WHALE SELF-VOTING: IS IT A SCAM!?
What's gooood fellow Mastermindz,
Trust you all had a glorious weekend. Here's some thoughts from today's daily discussion over at Steemit Mastermind group.
There's always something happening in the ocean dear friends, we recently talked about minnow copy-paste comment spammers and actually had some success dealing with the spam abuse of our members. Bravo! I've recently been following @lewisjfclarke's lead by responding to spammers with wit and charm. An entertaining way to add some flavor and spam the spam. However I decided I'm not going out of my way to throw away VP unless it's outright abusive, threatening, plagiarized or pedo stuff etc.
@lewisjfclarke getting spammed about his home team.
Today we're looking up the other end of the scale at whales. This dude @jerrybanfield shared a compelling and lengthy exposé of a few of the TOP earners on Steemit. He reveals that from his position they're gaming the voting system and draining our rewards pool by carrying on some sort of a stealth self-voting scam?
It's a pretty good article and brings up some fair points and clear issues that we need to fix before coming out of beta. Things are not exactly as intended in Ned and Dan's white paper that's for sure. Warning it's a LONG read and you have to be willing to jump down a rabbit hole of comments to get a full picture. I'll do my best to summarize in simpler minnow speak to share with you the points I found most relevant.
@jerrybanfield goes detective on @mindhunter!
The counter arguments seems equally valid in my opinion. From the liberty minded "do you" and do no harm, we each have every right to vote for whomever we wish. So what if you sell votes, delegate SP, or collab with other whales to game? Then as long as no "rules" are broken in this supposedly decentralized arena then who cares?
Well perhaps a few might, though they don't even know it and that could be a problem. I mean most of us are just swimming around picking up a few SBD dollars 'n' cents here and there. What goes on in whale territory doesn't effect us, does it? Well perhaps it's more like this; we don't know what we don't know, and perhaps beyond that there's what we didn't know, that we never would have known, unless someone told us right? Confused much? Perhaps like the tree falling in the forest, we have to accept we'll never know it all.
source
Ok cut to the chase.. Here's my best and certainly not expert take on the situation. Du we got a situation? SP (steem power) is how your VP (voting power) is calculated. The SP relates to how much of the rewards pool you delegate and depending on the % of VP you use equates to how much value you add with your upvote! Yay we got this so far, right?
So what's been happening far in the deep, down there where the whales hang out. Is they've been swimming around in some kinda circle-jerk formation. Posting strange comments in obscure threads, simple things like "me too" with funny memes and whatever. THEN, now here's the sneeky and kinda genius bit, right before the 7 day window ends, they upvote these comments with 100% whale power and BOOM! Big loads secretly draining out the backdoor with no one on the trending page any wiser.
source
So what I hear you say, yeah I didn't really know what either? Until of course this Jerry guy suggests some consider it to be a manipulation of the rewards pool. Well ok now I'm interested, see the amount of the total rewards these whales delegate to each other takes away from the remaining STEEM that the rest of us small fish share out. Is this even right? Anyone wanna slide in the comments to confirm if this is the case? How much is the rewards pool worth and how often it replenished? How do we verify any of this is true? Is this what witnesses want our votes to do? Oh so many questions.. LOL!
Anyway that's how I've read it so far. Now the counter argument, of course that's important too right. Let's hear both sides fair and square. Well the counter is that no whale was magically born a whale, they all did something to get their reputation right? Whether they invested directly into STEEM and bought SP, or they were simply posting early in the right place, right time kinda thing. The free world accepts all may do as they like right? Do their votes cause harm to others? Is anyone really hating on them for gaming to grow their investments? After all we're all invested in our own success as much as the success of this platform.
I have to ask myself, how much have I actually invested here? What would I do in their fins? Ok enough with these fishy analogies already. So that's the news through the blockchain and I'm just doing my part to echo what's going on. Now you all know what I know, so we stand a better chance of growing together. It never hurts to know these things right? I mean it might seem a bit gloomy but if anything it might either inspire more investors to buy in or it will help us appreciate the value of our rewards. Remember most of us have never earned from any other social media platform simply for creating our amazing content.
source @jeffhiedeman
One final thought, so there was a few follow up articles I read and then from the comments leading onto other posts. One of the whales involved with this alleged "self-voting scam". What was proposed was a way to combat steem-abuse would be to remove our stake from flags, otherwise known as downvotes. This means that flagging would be consensus based, more individual votes equal harder flagging. As opposed to some whale with huge SP whacking on a single flag and basically demonetizing whoever they wish, which is how it currently is.
This seems a little problematic as we the minnows would actually have to come together, support and unify. Which we don't have the best track record of doing so far. Gathering a majority to rid kiddie porn or plagiarism seems a lot less effective than grabbing a whales attention and saying hey big guy.. what we gonna do about this? A plus would be removing stake would also mean flagging no longer reduced our VP. Flags could then be used more freely with no loss of value to those who are deserving of our upvotes. Not sure that is a good thing or not? Seems equal to the argument of removing flags all together to me?
However, as I consider all these ideas and reminisced the journey we've all been on as a platform. Watching it unfold, transform and evolve faster than a squid through the corals. I wondered how does this help in the case of the whale circle jerk? I mean there's more of us than them right? So we'd be free to flag rapey behavior with less fear of the whale sized retaliation slapping us into a sub-zero rep. While whales would still have freedom to upvote quality content, strategically curate their investments if they like and still be held accountable. Would this help balance out the disproportions we're experiencing? Or would a few greedy whales still be able to splash around in their very own VIP steem room!
source @hilarski
Oh well the brain boggles, what will come of this platform eh? It's definitely been a roller coaster ride so far that's for sure. Of course these antics are an ugly threat to possible mass adoption. For as long as there's even the slightest murmur among the small fish of any financial gaming then the scam label is gonna stick. Why would anyone from fakebook dive in our ocean? At least over there they don't know how much money is moving behind the scenes, they can just busy themselves playing farm builder or whatever the fuck.
Here it's all transparent on steemd and forever in the blockchain. I'm doing my best not to worry too much about it fellow minnows. We can swim strong together and as long as we aren't emotionally or financially dependent on the rewards then we can wait it out and see. I'm simply here watching it evolve and staking my claim to a platform that has the potential to change history.
Here exists the possibility of a fair and free world, only push the button when you feel inspired and accept that we can all co-exist together if we choose to! The ocean is abundant, deep and plentiful
source @onlyvoluntary
Either that or we put a round the clock watch on them whale and make sure we get at least a 13 week power down warning should any of the big movers dump a ton of STEEM. That way we can all jump ship together, serve us up with salt and vinegar and look back at what could have been.. LOL!
Chin up though, I'm feeling the dolphins are on it and it might take one or many forks but we can fix this and serve the whole.. we just have to find the last "missing piece of the steem puzzle".
Wholeness.
What I love about Steemit is the anarchy of having the freedom to game to website in any way possible. I don't think that anyone is draining anything. Sure the Steem Pool could be distributed more evenly but fork by fork we improve the system. In the meantime there is money to take for everyone participating in the game.
Now for the whale the whole scenario must look like a huge chess board to influence entire communities by upvoting their projects. Like you said the potential is enormous. That means that the stake our whales have will be worth even more of a fortune it is now with even more influence on the platform. So if they are smart they hodl and play. It doesn't matter how the game is being played as long as it is being played and steadily improved.
The one thing that will push Steemit the most are discussions like these that get viral on the platform and spark initiatives and ideas how the community can react to unwanted content or behaviour. The hive mind will always find the answer in a system like this.
@flauwy That's what I love too, although I do feel it can be a steep learning curve for those leaving centralization and new to the ideas of free world thinking.
I'm interested in your perspective that this is like a huge whale chess game and no one is draining anything. I do agree that those with large delegation have the right to play as they will. However is there a set amount of STEEM in each rewards pool payout? I'm not sure I fully get how that works yet. I do see that there is money for all and perhaps this is what is best to focus on? However it does look shady when salty minnows see how rewards get played.
"It doesn't matter how the game is being played as long as it is being played and steadily improved."
This is so true and thank you for adding this perspective, it's easy to get stuck in a small bubble when truly we have the whole ocean. Here's to the hive mind and to open and honest discussion towards solutions.
Finally may I ask what is your opinion on removing SP from flags?
It is so easy for a Minnow to think how unfair some things on Steemit are. That is because the whole functionality is confusing and needs to be simplified. But do these people expect? Outside of Steemit no one is handing them money over. But here it becomes something that must be for everybody and hence must be distributed evenly or else...
But that is of course BS because the money comes from the investors trusting in Steem for various reasons. Some will upvote themselves, others will invest their upvotes carefully into great projects while others just run around and do upvote-jerking-off. That is all cool and their right. It adds variety to the platform. Thanks for putting so much money into Steem dear Mr. and Mrs. Whale or otherwise the price would be lower and probably less people would come and join.
I think whales are overrated anyway. Everyone wants a whale to swing by and upvote their stuff. But it is much cooler to have tons of Dolphins or an aremy of
the deadMinnows. With that you can make even more money in the long run.Either way there are so many things on Steemit where despite all the negative mechanics the community is hatching the most marvelous dragons. So I think that we need to be patient, enjoy the ride, hustle the game like a ten year old power raiding World of Warcraft and embrace the changes and updates on our way. And if we really want to change something than I suggest saving for some equippment and becoming a witness for Steem and contribute on all levels to the progress. Or even better: develop your own 3rd party app based on Steem.
About remong SP from flags: I don't know about that. Taking away to stupid possibility for a whale to destroy a career on Steemit is good! But wouldn't that open the door to even more ridiculous flagging? I think I don't have a particular opinion about this topic yet without more knowledge of the actual mechanics and looking at some flagging statistics.
@flauwy Hey I wanted to really sit down and brew on this reply. Thank you so much for dropping so much perspective on the topic. It's so valuable that anyone reading this comes away with a balanced view of what's going on. I appreciate you for that.
I agree that I and other minnows can be very thankful for all STEEM investors for their part in growing this platform and fronting the value in their chosen way. We all serve how best we can and provide value in our chosen ways right.
I enjoyed your power raiding analogy and agree to the extent not to piss other people off with spam comments and certainly not to plagiarize. However like I've said, every one has their own hustle and intentions. Plenty space for all and as you said, patience and enjoying the ride is key.
The flag adjustments will be interesting, I too have no strong opinion either ways yet. I started out feeling flags should simply be outright removed. However as I've read more and learned ok, wholeness is balance and we would be disarmed to defend the platform if we removed the yin to our yang. For the same reason I'm not sure about the imbalance of having stake scalable upvotes but not down.
It will be interesting for sure as we fork it out. Oh and yes absolutely agree that if one wishes to serve Steemit in the highest then they'd be best to step up to run for witness.
Anyway thanks for expanding this discussion with your insights. Much appreciated and you have a new follower.
Steem on! 🙏
Thanks for letting me be part of it. I enjoyed the article and comments. I like the Yin and Yang analogy.
You should chech out @craig-grant , his post one or two sentences so he can upvote himself and earn 20$+ I unfollowed him so I don't know is he still doing that, what I saw people stated to flag his posts
@cmoljoe So what I'm learning is that a lot of people feel self-voting is a issue am I getting that right? Personally I feel if one build SP on here then it's their choice if they are self serving or charitable right? I mean I get that some might feel its not cool to behave this way, however we could also look at it as inspiration to build and stack SP could we not?
Of course group circle jerking is perhaps more debatable, however one individual doing so it more clear cut to me. Isn't it the same as having the upvote box ticked in our own editor page? I only recently realized that this is seen as poor practice and yet I'm pretty sure a minnow with no following would want to self promote at least to get seen in the first place no?
In the free world it can't be one rule for one and different rules for others, especially just because they've built up more SP? In fact isn't the whole point of decentralization to be free from rules entirely? Good food for thought bro, thanks.
We don't need go deep in to this. It is obvious when someone is just taking money from Steemit and when he is offering his views of world or whatever. @craig-grant was posting just for money, but in the end I don't care, that is his choise. I don't like it, so I unfollowed him...it's simple in the end.
@cmoljoe True that, here's to each and everyone's free will choice. Cheers!
Interesting one. Was not aware of this. And wouldn't surprise me at all if it were true.
For sure it will drain the reward pool a little more than it is already currently being drained by the top 1% of Steem Power holders. As you say, they were not born Whales. They did something to put them in this position and as a group they support each other. And in many cases they make a big effort to support the rest of us too!
There was a time (around 6 months ago) when all the Whales stopped voting for a period to see how this affected the system. And in truth, there wasn't much noticeable difference.
So, I am left asking myself this... would I do what they do if I could?
Yep :)
@samstonehill Well some of the supporting whales came forward in the comments and acknowledged that they are doing this, only disputing that they were not alts for the main guy and doing so under their own free will agreement.
They can and some do make a huge difference to support the rest of us yes and again that is their free will prerogative to do so.As we saw recently with @iamjamie's post, it makes a huge impact and I for one am thankful for this gift based economy.
I don't feel as great about those "me too" comments and the sneaking around hoping nobody notices, however as you say.. would I do what they do if I could?
Personally I don't think I would, I don't feel good about myself if I'm intentionally over rewarding something of little value. Not saying those who do should or shouldn't do what they do.
After all this is the free, decentralized world we are hoping will empower the many more than the few. I'm sure most of us are agreed it's long past time to let go of that old paradigm.
Here's to wholeness and balance.
Thank you @kenistyles for this interesting post. Yes, there is an issue here. I am helping the Thai community growing and I see that kind of behaviors especially to the ones who have a bigger wallet. As the community grows I communicate that we need them to vote for others and make the pool bigger. But some doesn't want to give up on their practice. They upvote their own content and also every single comment they write. If they reply to comment they give one cent to the comment and they give a few dollars for their own reply. This is very unfair and dirty for others but I see also others now understanding what is happening and start to leave the ones who do that. So may be in the end they will end up alone with only their own upvote. But in Steemit I see it a lot with very large whale it is like a never ending circle with also gang voting. Let see what new version of the platform will bring us. Thank you to put this on the table.
@ricko66 Welcome mate, it's really just my thoughts on the original work done by @jerrybanfield to be fair. I wouldn't have even thought to investigate what's going on outside my community. It sure does add perspective though, one that I feel is important for us all to keep in mind.
I love that you are working with a Thai community, this is something I would very much love to assist with where I can. I've already seen the positive impact of sharing Steemit with those in my immediate circle, for Thai people a few dollars here and there goes a very long way. Thank you for helping others see the benefits of the blockchain and how we are using it.
About the "unfair and dirty" behaviours of others I don't know if I fully agree on that. I believe it is surely unattractive to new adopters, however it is their right and free will to do as they please. It is their choice and their SP after all. I feel you are right about the shift in awareness. Others will come to see this behavior does not serve the greater whole and make their own decisions about who to support and who to expose.
Scam isn't the right word. Scams are for whales colluding to circle jerk vote each other so they don't get a little jizz on their face for being greedy and I guess feel better about it. You know my stance, it's destructive to the platform and worse, it makes the smaller vested accounts follow suit in hopes to either get a vote in return or make money curating. Neither of those things happens to any reliable extent, but that's even more of the reward pool drained chasing money instead of promoting content. I try not to focus on the money any more than I have to and it's also why I don't call out names even though I easily could. People have to change themselves.
@clayboyn Truth and what's a little jizz between friends right?
I do know your position and when I looked at the effects of their example you're right, that was definitely part of the motivation for forming our own little guild-like support group.
So you're on point in that unless hyper managed these efforts seem unreliable and perhaps even ineffective in comparison to those heavy with SP. I'm not going so far as to say our smaller vested curation guilds are destructive. However I wholly agree the whale bukakke does not look good to mass population and specially any potential new users.
That's a massive cock block to all of us for mass adoption and the rise of STEEM in my opinion. Moving forward, "trying" not to focus on the money is noble and ideal if only we could all do that. In reality it's right here in our face and even more so when we clearly see others gaming it.
I respect your choice not to call them out, my stance in helping them "change themselves" is to share their actions with the whole. If you greedy own that shit and if you're strictly financially minded I can respect that. Do you boo, however if you think you can camp around being stealthy on the blockchain, then you really are delusional.
Let all the minnows know, let the dolphins sing it and then we can all choose who we support, promote. Then we can leave those who don't contribute value to OUR platform to play soggy biscuit with themselves.
Wholeness.
@hilarski Im not sure any of us can "go to the moon"... that's another subject ;)
Haha I'm not sure any of us even know what the moon is.. ;)
I like this info .
I like your #whalepower badge! It's nice to recognize the white hat whales are out there doing their thing to notice and promote value around here.
One of my follower made it for me. :)
Woah ok.. I had no idea that #whalepower was the name of a whole community. Now I'm researching what you guys are all about although it seems a long read. Any links to some kind of summary of the project? I'm currently trawling through your blogs and @neoxian's stuff.
All very intriguing and interesting. Hopefully I've not offended you lot or misused the tag for this article? Wouldn't want a community whale smack down lol!
@kenistyles
Not at All.
#whalepower is A Community Project, General Tag. Anyone can use it.
The only Tag on Steemit Platform that have Moderators / Curators that Read Articles Manually.
Wow that's brilliantly short and precise! Thank you.
So I'll still read up about your project and thanks (I think) for all you guys are doing! Manual curation has my intuition saying good thing, good thing.
meep
Hey there meepbot, haven't seen you in a while. How you doing?
Oh yeah meep is all you say..
I wonder if people have been calling you a spammer? Well here's to the free world little guy, no flags or votes from me! :)
meep
If you are going to copy and paste, at least be creative...
meep
that is surprising finding, while we minnows are fighting to get the site scam free. Sherlockholmes found a scammer need dozens of account to get around 180 or something SBD from twoo weeks.
But look at that comment value in the whale circle. It only need a few account, few simole commentz, and boom our share for smaller fish are lost.
Greedy does has no end. 😭😭😭
@ekavieka Good point on man, @sherlockholmes is doing great work to weed the platform from spammers and botnets. Just remember that even though they only accumulated a small amount, the compound effect of the SP the network as a whole was acquiring would have accelerated at an extremely fast pace.
While of course I feel exposing them with posts like this and the original by @jerrybanfield is the way I chose to go. I don't think focusing on their comment value and arguably abusive behavior is worth our energy. I feel conversations like this are how we will see progress towards solutions and them make the minnow voices heard in the up coming fork discords.
I just recently joined SteemIt after being introduced to it by another content creator out there. I'm learning so much already and I have so much more to learn. I will say after reading this and spending time on the site I agree with you that these are challenges to mass adoption. And mass adoption is what everyone here should want if they want to see value increase. Fixing these issues is way beyond my pay-grade but SteemIt is still in Beta. Here's hoping the next iteration helps address some of these issues. I'd love to see more people creating great content around here.
@markgatx Hi man, yeah it can be a steep learning curve in the start for sure. I find it so fascinating on many levels to watch as this mini-verse unfolds and evolves. The concepts of free market, free world libertarian-ism are truly and rigorously tested here, and that to me is a joy to see.
Truly as I see it yes, mass adoption is going to dwarf even the rewards of these little whale circle jerking antics, even to scale up to a single 10% of say fakebook market cap would truly make a significant gain in the wallets of every early adopter here. You and I included, as I see it these are still yet very early days for STEEM as a currency and this platform too. We certainly could and should look forward to the upcoming forks.
Until then my only advice to fellow n00bs as we all are that's no diss, is keep creating quality content. Don't mind none to the spam (unless you have the skill set and passion for that) there are highly efficient and smart Steemians already cracking away on that. These whales are just doing their thing and there are many what I call white hat whales who are not involved in the shenanigans described above.
The best thing I feel about what we have here is that it's all transparent and there's no hiding anything on the blockchain. So we all know and can see what's going on as long as we connect and embrace the community aspect. This is a social media platform after all, that being said if you have yet to drop the fakebook habit. I too am only a mild social user at the moment, then please feel free to join our steemit mastermind group.
We're all fairly new there and it's a small group, we discuss communal steemit topics and you might find some useful information in the discussion threads to help you settle in.
I invite You to team up with us to promote Your blogpost on twitter !
We work as a team with #FFSteemit
See how we do this here
https://steemit.com/ffsteemit/@nicnicy/go-promote-steemit-com-blogs-the-next-ffsteemit-blog-promotion-minnowsfaucet-ffsteemit
@clemdane Hey love, seems cool. I'll check it out! Thanks :)