How many bad actors would it take to spoil a platform?

in acavetrollquest •  7 years ago 

In the few days off I had - this crossed my mind a few times.




whale-2048103__340.jpg



We all know the situation with 1 person running off with 2.3% of the total reward pool, backed mainly by 1 other account, note I say account not person.

2.3% is a massive amount for 1 individual, when you have the eco system that is steemit, and over 700,000 registered users, okay so the average daily posters are in the 30,000 region, that leaves 97.7% for 30.000 other people.

Add into the mix those who are guaranteed massive returns for anything they post, you know who they are, trending is full of them daily.

I digress, now back to how many bad actors does it take, to wipe out the entire rewards pool? not as many as you think, only 100 of them could wipe out the system on a daily basis if they decided to do, what others are doing. What do I base this on? allow me to show you.

  • 1 - 10 x posts backed by 1 other persons 10x max power votes takes 2.3%

  • 2 - 50 people making those 10 posts, backed by 50 other peoples daily 10x votes = 50 x 2.3% = 115% and eco system gone. (yes I know 100% is max not 115% but you get my drift, and I also know 25% curation to the voter)

  • 2a - You can do the maths if you like & add in the 25% the up-voter gets in rewards, and the whole system comes crumbling down with (in reality) less than 50 x10 posters a day.

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Another thing that crossed my mind - was how much damage is being done to the system now, with small account holders on mass trying to bring down 1 bad actor. Over 100 small account holders and 1 or two large one's are throwing away so much money downvoting just 1 bad actor, imagine if we had 50?.

What would or could fix this situation I have zero idea, it seems for ever that it has been talked about, I still see only 1 large stake holder who is willing to commit his power and time to this daily, where are the other actors/whales & when will they join in (will they even try?).

Ned seems to somehow think it is good advertising, I have seem him say almost as much, stopping just shy of admitting it, I beg to differ though, I would say it is damaging to this platform and to any endorsement of this platform. Why? because people came here to escape the crapitalist society and police states they live in, only to find corruption is rife here also, hardly a good advert for a decentralised society, in my humble opinion.

And that's just it, this is only MY opinion, all of it, and you may feel free to disagree with me, as long as we still have freedom of speech, maybe not as long as we think with the way society is heading. so can we at least get steemit back on course? the jury is out, can the captains turn the ships wheel Abaft the beam (hard fork) and get us back on course, or will it be gangplanks and overboard we all go to Dan's new dream?

Your thoughts welcome below as always.

Peace love & respect to all.


Written by deliberator.
Images courtesy of pixaby and open to fair usage.
No animals or people were hurt in the making of this article.
All opinions are my shared thoughts for free.
Should you wish to send me bitcoins send them to fulltimegeek instead.



Deliberator = Definition of deliberator
plural -s
: one that deliberates

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As I've noted elsewhere this week, the collective SP of whales is greater than the SP of all other users combined, so we cannot go toe-to-toe with them in a flag war.

People sometimes fail to appreciate the size of this power imbalance. For example, one particular alleged bad actor has SP equivalent to the collective SP of about 34,000 red fish accounts (accounts with roughly 5 to 500SP). They are supported by another enigmatic account that commands the equivalent SP of over 85,000 of these accounts.

And if that wasn't enough for you, those whales I referred to earlier, you know how many accounts fall into that category? 36 And, as @plushzilla calculated some months ago, 1 whale holds the equivalent SP of over 150,000 red fish.

What is to be done?

While we are all stakeholders in the system, it's also true that the stakeholders who are actually able to change something ultimately hold responsibility for it. But there is no sense in which the smallest voters can overwhelm even one whale.

As I see it, our choices fall into two broad strategic categories, or combinations thereof:

  1. Smaller accounts make enough noise/fuss/nuisance/awkward publicity that it whales worry about the impact on their significant investments. 10,000 grumpy sub-500 SP accounts might not make much difference to a whale, but 10,000 properly targeted and hashtagged tweets might.
  2. Play the whales off against each other. If they were to see each other as threats, they might act to stop any one account from becoming too powerful. Of course, this option is fraught with difficulty as whales are capable of action that could be catastrophic to the whole system. And if they are happy to continue to collude and enable each other's bad behaviour, then this won't work at all.

So things broadly in line with option 1 are probably our best bet. We should make threats to leave for platforms that are fairer or give us a better deal - not least because that's what we actually should do!

Likewise, we should leverage our collective ability to influence other social media channels. I have 1000 followers on twitter. How many do you think we have between just the people in the discord channels we frequent? Get a thousand people tweeting with the same hashtag all at the same time, if the message is 'sticky' enough, it might trend. And even if it doesn't, it might actually get @ned's attention.

Hmmm, might be time to make a list of steem-whales social media accounts - time for some targeted comments on their posts elsewhere perhaps?

Go to it you legend you, I do not like your thinking, I fricking love it, make it so captain.

I have adult work-type things to do today, so I will have to come back to this later. In the interim:

ned1.jpg

Thanks for the mention :) I think the situation has improved since I last looked into it, and I think with more people investing time and effort into helping the newcomers of the platform we are seeing some change. Also there are people in @friendsofgondor and @stewartsofgondor setting good examples for the rest of us as we develop our profile on this platform!

This is the problem with anarchy, the inherently selfish and greedy individuals who run amok. Hope you're at peace, have a good night.

This is not built on the anarchist principle, it is built on a decentralised capitalist system now, and yes, I am at peace, thanks for asking my friend.

First of all, I feel bad, as I had to withdraw my delegated amount from the pool, as I was attacked (one of the reasons I stopped accepting payment for my posts). When I made my announcement about declining payments, he contacted me and asked that I stop fighting him, which made me mad as hell, as I was certain he realised he can no longer hurt me, whereas I can push him all the way down to zero Rep, so now he pretends to want to be friends.

Originally, he responded to my attempt to help him by flagging me, like 12 or 15 times in one go and then kept it up every day. Still, a fight of this kind does nobody any good, so I've agreed that if he leaves me alone, I will leave him alone. Let's see.

As for the fight you are talking about, I found an interesting comment about the whales of steemit, on another site. It is their argument for why their social media is better than this one and I find myself in agreement with them.

Then I saw another site also, so, here are the two posts, which do not say much, but go to read what the new sites say. I think you will find it interesting. I am thinking of signing up on at least one of them...

https://steemit.com/blockchain/@maxwell95/a-new-decentralized-social-media-platform-sapien
https://steemit.com/ico/@rentmoney/sphere-affiliate-program

I was all in sold, on the first one I read, and joining it tomorrow. :-)

Sapien?

I could not find what kind of posts they want. If it is only news posts, then, not interested, I have Gab for that (there I am not Mr Nice, I insult and try to anger many of the so-called keyboard-warriors).

If you see they want all kinds of posts, let me know. Also, do we need any cash for opening our account?

Let you know tomorrow my friend.

One of my twitter followers is on empowr - will check it out and let you know how it looks.

Thanks bro, I look forward to you finding out what your friend says.

He says it's more rewarding, but without further elaboration I'm not sure what he meant exactly. I did check it out for myself, and did a bit of research; seems a bit dicey. I'll do a post early next week, but in the interim let me just say this: Do not give these people your paypal or credit card details!

I noticed the paypal part, not a chance in a million on that 1, I looked at a forum talking about the site also, and it was full of people saying they were getting large paypal withdrawals from the site, without accepting or knowing about them.

I just checked empowr out, and it screams of scam to me.

Yeah, unless I'm mistaken, it's pretty bad.