While browsing Trending (and thinking it might be nice if posts turned over more quickly in and out of Trending, to give more small authors opportunities), I immediately noticed a post with a title that sounded a lot like the spam vacation rental junk mail I received when I owned a home:
Here's how the post opens:
They then link you to a few article reposts from Huffington Post, etc. with a one-sentence description of each.
They close out with an ad:
This entire post would look at home in any email client's spam folder. I get nonsense like this via paper junk mail realtors every day.
Immediately, I wondered where the content was here that justified these type of rewards, not to mention the coveted space in Trending, and the sycophantic comments that came along with them, complete with subtler "don't forget to follow me backs".
Naturally, I thought I would look into where these rewards came from. Cue up the Steppenwolf, because it's time for a magic carpet ride.
Now, let's see what we have here:
Here's the lead whale:
And our faithful second in command:
When you move on from there, you get to what appear to be some real posters, but given the size of the first two in question, it is almost academic by then.
It also begs the question, why are real posters upvoting this garbage? @aggroed has recently posted about related issues (spamming garbage content to self-upvote) here, perhaps he can chime in:
If this is what people see on the Trending page, pushing off their quality posts making 32 cents, Steemit will never hit mass adoption as anything more than another paid ad platform.
Where's @berniesanders when you need him?
Sorry I didn't see your post sooner. I saw the post you reference; it was very strange to me; I'm still new, and not always recognizing what I'm looking at yet.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but FB could just buy a few accounts on steemit, and then create bots that would upvote posts from FB they want to promote, and then they could take most of the payouts for themselves?
What is to prevent this obvious corp fraud?
It seems easy to ruin steemit at this rate, with a million here, and a million there..
And I also agree; if someone is worried about real members, actively posting and commenting, upvoting themselves, they are completely blind to the real issues plaguing steemit at this time. Since HF19, whatever..
I would think, improved algo would easily recognize voting patterns, and # of posts, all the things we easily recognize as bots and circles, and just tone down the metrics for obvious fraud. To start.
That said, I'd like to see your proposal, like this:
a) Re-steem limit - 1 per day
b) Upvote for same member in same month, diminishing returns to rewards pool
c) Upvotes for members with no posts - ?
d) More upvotes than followers?
e) trending posts last 24 hours, max
f) Etc..
What does it look like to you, to fix some of this?
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I like some of your suggestion, and have advocated for e) in particular. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much community will to makes waves on this at the moment.
Thanks for your comment, and sorry for my delay in replying as well.
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I hate to see that some nonsense earns $XXX while other quality posts don't earn even $1.
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That's exactly what I say earlier. There's a lot of shitty content that earns money just with promotion and selfvotes.
Not self-promotion but for a larger POV: https://steemit.com/steemit/@adrion/you-won-t-believe-how-steemit-changed-my-life-3
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For what it's worth, these incidents seem to come from a few huge votes, not wide community acceptance. I suspect most of the voters in our case study here did not even look at this piece, they simply saw something hit Hot or Trending and thought they would hop on the train for some curation rewards.
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I absolutely agree! I JUST finished a post explaining that the reward abuse has to stop. We need more people willing to flag this type of spam, because it's doing nothing but taking rewards from posts that deserve it.
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Unfortunately, there is a strong financial disincentive not to step out bravely (ahem, by our generation's standards) with a flag. If you catch the ire of one of these circle-jerk whales, they can ruin every post you ever make with 1% of their voting power. Your rep will be at -2 before you know it.
I personally expect that I will catch a flag on this or my other posts due to posting this post, and that ultimately, this post will have cost me Steem power when all is said and done.
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All the more reason why we need an anonymous account to flag posts deemed unfit by the community.
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True, throwaway accounts are an idea. However, I believe the reputation system might influence the ability to make fresh accounts for this purpose. Also, it does cost the Steemit platform operators money to create new accounts and burdens account creation, which could be a factor if many accounts are needed. Plus, we'd still need people willing to forego their own voting power to delegate for downvoting, not upvoting.
I was thinking perhaps a system where you get 1 free downvote per day that does not use voting power. Obviously that's a rough, off-the-cuff idea, but I think we need something that doesn't make people choose between "upvote myself for 100%, or another creator I like, or punish an over-rewarded post".
It's hard to make that latter case in rational game-theory. You don't make friends around here with negativity (or too much realism, if you aren't very careful).
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I created an account for my game project, and funded it myself via AnonSteem so that the blockchain wouldn't have to pay for me.
I single account built into a whale with delegated or even purchased SP could at least put a dent in the abuse, I feel. With a reputation earned from posting about what posts got flagged and why
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Agreed. Some people thought that is what berniesanders was, but I wasn't really around to pass judgment.
Now, where do we come up with the $3 million USD we'd need just to counteract whale #1 I cited above? =(
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Therein lies the conundrum :D
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Trending page is set for the amount of money a post has earned so if more than one whale votes on a shitty post it's bound to go on the trending page @lexiconical . And the people who work hard for their posts rarely get an upvote from a whale.
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Yep, you got it. I think posts stay on Trending too long (days, sometimes). It would help if we shortened that time-frame to a few hours. I also think it might be more important to track the total number of votes than the absolute reward amount. A post with 1 upvote @ $200 vs. a post with 200x $1 upvotes...the quality is likely to be, statistically speaking, far better on the latter.
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I read about a Steemit drama between whales before reading this article and the comments above. It's scary to see these whales coming after us and flagging everything to oblivion. Ruining all the efforts to build our presence here.
Well, money really is power afterall. Stay safe, @lexiconical. And thanks for this expose article
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Whoa, that is quite a revelation. I skipped the post many times, but it shows up in trending anyway. Amazed to see the income for the adverts! Nicely exposed.
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Very good investigation, we need more people like you. upvoted
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Thank you for the kind words. Comments like these are why I stick my head out above the parapets at all, as financially, I'd probably be better off sticking to my own pastures.
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That's a pity.. Such a great platform being slightly abused :(
Nice investigative work nonetheless @lexiconical.
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Thank you!
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we hate spam, I guess
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It's getting harder to call it out, as now they are adding a line or two of "original content" so they can claim commentary.
It's more the clear and constant self-promotion of an outside site for profit that "grinds my gears", as it were.
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I disagree because nothing is original.
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If this was true, we would never invent anything ever again, or create another piece of art again, both of which we will likely do tomorrow.
This is a demonstrably false stance to take.
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Part of the original and current potential use case for purchasing and holding SP is for promotion.
All Steem stakeholders have the ability to use positively weighted votes (upvotes) or negatively weighted votes (downvotes--mislabeled as "flag" on steemit.com) to influence a post or comment's potential payout for 7 days after it has been created.
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Well, I can't really argue with that. But, BookingTeam isn't even holding the SP, these are "curators" immediate upvoting garbage content, which is failing at their task.
But if the trending page is going to be a stickied list of what's in my junk mail, then I'm going to power down and move my investment somewhere that has potential.
Because a mini-twitter that becomes nothing more than an advertiser's posting board is useless tech, and will join the dinosaurs.
If someone wants to promote themselves and not look like a parasite, they can construct some original material, not repost Huffington Post links in an attempt to cover up the fact they are just paying themselves $1000 a day to run ads.
This is far worse than self-voting, which appears to have everyone in a monster-tizzy about reward abuse.
You may also notice numerous people are flagging some of these posts, as shown in the screenshots, but cannot counteract the effect.
Perhaps after X amount of flags, your payouts should be affected or automatically declined. You shouldn't be able to buy the ability to plaster garbage content over numerous community flags on everything you post.
Steemit should not become a land of Robber-Barons.
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there's always somebody who's trying to 'game the system' - steemit unfortunately is not immune to such shinenigans. there are a lot of people that have come onto the platform with wallets full of money and buy a bunch of steem power just to upvote themselves and get others to follow the 'trend'. it's a deplorable practice but inherent in the freedoms the blockchain allows us
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I did see that post and I'm like... why upvote this. Shesh!
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I think, unfortunately, we've answered that question with our cynical look at the top two voters.
There is even someone in that thread dragging the good name "Charles" through the muck in the comments.
Thank you for your reply!
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I did the same thing as @stackin, I thought, "who the hell is voting for this crap?" I saw some names I recognized and shook my head. My next thought was, "this is going to be the death of steemit if it turns into a corporate posting board."
I know it's a decentralized platform, but this is getting to be too much. This type of activity changes users motivation on voting. They see huge rewards and waste their precious votes on pure crap. It leaves plenty of quality content left wanting. Thanks for writing this post @lexiconical!
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great post mate..keep it up...i like make good friendship with you...great..
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Thank you for the kind words.
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GOOD POSTS ALWAYS MAKE THE TRUST AND SOME OF MONEY..BUT DONT THINK ON MONEY..JUST KEEP POSTING GOOD THING..I LIKE HONEST FRIENDSHIP..IM LOOKING FOR LOTS FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD...thanks for following me i did the same :)
vist my blog read my post and upvote :)
keep intouch for honest friendship ;)
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very good strategy you must be up voit
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Yeah, I think this kind of thing is a long term problem for steemit that needs to be fixed. Otherwise the currency won't last and grow.
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We're bound to see some of this, given the daily authorship numbers have increased about a factor of 10 in the last month. I hope we can come up with a way to counteract it that isn't a financial disincentive.
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This is how I imagine you.
Well done exposing this crap btw.
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That is one of my favorite episodes!
I was thinking about starting a series on Bird Law, actually. There are actually a wide variety of bird laws in this country, only some of which are governed by reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migratory_Bird_Treaty_Act_of_1918
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The opposite of this is Facebook where I was one of the original users and spent over $100,000 in ads only to have my posts get 5 or 10 likes on them. I prefer the relationship with the amount invested and if we get some circle jerks going on, I think that is up to the community to regulate. In all fairness I have one going with my friends I talk to them about the posts I most want to see and vote their posts up all the time to help motivate them to keep contributing. If we want better results I think the answer is to encourage ideal formatting and highest quality within whatever friend voting circle jerk groups exist! I gave it to my friends straight because I have the most valuable account that I am not voting shit up. They better do a good job and they get a vote proportional to the quality. If others have lower standards and paid to play, we can help encourage higher quality or help discovery of posts work more effectively than just the trending page and tags.
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"In all fairness I have one going with my friends I talk to them about the posts I most want to see and vote their posts up all the time to help motivate them to keep contributing. "
This doesn't sound like a circle-jerk at all, it just sounds like you guys are sharing quality posts.
"I think that is up to the community to regulate."
I'm hoping that my post I linked above on the low-quality posts that strike me as junk mail quality allow this to happen.
"The opposite of this is Facebook where I was one of the original users and spent over $100,000 in ads only to have my posts get 5 or 10 likes on them. "
I have a sneaky suspicion that money, or "lost value", is going to Facebook.
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@lexiconical
Me too stumbled on their post. I was really shocked with their results and and commented here:
https://steemit.com/money/@bookingteam.com/how-can-you-actually-save-money-on-managing-your-rental-property#@chandu91/re-bookingteamcom-how-can-you-actually-save-money-on-managing-your-rental-property-20170623t120218491z
Asking with a screenshot posted that they earned $1700 in 25 mins with 30 uptoes ???
They never replied i did all this exercise and found what exactly you have done.
But you made a right step to post all this analysis.
Glad to meet like-minded fellow steemian.
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Thanks for your efforts!
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I was thinking about this whole time, so happy you made post about this! This post should be on trending!!
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Very great post! I would have not found this post if I were not checking out the comments on the jerry's post. Actually this post should be in trending! And people should find out this post.
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I too found this post through Jerry's post. This post should definitely be trending.
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I care 🤗
No @berniesanders needed for this, the trending algorithm can be changed, just have to dip into the code and do it.
For what it's worth I agree with you on this, both in ending the circle jerk and updating trending page algorithm.
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I think we, as well as your compatriot who muted me, are all in agreement that decreasing spam and garbage content is a pretty important goal. The trending page of the "business" tag is a sad state of affairs.
...and I say that as a guy who got started here with a HendrikDeGrote upvote.
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We need human judges the same as we have witnesses to evaluate and moderate this kind of posts manually or between verified trusted ones, with penalization for abuse, steemit supposed to be better than Reddit, protected by wise big ones that do not tolerate scams, spam, and wasting our attention and time...
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that s a shit...
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Thanks for exposing this @lexiconical. That is really quite unfortunate when we know there is a limited pool of rewards and so much great content out there. I was really excited when I discovered Steemit and I still plan on contributing regularly - for a while at least - but it's hard to stay enthusiastic when you see that the site actually does not run on quality at all, but merely on a system where the rich reap all the rewards.
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Looks like there is a whole robot city behind those vacation rental posts!
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Truth has been spoken. Now I am quitting Steemit. Thanks for this useful information.
Well, one more thing can we make fake Steemit accounts by their(who are earning thousands by shity posts) names and start making money ?
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Well, I wouldn't give up yet.
As for the latter question, created accounts are unique by identifier, I believe.
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Hey can you change your First Name on the Poker League to your Steemit username with the "@" sign included please. Thanks!
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Unfortunately for us, this is a "pay to win" platform, and if you're not playing the game... you will surely lose.
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so true bro!!! a lot of different groups are forming on steemit just for this reason
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Never really thought about it or looked into the matter, but I completely agree with you. Companies who throw money into the platform will only dilute the effectiveness of a newbie trying to get situated and actually produce solid, valuable content. It's a difficult problem with no apparent solution. That being said, the devs need to consider this when approving these account. Anything with a username of ___.com should probably be rejected.
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