Steemit reputation is broken

Steemit reputation is a broken system. Can it be fixed? It’s not mentioned in the original Steem white paper, but I’ve always assumed that reputation is meant to be an indicator of how much your contributions are appreciated. Every new account starts with a reputation of 25. As you get votes that will increase based on some combination of the voter’s own reputation and the size of their vote. Reputation is based on some sort of logarithmic scale so that each step is harder to achieve than the last. Flagging also affects your reputation. It can even go negative and below a certain level your content will be hidden by default. This is the intended means to deal with spammers. Something in the algorithm means that only a person with a higher reputation can reduce yours by flagging. I guess this is intended to reduce possible impact by malicious users.

It took me about a year to get to a reputation of 70 and another year to get to 71! I’m okay with that as it should not be easy. A high reputation should mean something, but the dreaded ‘bid bots’ and other forms of abuse have corrupted it.

The current highest reputation (that I know of) is held by a certain Korean ‘crypto analyst’. He has 32,500 followers, but at least 90% of his votes came from himself and another account that he most probably controls. So his reputation is not based on what the wider community thinks of him. I doubt he cares as he’s just taking the money and barely interacts with anyone. He’s not making as much as he used to, but he keeps up a steady stream of mostly automated posts to maintain some income.

A more recent example is this guy who has tended to buy massive votes on each of his posts. That’s built him a following of nearly 13,000. His reputation is mostly based on what the ‘bots’ voted and not his followers. Could it be that all those followers don't actually support him? I have flagged him before, but I can't really dent those rewards. It seems selfish to hog the trending page like this.

I do get automated votes from various projects, but all I do is give them a small delegation that helps them support others. I think there needs to be some change as new users see these high ranking accounts and assume that what they do is the best course, even if it can be harmful to the platform as a whole. The white paper does have a section on voting abuse.

Fortunately, any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders. Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves. In fact, honest large stakeholders are likely to be more effective by policing abuse and using negative voting than they would be by voting for smaller contributions.

The smaller stakeholders have not been able to counter the abuse as it’s just too big and they also risk retaliation what can destroy their own reputation.

So what can be done? My thought is that the reputation algorithm could be changed to give a more balanced scale. Some will say that ‘bot’ votes should be excluded, but there may be ways around this. One way would be to make the influence of each account on reputation decrease over time. So if one big account gives you a vote each day it would have less impact each time and possibly zero by the end of a week. Maybe it could re-charge if they stopped for a while. I’ve not worked out the exact details. The result would be that you would need support from a broad range of accounts, each with a good amount of SP to get a high reputation. This is something like the difference between the Trending and Hot pages. The latter gives a better idea of what content is actually popular.

This change should also apply to flagging so that an attack by a single user cannot affect your reputation too much. Any real abuse will attract flags from multiple users.

There are a few possible issues with my idea that come to mind:

• It would add to the work required by witnesses. I assume they do the current reputation calculation. They would have to keep track of values representing reputation impact for each user who is voting on an account. Could that be too much extra load?
• It would really need all existing reputations to be re-calculated. That involves tracking many millions of transactions, but it would only need to be done once and it’s better to do it before Steem grows much more.
• Many of us would end up with a lower reputation. I don’t really mind this. It’s just a number, but it should be giving a real indication of your value to the platform. The real stars who get a lot of community support should be up the top.

I’ve not found much discussion of reputation in the Steem GitHub. There’s this and this on using it to prevent spam, but the developers admit that reputation can be gamed.

What do you think? Is it a real problem? We could propose something on Github, but it needs fleshing out with more details on how it should work, if it's even viable.