Steemit cheaters & how to protect the platform against them
We all know @wang the friendly bot that automatically upvotes a lot of posts and sometimes post replies (which are the same in every thread). I was wondering what kind of pull that bot had in this community so I had a look at the stats and it kind of shocked me.
This is a huge potential issue. You have newbies that try to upvote everything to get some extra steempower and that's fine, the will see that it's not worthwhile and stop and only upvote the good posts.
However I think the issue of bots is a lot bigger issue. Reddit already has an issue of voting bots and there is no real incentive yet, just making your post more or less popular. However when you introduce the financial aspect of Steemit in the mix I think we have a potential big issue.
This is just one bot and he has an estimated value of $ 130,000 which really is insane (kudo's to the guy who's managing it, you're quite the visionary). The platform needs to protect itself, there will always be manipulation but it has to be made as difficult as possible. It can be as simple as complex captcha's that you need to complete to post/upvote something. I'm not an expert, I'm sure there are people here with a lot more knowledge that can help the community.
Yeah, the steem whitepaper talks about using negative voting as a way of protecting against fraud, but I'm not sure how it applies in this case. Votes are a kind of contribution, but I'm not sure mechanisms are in place to vote on them, which is what you'd need to apply the whitepaper's solution in this case.
I guess you would need to write a bot which effectively downvotes all of @wang's upvotes, because they are presumed to be the votes of a bot. On the other hand, I'm not sure that solution even works as intended, because maybe then the person who owns that bot gets rich.
Not to mention, whoever wrote @wang could write a bot to downvote all of the good bot's downvotes. I'd have to learn the whitepaper more thoroughly to understand how this all shakes out in the end, but overall it doesn't seem like an incredibly promising direction.
captchas mean nothing, I have been beating the shit out of Google and FB and others using captcha for years...
Already proposed negative voting, but project leads don't care. I proposed also solutions to prevent abuses including plagiarism, account farming and account name trolling. They didn't care. Bottom line: they are fine with Steem becoming a pile of trash, have no plan to prevent it, and won't listen to people who propose constructive solutions.
Where are your proposals? I'm interested to read them.
Negative voting, account farming prevention, account name trolling prevention proposals were posted on Slack in the chat and also discussed in private with @ned. Abuse reporting is here. Quantified proxying of voting is here. That last one may or may not have been read as they ended up implementing proxying of votes soon after, but didn't get any feedback from @ned, @dan or anyone in spite of the fact I was asked to formalize it on Steemit. Nice. I'm officially done bothering to make proposal that are ignored. @dan and @ned are only paying attention to posts that bring some short term hype to the network, at the expense of everything else. Today again, another excellent post from someone reporting a vulnerability and who obviously put a lot of work in to it. Guess what: it's just totally ignored like other equally excellent posts from the same poster (see his history). Sure, he isn't a pretty girl, he hasn't put a sexy photo or stupid animated gifs in his post, and the general public who is supposed to pump the price doesn't care about security. But come on, how much effort is it to acknowledge the contributions of people who put in a lot of work to try to secure the network? I'm increasingly convinced that Steem is a pump & dump, and that its creators don't really care about making things sustainable long term so long as they manage to dump their stock of liquid steem before the hype dies off.
I know, it was an example, but you have to agree that this is an issue that threatens the entire community
'friendly bot' haha
You can do some digging around and see that some users have REAL manipulation power in comparison to the wang bot.
I upvoted you.
If it can be man made it can be man broken - that will always be the case. I read of one guy on here who had 14 accounts! TERRIBLE!!