RE: Proposing Hardfork 0.20.0 “Velocity”
Why is no one addressing the massive abuse of malicious whales?
You can't tell me, with those big brains of yours, that you don't see it. The scheme. The fraud. You know, when powerful whales (like @craig-grant, for example) upvote newcomers with a small % of upvoting power. And then, when these newcomers start attracting attention and earning higher rewards they flag said content with mid to high voting power FLAGS to return all those potential rewards we gave to said posts back to the rewards pool. Then to top it off (the kill shot) they habitually and consistently upvove their own content with high to 100% voting power.
If an owner of a web hosting company and his lawyer wife can see this potentially criminal fraud not only built into the system yet supported (and enhanced with these new forks) then I am sure you must be doing it intentionally, maliciously.
Can someone answer this for me, why are you not addressing the built in and encouraged fraud being taken advantage of by so many older accounts?
You know, somewhere Craig Grant is enjoying fireworks he bought with ill gotten funds. Meanwhile, some poor mother or father is explaining to their children there won't be any fireworks tonight because they put all their money into a website and couldn't figure out the game, losing it all.
Have you no compassion? FIX IT FFS !!!
While I am personally concerned about exactly the problems you mention, I am also hesitant to claim it is intentionally caused by the code. There are clearly accounts that are abusing the code for financial gain, but in my conversations with devs and other users, I have seen that there seems to be either widespread dissembling regarding the issue (which is possible, but I feel unlikely, as I see those same people doing things intended to help new accounts, even donating their own SP for that purpose, as well as much work creating communities such as minnowsupportproject, bots like @randowhale (admittedly a for profit concern), and various other initiatives.), or simply a capitalist/libertarian worldview that isn't capable of integrating the failure of SP weighting of VP to promote curation of quality content, as opposed to being used as a means of extracting profit from the rewards pool.
Regardless of the reason for the problem(s), it needs to be fixed to make Steemit work as the devs claimed in the white paper they intended it to. They clearly understood that obvious financial manipulation would cause a crisis of confidence. This has demonstrably been ongoing.
Unfortunately, other problems weren't foreseen, such as pandering to whales in the hope of getting their votes.
Steemit is still in beta for a reason. An enormous variety and depth of attempts to mitigate the problems SP weighting of VP causes has been undertaken, and this has bloated the code, while all the attempts at mitigation tend to cause additional unforeseen problems.
I think it's time to excise all that bloat, load on servers, and discouraging effect of unfairness so blatant, and try either equally weighted votes, or votes weighted only by reputation, and to implement a reasonable VP decay curve (10 votes?!? Who thinks only 10 votes is a reasonable rate of interaction on Steemit?) that still discourages bots from replacing human curation.
You have obviously put a lot of thought into the issue, a good thing to see indeed.
I would be inclined to agree with you on the Devs defence, except I find it too hard to believe they couldn't or didn't see allowing a self-upvoting system where the value of the upvote increases with the value of the account giving the upvote would be abused. It screams "you mean I can give myself free money (like, a lot of free money now with the recent HF19 changes)!" It makes no sense to me even coding in self-upvotes for profit and absolutely no defences against bots.
Yet I do see many working to fix it, a lot of users and a few Devs. And I hope it's a movement that continues to grow.
Newcomers should not be viewed or treated as "slaves" to use if they don't understand beyond the basics what is going on here.... even if allowed and one is "free" to do it.
Well, if you grant that devs believe in a sort of agorist philosophy, and that they personally also desire to be beneficial to their community (which is strongly supported by their individual efforts to help new users, for example), then it is possible to understand how they are in denial about malicious profiteering on their platform.
I'm not saying that they didn't intend for the wealthy to profit from SP weighted votes, but rather that they thought that would be the best way of promoting content, because they reckon wealth indicates intelligence, based on their personal experience.
The white paper indicates they expected 90% of rewards to inure to ~33% of accounts, and I believe that seeing 99% of rewards going to 1% of accounts may well have surprised - and dismayed - them.
Their world view has kept them in denial that this result is an experiment that demonstrates their world view is faulty. Their human reliance on their own anecdotal experience is overly weighted by their hubris and exceptionalism. Finally, people are biologically designed to receive a dopamine reward when they deny factual information in opposition to their chosen in group, and, as they are just human, they are as susceptible to this as is anyone.
I am a scientist, not a coder. I am trained to look at the evidence and objectively assess whether it supports a particular hypothesis, while most folks aren't. The constant attempts to mitigate the problems indicate to me a state of denial that wealthy speech isn't more valuable speech, and this verdant growth of mitigations is actually worsening the problems Steemit is facing.
tl;dr I don't think they're malicious, merely humans that, as we all do, think their anecdotal evidence of exceptionalism is true, and that they are in denial of evidence contradicting this.
trufax.... before the Internet, before most of the people on this platform even knew the white noise static of changing a channel on a tv with an actual dial on it, people used to bully others for their lunch money. And in this action the biggest profit for the bully did not reside in the money confiscated as much as in the pride felt & the pats-on-the-back from peers.
I like your way of thinking.
If you think about, why are we allowed to up vote our on posts? That's like owning a store, pulling a dollar out of the cash drawer, buying something for that dollar, putting the dollar back into the cash register, closing it, saying an incantation, opening it, and voila, suddenly there is $1.10 in the drawer.
Do that enough times and you end up with a drawer full of money. But it doesn't help the overall economy any. No movement of "money" between participants for this magic money drawer increase.
It's almost like being a counterfeiter if you think about it.
I tried to upvote your incredibly clever and accurate reply, but steemit's upvote just sits and spins without registering (like this website can do, sit and spin on a big fat ____). I even refreshed 3 times, opened comment in new tab twice.
smh lmao.
@sornprar - I've had the same thing happen to me on occasion. Most likely it is due to the age of my comment, there is a 12 hour window before the 7 day ends that up votes aren't permitted. (It would be nice if it would indicate such on a failed vote, but it doesn't).