RE: Whales: You Have Some Flagging to Do
Yeah, this is disgraceful... I wrote to a few people on steemit.chat about this particular cesspool earlier today.
As you say, this is short term greed... somebody "writing themselves $800 checks" with every upvote of non-comment on a sock puppet account. And note how the empty comments are "time stacked" so they can sit there unnoticed till about 13 hours before they are due to pay out... then they get their massive upvotes; lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm still not sure how to address all this at the code level... but I keep coming back to the idea of voting power being a two-factor algorithm. Yes the starting point is your SP, but that's also multiplied by some kind of "trust factor" so somebody who just randomly transfers in 500,000SP to a new account only has maybe... 1/10th? 1/20th? the power of a seasoned and trusted long term member who has a large "web of trust," as voted on by community feedback... a bit like reputation, but also different.
On the other end, people are expected to do what they can to get more cash. The system should be designed to work under all those incentives.
I totally agree with this comment. While sock puppet voting is bad, self-voting does some good things for minnow curators. First, it helps keep them on the Steemit platform with the incentive of making SOMETHING! Second, upvoting one's own comment is a promotion in itself, moving that comment to the forefront. How can anyone expect to ever get ahead when the can't play by the rules currently in place. I have taken the liberty of upvoting myself, mainly because I spend a lot of time creating posts without the benefit of receiving a lot of upvotes. And I do always share my voting power though. I DO NOT self-vote low effort comments though. Steemit is a two way street and until the rules change, it is what it is. I believe that once an account reaches certain thresholds, curation algorithms should change. The $800 self-written check should be a no no!
I choose not to upvote myself. On the other end we should disable it if we don't want people abusing it. I prefer to leave the choice to people, like you did.
That is one solution. But we also don't want to forbid investor to join and back the system. We maybe are pushing a certain role to some people that do not want to play that role.
If I may ask, how do you feel when you spend over two hours creating a post and you get two votes? Both from bots? It is disheartening and it has happened to me a lot. If my efforts were better rewarded, then maybe I would not feel the necessity to upvote myself and I could save my voting strength for others. It can go both ways I suppose.
Let's say it's even worst for because what I care the most about is the comments and the interaction. So this is even worst, even though we are paid to comment (my first payout ever was a comment). Upvoting myself doesn't help since the feeling of loneliness won't fade for the $$.
That might be only be me.
Ha, a lengthy post with no Upvotes and NO comments is pure loneliness!
Turning investors into curators, for example.
Thanks!
Interesting idea. What if they did something like that, where you have to be on this platform for X period of time, and post X times/get X number of votes, etc. before the "trust factor" increases? They could also tie this to reputation as well. The higher the rep, the higher the percentage you get. For example, 0 rep would bring in 0% of the earnings, 10 rep 25%, 20 rep 50%, 30 rep 75%, and 40+ rep 100%.
The only issue here, would be that people like berniesanders could still mass flag someone to kill their rep, especially if their reputation is already not terribly high. They could also mass vote an account up to boost the rep. It isn't a perfect solution, but it may slow things down.
Furthermore, what about limiting the number of accounts one person can have? I know this would be difficult to do, but they could potentially monitor suspected individuals, put them on probation if an issue is found, and ban/delete their account if they are found to be directly violating the rules in order to scam the platform. If nothing else, this would probably force people like bernie to be more careful and less brazen in his attacks. Perhaps some of the people guilty of doing this would be dumb enough to make it obvious, and get booted.
Just my thoughts, what do you all think?
Reputations scores can only be adjusted by people with higher reputation scores. That means low rep accounts can raise or lower higher reputation accounts.
Ok, I knew you had to have higher reputation to lower someone else's with a flag. You are saying it works the same for raising it? Only higher reputations upvoting you can raise your own?
As far as I understand, lower reputations can't raise the reputation of higher accounts.
In the post of @arcange, he shows that there are two rules to reputation:
// Rule #1: Must have non-negative reputation to affect another user's reputation
// Rule #2: If you are downvoting another user, you must have more reputation than them to impact their reputation
Rule #1 implies, that if you are upvoting a post of somebody with a higher reputation than you have, this has an effect as long as you have a positive reputation, with the impact depending on a) your reputation and b) your voting power. If this wasn't the case:
Wow... I had no clue about all this going on... COIN MAN...
@pocketechange
#utopian-io has a prototype of User Authority that is underway. Once they have some results and data exploring those results, they will probably make some pull requests for laying the groundwork in HF 21. Lead developer was @scipio, but I don't see any updates on this in the last month, so I don't know the current status. His intro post to the concept is at https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@scipio/userauthority-ua-explanations-applications-and-implications