RE: 100 DAYS OF STEEM : Day 33 - Tackling Abuse on Steem - Part I - What is Abuse?
As you stated, fighting abuse on Steem is a complex topic. I think it is nearly impossible to let the code of the blockchain alone protect us from abuse. Limiting the number of posts per account will hit very active users and community bots as well. For example, a very active curator who comments on 50 posts a day should not be limited. Limiting only the number of possible root posts per day would not prevent abusers from creating and self-voting comments instead.
One automatic solution that could help for extreme cases of milking would be to add kind of a max_total_pending_payout constant, which defines a maximum total pending payout amount for all active posts per account, but it would not be easy to implement something like this and it might have a slightly negative effect on the nodes performance.
For now I support that Steemit Inc. takes on the role of judge of abuse cases. If something goes wrong, the community can contact the witnesses or leave a comment in your posts to publicly discuss the issue.
For the future I would prefer a solution that enables witnesses to vote on abuse cases. I will have further thoughts on the subject and discuss possible solutions in a future post.
Instead of limiting the number of posts one could introduce 'diminishing returns' which means one still could write as many posts as one wishes, but starting from a certain number of posts upvotes on every further posts would have a weaker effect than upvotes on previous posts. That means a very active author would earn less per post with an increasing number of posts (this effect could for example start after his second post per day) but still could earn anything.
Similarly one could try to prevent the effectivity of upvoting the same users again and again (circle voting). How about if after each vote on a specific account (including one's own account) each further vote on the same account would lead to significantly less curation reward for the voter and less profit for the upvoted account? Thus, when upvoting an account which I had already upvoted before, my voting power would be smaller than in case I upvote an account which I didn't upvote before.
If I upvote for example my wife, my daughter or my cat more than twice per day every following upvote for the same account would get weaker an weaker (like voting power is exhausting anyway already, just faster).
This would work, but it would come with a side effect. If I would create a few shit posts before posting a real masterpiece of a post, the good post might receive less rewards than the bad ones :)
As we discussed many times over the years, in my eyes this would be the ultimately perfect solution. Using something similar to the calculated CSI on SteemWorld as a factor, so that the voted
rshareswould be multiplied by it prior to subtracting them from the pool and adding them to the active votes.This would not eliminate all cases of abuse (for example, if someone owns many accounts with much SP and votes each day with a different one), but it would work very well for most common cases.
Then just publish the "shit posts" after the masterpiece? ;-) (Of course also the ability to receive full votes for posts would recover again after some time.)
Or maybe not post any "shit posts" at all? Seriously, if you yourself think a post is a shit post, then, it is a shit post...
You won't find any "shit post" from me (but sometimes kinds of humorous meant replies).
"Using something similar to the calculated CSI on SteemWorld as a factor, so that the voted rshares would be multiplied by it prior to subtracting them from the pool and adding them to the active votes."
Sorry but I think that it's not a good idea to use CSI on SteemWorld as in my opinion CSI isn't a reliable factor.
If I see that an account with 100% self-voting (no vote to anybody else just vote for the own account) has an CSI from 0.0 but other accounts has negative CSI, f.e. my account in the moment, than Steemworld consider it as better to vote 100% only your own account instead of voting for others.
How this can be a reliable factor ?
I think as long as you can claim for every approximately 5000 Steempower one account a week I don't think that this solution will work.
If a whale has 500.000 Steempower he can just claim approximately 100 new accounts at once and than post in every account only one post every week.
So in this case he could always get full rewards for selfvoting.
He wouldn't be able to handle all these accounts in a way that every of them could create more or less reasonable comments/posts. However, pure automated comments, created for farming puposes only, could easily be detected and flagged by members of an implemented anti abuse committee, which I suggested, as well.
OK I wrote about 100 acconts.
You are right this is really hard to handle.
But if you allow one vote in full strengh every day it would be also ok to use only 10 accounts.
Every day one post in every of the 10 accounts and the other 9 vote this post.
I think it's not much difference in time to post 10 times a day in one account or to post in 10 accounts only once a day, isn't it ?
It's rather easy to spot (even by automated algorithms) if these ten accounts were only interested in upvoting each other instead of upvoting other users as well ...
For example also Voting CSI in SteemWorld would be very low.
haha, so I am the worsest guy at all cause my Voting CSI is negativ (-0,6)
Indeed, just another evidence of how well these kinds of algorithms are working. ;-)
Yes with 100% selfvoting you have 0.0 (like your friend hae...) so I am worse cause I have 0.0% selfvoting and - 1,1.
OK so your opinion is that selfvoting is better than votings others.
Haha - I even get worse than I was before, now -1,1 :-)
Such I bad boy I am.
Completely useless. Alts can be used to circumvent that and frequently are by abusers.
Nothing wrong with plain old PoB. But it takes an active anti-abuse community to do curb abuse. Not even Steemit, Inc with its mightly voting power can curb anything if there is no anti-abuse community to constantly bring abuse to its attention.
I'm on Hive but I want Steem to succeed also. In fact, forks are good in the world of DPoS because that's how things decentralise . Each project takes a different direction and attracts different people.
NOT completely useless!
I am pretty sure that most current abusers wouldn't take the effort to create that many alt accounts which are necessary to cirumvent this hurdle.
In addition it would be very easy to spot these accounts it they weren't active themselves and only received upvotes from one single abuser account (or circle upvote each other).
Concerning the committee, that's my idea since a long time.
It would only take creating one alt to double the number of daily posts one can make from ten to twenty.
That can easily be circumvented, too. Add a bit of randomization in the process and the detection becomes much harder. Add a few legit posts in the mix to attract votes from others.
Nothing wrong with a committee.
I also suggested to reduce the number of fully rewarded posts per day. In the early STEEM days this number was actually four per day.
The combination of these two suggestions would be rather effective in my opinion.
I disagree. That's all rather effortful and most abusers wouldn't do that. In the past it was very easy to spot the majority of abusers just by checking their 'Voting CSI' in SteemWorld.
For the remaining rest the 'committee' could be responsible.
Sure it can be tried. Time will tell if it works.
Another interesting related idea is a tax on too many rshares spent on the same accounts within a time period. That would force users to either create a lot of alts, which would cost them money in the form of account creation, or actually motivate them to look for more users to curate, which would be an excellent thing for user retention.
@steemitblog
I think that their is nothing like abuse on steem. We don't need to talk over it.
The post and comments can be different from user to user. How can we decide this is abuse. Every user can have different thoughts. They can write/read anything they like. The one thing can be right for one user but same thing can be wrong for other user. Their is no way.
For post payout, Milking : For one user it may 1$, for other 10$, for third 50$, for fifth 500$, for sixth 5000$, can be anything or me it is XXXXXXXXX $. That's not the criteria to decide the abuse. They have invested so much money here to work and support others. That's not abuse.
I don't find anyone who is abusing the system till date (from 2 and half years). So, I never downvote anyone. Their may conflict of interest/thoughts like @themarkymark and me always have different thoughts, we didn't agree on any single point. But i many times agree with @steemchiller thoughts. For abuse point i didn't agree with statement that, their is abuse on steem. Here is the power of feedom. Do whatever you like:
ALL IS WELL.
MY APPEAL TO ALL STEEMIANS : PLEASE DON'T SPREAD NEGATIVITY ON STEEM PLATFORM, MOST OF THE NEGATIVE PEOPLES ALREADY GONE TO HIVE. LET THEM SPREAD NEGATIVITY AT HIVE, NOT HERE. WE ARE STEEM WITH POSITIVE PEOPLE WITH UNITY.
Sorry @mehta, when I see that it looks like abuse for me do not you think so:
Already in the past all kinds of farming (for example the self-votes executed by @haejin / @ranchorelaxo), circle voting, use of bid bots ... prevented me from investing more money into STEEM!
STEEM was always described as a community blockchain where quality content gets rewarded. Such a social media site with really great posts on trendig should attract more and more investors. However, if these potential investors get aware of the fact that STEEM is only a place for people who try to get as rich as possible as fast as possible, without to care at all about STEEM price, reputation of the platform and future development, they will look for other opportunities and invest their money.
For example when using bid bots there is never a chance that posts are selected according to their quality but only according to the money anybody is ready to pay.
If a user like @haejin would upvote many small accounts instead of upvoting himself only, he could contribute enormously to the user retention rate of the platfom. And as we all know, the value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users. That means @haejin would increase the value of his own investment. But he (like many others) is completely focused on his short term profit.
Very turely said but it doesn't means this is a abuse. This require a different kind of thinking. If we grow all people together, I will grow automatically. This things has to be understand by all. But i am sorry to say that most of the user not doing so. It is not only @haejin. But again it is not an abuse.
Can You provide your reply on my comment no 1 to 9 on above? This clear me how you think an abuse.
We already talked on downvoting too much, so i didn't favor free downvoting OR say different voting power. What you say about system providing abuse facilities for top 20 witness earning others very less?
This is not entirely true, because we all share one reward pool, @mehta. If one user would reward himself so much that there are no more rewards for other people in the pool, do you think it would be a fair practise?
On top of that, there are users who create many posts automatically with a bot, upvote them and sell the weekly rewards to buy Hive tokens. This does not benefit Steem at all. It puts pressure on the price and shows to external investors that we are not able to create a fairly rewarding environment.
The rewards for all Steemians (also yours) will increase, if we get rid of those pool abusers.
Right, and for sure we won't grow if too many new users, who barely earn anything, at the same time are getting discouraged by observing this shameless kind of self-enrichment.
Brother, how you doing?
Sorry for using this off-topic comment to contact you.
I want to make a suggestion for steemworld: could you include in the visualization of rewards to come, the payments that we will get for having been added as beneficiaries in some publication of another user?
Only that. Thanks for your attention.
Thanks for your idea! It is currently not possible to retrieve those rewards directly from the blockchain via regular RPC nodes, but they should be displayed in the Coming Rewards indeed (maybe in an extra tab).
I'm currently very busy with other things, therefore it may take a while, but I will put this on my list ;)
My pleasure!
Go ahead buddy, great wrok.
I think that you don't understand my point. This is not an abuse. It looks like abuse to you but not me. They have the power to upvote and they use it and this permission is given by steem blockchain code. How this can be a abuse. That is not abuse to me.
Most of the people uses power they have. Why we have given power to them? Take power from them. The power is given by system, if system is wrong then modify/change the system.
Are you want to give power in reverse order? Those have more SP having less vote value and those have Less SP get more power. Or any new concept.
We invite you to read [The Steem White paper, page .14 for referance].
Abuse is defined by the opinions of stakeholders. You may consider something as
not an abusebut other people might think otherwise. It is a democratic-like system that is based on stake. If the majority of the stake considers that doing X should be considered as abuse, then no one can do anything about it since this is also code. The only way to influence such a decision is by buying more stake and invest to influence the consensus.The code of the blockchain also allows them to downvote. It does not matter if you do not consider X as abuse, such a definition can only be defined by a decision that will be based on consensus.
Thanks @symbionts for information.
Thanks for giving your thoughts on this matter.
That being said, there absolutely is abuse on the chain. It is just how you look at it and IF you want to see it.
I never see an abuse. If i see abuse then whole things going on steem is abuse including all as i mention in my first comment.
Interesting idea, but many users own multiple accounts which mutually upvote each other ...
SteemIt was down for 20+ hours over a simple bug. Yeah I am going to say SteemIt wont add shit. Lol
What is with the idea to take out the worth from selfvoting ?
If a vote was only a worth if you vote somebody else post or command - would this be a solution ?
Please see my reply here.
OK it's a good reason.
But: Correct me if I am wrong ... if users have multiple accounts they claimed this accounts with ressource credits from the main account. So in the end their will be one "mother-account" and as the blockchain save all I think you can also sort this out.
So what about the possibility to group the "mother-account" and all "child-accounts" together and take away worth from voting between all this accounts ?
There are ways to create accounts completely anonymously and I think in future there will be more account creation services, which offer to directly create an account via BTC or LTC payment for a small fee.
In this case the service's account would be the 'mother-account', so it's not really possible to solve it by watching the connection between creator and created account.
And of course, the account 'steem' is the 'mother-account' of all via Steemit created ones. Even there it would be possible to create multiple accounts.
"And of course, the account 'steem' is the 'mother-account' of all via Steemit created ones. Even there it would be possible to create multiple accounts."
I thought that you are allowed to open only one account the "free way" over steemit ... but probably they are not really able to check this.
I think allowing or supporting Steemit to be the judge is a big mistake. You know that they have proven themselves to be incapable of impartiality. You experienced that first-hand. For you to support such a thing is irresponsible in my opinion.
They have also shown blatant disregard for the will of the community, unless you would allow them to redefine who the community actually is. In that case, they would again be unfit to be judge.
This is a big mistake.
Dear @steemchiller
We're clearly on the same page here. STEEM won't survive if STINC wouldn't get involved. That's my strong belief.
Yours,
Piotr
I agree it will be impossible to design a code that will make it abuse-impossible. Humans are designed to find loopholes in the system. This problem just needs common sense.
Steemit would also get my support if decides they are going to take up this role and task. I am just afraid this will only give fuel to the haters and could give Steemit a bad name. A delegation or a community account, just like the Steemcurator02-07 would solve the problem without Steemit being put in the spotlight.
Such account, or delegation is something we know for years and is completely accepted by the community. It worked in the past. The ones running those accounts left, so its time for new community members to step up and continue.
If you have time, I made a comment on this topic in here, and would love your thoughts on that.
KR Ciska