Hi @walden , what's so shady about last minute votes? A 6 day vote is the least profitable vote (except for votes in the first 3 to 4 minutes or so where most of the curation rewards go to the author).
Of course, @sweetsssj has obscene amounts of SP so that's kind of hard to argue on the "low profitability", in fact, at that point whatever you do it's gonna be profitable for sure, but consider this hypothetical situation:
I've got obscene amounts of SP (I don't, heh). And when I post something new I get about $150 on average. I've got a decent amount of followers who value my stuff and it shows. Great, I'm a whale!
Now someone I follow did an amazing job posting something and I can clearly see the huge amount of effort that user has put into it....but he's got $0.00 to $0.33 on average at day #3. I mean, that user has about 15 votes but they're all from 15SP users so, not much at all.
What do I do? Do I post at 20 seconds since post creation to reward the author? That discourages all those 15 poor users from upvoting, that's just scarce SP spent for nothing. Why are they gonna spend their $0.00 vote and -2% SP on a post with $100 reward?
That' doesn't sound fair, I mean, those 15 guys have the same tastes as I do and they upvote the miserable $$$ they've got just because they really like the author's stuff. I feel like I can help with that. If I vote at day #1 with my $100 I'll probably get those guys a nice reward and the user's post will definitely be on the /hot list, and that's cool.
- But I feel that I'm helping too much. And yes, such a thing exists. The author gets a chance to get noticed, sure, but if I'm gonna do it every time people will notice that this author is my protegé, that can be damaging for his reputation.
- Which brings me to the last part of this hypothetical. If I really want to help my community and help all the guys with the same tastes as me, which I find legitimate btw, then I'll probably give them the chance to get noticed first, but I'd rather sprinkle some upvote magic from time to time on the posts I like, independent of the author. Also I'd rather do it from day #3 onward to reward the other upvoters and maybe, just maybe, I'd consider upvoting on day #6 just to let the author see how much upvotes can he/she get all by their self and then, reward big time everyone who contributed to the $11.50 payout that the post got before my upvote hammer.
- Ends hypothetical.
So, of course I'm not saying this is @sweetsssj 's story, I don't know that user's story at all, to be frank. And I admit that I've romanticized the shit out of that hypothetical, seriously, I recon everybody then met at Steemfest3 and liked so much to be together that they decided all to marry one another and live the rest of their disproportionally happy and poly-amorous lives in a lush hippie commune!
But I digress, I'm a newbie, I'm might be missing some obvious detail but it seems to me there might be a fair use case for last day voters and despite the unnerving profits these whales make just by upvoting, I feel that going all out with the pitchforks on them is unwarranted.
After all, SP is our stable income. Upvotes are just a validation from the community that we deserve this stable income. I struggled with the unfairness for the 7 day upvoting period until I realized this. The SP is there to be used. The community dictates how much regenerated SP we deserve having each day. The payout values per post aren't the goal. SP is, and it should be used. It should be spent.
@walden @berniesanders @emrebeyler @abusereports and even @ned and @dan (if not too busy with eos, of course) I'd like to hear your thought's on this. I think that this last part can even be and argument in favor of auto-voting on the 7th day (to contribute to de 25% curation pool) even but I'm not gonna write any more, this wall of text got long enough. :|
Cheers.
(PS.: I haven't reviewed my spelling so... Sorry.)
Of course there might be a fair use case for 11th hour voting, the problem is that this circle jerk is shunned by the community. this is seen as siphoning away of rewards, these rewards get cashed out and not powered up, and the abusers validate the act by saying that "it's their sp and it's allowed" which is hardly validating the community or the ethos behind steem of freeing the world from financial tyranny(I have to free my family first.. even though the amount of wealth is considered obscene by 95% of the world) through attention economy, the purpose of curating is to find new, original content and give it exposure and not siphon away a steady stream of SBD while making a mockery out of curation. This is abuse/gaming the system, even if it's not explicit, people see this, everyone understand this, nepotism is shunned and rightly so, this is a community built on the ethos of merit and not "because the rules allow for it", the rules beg us to pitchfork her indeed, we are the rules.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Oh I totally get that, scrapping the reward pool is detrimental to the community and it should be dealt with.
But is last day voting, or even auto-voting for that matter, a good KPI for scrappers? I don't believe so.
In fact, I propose a different approach, why not gather a task force to analyze these situations on a case by case basis? I mean, @abusereports at one point even reported @utopian-io, for [insert deity]'s sake.
https://steemit.com/bots/@abusereports/last-minute-upvote-list-2018-02-18#@abusereports/re-last-minute-upvote-list-2018-02-18-20180218t141925
Circlejerk pumping is, in my humble opinion, THE greatest problem with steem, it's so bad it's not even a steem problem, it's a consensus problem, a blockchain (and tangle) problem. IOTA has it so bad it's still being controlled by a central power and can only be democratically controlled later on with a gargantuan amount of participants and even then...who knows.
But there's good circlejerking as well, and that's why it's so hard to tackle this issue. @utopian-io is one of them. My preferred communities small communities could benefit from that.
All in all, I'm just questioning the last day voting phenomenon as a reliable KPI. How many of @abusereports 's reports are valid? What's the percentage of false positives? Did anyone bother to check? Are we going to just flag the crap out of every name @abusereports spews out?
It all looks uncontrolled, I see it only enticing blind pitchforking.
@walden has done a good job researching this case (I'll still have to review this specific user to get a proper opinion, but I value @walden 's effort none the less), I'll give you that. But by now he's already way behind schedule, just look at how many names have already been named.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Of course everything that a bot dishes out must be sifted and inspected and considered in the "bigger picture" perspective but the place to start is with those instrumental in siphoning off most of the rewards, big fish queue up first.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think we can agree on that.
I just hope that this doesn't get fueled by disdain towards whales alone. If I was a whale I'd probably be doing it to pump up users and communities I value. (I don't know, it's easy for a poor man to say his heart is pure, I guess)
Thanks for chiming in on the subject. I appreciate that. Let's hope for the best, as in...the best way to draw the line between good whale/bad whale.
Cheers.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit