Two proposed HF policy change for countering reward based abuses.
No-reward from self-votes on comments.
When a user vote on his own comment the rshare ($ value) would count toward ranking but would not be paid out to the user.
This preserve the benefit of SteemPower holder to give increased exposure to their content (thus future reward) but limit the temptation to create comments mainly to self-claim a reward.
Commenting only to self-reward has increased tremendously with HF19. A huge increase in comment spam makes conversation much harder to follow. People have to browse through pages of comments made by bots to find relevant information or real people waste time answering bots.
Note : I do not recommend this no-reward from self-vote policy to be considered for posts at this time, only on comments. (Post usually have a higher expected level of work put into them and are more independent than comments thus less invasive).
Increase down-voting power to counteract the lost curation reward opportunity.
I recommend increasing the strength of the downvotes (flag) relative to the percentage decrease in voting power by a factor of MINIMUM 25% but closer to 50%
People using their their steempower to downvote (flag) content almost always do so to improve the platform as a whole. It's usually to suppress abusive behavior or to demote content to the benefit of better content.
Reasons suggested by Steemit to downvote :
- Disagreement on rewards
- Fraud or Plagiarism
- Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
- Intentional miscategorized content or Spam
Detecting these abuse is a thought intensive process, requiring SteemPower to enforce it almost guarantee that nobody does it unless it's justified, but missing out on curation reward makes it a cost negative action (and that's not even considering risk of retaliation Vs. possibility of a reward kickback).
Example : It would cost a user the same % of voting power to bring down a post by $1.50 than to bump one by $1.00
Some of the latest post related self-voting and reward abuse:
https://steemit.com/project-smackdown/@inertia/self-voting
https://steemit.com/steemit/@kyriacos/deceptively-optimistic-self-shilling-posts-hurt-steemit
Please note that I will be moderating this thread for any small comment that does not contribute to the conversation. (do not take it personally)
While I am personally 100% in support of users rights to self-vote, I would be very much open to a hardfork where this functionality was removed. - not that it would do anything.
In the system, as it is currently designed, self-votes are useful and important curation decisions. Think of this as putting your money (vests) where your mouth is (posts). While some users do not like this practice, the way the (abet complicated) rules have consented to today, self-votes are absolutly ok. Because of the curation incentives, users should be curating their own content.
Your solution can easily be Sybiled, no matter how implemented. You can always just delegate SP.
I think people need to get over the whole self-voting thing. Either vests are vests or not. This "author vests shouldn't count" talk really does not make much sense.
Edit: I am going to spam this thread with links to more of my thoughts on self-votes. This thread was the inspiration for authoring the post and I believe many here might be interested.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Agreed and "Hate Speech" is very subjective. I can say that if you call me a "ROBBER," then that is hate speech and that hurts me. You could say those are the facts. I could say I was Aladdin or Batman or Dexter. I could say I was Robin Hood or Obama. I could have excuses or reasons. I believe in objectivity. I believe in freedoms of speech which includes the freedom of hate speech because hate is a subjective abstraction that is based on opinion and feelings and stuff. When police put bad people in jail, they could say to them, "That is hate speech." But, if a man murdered your mother. You could say, "You murdered my mother." But he could say, "Hey, that is hate speech. Do not say that. I am not a murderer." So, I am saying, I do not like government.... smaller government is better than bigger government... I like capitalism..... I like choices and responsibilities.... I like Bitcoin and Steemit... thanks for sharing....
Cheers
The strongest argument I can come up with for comment voting is for influence, which your change covers (my pros/cons post is here). I like this change. If people want to vote themselves up to make money, they can do it on their own blog. If they post too often with too much crap, they will lose followers anyway. Ultimately there's no way to stop self voting because of Sybil attack concerns, but this might at least make it a little more difficult.
As to the second point, well... I've been on the other end of abusive voting and it's quite discouraging to see 60% or 70% of a payout disappear in the last 12 hours during the time when no other upvote could change things, especially when there are hundreds of positive votes and many comments supporting the post. I agree there's a lot of reasons to avoid flagging, especially with daily target vote change of HF19. That said, I feel we still don't have good processes in place to counter abusive flags that aren't based on any of the reasons outlined in the steemit interface, but just to piss people off because of personal grudges. If it was just a downvote, I wouldn't mind, but the reputation is also impacted. flagging is complicated. I do think the platform could do well with more honest flaggers though, so I'd be willing to support it and see how it goes. Maybe it'll force a prioritization toward fixing the abusive flagging problem.
I think you are right on the influence part - at least mostly. The only thing with that is when others also upvote you, the argument against self votes goes right out the window.
The reputation thing is a major fault IMO.
Take a look at my post that yours inspired, I go deep into the whitepaper and sort out some game theory about self voting:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Excellent post, Kyle! Thank you for pointing it out. I think you covered a lot of details I remember reading and thinking through at the time, but as you mentioned, the white paper is just too far out of sync with what the site is today (reputation, "flag" instead of downvote, radically different distribution amounts with "bad whales" taking advantage of the system, etc)
:) glad it was interesting.
Although, I am not so sure the whitepaper is it of sync with what the site is today. Steemit is a portal into steem, just like busy.
I would just argue that steem is the first of many more experiments to come. I don't think steem correctly addressed all the problems needed by a network like this. I am passionate about the now though.
I think there is a bias of perception between bad flags and good flags. I suggested that there should be an easy way to select a reason or to enter a custom one when clicking the flag. Many people just don't know why they got flag, disagreement on reward can apply to pretty much everything and at it pertain to Steem what steemit inc say are good reason to flag is not really relevant.
The good flags are very rarely talked about because people don't appreciate that some whale downvoting a bigger whale that upvote it's own content increase the reward of everyone else that deserve it more.
Two example from today, who cares really?, the whale who spend SP, who lost a curation opportunity and risk retaliation to flag this isn't getting any praise whatsoever for their good flag. :
https://steemit.com/politics/@joseph/transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico#@mehmoodasultana/re-joseph-transparent-wall-at-the-border-with-mexico-20170716t040758669z
https://steemit.com/business/@bookingteam.com/what-you-need-to-know-in-the-vacation-rental-industry-07-16-2017
you can be sure under the present system fox cnn nbc ........ and the rest would never make a penny on this platform so it may have a good effect on keeping the riff raff out ... lol ...
Very well-said Luke! I totally agree with everything you said :]
Flagging is complicated and one of the poorest implemented features here on steem.
The problem is at the end of the day, I believe vests are vests.
@lukestokes, I do not like downvote or flag options... it could be something that could help.... but maybe not yet like you said.... Facebook does not have a dislike BUTTON..... and it is kind of negative to downvote and stuff..... and it is very subjective to downvote.... like hate speech should be included in the freedom of speech.... but some will say they are not..... but others will say they are..... and that is one of the debates people have.... I want to focus on upvoting... I do not downvote people.... I do not have time to do that and it is a waste of time..... better content will get a lot of votes..... better content will make a lot of money
.
We should not be motivated to post better by downvotes that we get but rather by not being number one..... like Michael Jordan / Jackson...... like Pokemon... I want to be the best.... but downvotes can discourage people too much as it lowers our reputation and that can get people to give up............... it can be very unfair.... like you said as people carry grudges and everything...... downvoting is like going to a restaurant and taking money from it..... because you do not like the food.... but other people are there eating the food and they paid the money.... downvoting is like stealing the money from the store or bank or whatever and it could be like censorship or something........
The whole point is that it is subjective. You are incentivized to vote payouts so they align with your views. If you don't you are risking steem becoming something where your stake is no longer valuable.
And what's to prevent the user from creating another account, delegating SP to it, and upvoting himself with it?
Absolutely nothing, which is why I over and over again come out 100% against this idea. It's silly when you can create multiple accounts, delegate, or vote trade. It might stop the laziest or most technically dis-inclined abusers, which just shifts the "booty" to the more technically savvy, determined abusers. It seems worse than doing nothing. The big abusers don't self-vote, they vote trade in cartels like BookingTeam.com:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
The only solution I see is removing flagging from using the same power as upvoting. There is too much financial disincentive not to flag things, and it's already bad enough there is a lot of social and retaliation disincentive as well.
Right you are.
They even talk about this in the whitepaper. My post inspired by this thread might be of interest to you.
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Thanks, I'll check it out.
It's a possible workaround but It's definitely inconvenient and moving the SP earned from posting account to voting account is limited by the 3 month power-down phase. Abuses would be as easy to detect as self vote and can eventually be counteracted with bots.
But delegation is instant.
Indeed. @transisto you don't need to power down to delegate. Delegation can be revoked, and it takes 7 days to complete.
https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_delegated_STEEM_Power
Good question.
Very good question...The better question is how do we grow the platform family:)
That's steemit.incs job.
right?
??
I was agreeing with your sentiment about the responsibility of the platform growing.
I think the only time self voting would be a problem is if all the high steempower holders were doing it, but they're not. Only people who self vote their own comments are minnows who make little to nothing anyways, which you can't really blame them anyways because of the high influx of new users the last couple of months, feels almost impossible to get seen.
Some numbers : https://steemit.com/project-smackdown/@personz/project-smackdown-14th-july-stats
While you may be right it is mostly the new users who do it, they are causing an awful amount of spam comments that but that seems to have slowed down as they may have noticed their voting power become inefficient after many votes.
The race to Nash is futile.
No reward for voting on your own comments makes sense.
Flags seem to be so seldom used that I can't comment usefully. Risk of retaliation from whales seems like an item to be concerned about.
It would also be a valid option but would add another magic % number. Zero for overall simplicity, Steem is already pretty complex.
Agreed complexity is already very high, simplicity is better than complexity
Can't work. Period.
Take a look here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Unfortunately there is actually a lot of downvoting that takes place for abusive reasons too.
The downvote implementation is one of the worst aspects of the steem ecosystem.
period.
Is there a hard outline of the rules and ethics of using the flagging system? I know there is that small “recommendations” that show up when you flag of what it should be for. Looking under FAQ I am surprised its simply as “users are allowed to downvote for any reason that they want. There are many users in the community who recommend only using the downvote on posts that are abusive. . .”
I now understand why it’s such a hot topic and an issue. It seems like a hard task to even try and find a happy medium when the guide lines are so loosely written. No wonder so many feel they have been abused by the down voting system.
Users are 'allowed' to do whatever the blockchain allows.
As I fear the reply from you would be. Blockchains don’t have ethics or morals. It is simply a slave to the highest bidder; therefore, no change needs to be made in down voting power. If someone wants something bad enough they just need make sure they are the highest bidder.
This leaves me with more questions than answers. I simply don’t understand the ethics or morals of the biggest account holders here. Interesting enough very view if any at all do. Since some of these people are unknown and don't choose to share that with us.
Well, it isn't as bad as it sounds (IMO). From what I've seen, the majority of the stakeholders (large and small) do have the best interests of the platform in mind. There are a lot of disagreements over what is 'best', but I do think most people's hearts are in the right place.
I agree. This platform would have been a wasteland long before now if otherwise.
Well said.
I just can’t think of a happy medium. If there was some kind of way to automate the process of verify that a flag was used in a legitimately manner and then refunded some of the power used back to the user maybe. That sounds like a very complex issue of trying solving. Even the bots that deal with plagiarism are not getting it correct enough to trust it.
No matter what kind of changes are made or not made with regard to flagging, we need assigned moderators who have the power to undo any flag not adhering to clearly set guidelines. We've always needed that, imo, but how to implement moderation where a lot of sp isn't needed (mod accounts with little or no sp) is perhaps impossible.
That is very true indeed! Thanks for bringing that up :)
Boom, I said similar in my comments before I saw the comments, good on ya Timmer.
Honestly.
Thanks for saying this. People listen to you.
And I'm think that part of HF19 was just to stop this kind of abuse.
You being an excellent witness, could you answer a question on this subject?
Would it be possible to set up steemit to automate a possible 6th flag be generated when a post is flagged? Then a few things could happen.
1. People could go to the tag "flag" and look at all the people who are flagged.
2. A process could be setup to a. let the populace vote on the abuse or b. hold the purse until reviewed somehow
This would avoid flag wars on the particular post. It would separate and make it easier to review posts that are flagged also.
Could you also tweak steemit to keep reputations/rewards intact until review/7 days is complete?
Thanks for all you do as a witness and valued Steemit member.
While it is technically possible, it would be a major change. It would be better for someone in the community to develop a UI that shows all the flagged posts. I don't know if it is there already, but steemdb ( developed by @jesta ) may already have something along those lines.
Thanks for your fast response.
Improve the platform - yeah right - LOL
Censorship is really not that great...
Which ?
There are lots of cases of retaliation, or 'disagreement on rewards'. The latter isn't really abuse, but it causes a lot of unhappiness among users. Making flagging more powerful would make that worse.
There needs to be a balance. I'm not saying that the current 1:1 between upvoted and downvotes is 100% for certain the right one, but since it is the current implementation the burden is on you (since you are proposing the change) to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the current system is not balanced correctly.. There does still seem to be a good argument in preserving the status quo.
Trying to stop self-voting directly this way is, I think, ultimately ineffective. Anyone can just make another account, and upvote from that account instead. Or, if they don't want to wait for powering down, they can post from the new account, and upvote from the old account. Further, people can just trade votes anyway.
Incidentally, I think the biggest abuse of rewards that I am curently seeing is the "BookingTeam Mafia" in Trending every day. It wouldn't surprise me to find many more groups like this, either. They just repost spam links and paper-junk-mail peppered with links to their website, then upvote themselves $1000 per post.
Well, that is what it was when I wrote this article on it 16 days ago:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
Anyway, I wrote another article more recently speaking to your second option, which I think is the effective route. I proposed a separate down-vote power, or a 1 (or more) free 100)% downvotes per day for each user. I was hoping that if we could remove the economic disincentive from "wasting" one's voting power on downvotes that the community would be drastically more inclined to police this, and they would have the benefit of subjectivity. It's harder to program a rule to find what I noted in my article above than it is for us to see it.
The whole foundation of steemit.com is rewards based. This is why I have no issues with someone upvoting themselves.
One way or another you have to convince one or more people to upvote you. In the end, it is all about what others can gain in return to upvoting you. There is a reason why some users are popular with rewards, because there is predictability for those who want to make a buck or two by helping others to make a buck or two with their votingpower.
It would defeat the purpose and turn this place into an ordinary social media site if you removed that. People have to find a way to "mine" the STEEM. But then, I do understand that some comments and blog posts are not worthy what they are rewarded. This is really hard to define, though. This would destroy this platform if we started to define what is good and what is not.
To every mother her child is extraordinary and exceptional. It would be hard to convince a mother otherwise.
Censorship is something that can easily happen if we even try to define what is a good post and was is not. That will always be subjective. If we go that way to define it, you will turn steemit.com into a police state with a million vigilantes.
If you really want to go that way, then you would have to first write out what the standard should be for a worthy post before a HF can even take place. This is virtually impossible. Only the market can make that value assessment. The market can be 1 person, 10 persons or 100 persons. Now, that 1 person could be the user themselves thinking their material is worthy.
The consensus of the whole community is really important if we are going to start monitoring what is a good post and what is not.
Those who have invested a lot are going to be the losers, but then again if the "abuse" continues that could also kill this place. So it is a fine line. I put abuse in quotations because this is a word that people are throwing around. I don't know whether it is the right word to use or not.
To continue, the communuty has to first decide whether this place is for everyone or some. If it is for everyone then no to flagging comments and posts. If this place is for certain people then we need to define that and start ganging up on those the community has decided are not welcomed any longer.
I think if we leave it as is, it will correct itself very shortly. The value of each vote is going down on a daily basis. Because, let's be honest, in the end, it is all about the money. Those who are abusing won't bother because the rewards will be too low and those who care about the abuse won't care because the rewards will be zero or low
You said it in a nutshell @tamim - I don't want to live in a egalitarian socialist state anymore than you do my friend.
well said.
You put it quite nicely. - followed!!
Interesting. Maybe a place for all but not a place for all content? Maybe all content is not valuable? Not sure here.
You might find my in-depth post inspired by this thread interesting:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
Agreed.... DETERMINING what is good or not can become too subjective.... and that can be dangerous...
My take on this is that self-voting incentivizes investors to buy in to steem, and for that reason it should remain at least a while longer. A huge number of the people I see that upvote their own comment for $1+ have recently deposited a large amount from an exchange, so this can be seen as their ROI and a lot of them still go on to vote on other things as well. Eliminating self-voting entirely will result in less interest from people investing into the platform because they may not have much drive to be posting quality content or spending every day curating to get their returns. It would also be tremendously discouraging to the people that are actively investing based on the current self-vote mechanisms to suddenly have this restricted. An example is: https://steemit.com/@adept/transfers he has been heavily buying into steem, and upvoted my post alongside his own comment, so I am happy to have his vote and he gets some return on his recent large investments into the platform, it's good to have people buying on exchanges for this reason even if there is some downside to be seen here, because people buying STEEM/SBD is the only thing that gives them any value.
On the note of flags, I think there needs to be a log curve for their strength where smaller SP holders have a larger impact with their downvote but megawhales have somewhat less than they do right now. The reason is that someone can have 500 upvotes and a single whale can destroy their earnings or reputation because they hold more SP than the people upvoting, and in contrast a whale can post something that has 500 downvotes and still come out ahead. A log curve would skew this scenario more in favor of a popular vote while retaining the whales power to outvote more people than anyone else. It would also give a larger boost to the masses for filtering out spammers if the same change increased minnow flag power from its current value. I see a ton of spammy comments on various posts that get flagged by minnows but nothing changes until someone big comes along and uses their voting power to flag it, and like you said they hesitate to do that because in many ways it's a waste of their vote. So I think the log curve would push higher SP holders more toward upvoting than they already are while giving more power to filter spam to everyone else, which is in my opinion the best way to filter out the spammers since the big guys can't cover it all.
...
sorry for the wall of text, I think the things I'm proposing needed some explanation for risk of sounding poorly planned. I actually have thought about this a lot and the self-voting thing plays into the game theory of steemit and is part of the reason people are so addicted to having more steem power, since it creates a snowballing effect it has a similar addiction mechanism to an idle game where there's never a good time to stop because you're almost always at your peak in terms of the rate of gain. The better way to address the people that are straight up exploiting it would be to rework curation rewards so that there's a better chance of having higher return by voting on other people's stuff, rather than the current system where only the top curators manage to exceed what you gain by self-voting.
Anyway, give it some thought guys. I think this is a really important topic that goes deeper than most people think, glad to have people delving into it.
Interesting!
Well the best part is, you can never stop self voting.
Messing with curves probably adds more harm than anything. Whatever is incentivized will happen.
The only thing is for people to get over the hump and start flagging when the feel it is right.
My post inspired by this thread might be of interest:
https://steemit.com/steem/@kyle.anderson/subjective-proof-of-work-some-rational-comments-on-the-self-voting-trend
I disagree with you on your point about self voting. If I buy or earn steempower I'm going to use that to support myself. What if I like posting about some obscure niche that most people haven't ever heard of? Of course, i'm going to get next to nothing per post. So basically, one could argue that removing the ability to award ones self, will inadvertently shrink the diversity of unique bloggers. They'll feel more inclined to post about mainstream topics for any hope of making something from their blog posts/comments!
I agree entirely.
Self-votes are important in the way steem is designed right now. There is a reason that upvoting your post is the default for top-level posts.
Interesting. I see it two ways now. You have a good point about self voting. But someone else suggested that if everyone self voted, that would deplete the Steem power and the system would ultimately collapse.
For myself, I think I'll pass on self voting for now and see how things play out.
duh.
The whole point is that everyone only voting for themselves is worthless.
This is why people are incentivized to vote for others.
Not to mention curation rewards.
If self voting is causing problems where overvalued posts are making too much - boom flagging. The race to Nash equilibrium is futile.
If you self-upvote and nobody downvotes you, you get the full curation rewards from the post times 4.
Excluding downvotes from the equation, most people see themselves as incentivized to self upvote.
It is absolutely incentivized.
This does not mean equilibrium is where everyone only votes for themselves.
Agreed.
For sure, glad I'm not the only one who thinks like I do.
ill follow a similar thinker
Thanks! I followed you aswell!
What is that reason? It seems to be a legacy from the beginning of the platform.
Legacy or not, the feature I would mention is curation rewards.
If all vests are going to be treated equal, I want (and should to some equilibrium extent) to put "my money where my mouth is" so to speak.
This all comes down to principle. If I can not upvote my own posts with my own vests then the very definition of steem changes.
Steem payouts are and have been since the white paper a consensus system. You should absolutely be allowed (by the blockchain level rules) to upvote your own posts. But others need to be allowed to counter your votes, to facilitate the end result of payouts by stakeholder consensus.
Witnesses must allow you to have your say, but other stakeholders don't have to allow you to have your way.
oh yeah. that is the only logical solution to this whole self vote thing.
if you think someone self voted more than the post is worth - flag.
otherwise who cares. you should only be judging posts by their payouts anyways.
The differences between posting and commenting would seem to suggest far different parameters of judging value- who would ever bother with flagging a comment for anything except blatant abuse?
I would flag a comment that was making more than I feel it is worth.