Downvoting to make Steem risesteemCreated with Sketch.

in steem •  5 years ago  (edited)

With Hard fork 21, downvoting has its own bandwidth now. I hate to see my VP sit at 100% but I was lucky to find a group of Steem users working together, minnows, dolphins, orcas and a few whales using their collective voting power to stop spam and low quality content from being rewarded on the blockchain.

Many wonder why Steem has dropped so much in price, to me its just Bitcoins movements affecting altcoins due to BTC dominance. But theres more than just that when it comes to Steem. As some users have found ways to abuse the payout system by self upvoting using massive leases, use of bid bots on low quality posts. Or even groups of Steem bots working together to raise the price of a post. The group of Steem users trying to stop this is Steemflagrewards. Steem Cleaners has been around a long time, just like @mackbot and @cheetah helping to keep the blockchain clean and free of junk. I remember when Steem was in the top 30 altcoins, and I have a feeling that the abuse on the chain may have been the cause for the drop from rank 30 to all the way up in the 80s and 90s.

Now there are communities working together to find more content that should be zeroed out and at the very least warned of what they are doing. Stopping this abusive drain on Steem being sold on exchanges. Stopping their reward before the payout date.

I joined the group about a month ago and have been keeping my downvote VP busy. And brought on as a member of the Steemflagrewards group.

You can join Steemflagrewards as well, discord link is below.

https://discord.gg/Xpw55PX

Members of the Steemflagrewards group will submit posts and users they find abusing the payout system and members of the group are free to downvote the posts if they agree with the abuse.

Messages are left on the abusers account letting them know why they are being downvoted.

Its not always met with positive results. Sometimes these are retaliatory downvotes, ive received one so far.

Out of the dozens of users ive downvoted. It only occurred once and the user is now not using bid bots and last I checked not self upvoting their posts. And only their posts at a 96% self-upvote ratio.

By allowing these users to get away with abusing bid bots and self upvoting only their posts. Usually the abusers take their earnings and send it off to Bittrex to cash out. Which lowers the price, if there are hundreds of users or thousands of users abusing this. The price of Steem will continue to drop. And as someone with stake in this system I do not want to see that happen.

Here are some examples of crap posts we downvote:

Just a few sentences and then uses bid bots to upvote, every day.

More trash using a bunch of tags to earn tokens, the same goes for Steem-Engine payouts, if they cash out these coins it will lower the price of tokens if they can get away with it.

I powered up some more to hand out more downvotes, along with upvotes to good content.

In the past, downvoting had no rewards to it. And just cost you voting power you could otherwise use for upvotes. But after Hark Fork 21 it is now possible to really put that downvoting power to use.

By joining Steemflagrewards, and downvoting #flag-targets you will earn SFR (Steem Flag Rewards) tokens. And also get an upvote from the @steemflagrewards account.

By submitting users and posts for consideration of downvotes you will earn a bounty. So you dont even need to do the downvoting, just "curating posts for downvotes" so to say...

I could upvote my posts, and add 30 cents to my posts, but id rather spread out that vote to others that will instead return the favor. To help out the @steemflagrewards account I also delegated 2000 SP to the account to help have more downvoting power.

If you want to help:

  1. Submit posts/users to be considered to be downvoted in the Steemflagrewards Discord.
  2. Join in the downvotes in the #flag-targets channel.
  3. Request Steem leases to be canceled for abuse. Steemworld.org you can view incoming delegations for users.
  4. Delegating Steem Power to @steemflagrewards or to any flaggers of which you think are doing a great job to keep the blockchain clean.

Besides helping to stop abusers from being rewarded, by joining the Discord group there is collection of great Steem users are on there. Many with great content, and if you have good content as well they may recognize that and help your posts out if you do the same in return.

In the last month, I have also seen a steady rise in the price of Steem along with its rank slowly improving. I think the downvoting is having an effect on the price of Steem.

Or at least it seems to be that way, with accounts like @ocdb and @acidyo, and @themarkymark joining in and dozens of minnows, dolphins and orcas I think we can all make a meaningful change to the rewards system in the Steem ecosystem. Looking forward to any of my followers that join the Discord, you will be met with a warm welcome and it feels good to be part of a community working together to protect Steem and its value. Steem has such a great underlying structure, we cannot allow it to be abused by spammers and other low quality users. As long as I hold my stake, I plan on downvoting content I find wasteful on the reward pool and would love to see others doing the same. So we can all help raise the price of Steem.

Link to the Steemflagrewards Discord:

https://discord.gg/Xpw55PX


Addresses below to help me buy better camera equipment and support me to travel to locations to do photo and video and overall great blogs in new places. I would be happy to list some of the contributors in my posts for donations that help me along the way.

Coin

Address

BTC:

bc1qhfmvd2gywg4fvrgy2kkkkyqta0g86whkt7j8r7

LTC:

ltc1qdyzm5cwgt8e2373prx67yye6y9ewk0l8jf3ys9

DASH:

XkSqR5DxQL3wy4kNbjqDbgbMYNih3a7ZcM

ETH:

0x045f409dAe14338669730078201888636B047DC3

DOGE:

DSoekC21AKSZHAcV9vqR8yYefrh8XcX92Z

ZEN:

znW9mh62WDSCeBXxnVLCETMx59Ho446HJgq

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This a meaty post and really appreciate the SFR shout-out. I tend to be like a squirrel and work on many diff things so am easily distractable. (It's hard to resist fresh inspiration ya know)

I plan to focus on refining things w SFR to make everything run smooth but, but, more importantly, use tech as a force multiplier for well intentioned people. We've made a helluva lot of strides in that direction and in proportion to our SP believe we make a disproportionate difference on chain. Being resourceful is something I was taught long ago.

Hope we've done well thus far and a DAO proposal is on the horizon. I just want make sure its tip top. My ambition tends to get ahead of me at times but believe will catch up once I onboard my brother and others for a more globalized approach to moderation.

In other words, this is only the beginning.

!CHOPS 4

@anthonyadavisii

thanks alot for checking out my post, loving the community you started. Thanks for letting me join. That would be great for a DAO proposal, and give the group enough SP to handle almost all bid-botted or large group upvoted posts.

Looking forward to how it scales, as Steem grows we will need to scale as well.

You were one of the first people I followed on here when I started being active on Steem last June. I was glad to see you in the @steemflagrewards server when you joined.

It took me a while at first to get onboard with the whole downvoting thing. I lurked in the @steemflagrewards Discord server for a long time before I decided to join in. I wasn't sure at first whether what they were doing was good or bad. Then I came to realize that what they were doing was necessary.

Anyway, it's great to have you on the team.

Thank you. @saboin. Used some SFR to give this supportive comment a boost. Hope to work to scale things and tighten up our process to ensure we stay in the straight and narrow so to speak. It's so easy for flag groups to gain a negative stigma.

It really doesn't take much.. no matter how much good is done. There was a time when morale was pretty low but glad things seem to be turning around. We have some good allies and think the fields will be ripe for harvest when the full vision of SFR is realized.

At this point, I'm going need to navigate into the business side.. something that is completely foreign to me as a tech person as I think what we do can be leveraged as a business service.. and I want to make sure everybody that was there and believed gets first dibs on the opportunities I hope to be created.

One day hope this thing will be more than a hobby. Don't get me wrong. I love my job but get a lot more from what I do here. It's a lot more satisfying than managing domain controllers any day of the week. Syadmin work can be droll.

I was surprised as well who I recognized when I joined SFR. Just like you I looked around for awhile before getting more involved.

You too @saboin good to join you on SFR and on the Caturday Discord. Thanks much for the CAT tokens again.

Great to see you in this group.
And here a great quote from the @steemflagrewards posts, in case you receive a lot of revenge votes:

If you feel you've been wrongly flagged, check out @freezepeach, the flag abuse neutralizer.

Thanks, @captainklaus. I boosts this as it is a helpful reminder of our friends at @freezepeach. I also might add that @r0nd0n, FP creator, has started a witness campaign that you may be interested in reviewing.

https://steemit.com/witness-category/@r0nd0n/my-application-for-steem-witness

Thanks much, ill need to look into @freezepeach I keep hearing about it but dont know much about it. Thanks for the tip.

Freeze Peach sounds like free speech. It's meant to counter downvotes when you get downvoted for having the "wrong" opinion. They help whenever you get unfairly downvoted. I'll send you an invite to the Discord server.

What to do about messages in our wallet -- "you have 20 hours to un-vote this guy or I'll downvote you" - well dang, I'm 2 days late seeing that one, and I also don't recall voting for this markymark. Gaaah!

Please REMOVE your witness vote from the downvote freek @themarkymark, he doesn't deserve to be in the top 20 witnesses! You have 24 HOURS from now to act, otherwise you will be DOWNVOTED! (Just let you know how you feel when you received downvotes) Link to remove the witness vote: https://beta.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=themarkymark&approve=0 For reasons to remove the vote, please check out this post: https://busy.org/@fuk.themarkymark/fuck-themarkymark

YOu can ignore that threat!

Thank you - and even if I'd been downvoted for it, I'd oppose blackmail and coercion. On to happier subjects now. Happy Valentine' Day to all. :)

Last I heard they have not carried out with the downvotes. Ah thanks alot

Thanks for helping out with SFR. There's plenty of crap to deal with and if we do nothing then it will just get worse. That harms the reputation of Steem. I see downvotes being as valid as upvotes. Both are used to adjust the rewards of a post and if those rewards were not earned then they should be removed. There's a finite pool of rewards each day.

Steem on!

Glad to be a member, yes sometimes big bidbot upvotes can get past us. But luckily it seems SFR knows a few whales that can help out if the heavy downvote is needed. And I completely agree, we need to stop abusers before others try to do the same and magnify the issue.

thanks alot for the comment

I just saw on abuser refusing to understand that buying votes is wrong. 'Why should I not buy votes if people are selling them?'. It can be hard work to explain to them. I know some people are desperate for any money, but we need to encourage a culture of earning rewards. It's going to get 'interesting' if millions sign up. Then we may have to automate more of the moderation.

Hah yeah the cognitive dissonance is strong in some.

Looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

My DV Power is just idling. Is it possible to make DV trail for @solominer? :D

If you use Steemauto, you can find my downvote trail on there under my username.

Just started one, good point.

I am not a big fan of steemauto. They have been using my accounts to vote on other post before without me knowning :/
Not sure if there is an alternative which allows you to DV

Cool! Will look at it when I come home! :D

There's no way in hell I would ever consider joining a DV trail. I think downvotes should be used ONLY in the case of plagiarism. If someone wants to self vote that's their right. It's their stake. They're dumb for not using 10 votes a day tho.. if a post is low effort then don't upvote it.. but downvoting it just creates animosity and drama.. ask yourself this.. would the blockchain benefit more from 250K people shit posting.. circle jerk voting and bid botting into trending OR have 50 people writing quality posts?

Clearly you have no clue how the reward pool works if you think 250k people shitposting and milking rewards is sustainable, and will create any incentive for legitimate users.

I will certainly agree that I have no idea how the reward pool works.. but I know there's a lot more transactions with 250k people circle jerking.. more transactions = more use = better price. If there's no transactions then there's no blocks.. aka no blockchain

more transactions = more use = better price.

Not necessarily. Bloat, or pointless transactions, such as someone removing and adding witness votes thousands of times a day, is really not adding much of value to the chain.

Also usage doesn't have to correlate with the price. Just look at Tron or BSV. lol

We don't lack transactions is what I'm saying, Dave. It all comes down to more people buying and less people selling. And of course, BTC rising.

It all comes down to more people buying

Who's gonna buy something no one uses? Might as well be trying to sell condoms in 1968..

Who's gonna buy something no one uses?

Speculators. I don’t think we’ll be rid of them for years. Lol

but I know there's a lot more transactions with 250k people circle jerking.. more transactions = more use = better price.

So if I write a shitpost script that generates millions of transactions on the blockchain using my resource credits and self-votes, that will drive the price up?

You don't see any issue with that logic?

I see the issue yes.. but am I not correct thinking more transactions equals a better price? Would STEEM be a better investment with 1M transactions a day or with 50?

Commenting as a reminder to respond later. I believe I can address your points in a way that hopefully you may find reasonable.

Thanks for sharing your POV.

You don't have to join any trails. You can manually downvote just for plagiarism if you like. Most of us in SFR act as individuals. I mostly remove votes where they were bought from bots. Someone buying a dollar of votes or more on several posts per day is depriving us all of rewards. I don't want to chase people away unless they really are not interested in working with the greater community. Good posts add value to Steem and we need more of them for sure.

Yeah DV trails dont give you a chance to consider if its spam or not. Im not on any DV trails with my @solominer account. That way I can make a conscious decision on what to downvote.

And its not their stake in many cases, its leased. So they did not buy into Steem, they are just renting it. Id rather downvote crap content than allow it to pay out and lower the price of Steem.

Id much rather see just 50 people writing quality posts, instead of allowing everyone and anyone to bidbot their posts into trending and then making a dash for the door with their earnings, lowering the price of Steem.

Would you rather buy a token that does 50 transactions per day or one that does 50 million.. downvoting people chases them away.. mostly new people.. but some old timers too

Id rather see just 50 quality content creators in trending at the moment and 10s of thousands of users in new. And as the community grows, along with quality content creators then trending will grow too.

Especially if the price of Steem rises, that will encourage quality creators to join. But if we do not, the quality creators will never be seen in the never ending sea of shit posts and piss quality content.

Steem can handle alot more, see blocktivity.info its one of the most underutilized blockchains compared to its capacity.

And if some old-timers leave because they cannot bid-bot their shitposts anymore then good.. please leave. Goto some other platform if you want to post low quality content.

Oh I 1000% agree that trending should be exceptional content.. downvoting chased away old-timer quality content creators like @lyndsaybowes ...

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It looks like @lyndsaybowes was being downvoted by a single individual. Theres always going to be lone wolf actors but at least with SteemFlagRewards each member decides on what is downvote worthy and not a centralized group.

Cool discussion of the DOWNVOTING
Thanks for presenting on #pypt @pypt

thanks alot for checking it out.

Great post!

The cleaning effort on this blockchain is under-appreciated, even though it ensures more rewards are available for legitimate work.

  ·  5 years ago (edited)

What you are cleaning? You stolen the peoples money, who invest in bid-bots, to promote their hard work, and this money is back into pool - that's stolen money, not cleaning, and not right way for economic!

Ah... maybe you and people like you clean the Steemit from people, to blown the people away from steemit. One day, the Steemit will be just a bunch of people like you and youple of others like you (SFR), to stay here and be happy to be in a such community, alone. Because, you downvote real peoples work, not the spams or plagiarism.

Every bussines, like example, google, you pay bids for words, to promote your work, site, whatever, or google ads, and here, the bots are created to help people to promote their work, for money, ok, but that's it, and you destroy this now.

You see that no one are investing more in the Steem?, the price of couple of cents in the last days, are just the money you stolen from people bidding bots with their money, you take this back, and put into pool, but that's not the economics that should be. Look at the charts, investments before the last 2 forks, and look after, you will see, no investments more. I talk about millions of dolars investments, not a couple of dolars like now.

You all do this wrong with downvoting real people. People receiving 2 days long just downvoting, but, not from normal people, just from some bots, with no posts, and maybe 10% from normal people who join the DV trail, and they have no clue what they are doing, almost all of them are beginners here, or thinking, ok, i hel to downvote the spams or plagiarism, in fact, they helping SFR to blown away real people.

Please, stop this, until is to late. look at other posts, overall in steemit, people are complaining about this problem you create here with such ideas.

Do not downvote real people with real work, please to all real people with real accounts, because, SFR is 90% automated bots, accounts with nonsense posts, or no posts at all!

Do not let this happend.

  ·  5 years ago (edited)Reveal Comment

thanks alot..

I am really glad someone came up with the idea for @steemflagrewards giving people incentive short term with tokens and upvotes for going after targets will hopefully turn more users into those who want to combat crap on the chain. Long term the price of Steem should rise if we can stop the leaking caused by abusers.

You can credit @anthonyadavisii for creating @steemflagrewards.

The idea sounds very good but I've been downvotet too with one of my last posts...
Not so sure if they will use the power for good or just abuse it

Posted using Partiko Android

Right, well thats why I like how its up to the individual in the group to decide to downvote or not. Most of the users do not like people using bid bots and thats why you got downvoted, but I decided to refrain from joining in.

I think previous groups trying to handle that were quite centralized and hard to reach the people in charge. At least with SteemFlagRewards its an open discord and people can come in and dispute the downvotes.

Maybe I should join too
As I says the idea to punish bad content is a great idea
And as you says in your post the power to downvote will otherwise just be unused
I hope my English isn't to terrible, sometimes I just don't know better 🤭

Posted using Partiko Android

If you want to put your DV bandwidth to use there is always content on there that I think is easily thought of as bad content. Of course its up to you to decide what "bad content" is as its subjective.

Check out the discord links in the post to join SFR, you can always lurk for as long as you want. Everyone is friendly there.

I appreciate your efforts to keep the blockchain clean and free of junk!
Now, to discourage this chronic downvoter who goes after @Freewritehouse with some kind of vendetta (he disapproves of SBI?). It's one thing to identify and dispose of true "junk" posts. It's another to punish sincere people who are writing and sharing as part of a community (with a hive number and all; how's that for legitimacy!).
Sorry. I see #downvote and think #abuse by the downvoter, and that's not what your post is about! #Steemflagrewards is where it's at. :) Thanks for this @solominer.

Ah thanks alot, yes I know who you are speaking of. I pulled my delegation to SBI because I was getting downvotes. When that gets straightened out I look forward to returning.

Like you said its not them downvoting based on content, instead based on association with another group. I hope that does not catch on, not a fan of the in-fighting probably because of failed bid-bots.

Thank you!
In-fighting, bots, and sabotage are among my pet peeves.
And chewers, of course. Who doesn't hate unnecessarily loud chewing? :)
Down with the gratuitous downvoters!
Up with solominer!

I think the one @carolkean is talking about used to be a bid bot owner. He sees SBI essentially as bid bots with an extra step. The best we can do is to keep discussing it with him and try to persuade him to leave SBI alone. That guy is on the SFR flagtrail, so he does downvote some stuff that legitimately should be downvoted. He might come around eventually. Let's hope.

Now I have this guy in my wallet threatening to downvote me if I don't unvote some witness, and as far as I can see, I never voted for this markymark in the the first place. Do I hit Approve? This doesn't look like any witness site I've voted at before.

Where do I report @themilkymark for this:

Please REMOVE your witness vote from the downvote freek @themarkymark, he doesn't deserve to be in the top 20 witnesses! You have 24 HOURS from now to act, otherwise you will be DOWNVOTED! (Just let you know how you feel when you received downvotes) Link to remove the witness vote: https://beta.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=themarkymark&approve=0 For reasons to remove the vote, please check out this post: https://busy.org/@fuk.themarkymark/fuck-themarkymark

And when I try to make sure I've voted for @enginewitty, I get these scary messages about granting privileges to apps:

Who would agree to "let it change all your data"??

Awww, you're a peach! That is a bit misleading, we should probably have some devs reword that!

It looks like you are trying to add the SteemConnect extension, you do not need that to vote or unvote for witnesses.

You can do it from the hamburger menu in the top right.

And you're the markymark I was told to downvote or risk being downvoted myself? Thank you for the information. :) Next up, get that blackmailer out of people's wallets...

Hell will need to freeze over before I surrender my right to choose who I vote for.

Amen, @shadowspub!

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I agree on dv but for me I don't want to join in a trail because dv is different from uv. But also we have different ideas about this matter. Anyway there should stand to make steem a better platform.

I work with SFR and I'm not on the trail.

I just downvote along the way if I feel my downvote is needed.

very true, it's fine that you'll follow an upvote trail because you're motivating someone. However the dv trail is making a disappointing effect on a person. That's why I chose not to follow a trail on it.

yep thats why I manually downvote looking at the SteemFlagRewards discord.

I'm on the trail, but I check @steemworld every day to see what I downvoted, and I sometimes cancel my downvote if I think it's not necessary. It depends what the reason for downvoting was and if I think we overshot. If it's for buying votes, I usually aim to only take out the amount that wasn't earned organically. Each person can do as they wish. Nobody is forced to join the trail, and everybody has the right to cancel their downvotes if they don't agree with it.

Ive pulled back my downvotes as well using my @makingblocks account after noticing it unvoted for something id rather it not. So I know what you nean. Yeah it is a very friendly group and I feel like I can selectively downvote what I want to as well.

yep I feel ya, id rather make a case by case basis on deciding what to downvote.

So true, I had to decline downvoting one of my followers @kiel91 as they came on the radar for bid botting. Was kinda worried the group was going to be mad at me, but instead I got a great response.

Hi @solominer!

Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 3.825 which ranks you at #5044 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has improved 11 places in the last three days (old rank 5055).

In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 83 contributions, your post is ranked at #8.

Evaluation of your UA score:
  • You're on the right track, try to gather more followers.
  • The readers appreciate your great work!
  • Try to work on user engagement: the more people that interact with you via the comments, the higher your UA score!

Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server

  ·  5 years ago (edited)

  ·  5 years ago Reveal Comment

Thats what I usually try to do, I look at the bid bot amount and nullify the rewards. Or in the case of @onthehook8 I removed their self upvote worth before payout.. Leaving them with the worth of the other upvoters.