RE: Thoughts about authenticity on the Steem blockchain - Volume #1: Identity
As a community, we allow users to post utter shit every day in order to get their vote from upvu. We "allow" it because these users are seen as investors.
You're getting ahead of me here. Plagiarism/spam/AI content is probably my next post. But yeah, when I was highlighting this:
Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.
and this:
All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
I have to say that both excerpts reminded me more of the Trending page than the situation that launched this conversation.
The blockchain has built-in ways to reward investors with interest for staking (or for holding SBDs) and with curation rewards. In principle, if we want to increase ROI for investors, it should be done by changing those parameters, not by diverting author rewards to investor/spammers at the social layer.
If we want to understand why the number of comments per block has fallen from >1 to 0.4 during the last year or two, part of it is almost certainly the bear phase of the crypto market, but I suspect that the dominance of bidbots is also a major factor.
So it feels as though abuse on the platform is inevitable and there's no knowing what difference the whack-a-mole makes.
This is why I touched on measurement in the conclusion. We really need a way to know whether we're making progress or not - and to be able to change course if we're not. On one hand, it's not possible to measure perfectly, but on the other hand I think that estimates are possible. I'll probably come back to that in a future post, too.
In addition to my other comment, this might be a useful tool with regards to measurement...
https://steemit.com/hive-151113/@steemwatcher.com/weekly-statistics-of-steemwatcher-portal-or-or-07-06-2023
I'd love to see something like that happen - where the "Savings" element took a higher proportion of the reward pool than the author rewards. I guess the downside then is that there's no incentive to power up. I've not really thought this through and my brain's refusing to operate at the moment. Stupid brain.
There are so many challenges with this, I don't know how feasible it would be. The Steem Watchers record the cases that they find but I believe the reward incentive to each watcher clouds the motivation to find more. E.g. if they receive $x for finding 6 plagiarised posts, what's the incentive for finding 50? Best to save them for the next report.
There's also the increased difficulty when people start translating content to hide their plagiarism and increasingly complex scams.
I think there was once a plan to write a bot which automatically assesses the originality of each post. @alexmove had something running when papi.mati was running the anti-plagiarism campaign. I don't know if what he developed can be repurposed as some kind of measuring tool?
If people could ever get past the terror of SBD prices being below $1 USD, doing conversions and arbitrage would be a way for investors to make money with STEEM while keeping it liquid, reducing their incentive to find "passive income" solutions that manipulate the reward pool.
Hi. @the-gorilla
Services like zeroGPT could be used to determine AI generation, as well as to determine non-uniqueness. The problem is volumes - to check ALL posts, huge volumes are needed to pay for the use of these services.
If you check selectively, then a certain structure of thoughtful checking is necessary. For now, this is the question. A small number of posts - you can check automatically. For example, selectively 1 post per month from the author (for example).
I think that's the main problem with every approach to fight abuse on Steemit. There's got to be a human element at which point scaling it up becomes a big issue.