Witch Hunting Self Upvoters Solves Nothing

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)
I'm 2 months into my Steemit journey, and I'm getting more and more tired of uppity Steemians that believe they know what's best for everybody else. Last I checked, this is a decentralized platform and this group of high brow users does not have the right to dictate how everyone behaves.

I may be overacting, because I do think most Steemians want what is best for the platform, but the approach this anti-self voting group is taking is very misguided. One of the main reasons I joined Steemit was because this is a decentralized platform and I assumed the entire group of users had a voice. Perhaps this group has watched too many batman movies or Hitler documentaries. Unless you are dictator, a thoughtful discussion works better than public shaming or secret down-voting projects.

I fully agree with the general sentiment that there is Steem reward abuse on the platform and we should figure out a way to update the system to prevent it. However, self-upvoting comments is not the end-all-be-all of abuse on Steemit....it's just one form of abuse. The general abuse I'm referring to is claiming Steem rewards for actions that have nothing to do with legitimate posts.

1. Self upvoting Abuse

This is most commonly talked about abuse. After the last hard fork, authors can double their Steem power every 6 months by self upvoting their own comments/posts if they were to self upvote efficiently. @JerryBanfield wrote a post explaining the details on the math behind this.

I have seen several top 10 or top 50 lists posted about authors that are generating a high amount of SBD via self voting. These lists focus on dollar value, not percentage as a return....which to me is poor or no analysis. There are lot of people that can extract data from the blockchain, but that does make it analysis. Analysis requires some thought behind it.
My major problem with these reports is that they unfairly hurt authors that have high Steem power balances. In fact, the majority of the users that end up on those lists have huge Steem balances. For example, a user generating 10% return per month by self upvoting with Steem power of $500 doesn't even make the list. A user earning 1% return per month by self upvoting with Steem power of $10k is shamed on these lists.

2. Bot Abuse

The most efficient self upvoters on Steemit are bots. They can vote using an algorithm and get much closer to 6 month doubling effect vs a human. There are also bots that sell their powerful upvotes to anyone that is willing to pay. Many of these bots generate returns much higher than 30% per month.

I don't see too many people having issues with these powerful bots when compared to a random user self upvoting. This is probably because the majority of these bots are created by powerful Steemians, who may also be witnesses and they also partake in other projects that are good for the community.

3. Steem Delegation Services

There are services available where users can delegate their Steem to someone that is willing to pay them for it. For example, you give me $10 Steem and I will delegate $600 Steem power to your account for a week. What do you think the Steemian who has access to $600 Steem power for that week will do besides go on a self upvoting spree? I'm generalizing here, but the majority users will want to recoop their $10 investment somehow.

4. Multiple Accounts

Anyone can create alternate accounts to upvote their own posts/comments. There are also groups of users that auto-upvote each other without reading their content so they all earn more income.

All of these are different types of potential abuse of the system. We can always argue that a new user who buys delegation to self upvote his/her own post isn't abusing the system because it's quality content. That argument can be made for any of the 4 types of abuse I listed...maybe the bots are really upvoting quality content? Maybe the people buying bot power are upvoting quality content? Some are abusing the system, some are not.

Are these 4 really even abuse?

The system incentives self upvoting and it's clear that it's being done in many many forms. I have no problem with people creating these bots or coming up with creative ideas on selling delegation power. And I used to frown upon self voters, but now that I see the bigger picture....who cares?! Self upvoters make up such a small percentage of the abusers, my guess is less than 10% of abuse is a result of humans self upvoting.

It would be like spending 2 hours to pop one zit, when your whole body is covered with zits. Popping that one zit won't make the rest of them go away....and that original zit will pop right back up day later. It solves nothing.

Don't hate the playa, change the rules of the game

Let's solve the real problem instead by changing the system. I have been on the platform for 2 months, so am unclear on the process on how rules can be changed. I assume the witnesses make those decisions? If you are truly against people self upvoting then try to influence the witnesses or become one so you can have influence on the change you are after.

Public shaming a very small group based solely on account value does not help the situation. Many of these users are not abusing the system.

Final Thought

Demanding Steemians on a decentralized platform to forcible do what you want will not work. Spend your energy on ideas on how to solve it instead. If you think someone is abusing the system, have a conversation with the person before public shaming. When is the last time punching someone in the face resulted in the person being hit instantly agreeing to do what you want?

If you continue to go after accounts that have a lot of Steem power vs those that actually abuse the system, you are encouraging the richlist users to create multiple accounts, delegate out power, or power down to sell their Steem. The only group that wins in this situation are the bot creators, who will continue to generate a huge return on their Steem.

If you are one of those anti-self voting activists and you continuously transfer the Steem you earn to an exchange, then take a look in the mirror the next time you think you are better for the Steem community than every other Steemian. You taking Steem off the platform hurts the system as well, because it depresses the Steem price. Higher the Steem price, the more people want to join the platform. Again, I don't have a problem with anyone that wants to power down or take money out of the system....but stop judging others when you may also be doing something that is potentially harmful to the platform also.

Thank you for reading this post and for allowing me to decompress. I generally upvote the non-"Great Post" comments on my post anyway, but if you want to upvote your own comment on this post then go for it.

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In my opinion this people who are against self upvote are socialist or are a great whale who do not want to increase competition.

Anyway, this will be detrimental to Steem, just think: Would you invest in a crypto currency where you are forbidden to profit? I think not.

If the people continue with this conversation of sharing wealth with everyone in the end everyone will have much of nothing.

Who wants to gain more SP that seeks to provide an excellent service to the community or that works to buy more SP.

That's a mischaracterization. Are you aware that every day we all have to decide with our up and down votes who gets the Steem?

There's nothing "socialist" about supporting the original idea of Steemit, that of cooperative voting. The idea basically is that you profit more by voting for others than you do by voting for yourself, to encourage us to evaluate each other's post and thus determine share of that day's rewards.

So I underline, profit is still and always was part of the equation, just not straight up interest on your stake. You have to do the slightly difficult work of finding good posts to vote on. If it's just interest in a bank, this aspect becomes marginal and it's just a ponzi.

Okay ... every one can do what think best about his vote, including voting for himself. Even the platform itself, at the time of writing your post, allows this option to be selected automatically.

As for the hypothesis about profit more by voting in the post of others than your own ... please show me some real proof. Some people talk about game theory using the Nash's equilibrium, but without evidence (probably those who say this don't study game theory). And honestly it has no logic.

Think about: The author of the post earns 75% of all value earned, while the curators earn 25%. I don't see how a curator invests 1 SBD and earns 2. Maximum will earn 0.25 SBD.

In my opinion the best way everyone will win in Steem is to provide services through the platform, for example if a charity's institution post on the platform and win the donations through votes, or a person create quality online courses on the platform and be paid through votes, rather than adsense from Youtube, for example.

This self-vote or not discussion is just a waste of time, in my opinion.

As for the hypothesis about profit more by voting in the post of others than your own ... please show me some real proof.

Proof of what?

The idea basically is that you profit more by voting for others than you do by voting for yourself, to encourage us to evaluate each other's post and thus determine share of that day's rewards.

Proof this :)

That this idea was an original objective of Steemit?

From the whitepaper, section 2.5.2 - Voting on Distribution of Currency, pg 17 on new whitepaper available here:

The naive voting process creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.

In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner. For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes^2 rather than votes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with n^2 the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law[5].

This is exactly what was weakened in HF 19, the incentive to not defect to self vote, and exactly what needs to be fixed.

I agree.

I'm talking about today's reality. I joined Steemit after this HF, so I don't know it was before. What I know is the reality of today.

Thanks for sharing your opinion :)

Oh I see. Today's reality is not described in any official document except the code (not easy to read) but we can all observe by experimentation, though it's not ideal.

Markets are good at optimising around incentives and we can observe from the increase in self voting that it is more incentivized after HF 19, as can anyone who has experimented from this.

No problem, thanks for asking. 🙂

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This post received a 2.9% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @rtdcs! For more information, click here!

You have to do the slightly difficult work of finding good posts to vote on.

If only every user got that concept. I actually think finding good posts from authors you don't know is part of the fun of Steemit. Feels like too many people upvote without reading the content.

Completely agree! I wrote a post about a month ago in which I said that the self-upvoting 'issue' that some people complain about is kinda a debate between socialism and anarchism.

Some people when they reach a high level of wealth in the offline world, give a lot of money back to their communities through whatever methods. And some people, don't. Some people take most of the profits and reinvest it into making more money for themselves. Should we get to vote or decide how these people should use their earned money and through which means?

You either invest time writing content on Steemit and earn Steem Power, or you invest money and buy that Steem Power. In both cases you should expect to get a return on your investment and that money that you can give yourself by upvoting yourself is totally earned.

That being said, I as a minnow, have decided 3 days ago to stop upvoting myself because I think I could earn more by using those self-upvotes to vote for other people's content and earn curation rewards. I'll have to see if that's true or not.

Good luck my friend. Share your results to us later :)

Thank you. I intend to do so after a month at the end of August. :) It takes a bit more time to actively curate content than to just upvote myself but I think in the end it will be more profitable.

I wish you success!

I don't see mathematically how, but I will wait for your results :D

LOL...yeah the math does not compute on that theory

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You're a genius if you figure that out!

I think that even if I make it more profitable to curate content than to upvote myself, that will mostly apply to me. I said in a previous comment on another post that I view curating as a very subjective activity because every individual is a unique mix of life experiences, beliefs, definitions that he holds, opinions, points of view, ideas, etc.

While someone might consider a post as being quality content, another might view that content as completely useless or non-sense. And that translates directly into what posts he or she decides to upvote and how much each person will earn from curation.

Yeah, makes sense. In terms of financial rewards...curation return is very limited.

No one is anything that you shouldn't get a return on your investment into Steem Power, it's the most primary reason to convert Steem to Steem Power, always has been and always will.

The issue is on how the awarding of new Steem is to be done. I argue that we should preserve the original intent of trying to align incentives so that people vote on others in order to gain for themselves via curation rewards.

It's not about socialism or anarchism at all, it's more like how to distribute newly issued shares in a company by peer voting. Btw your post linked does not make hardly any argument at all about this. It would be interested to see it fleshed out, maybe you have a point after all but I don't see it now.

I argue that we should preserve the original intent of trying to align incentives so that people vote on others in order to gain for themselves via curation rewards.

You make it sound like that was the only way Steemit users were supposed to earn Steem, by curating content. Incentives are both for upvoting others and thus earning curation rewards and by creating content.

What you're arguing for is for Steemit Inc. to disable the ability for people to self-upvote because some Steemit users that have acquired large quantities of Steem Power are now upvoting themselves thus acting all greedy when in fact they shouldn't do that and instead they should give those upvotes to other people's content.

Witnesses are your politicians and can vote to change the rules. Convince enough witnesses to accept such a change and maybe you'll get your wish in one of the next hard forks.

I personally don't care if we have or do not have the ability to self-upvote.

It's not about socialism or anarchism at all, it's more like how to distribute newly issued shares in a company by peer voting.

There isn't one company here.

Everyone of us, here on the Steem blockchain, be it on Steemit, or on chainBB, or on other platforms built on Steem, represents a company. And everyone of us get to decide how we want to invest our earned Steem.

You can invest your funds in your company (by upvoting yourself) or you can invest your funds in other companies.

When I upvote someone else's post I actually, metaphorically speaking, from a financial point of view, buy shares in their company, which is represented by their post. Those shares, after 7 days, will bring me a profit, represented as a curation reward.

Exactly. I probably need to calm down and write thoughtfully like your comment, I'll probably get my point across better.

Hmm, I don't know, I kinda like your firebrand style :-)

Cg

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In my opinion it's good that people publish raw data, data is not subjective. I think that self voting might be a sign of the platforms general inefficiency for rewarding people. It's all about incentives and we just need to figure out how to have incentives that benefit the platform the most.

No system is without faults. And the people who hate self voting can just ignore the user's and uovote those who don't, I really don't see the problem. This way incentives will adjust, making it a worse long term strategy.

I hope more objective data is posted about as many aspects of the platform as possible. Information is the key to make good decisions and when both parties have perfect information you'll have an efficient exchange :)

I think you're absolutely correct in your comment regarding the cause of self votes. Imma upvote it even though my VP has dipped below 80%, and now I'll have to wait longer before it recharges and I can vote again, because HF19.

An issue is that the Steem premined yet constitutes the majority. This Steem isn't being used to curate, and isn't causing Steemit to grow by rewarding content creators. This leaves open the question of whether Steemit was ever intended to actually attain the goals publicly claimed for it, or whether there were other motives that may have been cryptically held by the devs.

It simply may be impossible for Steemit to transition into a platform that does efficiently reward authors without the Steem held by @dan, @freedom, and other whales being invested in that process.

Thanks for the comment...100% upvote. Raw data is not subjective....but if you have looked into the Steem data...just the act of getting some of that data and trying to organize/label/make sense of it can be subjective. Just showing data or choosing which parts to show or not show is subjective. In fact, I can show you data in the real world to prove any point you may have. Are you for global warming? There is data on that. Are you against global warming? There is data on that too.

I do think we need to start talking about that data so we can all make sense of it.

This is a great point. Selectively choosing datapoints that fit the goal is bad. Luckily data on steem is public and its easy to disprove conclusions made from selective datasets.

I think that most issues discussed have fierce debattants on both sides of the aisle. In the end its always up to the readers to dissect and study ALL available information.

I just hope people will stay constructive rather than start a flaming war. But this is the internet after all, we'll see.

I didn't really believe in abuse of the rewards until I saw @dayu borrow 80k SP from @minnowbooster to self-vote 100% spam comments. That's just a loss for everyone here.

So I think we need algo changes to disincentivize the worst kinds selfish behavior. Perhaps ones that make repetitive voting less profitable.

On the other hand, I have a real distain for the marxist/wealth distribution suggestions I read here from time to time. Guess how much stake these users have in the system?

Steemit mirrors the real world, shaming SJW's and all. It's all part of the game.

...and don't get brainwashed into thinking it's not a game.

xD

Good point. In your opinion, how do you stop the abuse....by stopping the self voter or the person enabling that self voting? I know it's a complicated issue...but feels like everyone is jumping on the self voter and ignoring the people providing the services that enable that behavior.

That implementation is becoming suggested more and more, but i'm only in favor as a last resort when there's no better way. First we should look at voting incentives, for example in the form of a different curation reward scheme or something.

And going back to 0.5% (or at least for comments) is worth looking at.

I very much like the idea of increasing the curation reward percentage to the point where randomly cast votes, equate to the gain from pure self-voting. Can anyone work out what this would be? @calamus056? I haven't got my head around the rewards structure well enough yet.

At this point there would be no significant amount of self-voting, as it would take marginal effort to get greater profit with a cursory glance to evaluate content before up-voting it.

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Really nicely put, and as you'll see I have commented on your debate on the self-vote article. You have a nice way of putting things, and you've definitely gained a fan :-)

Perhaps this group has watched too many batman movies or Hitler documentaries.

That is one of the funniest things I have read about this community!! Proper fofls :-D

If you think someone is abusing the system, have a conversation with the person before public shaming.

Exactly what I told some prick last week by the way. There are too many SJWs on here :-#

It's funny though, I didn't notice your name on that list until you commented. #justsaying :-)

Cg

LOL thanks. I don't mind calling myself out....someone has to do it!

Thank you for posting @financialcritic.

Your well written, brave post was only discovered today.

A slippery slope.....this 'witchhunt ' business.

@remlaps wrote an article concerning this very issue from a different perspective....that of the specialized niche catagory...ie...classical music, etc.....a recommended read if one is interested.

All the best to you and your family. Cheers.

Indeed there are more possible abuses than just self-voting. I never hated anyone just because they upvote themselves. Maybe it does have a negative impact on the reward pool or something but it's their choice.

Exactly, it's their choice based on how the system is designed.

I agree that naming and shaming is seems unhelpful, and that there are other types of behaviour that could be called abuse (or quite legitimate), depending on ones view, but allowing people to see that according to the article linked below around 40% of comment votes were self-votes is useful.

The total author rewards for all comments was $230,754.392 SBD. At least $78,544.107 SBD was from self-votes. At maximum, when 100% of curation rewards are assumed to go to the self-voter as well, it's $104,725.476 SBD. So the total amount of rewards that went to self-votes on comments was between 34.04% and 45.38% (likely closest to 45.38%). This is only visible self-votes, we can't know how large the abuse is between multiple accounts that are owned by the same user. - source

I'm not buying the data by that author based on some of his past reports. Seems way too high, it may be right...but I want to confirm for myself.

I'm not buying the data [...] ...but I want to confirm for myself.

I would love that, please do.

Same here, I've been wanting confirmation for a while. If it's too far off i need to dive back in the code for a while.

The fact we can self vote is all the evidence required. If it can be done it will and if it can be gamed it will.

Also SP is your money and self voting is simple way of paying yourself dividends on your investment that is locked up.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Either take away the dividend ability or stop hating.

Yes please, that would be great :)

Or at least make the "dividends" come from contributing to the network as a curator. We all agree that the system isn't optimal at the moment, right?

I agree the only answer is to change the rules of the game. You cant have things where the good of the site depends on people being good.