Before @freedom revoked minnowbooster's delegation, the biggested beneficiary of selling vote business was minnowbooster team. Now the biggest beneficiary is a bunch of delegation beggers who are getting delegations from freedom and returning 50 SBD per day for 100k SP and freedom himself.
Freedom is an anon investor who most likely funded the main steem team during the initial presale. There was no steem ico because they were able to gather funds without any ico. But his recent actions is sinking the very thing he funded at start. His delegations are:
tayyabhussain, one of the delegates says this in his bio:
Send Min Bid 0.10 SBD & Max Bid 10.00 SBD. My Team Has 500K Steem Power In Different IDs, I Will Upvote Your Post From Any ID
The team he is talking about is most likely getting delegations from freedom as well. So, here we have steemit officials calling steem proof of brain where people are supposed to earn steem by posting quality content or popular content but in reality, many quality contributors are leaving the platform because of the way steemit is functioning.
I have seen at least a few high quality authors leave steemit after posting five or six posts. One of which is, https://steemit.com/@bynaomi. People are talking about user retention in steemit but if steem continues to allow unregulated vote selling, then only a few vote trading experts will be left in steemit who will mine steem using bot votes.
People like @bynaomi are leaving steemit because they are not getting even 5% of what their contributions are worth. On the other hand, 3-4% of the reward pool is going into the pocket of bot operators and vote sellers getting SP from @freedom.
And they are either the same people or working as a team to maximize their earnings. They largely do not care about content quality and their votes are disrupting the steem reputation algorithm. Those who are buying votes are getting extra attention, extra rep points regardless of content quality.
Steem will lose legitmacy of being a social network if it continues to operate like this.
To fix this big big problem, I am working on an experimental idea of having a mechanism that will allow high quality content creators get rewards without buying votes. I have a lot in mind but for now, I have created the discord channel steemit moderation. Invite: https://discord.gg/6frydN9. I will write a brief explanation of how Steemit Moderation will work and how it will help retain high quality users later.
For now, know this, if you are a high quality content creator and receive only a few cents in your posts, you may post links to your post with excerpts of the first two paragraph in the "posts-to-review" channel. If I review the post and find it worthy, I will give 0.5-2$ vote on that post. I will try to review about 5-10 posts a day.
The chat already has two whales and two dolphins. If you are a whale or dolphin looking for good posts to upvote, consider joining the chat. The chat is largely empty and it will take some time for it to get on track. So, please have a bit of patience.
It appears to me that @freedom is operating within the consensus rules of the STEEM network.
The STEEM token is now only for liquidity, investment, marketing and development.
SMT's will be rewarded to Content Creators in the future.
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There is no proper consensus about this issue.
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Delegation is in the code. SBD is in the code. Trading delegation for SBD is a Free Market Activity. I don't tell a user what to do with his Bitcoin. I see no need to dictate what a user of the STEEM network decides to with his Mined, Earned, or Bought stake.
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I'm not interested in telling anyone what to do, except leave me alone if they're bothering me, but I often hear that 'it's in the code' refrain, so I'll point out that if the code doesn't allow it, then 'it's not in the code' will be equally valid.
Also, unlike BTC, or any other crypto, Steem is spawned by a social media platform, and societies have needs beyond economic. Steem therefore has to be different than other cryptos.
I'll not bore you with my spiel, as you dont wanna hear it, but I reckon the points I've made are valid, as is this one: of the accounts opened in 2016, but ~11% remain active - including all the bots, and multiples.
There have been around ~450k accounts created on Steemit, and there are about ~10k active posters, per @arcange, today.
@littleboy isn't wrong to call attention to the problem. Content creators are the engine that drives the use case for Steem. If the platform collapses, the use case blows away, along with the value of investments in Steem.
Food for thought, I hope.
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Sounds like a way to create a Black Market in Delegation.
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exactly.
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Which presumes that there is a future. If most people pack up and leave in disgust, this will be akin to the tale of "killing the goose that lays golden eggs." Short term greed has a sneaky way of preventing long term success. If someone like "freedom" makes $5,000 a day from delegations NOW, but as a result their $7 million capital becomes worth $700,000 as Steem becomes a "shitcoin," is that REALLY a good investment?
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Steem is an organic thing. What practices are common now will not be common in the future. But changes only happen with vigilant users like yourself. We all need to improve and build real quality, not sell votes and in the process create a shitposting site. I support your rigorous nature.
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I spend a lot of time on the sidelines, just looking at the use and mechanics. I spent a large portion of my working career looking at systems and finding flaws that led to inefficiencies and have formed off-the-cuff opinions about Steemit.
Steemit has a fatal problem, IMHO: it allows use of bots. Instead of a promising archive of an accumulation of creative work, it has become a race to grab money more quickly than the next guy and that ensures that the tech-savvy will reap the rewards. No really creative person is going to chase commenting the bot-selected, newest post, and there will be no recognition for any posting that is really worthwhile because it is a few days old, forgotten by the "let's vote and get rich" pressure, and relegated the the vacuum of history.
Eliminate ALL activity that allows anything to vote other than a human at the keyboard. Allow votes to continue and reward any post, regardless of age.
Most of the trending, see-it-now posts have an interest life of about ten seconds and those worthy of my attention lie on fallow ground because everyone is being fed what the bots are selecting. That may be the business model, but it will turn Steemit into a gambling game instead of what could become a very rich archive of talented stories, photographs, personal archives, and documentation of our times.
It's a shame, too. I had such high hopes...
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I yesterday voiced almost exact same concern to @andrarchy, public liaison for Stinc, and suggested 2FA, and/or captchas, as means of dramatically reducing bots.
I confess I am nonplussed by the lack of interest in the problem, and potential solutions, from Stinc - but for one detail. Witnesses control the code, and stake weighted voting selects which witnesses will do so.
A Sybil attack requiring only purchasing the vast mined stakes of the top whales would gain complete control of Steemit, Steem, and the blockchain, and the current stakeholders would float off into the sunset on their shiny, golden, parachutes.
That's the only thing I can think of that precludes some effort to change the attack vector on the witnesses, of which I've seen no sign of effort whatsoever.
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And my response to you was that, though I am not a security expert, requiring that users enable 2FA during sign up would introduce yet another layer of friction when the most common complaints we get are around simplifying our sign up process. I've never heard anyone else on the platform suggest requiring 2FA and I am very curious to see if a significant number of users think that introducing a very, very serious barrier to the sign up process is a good idea. Many potential users would not even know what 2FA is. We are happy to examine all proposals, and anyone is free to submit PRs through github, but I do not believe a significant number of users will agree that we should make the sign up process harder instead of easier.
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2FA may not have universal appeal, but neither does voting in a losing competition with bots. 2FA could be required for anyone wanting to vote and that would provide incentive. It's getting to be a cruel world and that's due to the bots and vote-selling. People cannot idly stand aside and allow computers to run Steem, so why not include 2FA as a way to make a statement? Simple as that: only real person votes count. Period.
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If it's a user experience concern, how about making it optional? I can't speak for anyone else but it seems logical to me that those who have a lot at stake might appreciate the option?
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Thanks for adding your position on 2FA. I also mentioned captchas. I expect the concerns you have over them are of similar effect as 2FA.
I also think that I am not the best mind to examine this issue, and that it is something of great import to the community.
Perhaps there might some useful response from the community to a request for input regarding bots, and means of restricting, reducing, or reasons not to do either, from Stinc.
Also, I've never received any comment regarding the vulnerability of the witnesses to economic Sybil attack. Does Stinc have a position on this matter?
Thanks for your measured and substantive response!
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2FA and captchas do not prevent bots from operating. All you need to run a bot is to write some code that interacts with the blockchain directly without using a website. The blockchain cannot differentiate a transaction that was signed by a human or a bot.
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So, what you're saying is that bots can interact with the blockchain via other interfaces, such as busy.org, MSPSteemit.com, etc...
Are you certain this isn't preventable? While Stinc allows unregulated interaction with the blockchain, AFAIK, is this necessarily the only policy?
Couldn't Stinc require an interface to be accepted?
None of us can differentiate between a vote from a bot, or a vote from a person - that's my problem with bots. They're not people, and shouldn't be impacting votes on social media IMHO.
But bots can't use 2fa, or solve captchas, and if most bots interact with the blockchain via Steemit, then most bots can be controlled via Steemit.
Thanks for pointing out the additional potential attack vectors bots present!
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What I am saying is that you do not need a web interface to interact with the blockchain (if you know what you are doing). Steemit Inc does not own the blockchain so they cannot prevent anyone to interact with the blockchain (if they did then the platform would not be censorship resistant).
Bots do not use steemit or busy or chainbb or any other public app to interact with the blockchain (I think you misunderstand how bots work). I am not a programmer but even I can figure out how to use the code to build my own bot or interface (it's not going to be pretty but I think I can make it work).
Furthemore bots are not bad in and of themelves, they are just tools that can be used for good or bad. Take @cheeta for example. That is a bot that searches for content that is likely to be plagiarized.
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It's undoubtedly true that I misunderstand how bots work.
What I see bots doing, however, indicates to me that the harm (IMHO) is dependent on interfacing with the community, particularly on Steemit, the only place I perceive them.
It is this interaction between bots and people, in particular the ability of bots to be employed to impact the choices made by the community as to content quality - votebots - that I am attempting to address.
Since your point, that the bots themselves need not interact with people on Steemit directly, and merely direct their voting as per interactions between people on Steemit mandate, establishes that neither 2FA nor captchas have potential to preclude bot votes, I deeply appreciate your explanation.
Nothing pleases me more than finding out I am wasting my time, because that enables me to change how I proceed.
Thanks!
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The first post that I made on steemit (more than a year ago) was a complaint about voting bots. As I learned more about the platform and blockchains in general I realized that bots can't be stopped.
Over time I realized that the Steem blockchain is much more than steemit or the social media applications that are being built around it. A good example is utopian.io which is a platform that uses steem to reward contributions to open source projects.
With the upcoming launch of the Smart Media Tokens protocol a whole new avenue will open up for anyone bold and creative enough to build new applications on top of the Steem blockchain.
There is an old post from @dantheman that sheds some light as to what can be done with this technology (it opened my eyes...especially the part where it mentions that we don't need permission from steemit.inc):
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-anyone-can-build-custom-apps-on-steem-right-now
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It's people like you that give me faith that this weird crypto experiment will work out for the better.
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You know what @littleboy, we need people like you. Rather minds like yours. We need problem-identifiers, the cleaners.
I almost 100 % agree with the rep algo abuse. I have been seeing it but didn't complain, thinking it might be considered whining because I dont buy votes (or can't).
I am consistently working hard and I am happy here with the slow and steady progress that I have been seeing in these almost 6 months.
People like you, like the quality authors will soon be happy with their effort because posts like this one will be read and solutions will be found.
Steemit has a lot to improve and it will certainly improve. Quality will be rewarded and abusers may still be punished heavily using retrospective flagging (flagging old posts and comments.
Thanks for enhancing my perspective on this issue and I will surely raise my voice as well. Glad to join the discord and following you from now on!
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3-4 posts is nothing on steemit. You need months to get visible. If there are more post created that minute you go down the drain very fast without somebody noticing you. I do not agree with the low accounts and beggars who got their delegation from freedom, but you need to build your network and relationships on steemit and after 3,4 posts you will not be able to do it. It takes months to do so and the more people arrive the harder it will be to be seen.
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The best way is to play by the rule of the game, any attempt to cut corners under any guise is corruption. We can make the world a better place by always playing by the rule of the game.
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I submit that there are games where cheating is not only accepted, but is the intention of the game.
My ex was great at cheating and playing games =/
In such games, players either cheat or lose.
Steemit seems to be becoming such a game.
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When quality gives way to economic interest, unfortunately the outlook is not promising either.
I should also like to point out another problem, SPAM comments. Right now, I'm concentrating all my efforts on fight this scourge.
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This is my problem with your statetment.. which none of the people who hate on @minnowbooster seem to mention.
90% of the liquid that goes to minnowbooster gets dispersed among it's investors.
Between the team that maintains this bot, 10% of the rewards are distributed.
The rest of the rewards are distributed among people who delegate to minnowbooster, the people who invest in buildteam, ect. That doesn't even count the fact that the people who sell their vote to minnowbooster are getting a large chunk of that money, and minnowbooster only takes part of it for maintaining the bot.
The reason I like minnowbooster is the fact that @reggaemuffin has been a supporter of minnows since he started using steem, and he actually started it because he didn't think the way other bots were run was fair...
soo... you have every other bot on the market, except for the brand new MSP bid bot taking 100% of the liquid from vote buyers, and you have minnowbooster taking only 10% and sharing it among a diverse group of people across the steemisphere, many of whom are powering up...
why does everyone hate minnowbooster, when the other boosters didn't provide a positive roi, and kept all of the profits to themselves?
Please educate me! I have open ears.
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I can't answer for @littleboy, but I see bots, as @willymac does: simply direct competition for rewards with actual content creators. @markymark has posted several comments of late in which he points out he just doesn't have the ability to screen out shitposts, and I don't doubt him.
Essentially, focusing on financial schema to gain rewards kills content creation, and drives churn. Steemit users leave in droves, for this reason IMHO. Steem is consistently being ever more concentrated in the accounts that hold most of it. Steemit has a worse GINI than any nation in the world, and this discourages the artistic types.
Steem needs the artistic types, since content is the engine that drives Steem use, and thus it's value. Killing content kills the Steem.
I don't hate on profits, bots, or anything. I'm just pointing out the results of their proliferation, and the transformation of Steemit from a social media site to a pool mining site, that uses shitposts (at worst) as a vector for mining ops.
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as aggroed points out, hardfork 19 is what brought the ability to make profitable bots... most of the bots that came out weren't that good... I'm no developer... but I suspect the answer is something besides linear rewards, which also is not n^2....
so really we need developers and mathematicians.... or mathematician developers... and someone to come up with the code... because obviously steemit inc has a pretty hefty load to complete roadmap2017, and doesn't seem available for these types of changes at the moment.
However, "we" have the power to propose forks... but everyone is too busy to do anything but complain about it.
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Well, I can appreciate that I do often sound like a broken record on this and related issues, but I also do attempt to offer improvements, and am aware of many others that do also.
@bitopia has posted several relevant proposals, and the best of them, concerning the promotion feature, is simply outstanding. My own latest post is, in fact, a conceptualization of how to insulate creators from profiteers, while allowing profiteers to concentrate on profit, their apparent overriding interest.
Have a look if you care to. I won't link it, cuz I don't wanna spam, but it's todays, and it's brief.
@bitopia's is better than mine, and far more developed. I fully endorse it.
Thanks!
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I'm glad you are fighting the good fight, because I don't know how any of this shit works.
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Excellent insight, with which I agree.
Thanks!
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