posts, i don't get it i mean is this how steemit is headed to create a quality content community?
Join communities, build a network. You have to make friends here to get anywhere, and there are dozens of great communities to choose from. If you don't go meet people, people will indeed not realize you exist.
Just another brick in the wall of failure.
Incentivizing people to become power users, and then not requiring any further contribution back to the community at large creates static power networks that don't do anyone any good.
Unless you're in the "club" of course.
Sounds like any power structure ever attempted across the planet, and they aren't that stable either. Steemit is doomed unless there are changes to this.
Otherwise it will just be a bunch of top-tier users voting for each other, and bots all the way down. Who needs humans when you just want to scrape another buck off of gaming the system.
Vesting of 50 K SP to spammers, sweetsj posts always on the trending page, "whale club", voting buying projects and other arbitrariness are making this environment increasingly unbearable.
It's truly a relief to read this post from you. @personz sent me here to check this out after reading my post- he said he's working on some curating tools that will hopefully provide an alternative to vote buying, which I am definitely interested in. I suggested in my post that people 'peacefully protest' by refusing to vote on those who are buying votes.
I absolutely love @steemreports. I went from 9% self-upvotes with 60 outgoing votes a couple of weeks ago to a 6% self-upvote with 80 outgoing votes this past week just from monitoring myself with their tools. Thanks to my lovely, hilarious friend @meesterboom who gave me the link in chat.
It's still not enough outgoing votes, but it's an improvement.
My husband is investing in steem in the next few months, and by spring my hope is to start a curation guild with a group of trusted friends. On our own we're currently worth between 1-3 dollars at a full vote- not substantial- but if I get enough of us on board it could definitely be valuable. And perhaps inspire others like us to do the same..anything that veers the platform off the track it's currently on.
While I agree that such behavior is bad, this is a free market and @freedom can do with his SP whatever he wants. It's basically none of your business. No matter how the rewards system works, there will always be a small percentage of bad actors.
@transisto I'm wondering why you've decided to downvote two of my posts please?
Post1
Post2
These are both my own works - Post 1 is being written and posted directly onto Steemit.com as I write it.
If there's a reason that you've flagged my posts, I wonder if you'd at least let me know what it is so I can either amend the posts or avoid being flagged in future?
Added by Edit
Ah, I have 11 (eleven) posts flagged for making 'too much' - in other words, my work just isn't good enough for this platform.
Thanks for that. I could go off on a rant about your opinion being one of a very few that think what I do is worthless but I'm not going to. You're entitled to your opinion and even though I happen to disagree, I'm not in a position to make that disagreement count because I haven't been raking in rewards high enough to have made a massive difference.
My work is all original and a lot of people enjoy reading it - as well as the tips and advice I've given and the new members I've introduced over the time I've been here.
OK, I can take a hint.
Powerdown started.
I think the main cause of the problem is that self voting or selling votes gives a better ROI than curating. If we change the author/curator share to 50%/50% curating could become more profitable then self voting.
@jesta proposed to make the reward distribution configurable here. Sounds like a great idea.
Not surprised such scam shit happens here - I am doing something wrong. Another Reason to Get Rid of the Power Delegation Feature
Vow this is a second article what I learn today. What is up in Steemit?? Is it true, who has money doing what he wants? Amazing....no rules.
Nerf-self-voting.
100% upvote on this one....you really took the time to nail it.
Thank you for standing up for the rest of us. It is one thing when newer people complain, or those who do not contribute too much. However, it is something different when one with a lot of SP stands up and calls out others on the same level.
@transisto, you are one of the good whales on here. Over the past couple months, I have seen your votes around....isnt that is what is suppose to happen. I know there are a number of whales working hard to make this a better place. That said, sadly, you are in the minority.
We all know that steem is going to be a very hot blockchain. Personally, I am not worried at all about steem and the price in the future. It will explode based upon what I already have seen. That said, steemit might be an app destined for the dust bin.
When the "rich" want to play games, others tune out. Again, I know this isnt all whales, yet with the voting power that a whale has, even a 10% vote on someone with <50 rep would make them very happy.
The foundation for greatness is here...however, do people screw it up with greed? That is the billion dollar question. There are plenty of other ways to get involved with this blockchain even if steemit is deemed to not be it....with the other apps out there and more being developed, the path to content creation is there.
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Maybe I don't fully understand, as I am new to steemit, but this always presented itself as problem to me from the get go.
Correct me if I am wrong, as I don't have a firm grasp:
Steemit system is BASED on monetary gain. Those with more monetary value, have more power within the system. To me this just makes the steemit environment and instant late-stage-capitalism/trickle-down-economics scheme. People with wealth get richer, and barely anything trickles down to the rest of us. On top of that, like late stage, it just pins everyone against each other. Every one is in it to become one of the top 10%, IE not share their wealth. I mean, that's sorta the idea that I got from all of it.
Now I am not saying the above is not a problem, but you can also see it spawn a counter-culture of "oh well I am not getting votes, this is the obvious reason, I SPEND HOURS making content." I mean let's be real, if you are spending hours on content with no results, you can't just instantly blame the system. Maybe your content isn't good enough, or people just don't find it interesting? So you just get instagram post envy with people reporting every one higher then them, looking for reasons to bring them down.
It seems a social issue, more than just whale corruption.
Just my thoughts, and like I said, I don't really have a firm grasp on things, so any insight would help.
LOL these scammer cry after seeing this and i am also very irritate for those account who always beg
I'm trying not to be like that spammer :/
interesting
All we need here is Steemit Police and CIA departments :)
Or what you think guys!
Totally agree nice post
Thanks for bringing more visibility to this.
Day by day, our talent, creativity and high-mindedness are shown.
Allow me dear brother ....... To raise the hat respect and appreciation to you for what you bear the thought of yoke and insight into your next new.
My love and appreciation for you ..
It's nice to see a user with a self built account pointing this out and not just the ones making money via delegation and votes. I have not been around all that long and it is a big learning process.
I have been buying some of my Steem via exchanges to help myself grow faster but every time I look at a bigger players account they are powering down. Doesn't it keep more value in Steemit to delegate to others for money than to power down and sell your steem?
It's not fair to everyone who posts quality content, congratulations on your work for discovering these things.
Indeed, "big thanks to @steemreports for providing tools to uncover these schemes so easily."
Perhaps a hardfork which changes the formula for rewards to include some kind of monthly/weekly gradated bonus for 'good behaviour' might help. Of course, coming to a consensus on the definition of this would be a challenge, but it could include metrics describing how well your votes/flags are dispersed (spread of accounts, account reputations, vests, etc.), and how many flags you sacrifice your voting power to do for example.
Maybe we could even use machine learning to establish the ways 'good accounts' comment/vote, and score all accounts for the reward share on that basis. I might be getting into fantasy land here though! :)
Steem concept is genious, unfortunately for some people the main reason of posting on steemit is to make money but when they face reality and they see you need more to achieve a certain amount of rewards they give up on the site, this is one of the main reasons why steemit struggle in taking off, we are still in beta though so a lot of work will be done.
thanks for the detective work. resteemed for the Korean community.
Maybe the blockchain need another fork but for what change. Need to evaluate it and
This is what's so beautiful about this public system. Those who try to game the system will eventually be caught and dealt with in some form or fashion.
I have been wondering about this for a while. I am just a minnow but here is my opinion. With services delegated or should say selling SP to people, it will not really ever get any better. I have been on Steemit for 7 months or so and work hard at my posts and always try to curate every day. I lots of people that work hard on the posts they put up, pictures and lots of text. Then to see a single sentence post make one hundred dollars or more, it is very discouraging. Hope the whales get the idea from this post and really wake up.