RE: Making SPAM fighting on Steem into a game of skill
I love the idea and it's sparked a lot of thoughts on how it could be achieved on a simple and then more complex basis.
e.g. v1 allows people to anonymously report content as plagiarised which (registered) users can then agree or disagree with. This will give the post a "plagiarism/abuse" score which can be shared in a daily report for action by @ac-cheetah. Then subsequent rewards, registered user reputation, etc. can also be administered, perhaps via one of the steemcurator03 - 08 posting keys so that even the rewards remain anonymous.
A future version could include automated highlighting of potentially abusive posts and it could slowly become more complex.
This will maintain anonymity, use the gamification idea and reward users for highlighting abuse and penalise those abusing.
And to prevent people arbitrarily saying everything is plagiarised, include some known to be ok posts within the game so that those trying to abuse the reward part of the initiative fail. Perhaps even a minimum reputation threshold within the game before somebody playing the game gets rewarded. e.g. You start at 25 rep, every "fail" by highlighting an ok post (it'll be really obvious) loses you 5 points, every "approved as abusive" post gains you 1 point. Once you hit 50 points, you share a proportion of a reward pool (which could be a weekly steemcurator upvote).
I need to go out now but will mull this over whilst I am and come back with some ideas. This feels like it's well within my skillset - I just need to decide whether it should be a priority over the reskin.
I have also been thinking some more about it after I posted, and also landed on the concept of publishing regular anonymized reports (daily, or more or less frequently, depending on participation levels) with the identified posts. It improves transparency and it's another income stream for the operator.
There are a lot of possibilities when you get to thinking about the details.
Another thing I was thinking was to use beneficiary settings to distribute rewards, so the content doesn't show up on the players' blog pages, comments, or reply histories. i.e. the account running the game posts the game reports with appropriate beneficiary settings to direct rewards to the players. I suppose that could be an optional setting, but I would think most players would prefer not to have that content be visible on their on profiles.
I was thinking about the beneficiary route too and (correct me if I'm wrong) I thought that a malicious actor could still identify supporters via the post itself (which says who the beneficiaries are) or via the wallet transactions (I think the rewards get paid to the poster and then transferred but I could be wrong about this).
That's why I ended up with piggy backing on the new steemcurator teams so that the support blends in with another activity.
I've produced a strawman wireframe (buzzword bingo alert) for how it could work but I'm too tired to post it tonight. I also thought that something like this could work really well with the site redesign I'm working on - where a user can report a post as plagiarised within the post itself.
I also thought that if a post reaches a certain "plagiarism rating", then a comment could be auto-posted tagging community admins and mods (assuming it's in a community) so that they can take action too. Similarly, if a user is consistently flagged as an abuser, a comment could be automatically added to every new post of theirs - I think sentinels did or still do something similar.
Yeah, this is a concern. The posts distributing rewards to players would have to be totally disconnected from the potentially abusive posts (PAPs ;-). This way, the malicious actor would be able to tell who is playing the game, but they wouldn't be able to tell who ID'd their particular post as spam/plagiarism.
Earlier, I didn't see what you were getting at with the steemcurator## accounts, but now I think I do. If the account is voting for other stuff, then there's no way to tell if the vote was for game participation or for other reasons.
The drawback to that, though, is that rewards could only be distributed if the player was also posting for other reasons. I think we'd want to include players who don't want to post other stuff all that frequently (if at all).
I like the idea of putting abuse reporting and thresholds into the web site. I guess it would be easy enough to integrate abuse reporting, but rewarding the successful abuse-hunters would be trickier.
This is potentially enough to put some people off. I know a few users that are still knocking about who have quite a lot of power that downvote for their own (often insane) whimsical reasons.
Exactly 👍🏼 It's the ultimate cover and I expect the man behind ac-cheetah to also be in one of the chosen steemcurator groups so I'm confident he'd support the idea.
Good point - It would be fairly easy to keep a record of who's owed what and if / when they do finally post something, their reward could be automated. If they don't post though, there's little fear of retribution from that PAPper (😉) so the the idea of remaining anonymous being optional could work well here - the user choosing to have their rewards credited via a beneficiary or wallet transfer. Or they could even create a "dummy" account to collect rewards.
I think so. I think that a standalone website would be fairly straightforward to do (which can be launched first on the same server as the reskin will live) and then the new website could easily automatically post data into the existing database. The rewards pose a challenge. The other big challenge is people highlighting a post as plagiarised, unaware that the author has a blog, website or photography portfolio elsewhere.
I know that HiveWatchers is heavily criticised on Hive for its heavy handedness and this feels like it's heading in that direction... https://hivewatchers.com/
There were a lot of complaints when they were here, too. Not just the heavy-handedness, but also arbitrariness and alleged conflicts of interest. I could never decide if I thought they were a net-positive or net-negative. I think I delegated, undelegated, and redelegated to them a number of times.
One of the big lessons from past efforts is the need for an appeal process when there is a central authority who is making the decisions. Of course, on the other side, that just makes abuse-fighting harder.
Those sorts of challenges are the reason why I've been trying to think about decentralized techniques like this game idea or quorum sensing and adjustments to the rewards algorithm to make abuse less profitable.
The nice thing about your idea to publish a daily report out of the game play is that multiple projects could develop competing lists in their own ways, and maybe the best would bubble up to the top. Maybe a part of the project should be to publish a standardized reporting format.
I think that I'm going to park the reskin for a while and work on this instead. I think it's got real potential for good if it's done well. Once a certain threshold's reached, a reply to the post could be triggered. Any reply from the author could be added to the game so that future players can see it - although the original author could decide to edit the content or suchlike so perhaps the original content could be saved.
Since the downvote trail is managed by somebody else, me writing the game and reporting the results could work well. I think that an initial version could be written in a couple of days so it's just a question of finding a couple of days 🤔
Your quorum sensing post offers an interesting idea. I think that to some degree ac-cheetah's downvote trail achieves this - especially in the knowledge that there are users with far high power backing you up. Like the gobshite kid who has the MMA world backing him up. I'll let my subconscious work on this one too.
I agree, the main difference is that it doesn't happen on a post-by-post basis. That might not matter much, anyway, though.