Self voter Return on Investment (svROI) notoriety flagging bot
Overview
Self voting is something that most people agree is problematic on the Steem blockchain. However only a very small minority of people would go as far to say that there should be no self voting allowed at all, with most agreeing that a smaller proportion of votes should be directed to oneself than to others. There is no consensus on the ratio of self votes to outgoing votes, but self votes should generally be the lesser.
There is a consensus that investors should get a return on their investment, and that buying Steem (and especially powering up Steem into Steem Power) is something that should reward the investor. When expressed as self votes this motivation is in conflict with Steem's main stated purpose: to use the wisdom of the crowds to determine a value for social media posts. This is especially true in the context of a limited reward pool.
Self votes are problematic if they self award a return on investment much higher than the consensus amount, i.e. that some investors take advantage of other investors' goodwill. One of the main reasons is that this suggests to serious outside investors that Steem is a ponzi or other type of scam, and signals to malicious investors that Steem is a get rich quick scheme. It also shows existing users that the platform is not about any contribution except capital, and discourages the creation of content, development, or any other non-captial investment.
We can calculate a value which indicates this metric as the return on investment with regards to self votes and denote this value svROI. It is extrapolated to annual return from the sampled period. If we see a very large relative svROI value then we believe there is strong motivation to down vote the excessive self voters self voted posts to the value of their self vote.
@sadkitten is a bot which calculates svROI for all accounts on the Steem blockchain and counters the self voting of those accounts that take advantage of their investment at the expense of the community, to the best ability of the voting power and delegation.
Though there is a consensus about excessive self voting there is no consensus about what to do about it. This project is only one approach to deal with it and can be categorised as down voting over a disagreement of rewards. While this is an officially supported reason for down voting by Steemit it is still contentious, with many outspoken critics. However our position is that all votes are legal, all votes are valid and that the balance between mutually exclusive ideas of fairness can only be settled by a free vote when no agreement can be made.
What this bot does
@sadkitten scans every single vote made on the Steem blockchain, identifying self votes. It calculates the svROI metric and keeps track for each user. Each week a list of the top 100 self voters is compiled and for the week after that the bot attempts to counter all self votes by these 100 users. The list is ordered highest self voting to least on that list.
The bot is best effort and will make use of the available SP to the best of it's ability.
If you agree with the mission and want to support it please delegate to @sadkitten, no need to ask permission, just pitch in.
Delegated.
https://steemd.com/tx/2b9c2ce46a65de3caa9a43f7f215bfbacd8d1cd6
edited
I forecast helpless minnows to be smashed again while noone touch any whale no matter how bad are his sins
@sadkitten doesn't look at size of accounts.
@transisto selfvoted for his own comment heavily and has problems when others are doing the same. Am I missing a point or smthn? Explain Please
Your not missing anything... this bot is one attempt to destroy Steemit. Everyone should flag his comments and speak up about this Orwellian bot for what it's actually doing...
Harming and scaring away new Steemians, whilst bolstering the reward pool for the whales like @transisto.
This bot is not being used to flag whales who self vote, it's only being used to flag minnows.
Every bot that adds a new BS "community rule" is subversive and anti decentralization
This. It is so absurd how people think flagging small users does anything good. All it does is make people get a second account or buddy-up vote.
please explain this nonsense @transisto
I am SO conflicted! I strongly support your purpose, and comprehend the point behind automating it, and pooling SP.
I am highly reluctant, however, to abandon my principle of opposition to automated votes. I haven't purposely done so yet, and yet I am strongly attracted to do so here.
Gonna think more before I undertake an action that will invalidate that principle.
Out of curiosity, why decline payout? It seems counterproductive to me. The payout for the post could provide more SP to @sadkitten.
Thanks!
As you know I've never been against automated voting in general, no more than setting an alarm to wake me up in the morning. But I have been constantly questioning whether or not any particular use of bots for voting is positive or not.
In this case I'm happy that the bot is performing actions I agree with, so I am happy to support it. It's a personal call. I'm glad that you're in favor of at least the mission, if not the means. Perhaps you'll come around to that too.
Decline payout is generally the best thing to do on shared accounts I find, and it is culturally a gesture of goodwill, that it's not about the rewards. But I'm not herd set on that, it wasn't considered for more than a few seconds.
the SadKitten bot needs to be stopped it only helps the whales, everyone knows that, when any post has a upvote that shows a amount besides zero that the post will most like then be viewed by someone and maybe even upvoted, and everyone who does up vote get a slice of the pie, the down votes hurt not only the person who upvotes their on post but others who also get a part of it. and when the coins are devided up by steem the only one who get any are the select inner circle aka the whales, which is the only reason that the sadkitten bot is really their, why not flag all the other bots out there who always upvote the whales the ip and vpn always show that the bots are from select whales even now some whales are now changing often the ip and vpn to cover ther butt, steem was a good idea at first then the greed and bots and now even more sad kitten proves it greed and censorship to keep the peasent poor while the rich get richer, greed is greed and nothing more and it will be the death of steem as people flee and will not want steem
Disclosure, I'm still the dev behind this and still support the initiative, now rebooted. 😽 🤟
edited
🤟😽
how are you going to make the bot to guess or detect the large account of users who have 2 or 3 additional account? to regulate the auto vote.
That's not included in the AI so far, but I'm working on it. As for the how, that's fairly easy to determine.
How do you determine if they are using other accounts to vote on their own posts?
We don't, but that's something we're looking into. Step by step.
When two accounts both upvote each others comments within a minutes, over and over it can't be hard to detect.
See accounts ghazanfar.ali and leopard0505 comment history. Both are commenting on an article with a minute of each other and upvote each others comment, no way that is just automatic upvoting, it's clearly the same guy. That has to be a way to detect such obvious fake account upvoting
Does the bot have some way to counter circlejerk votes?
Not yet
No it does not
Posted using Partiko Android
So self voting is bad because it goes against the stated mission of Steemit ‘to use the wisdom of the crowds to determine a value for social media posts’, yet vote buying and automated voting via bots is acceptable?
That is one major contradiction. While I agree self voting does not help identify good content, nor does auto voting and bots and when you have a witness on the trending page having paid approx $2k for upvotes, I fell the platform has bigger issues than a few minnows upvoting themselves.
exactly
I agree with you on the point you are making. This bot is asking for delegation SP while voting up his own content with another account.
And folks wonder why #steemit platform is losing?
Posted using Partiko Android
Sounds good. I wrote a bit about this not so long ago when I went to war with an abusive self-voter. I was trying to determine where consensus was on what people consider abuse, but also targeting the worst offenders (as you are doing) is possibly a more pragmatic approach.
https://steemit.com/steem/@buggedout/grey-areas-of-steem-1-legitimate-self-voting-vs-abusive-self-voting
Sending some delegation now. Good luck with your mission.
I still don't understand how I can self-vote my tiny article and it gets no exposure.
But assholes like the creator of this bot can have numerous accounts to self-vote many articles at once.
Posted using Partiko Android
I think the point is, you can self vote, as long as the majority of your votes are to other places.
Who or what determines where each individual accounts votes are being placed?
Posted using Partiko Android
I don't understand your question. The user in the case of a human account, some algorithm in the case of a bot account, is, I think the answer, but is that really the question?
Posted using Partiko Android
I even saw a 93-94% self-upvoter today. Irony - they were making a fuss about how much they gave back to people with an occasional upvote. (They were also gaming @minnowbooster, but that's another story. )
I agree that it's only part of the suite of problems with which we are grappling at the moment. I mean, this won't ping someone like @trafalgar, who is doing quite well out of voting for the multiple accounts he controls.
At least between you and @transparencybot, people hoovering up the reward pool have to work slightly harder for it (or just delegate their SP to a bidbot).
Right, you hit the nail on the head, it's just one part of a solution. It takes many people working on this stuff to have an effect. The point I've been trying to make is that because a solution isn't completely comprehensive doesn't indicate that it's useless.
That's a fair point and it requires the whole community doing their own thing to keep it clean and fair, thus me constantly banging on to my fellow bottom feeders that we can make a difference in our own small way.
I know that trafalger, I grassed him up before. He's the one who just comments on posts then upvotes himself 6 days later.
I note that he moved his voting to 3-4 days to avoid that attention. But his actions have started to grate with some of the people who have previously defended him - and I can't say I blame them. See here for a relatively short summary, or here for a long comment thread of justification, economics, game-theory, claim and counter claim, as well as the same spurious moral reasoning that the wealthy regularly wheel out any time the peasants get too uppity.
Indeed. It's not just decentralisation. It's that reality, being complex, doesn't reward 'one size fits all' style solutions.
Right on.
I agree @bronevik. I think this is just another bad idea. Flagging, and negative reinforcement have never worked. This just creates another avenue for abuse and solves nothing. If self upvoting were a bad thing it would have been removed in the last hard fork. And if you have ever read the Steemit White paper you would know that Steemit IS 100% Capitalistic... by design. In essence you're punishing people for using a thing in a way in which it was designed to be used. That is gas-lighting. That is sociopathic. Please stop this nonsense @sadkitten.