@weenis: Everyone can see that you are operating the bot army that is swarm voting on #steemit and #steem posts.
If you are reading this and happen to care, some, but probably not all of @weenis's bot swarm accounts are:
@abctrade, @alniskobs, @amboyst, @anarchypory, @angevel, @backetri, @bignastywhale, @catirabella, @cheremet, @chonesta, @confucius, @countrytalented, @cozyone123, @crumaner, @curls4life, @daysaiyan, @daysmega, @daysmega1421, @dotersvilic, @eleiminer, @emilyelizabeth, @etccrap, @eternalabove, @feeltheblade, @forgetthefallen, @gaspot, @gunpower, @hxclife, @joujou666, @praisenoone, @redddet, @redredwinewine, @rickydevil, @rottennasty, @silversterstay, @softpunk, @soupernerd, @steemit.tips, @steemitlove, @steemlove, @sugarfromhell, @weenis, @yandra86
If you are not convinced these are a bot swarm, just check out the new posts and watch some that are tagged with #steemit or #steem tags. You can cross compare the voters and see that these all likely belong to the same individual. The oldest account in the list is @weenis, that is why I'm calling him out. You can also see that he is clearly testing a bot army in this picture:
Hopefully I don't need to explain to you why this is completely counter-productive, AND a massive waste of YOUR time, but here goes:
- The blockchain is extremely transparent. It only took me five minutes to identify this swarm, and now I will never vote for any content generated by any of these accounts. You are literally crippling your own potential on this platform by getting yourself added to blacklists by many people with valuable votes.
- You are screwing with the algorithm used to list content in the 'hot' section. There are many articles with decent payouts and a decent number of legitimate votes that are falling behind posts with $0.02 worth of payouts and 60 votes from your bots. Rest assured that this issue can and probably will be resolved algorithmically.
- This is just such a massive waste of your time. A lot of your bots are voting instantly after posts go up, meaning they will receive $0.00 of rewards. Furthermore, each of them has such a small stake, that it's not likely they will receive any reasonable amount of curation rewards anyway.
Great work uncovering this. Why does it really matter for these bots though? They add value, cause no harm, just waste his own money.
The comment spamming bots will be the least valuable on the other hand.
GREAT POST
GREAT POST
GREAT POST.
Etc.
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Here is why this matters:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@discombobulated/this-is-a-honey-pot-post-for-bahts-real-people-please-ignore
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The only real problem that I see at the moment, is that the current algorithm used for calculating the order that posts appear in the hot category seems to be biased more towards the number of likes and comments a post has, and less towards the expected payout a post will receive. This sets up a situation where the spam up-voted comments get artificially more exposure by appearing closer to the top of the feed and other content gets less exposure than it otherwise would have.
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I never use Hot so this was news to me. Hrm. Thanks for the tip.
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Nice post, I was literally investigating this last night.
Edit: Here is a follow up:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@discombobulated/bot-makers-program-your-sh-t-better-you-are-potentially-harming-the-platform
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Nice catch, i really doubt its wang though. He is making way more on his own account then this swarm could ever hope to make.
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Yah I don't think @wang is the owner necessarily, it is just interesting to see him supporting someone affiliated with the bot-net. Not trying to make any implications here, just highlighting the association.
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A lot of strange stuff going on. It will be interesting to see where this things goes.
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A thought occurs:
I wonder if @wang had a automatic upvote script for posts that had so many upvotes in N time. Perhaps this bot-net is exploiting that?
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Hmm... so you're saying I shouldn't have voted for this right away? lol
I understand what you are saying. Not sure I understand why that is the case though, you'd think that the sooner you vote on something, the more you would receive percentage-wise. I suppose I'll have to adjust my voting strategy, never knew there was one!
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completely detracts from the system
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I'm tired of all the bots as well, I actually posted about this yesterday lol. This is ruining the experience for me, and I'm sure many others. Wait til the "I made $10,000 online this month" bots start getting released into the wild... it can only get worse unless there is a system in place to weed them out and get rid of them. Personally, I don't think making "downvote" bots is the answer either, it just makes a bigger mess.
One question though: I'm kind of curious about how the curation rewards work, do you have a link to a quick read on that which explains it like I'm 5?
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There are some posts, but the ones I found seem out of date. Basically in simplest terms, your rewards are proportional to your voting power (if you vote very frequently your voting power decreases, over 24 hours it recharges to maximum), your rewards are proportional to something like SP*log(SP), where SP is the amount of steem power you hold in your account, and your rewards depend on WHEN you vote. If you vote immediately after something is posted, you only receive about 1% of what you could have, and the rest goes to the original poster. If you vote 30 minutes later, you receive 100%. In between it changes linearly. If you vote at 15 minutes, you and the author both split your curation reward evenly. There is also a factor that you want to vote before a post is popular (i.e. before it has a large $ reward). That's because you are kind of "discovering" the content, so it is more valuable than voting for something at the top of trending.
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Hmm... so you're saying I shouldn't have voted for this right away? lol
I understand what you are saying. Not sure I understand why that is the case though, you'd think that the sooner you vote on something, the more you would receive percentage-wise. I suppose I'll have to adjust my voting strategy, never knew there was one!
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That's how it was originally, the sooner you vote the better, but they changed it because it gave bots too much of an advantage.
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More proof that bots ruin the user experience. They just need to get rid of them entirely.
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Excellent post!
Be aware that this same bot is not just upvoting to attempt to reap rewards but also down voting against competitors and people who attempt to curate against its spam
I wrote an article about this same bot group you are concerned with here
https://steemit.com/steemit/@desmonid/s-o-s-i-m-being-targeted-by-a-malicious-downvote-bot
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I guess the silver lining is that those of us who use the platform legitimately will (hopefully) grow our steem power fast enough that a few dozen spam account downvotes don't affect our payouts our visibility that much. I hope...
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That is the hope but what actually unfolds remains to be seen...
Hopefully more fine tuning of the algorithm will help discourage vote botting.
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its also downvoting ppl as well, or at leat it was until just recently
https://steemit.com/doyourpart/@sigmajin/spam-bots-and-retributive-downvoting
https://steemit.com/steemit/@desmonid/s-o-s-i-m-being-targeted-by-a-malicious-downvote-bot#@sunshinecrypto/re-desmonid-s-o-s-i-m-being-targeted-by-a-malicious-downvote-bot-20160728t150
but i think they stopped that with an update
https://steemit.com/steem/@sigmajin/downvote-bots-might-all-be-dead
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hahah nice eraning bot
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Look what I posted a week ago https://steemit.com/steemit/@mahekg/cheating-bots-have-taken-over-steemit
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This happened to me posted a few minutes ago:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@coinz/finding-your-voice-on-steemit-com
Using #steem and #steemit among others and was swarmed by bots, at least 30 upvotes which amounted to nothing. Wondering if avoiding those categories would mitigate the problem at least temporarily?
Is being swarmed by bots like that hurting my post's money making potential?
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The swarm of votes is probably artificially elevating certain posts in the 'hot' category at least, so in that way it might have helped you. But it also hurts other valuable content by pushing it artificially lower in the list.
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Agree... there are a few good bots, but most of them are just spamming.
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Indeed these bots have to be stopped, this is a threat to Steemit
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There's good evidence to believe the guy running them is a moderator at /r/btc. Aside from the most obvious fact that his name is among the bots, his response when I accused him of it was this:
He also made a highly misleading post about SteemIt on /r/btc where he has immunity as a moderator.
https://steemit.com/reddit/@demotruk/banned-from-reddit-com-r-btc-after-criticizing-a-moderator-who-is-brigading-steemit
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Interesting, I'm not familiar with the reddit community (I was only always a lurker). Thanks for the tip.
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From looking at these bots on steemd, it seems like they were all made on the web UI via a fb or reddit account.
That is to say, there wasn't an actual investment, just the 3 steem you get for free.
A simple way to prevent this would be to simply prevent voting at all until you have something like 5x the number of steem your account was created with. 15 steem is small enough so that its easy to buy, or to get with even an OK post, but would probably discourage a bad actor from mass producing accounts.
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Add kapets123 to this list plz. 3 or 4 re-posts every hour for days.
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Trogdor, absolutely wonderful post. I really enjoyed reading this post.
Weenis needs to get his shit together.
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