Bid Bots: Steem's Achilles Heel? I present A New Way To Solve The Bid Bot Issues And Reinstate 'Proof Of Brain'.
One of the main reasons I was initially attracted to use Steem is its independence and decentralisation - after years of being delisted and outright censored on G+ and Facebook, a blockchain based solution seemed ideal. As a system engineer/designer and also someone who always looks for exploits and all angles in systems - I would like to focus now on some issues relating to system security and also relating to bid bots.. Plus propose yet another painless way we can solve the issues involved and improve Steem.
New users to Steem fairly quickly learn that the potentially utopian, non-hierarchical ideal of an 'anarchist' social network they may have imagined is not exactly what Steem is. The 'anarcho capitalist' aspect is not tempered by enough checks and balances to prevent the wealth level of users from being able to dominate the 'reach' and exposure of posts on the network. Far from being a true implementation of the 'proof of brain' concept that serves as one of Steem's unique selling points, the reality is that 'proof of wallet' will trump 'proof of brain' every time here.
As long as a bigger wallet translates to bigger reach on the network and higher positions on the trending page, the 'proof of brain' becomes harder to find in a sea of posts that only prove the presence of money on the part of the poster.
It could be argued that this is the price that the network's users have to pay in exchange for being paid to blog and post whatever they like. Instead of having to watch a few seconds of random video adverts on Youtube, they instead have to sift through paid posts from all manner of people who have bought their way into the trending pages. As long as there is desire to be high in the rankings, there will be desire for Steem Power and the price of Steem can increase, which is good for all users.
So this is the basic dynamic that has drawn great debate right through Steem's life so far.
Free Speech?
While some might come here mainly to 'make money', the uncensored nature of the system also draws those who are seeking to spread information without being held back. This is ultimately where the ability to buy votes becomes even more of a significant problem. While using bid bots can force us to see posts that are artificially boosted and which do not truly reflect the will of the community, there is an even more problematic outcome. It is possible for malicious actors to stifle free speech and prevent the free flow of information here, just as they already do on the mega corporate networks.
How To Ruin Steem With Bots and Money
- Buy enough Steem to give you enough power to run a bid bot.
- Run a bid bot.
- Receive new funds from running your bid bot.
- Use your growing resource pool to boost your own posts and those of your team, drowning out those who you don't want to be heard.
- Make sure your bot dominates the other bots and becomes the 'go to' service for vote buying.
- Introduce arbitrary blacklisting of those you want to silence, so that they can't buy votes from you.
- Add your opponents to lists run by 'anti spam' bots to ensure that they get extra negative PR and even justify auto downvoting them into oblivion.
- Build your Steem Power and a network of sockpuppet accounts to allow you to produce a lot of pointless content that distracts the community away from the material that you want to suppress.
If you can't make enough money from Steem directly, find money from elsewhere.
Now, if this is just an individual actor or a small group - the chances are that their effects will be limited. But what if the actor is a state/government with access to an infinite money printing machine? Aka fiat currency? Or even just an oligarch or someone like Marc Zuckerberg?
Effectively, it could be possible for a secret service related to such a group to setup the scenario I have highlighted and to carefully control the finances involved such that their investment into the tokens doesn't really benefit anyone much except for them (in the long term) and achieves their goal of controlling the free flow of information too.
How much is control of the free flow of information worth to those who are highly motivated to do so? What if they have almost unlimited money? Why would they not have a go at such control?
Those who have shared 'controversial' material on mainstream social networks, that dissents from the mainstream narrative on key subjects, will possibly already know that great resources are already employed to silence such messages.
How can we really defend against this on Steem?
Even without bid bots this takeover attack could still be possible just with Steem Power, but it might be more noticeable and difficult to pull off. So while the idea of moving all posts that use bid bots to their own list of 'promoted' posts is a good one anyway, it might not be enough to fully secure the free and honest flow of information here.
A SOLUTION!
What if? What if we had a way of building a kind of 'mute' list, just as we already do in steemit.com, but where we can mute the voting effect of VOTERS? This would have the effect of us viewing trending lists without the influence of voters that we strongly disagree with or just see as being manipulative in some way. This would also allow us to black list bots too. The resulting trending/hot lists would be re-ordered so that the payout/reward levels displayed for each post are adjusted so that the voters we choose to mute no longer effect them. This would make the trending/hot lists take a different order for each Steemian, based on their choice of whose votes to mute.
From a programming perspective, this would not be too tough to do, the only issue is that of the processing overhead required to produce custom trending/hot lists based on each user's own preferences and 'mute voter' lists.
The interface need be no more complicated than the existing 'mute' features, except that the list being built is a 'mute voter' list instead. Then, lists such as trending could have a filter flag option that allows us to either view the list with or without our 'muted voter' list engaged. If we have chosen to mute all bots, then we will no longer see their effects. Perfect!
Think of how Facebook allows users to easily and quickly manage their follow/block lists and even snooze people. This could all be performed in a similar way, from within feeds using drop down menus - to add / remove voters from the 'vote mute' list.
Not only does this solve bid bots on a per user basis - but it maintains the principle of free will since no-one is being overpowered by the feature and everyone can have the version of Steem that they personally want to experience!
What do you think? Would this Improve Your Experience of Steem and Your Confidence in Investing here?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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Without witnesses there is no Steem, Steemit, DTube, Utopian or
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A bidbot is essentially a business running on the blockchain. Trying to get rid of the business is bad for the blockchain. If you want to see less bidbots then I'd suggest having a buisness that is a more attractive return on investment than the bidbot so investor capital flows out of the thing you perceive and to the positive rather than completely abandoning steem.
The suggestion framed here is very elegant as it basically says "this is a business we don't need, let's see how we can avoid using its service", rather than "let's burn the which".
No, not all businesses are good for the commons.
To my mind, the original idea of Steem basically offers that more attractive ROI in the sense that a fully functional proof of brain algorithm (unhindered by bid bots) would effectively motivate growth of the platform and increase user retention, leading to a gradual growth in the value of Steem. The original design does grow the platform at a sustained rate (based on what I have seen) and that should increase the value of Steem as investment grows. The issue is that this is a long term process rather than a short term process like bid bots - so to my mind I am advocating long term vision of the kind that Dan had originally - rather than short term exploitation.
This is fucking brilliant. Give end users to power to mute voters!!
Can't imagine steemit will implement since they move so slowly but maybe we can get one of the other front ends to do it.
Thanks! I have already posted a link to this post in the Steempeak suggestions channel. :)
You're not on trending and I am reading your post and answering the proposition in it. I'll repeat some of what I said in chat:
People who originally got upvotes prior to bid bots did it with a) their own SP, b) their friends' SP, and c) with votes purchased behind closed doors. This is still very common and you probably know numerous individuals lost free delegations for that very practice.
Using terminology that applies to traditional private media platforms and other elements of pure central control like "censorship", "silence", and "suppress" is inaccurate on a decentralized blockchain. It would literally take a hardfork to outright censor something. Everything is on the blockchain.
The fact that content is always on the blockchain (despite how its displayed through various front ends) means that said content is always visible and read. My most popular post is one I made a year ago. It still gets a lot of visibility despite never having been on Trending or anything close. Content visibility and the received payout and prominence on the Steemit frontend are all different things.
The bid bot owner has the right to control whom their property, which is the bid bot, upvotes and downvotes. It is their account, their stake, and their property. It's literally their use of their stake, which is a key principle the blockchain was designed on.
As I said in chat, I agree the Trending page should not be the landing page of anything. All that does is hamper the user experience.
No matter how large the stake, content can't be suppressed. Your posts are part of the blockchain until you remove them. No one except you, no Zuckerberg or anyone else, can change that.
The vote muting idea can work but with a lot of effort on each user's part. They'd have to manually filter based on specific usernames (to remove their effects), which they'd have to list. This is something that you'd have to set up on your own condenser and test to be honest. Once you start you may find other problems and false positives. For example, I've got a curation script that I don't use. It's coded to determine who the greatest curators are and to follow their votes. It excludes all bots and similar automated accounts. While it works, it gets stumped by trails of staked accounts. So no matter what, the feed I get from it is still far from perfect and more often than not, where you'd think A ---> B it's actually A ---> (C, D, E in various relationships) ---> B.
Tagging @paulag here since I believe she had a Trending version without the bots somewhere already too.
Thanks for your thoughts here.
I was not aware that people lost delegations for selling votes, no. The idea proposed here would allow everyone the opportunity of filtering their feeds by their own subjective decision regarding voting behaviours - this could include muting of clear voting collusion and sale of votes if the individual user so chose.
When the ability of a user to thrive fairly on a platform depends on them having 'reach' and exposure (such as can be provided by the trending page) and that reach/exposure can be limited and controlled by others subjectively and without recourse, then it is not wrong to describe that as a form of suppression. Not only will their post artificially be seen by less people and receive less payout, they will lose motivation doubly - partly through the points already mentioned and partly because those who are not being held back (and in fact actually boosted) will often not represent (to them) 'better' work than theirs. It is like working in a factory where some workers get paid more and more promotions, despite producing less output and more broken products simply because of who they know or agreements reached behind the scenes. Very demotivating. In terms of the idea of 'silencing', it is true that the blockchain itself is not totally scrubbed in such cases, but how many people (even who know about the situation) will actually go and look at the blockchain to hunt down posts that have been lost down the memory hole? Almost none. Besides which, the posts I am talking about are not actually being 'hidden' in the sense that downvoting does - they are simply being made very hard to find - just as google has been doing with just about any pages that don't conform to the 'official' version of 'normal'. (note: google received the largest every corporate fine for this behaviour from the EU last year).
Reputation feeds from post payout and post payout feeds from short term visibility and reach. Limiting one, limits the others. You may not be receiving the same traffic, payout and reputation if you are not visible on trending - which is patently unfair and demotivating. Why should your hard work in the long term be used more effectively by others simply because they are willing to buy votes? Steem is meant to offer 'proof of brain' in the form of ordered lists of posts according to that 'brain' - without such a feature, the entire economic model and incentive structure is lost. It will not be difficult for competitors to take Steem's momentum just by solving this gap.
Nothing in my proposed solution prevents bid bot owners selling votes or doing exactly what they have been doing all along, it simply gives average users the ability to excuse themselves from also receiving the effects of the bid bot 'service'. Advertising companies get paid a lot of money and work with property owners to put up billboards just to get inside the head of random people. Those random people may not have much choice other than to walk around looking at the ground - that's not very civil or friendly imo.
The trending/hot pages are part of the issue, but the entire design model of steem is based around having such ordering of posts.
See above. You might be demotivated to the point of removing them yourself for the reasons already stated.
I can think of numerous ways to make the filtering process simple and effective. Facebook have already shown part of how I think it would work well - the rest would be relatively simple to add in. The method of tracking votes and removing the voters that we personally disagree with would only require us to mute the voter that votes at the end of the trails - I'd need to see a real world example of the problem you are describing with your curation bot to respond in full to that idea. I am speaking with the Steempeak team to discuss the possibility of implementing this there and also thinking of putting up a test trending page on steemocean too.
I stopped being demotivated about two years ago and long gave up. I'll reply properly if I can think of something constructive to add in a bit.
hehe - good for you! i got over the issues here mainly because I got a lot of help and support from pro-active whales and others, but not everyone has that support. as a system 'guy', I like to take the principles that work and try to apply them so that everyone can benefit.. I see this approach as one way to do that.
There will always be entities so large that they can do whatever they want. Seems to me that the only thing we can do is gang up and there in lies the problem; some of us don't want to join a group, community or gang that pigeon holes us into a limited segment of like minded individuals; it's boring! Your solution would provide a partial answer because we may not see the comments, flags or votes, but the financial effect would still be there. I do like the idea though; just uncertain of it's implementation having the desired effect.
The financial effect would be lessened since the posts would be less likely to use bid bots and also they would gain less traction overall. It's good to work as a team, voluntarily, but ultimately that is what steem can be in totality - we can all work for mutual benefit just by opening up space for free will.
"we can all work for mutual benefit just by opening up space for free will" I can certainly get behind that one. Greetings!
I like this idea and I agree with a lot of what you have said. I am no a bidbot user and I have worked my ass of to get where I am and to have the rep I have, which means nothing.
What I would say is that this is not a steemit inc problem. Steemit.com is only one user interface and if you use other UI's you will get a different experience, although some of these still do use steemit.com trending, some do not.
So is this something that should be created on a different UI? because although steemit have made changes to steemit.com, their focus is the block, not really the UI and changes like this are faster implemented without steemit inc.
Yes, I am currently looking to help the steempeak team integrate this into their site or failing that I will code a demonstration on steemocean that allows us to see the idea in action.
I personally never look at the 'trending' page , simply because I know it is fake . I look only at 'new' and my feed pages , those pages are not affected by bid-bots . But I agree that some people are trying to suppress certain type of news here and that is a problem ...
Before bid bots became a 'thing' here, the trending page was genuinely a good way to find good and different content, I'd like to return that and to reinstate the white paper. I feel a bit like a constitutionalist.. lol
I guess that can easily be fixed (trending page) . The real problem here are ' cleaners' and other wannabe controllers ...
I would definitely use this feature if I wanted to use Trending at all. I've never really looked at Trending though, other than when I somehow get logged out, so using my bookmark to the site takes me there instead of to my personal feed.
I hate that the world is shown Trending by default when they come to any of these steem sites. That to me is the real problem.
The way of finding posts people are funneled towards is just wrong.
Thankfully when I first joined this site I had the forethought to search by tags I found interesting, then go through "new" to find those people who replied to reader comments. I built my feed that way, and now I have a strong enough group of people I follow that between their content and their resteems, I have a kickass feed.
But if we're going to have to have everyone dumped on Trending when they first come to steem, then something should be done to clean up that page. Unfortunately your solution will only apply to people already here, who know to turn it on. I can't see it being on by default. But those people already here should be taught to use the approach of searching by tags and weeding through posts to find good content creators, instead of just being lazy and depending on Trending.
Perfect, like @buggedout said brilliant! @ura-soul Have a witness vote with an upvote backer.
steem will survive and prosper if "we" keep solving problems with solutions like this.
For me it's control, give me control over the content I expose Myself too. Let Me make my own choices.
I'm sure I would have this "VoteBot" filter ON most of the time because I believe in the "proof of brain" concept however I would also turn if off now and then just to take a look.
I often open hidden content just to take a look, so far it's all been hidden correctly IMO.
I would also like a way control hidden content globally on or off, (just for me of course) and a way to search specifically for hidden content.
I think its important just like Open Source software for everyone to be able to look if they want.
If this is to work it needs to give as much control over to the user as possible.
Thanks! I may actually code a test version of this on steemocean.com to demonstrate in realtime what the trending page looks like with such a filter in place.
"[...] produce custom trending/hot lists based on each user's own preferences and 'mute voter' lists."
Sounds great!
Self-adjustable multiple trending, tag and follower feeds are also something I'd wish for and believe could improve the user experience.
steempeak makes some very small efforts in that direction; yours sounds a bit in that direction to me too.
Anyway: Sounds like a great idea.
Thanks, I am talking with the steempeak team currently about how to possibly implement this.
Great!
Easy, I never look at the trending age.
I was thinking something similar.
The trending page, pre bid-bots was a good way to find good content and since it is effectively the main page that people often see by default, it is worth fixing!
Well, thats true... Keep up the good work/ideas!