RE: All aboard, the @flagtrail

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RE: All aboard, the @flagtrail

beat-the-bookies in #cleansteem • 6 years ago

By turning steemit into a hostile environment.

Just look at the discussion here, not very friendly. I know Asher and I know that his heart is in the right place even though we are on the opposite ends when it comes to the bid bots. I think of it as a vital part of the steem ecosystem, he sees the spawn of satan...

Now, let's examine his first flag (https://steemit.com/life/@metama/life-is-jici4j7z). Take a closer look and tell me what do you see? Here's how it looks from my perspective:

The guy spends $80 buying the upvotes.
The flaggers show up and start flagging him for spam 3 lines of text post
The flaggers leave a ton of comments (pure spam)
The flaggers upvote those spam comments

It makes the whole operation look like a bunch of hypocritical douchebags. I know that Asher isn't one, but he's the only guy involved that I know with that project. Perhaps, they are all hypocritical douchebags, perhaps they are not.

Now, after all is being said and done, what's the end result? Is steemit a better place after those flags and those comments? I don't think so.

I'm all for flagging massive, industrial-scale botnets that are set up for the specific purpose of milking the system, but I would never flag that post.

All I see is a guy that spent $80 within the steem ecosystem there.

6 years ago in #cleansteem by beat-the-bookies

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enforcer48 6 years ago (edited)

The flaggers show up and start flagging him for spam 3 lines of text post

That's not what we flagged him for, but okay.

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imacryptorick 6 years ago

My comment to ats david address most of what you said, so I'm gonna paste it here

SFR should transition to upvoting posts through the Steem engine tokens... It's in process, and a year ago there was no decent SMT stand-in. Now there is.
If we want abuse to decrease, we need incentivize abuse fighting. Right now, the best to do that is upvotes (sadly, on automated comments).
I suggested that the ratio between the flag value and the SFR upvote should be significantly lower (in the 0.5-0.75 area), but I am in minority opinion. Although, at the moment, the goal is to actually popularize abuse fighting, so a 1:1 ratio has some benefits in the short term.
It will take some time to reach perfection. Please be patient

About the 'abuser' in question. Factually what happens is:
He sends about 75$ worth of coins to a bid bot
He receives 80$ worth of coins from the reward pool
People who post much higher quality content, get lower rewards because a large % of the reward pool goes to (with no means to offend what so ever) absolute crap
One of the key 'selling points' of STEEM, is, high quality content is produced & rewarded here. So users like him damage this moat in two ways:
1: a larger % of content is crap, and new users are not impressed with the platform, and leave
2: actual high quality content receives significantly less rewards, and thus is even less common on the blockchain

So he didn't really spent 80$ on the ecosystem, he just tried to convert 75$ to 80$, via a shady mechanism (people willing to upvote shitposts for STEEM). He made an investment.
Spending 80$ within the system would be something like paying a user coins for some kind of work, whether graphic design, video editing, or anything of value to the payer. Which extracting money from the reward pool: is not...

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beat-the-bookies 6 years ago

Until the new system is in place, each spam post gets a ton of spam comments that are being upvoted so you are not returning that reward into the reward pool.

One of the key 'selling points' of STEEM, is, high quality content is produced & rewarded here.

It's being produced, all right, but rewarded? Sometimes.

Blaming the bid bots for it and that guy that invested $80 is absurd. Each and every day I see a ton of good posts that don't go over $1, hell even over $0.10, and at the same time I see a total crap, a shitpost of the kind that you'd flag going over $10. The only difference being that the good content has been produced by a nobody while that shitpost is being produced by somebody. There's a social aspect to it and I don't mind it.

If a whale farts, the upvotes are there. A lot of it. That's just how it is.

I know that in an ideal world the whales would be out there rewarding great authors, but the reality is a bit different. There are only two ways a nobody can get any visibility (or earn something from the posts):

Get lucky and get the support of some big account
Buy some upvotes from those that sell it

The first scenario is not that common, so the only realistic approach is to go with the second one.

Which extracting money from the reward pool: is not...

The reward pool is the key STEEM's selling point, to be more precise, the ability to profit from it. If by some chance that goes away the users and investors would leave the platform en masse.

We need those guys that trying to convert $75 into $80, and from what I'm seeing, he wouldn't get flagged if he put in a bit more effort in that post and made it look high quality.

I know that you disagree with me here but look at it this way. You spend $75 usd worth of STEEM/SBD buying the upvotes. At the time you've got those upvotes you're $5 usd in profit, but what happens if the price of STEEM/SBD goes down? You lose $$$. Add to that the fact that half of the payout will be in SP and he'll get just 50% in SBD (depending on the price movements he may not even get SBD).

By the time he gets the post-payout, a lot of things can change, and he can lose $$$ even if he's been in the profits at one point. I'd rather see people circulating that SBD/STEEM within the system than seeing them sell their liquid earnings the moment they've got it.

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imacryptorick 6 years ago

@beat-the-bookies

Perhaps I should have made this distinction earlier: buying votes for content that provides massive value (even 80$ worth of votes) should need be compared to buying votes for absolute trash.

I'll make an argument that is not made often enough imo, we lose more if bad actors (i.e VP abusers) hold too much SP, rather than they dump it all on the market, even if they do it all at once.
A short price fall, will be an opportunity for many minnows, dolphins and plankton to grow their stake, without breaking bank in the process. AND if the bad actors leave, the reward pool will be distributed by those who're left, most of which would gladly upvote content based on its merit, and not just because they're bound to earn from it.
I'm playing this game long-term. I believe that Steem is just scratching the surface of its potential. We could rival Medium in a few years, if we play our cards right.

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beat-the-bookies 6 years ago

I'm playing this game long-term. I believe that Steem is just scratching the surface of its potential. We could rival Medium in a few years, if we play our cards right.

Some people think of steemit as a medium, some as a fb. I think it's a bit of both.

I've just checked your blog and wallet, saw your post about this initiative and your holdings. You've got a ton of sp and you can make a real difference. I'll be the last guy on Earth to tell you how to use your stake, but I'll invite you to think about the other approaches you can take and see if you can get more bang for your buck that way.

Fighting the abuse is not the best approach in my opinion, sure, there has to be some effort to combat the botnets since it can cause a lot of damage, but these hustlers trying to make $5 with $75 investment are not that big of a deal.

I see that you're aware of the problems this initiative can cause and that you've limited your flagging to 50k sp accounts. So, if I have 50.001 SP, I'm safe. The problem is the backlash. There's no way a person can not take the flagging as a personal attack because it's very easy to produce a 100 more shitposts of the same quality that are not being flagged. So, you either have to flag all of it or accept the fact that you'll have people holding your actions as a personal attack on them.

Steem has great potential, but so do have many other projects out there. Keeping people around, engaged and invested is much more important than going after the hustlers.

With that in mind, here's something that works. Two things:

Autovote lists - most people earn nothing here. Very few make any money and the upvotes & rewards are seen more as some game points than the real money. I can give you an example of a guy that with a fraction of your SP did a great job and his efforts have produced a vibrant community on steem that's alive and kicking for over a year now.
Here's how he did it. He'd look out for the new users that are posting under his niche tag, and if he saw a genuine account he'd add it to his upvote list. He'd start you with a small upvote and if your content started to improve that % would go up... A regular, even if worthless in the terms of $$$ upvote and the path forward has created a community and kept it going to this day.
dApps - Have you tried Actifit? Those posts do look ugly/spammy, but there are real people posting them and having some fun. That's the app that has an effect on people's lives in the real world. It motivated me to start walking, not because I'm earning $$$ from it, but because there's a community around it. It's fun, too. I see a friendly banter going on, people trying to outdo each other... That's the kind of thing that's worth supporting.

I guess, what I'm trying to say is that this game is about the people, not the content, having their attention and getting them to spend their time around here and not on some other project. God knows there are a ton of them out there, and that's why I think it's better to build up this place than to police it.

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imacryptorick 6 years ago

Many things to respond... let's see if I can reply to everything using one paragraph;

The way I measure whether I'm doing a good job decreasing VP abuse on Steem, is by how much SP that is held by abusers is powered down.
A 50K limit is fairly arbitrary. Just to avoid a situation that I'm at war with 6 Orcas, which can together bundle up and mitigate everything I do. Whether I'm flagging 10 people with 10K SP each, or 50 with a combined SP of 75K isn't the point. How many of them cease operations is the only metric that matters.(again, how much SP is powered down and sold, regardless of how many people actually held it).
If I'm being diligent about who (or more accurately which posts) I flag, it doesn't matter whether the flagee refuses to understand that it isn't personal. I can explain why the flag was placed on his post. But if his too stubborn, I'm not going to be his therapist.

Regarding engagement, both are (almost) equally important. You can't have a good social network without a large user base. But you also can't have a large user base if not enough rewards are available for great content creators (we're not really built for FB like activity, but let's just agree to disagree how much Steem is like FB and how much like medium). And why do I think that abusers affect the available rewards that much? Well, because they are. Take a look at this chart from from July 2018, to April 2019, SFR had responded to over 13,500(!!!) instances of abuse. And that's only for those they CAUGHT, 13,500+ upvotes that took rewards from content creators that actually care about the future of our platform, and instead rewarded users that see Steem as nothing more as a cash cow.

This ecosystem needs both curators (those who focus on upvoting quality posts), and abuse fighters (those who try to make the curators VP worth more), those are two sides of the same hammer. You need both for the platform to thrive.

And don't get me started on the risk of the abusers being able to overpower everyone else... we'll be slaves if that happens. And STEEM will rapidly move towards 0.00000001BTC

So basically, curators distribute the rewards, but abuse fighters make sure they actually have enough rewards to distribute

#CleanSTEEM

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