Hello Steemers, yesterday, I noticed a very strange activity on my post when I submitted my work titled The Seven Cures for a Lean Purse That Changed My Life : https://steemit.com/money/@delphia16/the-seven-cures-for-an-empty-bank-account-lean-purse-that-changed-my-life .
After about 10 minutes of submitting my post, I had already had about 34 upvotes without a significant shift in the numbers so I got get suspicious. I found out that someone or something with the usernames laonie had upvoted me 12 times with different versions of this name from serial laonie, laonie1, laonie2 up to serial number laonie12. Is it that someone has twelve accounts? Or have they just found a way to game the system? Or are they bots?
What effects are this guys having on the quality of upvotes and the reward system?
Or is it a systematic ploy to create a perception so as to limit the worth of a post?
And is there a way to kick this guy(s) off this platform if they are going to be diluting the votes? Because it gives the wrong impression of who appreciates you work.
Anyone with answers please respond.
Thanks you. And for the real and genuine people and members wading through posts to identify, read and support great content, I say thank you for doing a great job.
Happy Steeming
Interesting that if that was the work of a single person and they were using bots that they had the lack of foresight to use differing names on the accounts, surely an instant cause for concern with account activity. On a plus side I am sure the votes will have done some good, even if it is better to have real voters giving agreement on quality content!
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Thanks @stephenfrost. One would think they would try their hardest to conceal their activity by at least having different names. They are just not bothered about content, they are only interested in newer ways to game the system and make some money.
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Indeed. On a related point I have noted various posts cropping up in the feed offering "bot services" with prices for likes, follows and even flags, somewhat disturbing to say the least!
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Already? I hope steemit finds its feet quickly to deal with this just like Facebook. The moment bot activities are discovered, the account should either be locked down for a while, suspended or deleted.
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Indeed so. I am still to understand the full details of how bots affect the intended workings of Steemit, though abuses and flagrant profiteering through the sale of bot services for hire could massively distort and harm the platform driving real users out. As for Locking things down, suspending or deleting I think a different approach could be better. Potentially reviewing account activity and how it is linked with other accounts, from there discerning what patterns exist in terms of usage and potential abuse. If a person is outright touting services then fine kick them, though in the cases where it is less then fully discernible more cautious action would likely be prudent, at least until any truly 100% reliable detection systems are in place.
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When people mine steem they often create accounts with names like that. Possible someone then used those accounts for bots or sold them. There are so many bots voting sometimes I wonder if they outnumber people on steemit.
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@fubar-bdhr, thank you for your reply. I sincerely hope not. And I hope the system comes up with a way to dealing with such activities.
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I think its not a problem as long as their votes has bearing, I mean if they have huge sp.
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That's true @juvyjabian, but with huge sp, if they choose to reserve the gesture by downvoting as well in such numbers, that will simply be wrong!
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Yea but usually bot are created to upvotes only, they cannot be created to do both upvote and downvotes.
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I hope so, I truly hope so
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I'm afraid I'm partially to blame for that. I was the first voter, the @laonie bots (and some others) are stalking me around. I'm now voting only on posts with $0 so the authors have nothing to lose, and the bots have nothing to gain. It's worth 65 cents now, my stalkers combined.
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@liberosist, thanks for your comment. If that will really make the different, I think I need to watch out as well. But there are great post that real people have supported by upvoting. That shouldn't scare us from supporting great content even if the post has made some money too.
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I am sorry, @liberosist , i have read some your posts and checked your curation records, your are a good curator, that's why my bot followed you, i explained my robot experiment in my post before:
https://steemit.com/steem/@laonie/my-robot-experiment-distribute-my-voting-power-to-the-hands-of-good-human-curators
if you feel unconfortable with that, i will remove you from the list, so the bots won't stalk you again.
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Thank you @laonie, much appreciated. :) I understand your experiment, but perhaps you should reach out to users on chat before following them. You are of course free to do as you please.
The thing is many of us are much lower SP (like 1/10th) than you, so having a bot following us instantly simply robs us of curation rewards. At that point, we are no longer motivated to keep curating. I'm sure you will understand.
The other effect is that the authors suffer too, as others are less motivated to vote as well.
Of course, I don't blame you, it's just a flaw in the curation system.
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I think you might be wrong about how the curation rewards works, as long as i vote behind you, you won't be robbed, but on the contrary , your rewards will increase, and the authors won't suffer, the more votes increased the chance of the posts to be exposed, it's a win-win situation.
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Oh, no, that's incorrect.
I'm speaking from observation, and keeping a close eye on exact Voting Weights with the Vote Inspector on SteemStats.com.
The curation rewards work are heavily skewed towards R-shares than time. My R-share is 1/10th that of yours due to my low SP holding. I have calculated, you'd need to vote approximately 3-4 hours later for it to have a break even impact on my rewards.
But it's very different here. I'll tell you what happens. If I vote early on a promising post, and I'm the first one to vote, I'll get ~90% voting weight. Then if a whale votes, my weight will be down to 10%.
However, if your bots follow, then my voting weight is instant reduced to 10%. And then when the whale votes it's down to 1%.
The end result is that my curation rewards are reduced by 90% - I put in a lot of hard work into finding new posts, but if you are shadowing me than it's not worth it for me.
I hope you understand the problem now. :) Like I said, I understand completely what you are doing, but the system is deeply flawed.
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The rshares is affected by SP,voting power,voting weight , it's the same no matter when you vote, the weight (not voting weight) will affected by sequence , but not time. as long as i vote behind you, your rewards is the same, i did a test for you, your can check here:
https://steemd.com/test/@laonie1/this-is-a-test
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That precisely proves my point! If you had just voted with @laonie5, for example, @loanie5's voting percentage would have ben at 90% or more. So, if a whale came in and voted, @laonie5's voting percentage would be bumped down to 10%. Let's say more whales came in and voted, the post ended up with $1,000, @laonie5 would end up with a 5% or so weight, and a 10 SP curation reward.
However, if @laonie 5 were followed by @laonie8, 9 and 10 which have higher R-shares, 5's weight will be bumped down to around 10%. Then, if whales come and vote, it would end up with a weight of 0.5%. Instead of 10 SP, @laonie5 will take home 1 SP.
I hope you understand what I mean. You can try the test again, see the weight percentage at the time when there's only @laonie5, and see @laonie5's weight plummet down when the higher R-share 8, 9 and 10 come in. Not to mention, when @laonie comes in, which is even higher R-share and totally decimates the equation.
Also, you can clearly see the weights going down by time, albeit slightly. Your case is not representative because no one else is voting, and the rshares are similar, so the weights are going down much slower. But in an actual situation, the weights go down massive over time. You can see my article Mind Your Votes where I demonstrate that a minnow can end up with the same weight as a whale.
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I checked your curation rewards in 24 hours, it's 37.254 SP, your total SP is 6,371.896, that's 0.58% profit in one day.
It increased a lot during my stalking.
I am stalking @nanzo-scoop as well, he is happy to be stalked, anyway, i removed you from the stalking list already, i hope you can figure this out in the future, i understand why some people like you misunderstood about this, because you are not Geeks.
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But how do I stop this bot from following me about? It just sent it's 12 bots to upvote my posts again on this post!
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My bot voted your post because liberosist thinks you posted good content, it's a support for both of you, you know, most of the other bots vote the TOP authors only, that's why the same names shows on the front page again and again, and most of the authors like you were ignored.
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@laonie, thanks at least for showing up here in flesh. My problem is, it feels like a troll. How do you then gauge quality content since bots are not as smart?
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My bot don't gauge the quality of content, it relys on humans to do that.
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Minnow curation bots don't have a big impact on the platform. As you noticed, they didn't impact your payout much and the weight-based voting system protects against users creating lots of bot accounts and gaming the system.
Whale curation bots are a much bigger issue. You'll notice that many whale accounts upvote the same accounts and allocate resources in the system to the users that have written popular posts in the past. This has the potential to degrade quality and prevent good content creators who are newer to the platform from getting rewarded.
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Thanks @ntomaino for your comments. There seems to be a lot of war on this bot voting system. I just want a fair system with a level playing field so good contents by newbies and old members that deserve rewards can be rewarded accordingly.
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