RE: ✍️ The Priest and The Contest-Monkey - Episodes 5 & 6: Determining Breakout Points
I’m on my mobile so won’t research any extra detail right now…
I agree with the dish and I’m in no doubt that somebody from Nigeria cooked that recipe. They know each other and on the day Simon bought the fish, he says that he cooked it with a neighbour. If I cooked a meal with another Steemit user, I can 100% guarantee that I’d tag them. The same photo of the fish appears at a later date from a different user. It’s strange but the advocate would think it irrelevant.
On subject of the sandals, we’d call them flip flops and I prefer flip flops to sandals so it would be difficult to determine gender (assuming that I’m male). I put very little value in this anecdote. I know there’s an image of Vickyson holding the fish dish, perhaps the original photo will show her footwear.
She does say in her intro:
I do small business, I can't say business is good because is out of tracker
Which correlates with the idea that she sells street food. For me though, all of the "characters" require a real world person to support it so I have little doubt that details like this are true, even if they get other details "wrong" sometimes.
Some of the suspicion surrounds the use of the publicly available Facebook photos. If you have the Facebook account, you have access to the photos so why not use them instead of a half arsed screenshot? I only found this Facebook account through being friends with one of our protagonists - I’d never have found it through names alone.
Like the wasa account, I have no doubt that there’s a real person who is aware that the account exists and helps to support it through the use of photos (and maybe even a video call) when requested (see my reply to Simon for more on this). Including Facebook accounts - Facebook being a key tool in recruitment. (I.e. the prospect of making a few dollars and all you have to do is provide photos when requested).
That’s why it works and is so convincing. Users in Pakistan have been doing it for some time in their local villages. It’s also why once these errors are corrected (which they will be), it will be impossible to know if any newcomers are real. Which is a sad point that we have been approaching for some time.
This is the reason everything took so long to investigate and subsequently explain and present. And why it’s presented as a whole, rather than just one component.
Hence, the sadness in writing all of this down. So much of the emphasis of rewards evolves around “proving that you’re real” and then entering contests.
Also commenting from my cell, so this will be brief. General topics that occur to me for later follow-up (if time allows):
I know how long I spent just on pieces of this, but I can only guess at how much longer you were digging into it, so thank you for doing that.
You are right about overvaluing posts. There is no point in chasing each specific case if the system allows overvaluing posts. STEEM has many clones. Most of them try to position themselves favorably against STEEM, noting that they do not have bid bots, only manual curators.
I think the best option would be to make manual curation more profitable than automatic and more profitable than content creation (for large share holders). The current algorithm had this goal, but in practice it doesn't work very well.
I've seen that attempts to make manual curation more profitable than delegating to bid bots have already been made. But it didn't work. This is a complex question that requires long and thorough brainstorming. A special discussion thread could be created for this. But all this has no meaning. Even if we managed to invent the perfect formula, these changes would not be implemented.
Despite everything, I believe that we need to involve all those who are willing and still reach a common opinion on what needs to be changed to implement the principle of fairer distribution of rewards. Then, having a ready-made decision, perhaps someday the appropriate circumstances will arise for the implementation of this decision.
Compare the time spent on manual curation vs automatic curation and the cost of human time, and the cost of possible Steem rewards -- then, the answer becomes obvious which way development WILL NOT GO.. imo.
By the end of it, I think I knew some of them better than they know themselves 🤣
Seriously though... you're almost certainly correct that the reward mechanism is at the heart of this...
Perhaps the solution would be as simple as never displaying voting power or who has voted on a post, thus reducing the incentive to chase the vote of a whale. Imagine that. Perhaps this is the seed of my next post.
Or it will lead to even more fraud, since nothing will be visible immediately, and in order to expose the fraudster, you will have to dig even more in dirty laundry.
Besides that -- we are on the blockchain, right? The info may be hidden within the Steemit front-end interface, but still be visible in the block inspector, like the steemworld. Right?
I think you are right.
Good point 😪
sounds quite curious! that idea never came even once to my mind.