Bring back bots! Steem-Engine is a bigger menace!

in #steemmonsters5 years ago (edited)

steemengine_logo.jpg

I do not own this logo. This logo is owned by SE, Aggroed or whoever.


Im kidding ofc. The title was clickbait... well a part of it at least. lol
So ive been doing some digging. Talked to a few folks that fight abuse and unfortunately i stumbled upon something not so great.

I personally dont care much for Steem-engine and the Tribes created. This is just my opinion ofc and if you feel that Tribes offer some value, all the power to you.
I hold that they offer little to no value and that the only thing they do is exert downward pressure on the price. Not until a clear use case pops up for them and them actually create value for Steem i will hold that opinion.
The only Steem-engine token i think has value right now is DEC. Its easy to determine why i think that although (and thats an important word) a part of its use im extremely unhappy with.
There might be others but overall the LEO tokens, PAL, CCC that simply take a topic and mint tokens for it for simply adding a tag to the post i hold in the lowest of regard. The mining SE tokens that create inflation for holding it, same thing.
Some even point to Actifit tokens as something revolutionary but id say those tokens might be the most worthless of the lot.

You shaked your phone for a couple minutes and ill give you a token for it.

Might as well give me a worthless ribbon for participation.
And these are not tokens for excellence in achievement.

Steem is different. Your contribution is rewarded. Posts can have educational value, entertainment value, along with the basic "means of payment". Tokens that just get given out for task completion have as much value as a high five you give your pal for bringing the beers.

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Or the tokens that reward you for just adding a tag to your Steem post. Its nice getting some more shittokens, but overall that doesnt really add any value.. Currently. Things change ofc.

But thats not what i wanted to talk about.

Some of you have been introduced to Whaleshares.

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Some have even tried it out. Ive used Whaleshares for around 6 months. I liked the drive of the folks in charge, i liked their enthusiasm but at the end of the day their lack of vision, their incompetence and lack of self awareness made me move away.
They did pride themselves in one thing.
Fuzzy, a former whale, claimed that Whaleshares was the first to implement the equivalent of SMTs ,or what SE tokens are, in the form of "WHALETOKENS".

See, the way that whale tokens worked (Some did lock their markets) in the negative sense was pretty simple.

  1. You powerdown some WLS
  2. You trade the WLS on the Bitshares market for BTS
  3. You use the BTS to buy "Whaletokens"
  4. You send the Whaletoken to the Whale operating the bot
  5. He upvotes you for the larger amount of WLS then you spent on buying the whaletoken

This created a enormous downward pressure on WLS and in a year the price of WLS plummeted 99,7%. WLS right now is basically worthless. Its so worthless that even paying 5 steem a month for sharing automatically from Steem to Whaleshares the same post is a complete waste of time.

The same downward pressure exists for SE even though it is much smaller at this time since SE has low Volume. If the volume increases the SE created bots could potentially mimic the effect whaletokens had on WLS.
STEEM is sold on the market for tokens that in turn offer a low cost of promoting on STEEM front ends, ruining the proof of brain, creating dumb inflation and reducing the value of the trending spot just like Bots did.
For that reason SE bots are much worse for the STEEM ecosystem because they not only do the exact same thing as "oldsteem bots" but they also take steem out of the system to purchase tokens that offer nothing more then a return in STEEM that comes from the reward pool.

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@aggroed, from someone that created Steem Monsters with Matt (sorry if i forgot someone else). and Minnowbooster with a few other witnesses, both projects creating a massive value for STEEM (one being community support, the other a great use case) has decided to make both into bots and devolve himself into the current biggest enabler of #oldsteem and bidbot use.
.... But with a twist.

Memos no longer show the bidbot use and its all not so open to see since SE is being used meaning that you have to dig deep to find what is actually a vote purchase. Things most people do not know how to do and will not find time to do.

That makes SE bots potentially very dangerous.

Aggroed has basically made true the claim Fyrst made some time ago.

If bots are banned from STEEM or somehow unwelcome, ill just sell my votes for Bitcoin.

SE is Fyrsts Bitcoin.

Im not saying thats all SE is, but it is indeed a part of what SE is.

Now i know that people love Aggroed and i dont blame them. The dude for all the credit he might have taken from others, obviously has had major positive effect on STEEM. More then me, you or most of us.... but one thing we should not allow and thats being inconsistent in our criticism and being hypocritical in our actions because of who we might think someone is.

On Steem, no one is above Steem and no one should be given a pass.

Just some info and ill see you around in the next "ball busting post." ;)

Sort:  

I have nothing against alt coins. The market can decide what they're worth.

I'm against alt coins being used to buy votes on here. Not only do they serve to undermine honest voting like all other forms of content indifferent voting behavior, they have the additional affect of causing people to dump Steem to pump their own altcoin.

Therefore, I have been and will continue to target these services with my downvotes to make it as unprofitable as possible to use them.

I dont even mind the dumping of steem to prop up an altcoin. Its a free market.

The problem occurs when the following happens:

Steem dumped into SE altcoin - altcoin purchase of steem vote - payout - Steem dumped into SE altcoin ...

The negative effect is two sided. Downward pressure on price + oldsteem bot use.

Thats why i say that would be worse along with not being able to track it as easily.

Posted using Partiko Android

So, are you going to downvote those over-the-top SCT posts?

They've said they're shutting down shop (the vote selling part at least) on the the 1st of Oct so I'm leaving them alone until then.

Steem monsters is great and I've bought thousands of packs in support of that project. It makes me sad that the @steemmonsters new whale status there was so much fanfare about was just positioning the account for a new DEC-based bid bot. Now I see @steemmonsters bids stacked along with sct vote bots and all manner of garbage. It makes me very conflicted about continuing to support @steemmonsters.

Aggyboi simply saw an opportunity to make some money and obfuscate the bot issue by hiding behind SE and his own reputation.
It sucks honestly.

Ive put in quite a bit of money in Steemonsters and promoted it on twitter and where ever i could. Seeing this other side of Aggyboi is very concerning.

One key difference is that Steem has flags. I imagine that once people catch on to others being abusive in this way, their posts will be flagged just as they are now with bid bots and it will become unprofitable. Disagreement with reward has been, is and always will be the number one reason for the downvote. I think Whaleshares not having that mechanism is a fatal flaw.

Personally, I don't see any huge value added with all these tokens either. At least not most of them as they function right now. I don't plan on purchasing any but I'll take ones I get and stake them and/or trade them for Steem.

I see very little value in them as well, for now. The only one with a use case is DEC and they tainted DEC by making Steemonsters a bot.

For more than 1 reason, I've been concentrating on m y nice operations at Steemit (incl curation even in the times before the last HF), hence I've been missing out on all the stuff ongoing. I noticed indeed with the emerging of the Steemit-look alike tribes with their own tokens, value is not added at all. I've see more and more users trying to mine a lot of different tokens by adding all tags they can add. I've even notice more and more users turning to UIs that allow more than 5 tags to be added so they can include even more tags to get even more tokens. SMT sounds all nice, but if this is the way SMT will work when it will be made available, we shall re-think if SMTs will be a good thing for Steem to happen.

All of it depends on the use case.
If indeed whats happening now with SE continues with SMTs that would imo not bode well for Steem.

Posted using Partiko Android

Memos no longer show the bidbot use and its all not so open to see since SE is being used meaning that you have to dig deep to find what is actually a vote purchase. Things most people do not know how to do and will not find time to do.

Is this something that was changed recently, i.e. because of the downvotes onto bid botted content?

It was never a feature as far as i know. I dont know the tech but based on what Traf told me SE communicates with steem via CJson.

The issue isnt if it was removed or not. The issue is that its harder to track SE bots and vote selling because of that.
Their effects are seen on Steem but their use doesnt show on steem frontends.

Posted using Partiko Android

This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.

You slightly missed the point in the comment on the news post.

This was about the dangers of SE based bots.
Just a heads up. 😉

Posted using Partiko Android

Yes I think I used too neutral a tone to reflect your concerns.

How would you word it?

"Concerns with bidbots moving to Steem Engine and why those type bots pose a bigger danger then oldsteem bots."

Something in that regard.

Thanks for that - now amended.

most interesting, and 't was to be expected, i totally agree a token on top of steem derived from steem using bloated inflation from the pool to create its value wont do much good, but its simple logic that if there is 500 billion to invest in crypto and theres not just BTC but 20000 coins the value will be dispersed and according to statistical history , the real money will go for the gold before it goes for the silver ...
Your take on how steemmonsters just used the bru-ha to position themselves as number one bidbot is somewhat refreshing, i saw it as a GOOD thing but now i do have more perspective and much to my surprise, looking at steemmonsters where most bods never gave any actual roi (maybe they did at the start) i see most of them promise CRAZY amounts now ... im seriously gonna have to check that out, thanks

just did, maybe i'll publish a report on REAL roi in a 100 years when i had enoughdough to try them all (b/c i did once and it turned out most of them were full of it and gave less than you put in by default)
pointed me to another interesting bit i havent followed up lately as it doesnt really matter anymore : the price, at this level, despite everything both steem AND sbd are down a cent again ?

consecutive days of up over down , steemit not selling off, monsters adding 120.000 among others yet still it goes DOWN ?

and thats why i didnt even bother checking thanks for this post, it was most interesting, insightful and informative

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o wait (3rd and last edit) .. it just dawns on me : this shows a great opportunity !

looking at how steemit.inc (pretending not to be STEEM) tries to counter inflation with all kinds of laps and patches and the actual moneymakers adapt on the fly faster than you can say hardfork ...

the original idea of saint satoshi was to have NO inflation after 21 million, that was like part of the core of the original idea, steem took that part to another dimension and replaced it with hyper-inflation. It's been my conviction for a while the solution lies not in patching but in capping it. Now if no one can find a way to do that because they're rusted shut in their thou shalt good content and its not for the money but it says so on the sign-up page ways leading to all kinds of negative energy and enmity and people thinking censorship is actually a GOOD thing and you can define and measure the good in content as a single entity or provide some formula that tells you what a good post is ...
why not just cap it and let the bots solve the issue lol

HARD CORE ....
they seem to be creative when it comes to money

Hi @lordbutterfly!

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Thanks for the post @lordbutterfly, this post was submitted into the HoboDAO contest #6 by @hobo.fund.

I would like to defend the Hobo token (ticker symbol: HBO) on SE, which is quite a bit different from most SE tokens and is not used in bot upvote services.

The Hobo Token Supports Quality Content

The Hobo token is not used to automatically upvote users of its token for spending tokens. The Hobo token is used for submitting content for entry into a HoboDAO contest. Only five (5) submissions will receive rewards, while all other submissions to the contest do not receive anything.

The five (5) winning submissions are chosen by a group of people we call Casters, which review the articles and score each post.

The Hobo token has a use

Proof of Brain is an interesting concept but I would say that people are sometimes overvaluing this distribution system. It is beneficial some of the time, and other times it is a bad idea. An inflationary token still needs to have a real use case other than to just mint more on the basis of public opinion.

The rise of indie authorship is wonderful, but it also brings about volume beyond what readers can handle. It can be good to have some bottlenecks in place. Steem's bottleneck setup is POB via stake-weighted voting, which has some flaws to it. One key flaw is that this means wealth begets authoritative opinion on Steem, the HoboDAO aims to adjust this for fairness.

I don't wish to take up too much space in this comment, so if you would like to learn more please feel free to check out the @hobo.media blog to see for yourself.

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