Stupid question about a potential attack(?) against steemit !

in stupid-question •  8 years ago  (edited)

If competitors use Steem Power to attack us...

What would happen if a competitor created some accounts and fairly Powered them Up to...

1.Downvote Good Content and
2.Upvote bad content?

Would an attack like this ruin our platform?
How could we defend in such a situation?

PS Same question in a lower scale....
Let's suppose a user with significant Steem Power don't like us, and starts to downvote each post of us. what can we do about it? Stop using the platform?

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First, this would require an irrational actor. A rationale competitor would be better served by

  • investing their money into their new platform vs. investing in Steem in an attempt to destroy it.
  • investing in Steem, upvoting good content and generating more money to invest in their platform (if they 'fear' Steemit is going to be successful) . If they think Steemit will be unsuccessful they can simply ignore it.

Let's say there is an irrational actor that is hell bent on destroying Steemit. They would need to

  1. somehow acquire a ridiculous amount of Steem/ SP (with only a limited supply on the market). Maybe if they had unlimited funds, they could buy off several whales to achieve this.

  2. downvote ALOT of good content. Their influence will be diluted the more they downvote. If they split their SP across several accounts, they dilute their influence.

  3. upvote ALOT of bad content. In fact they'd probably need to create bad content themselves.

  4. legislate against other invested Whales taking action to counter their abuse (by voting oppose to the way the abusing Whale does.

  5. legislate against Steemit making changes to the algorithm/ coding to counter their abuse.

We start moving into the realms of anything is possible, I guess. However I doubt it is an appreciable risk. There are probably less burdensome ways of attempting to attack Steem/ Steemit then trying to downvote/ upvote it to death.

People like me would step in to stop them. There are enough of us with a vested interest to see this succeed. Have no fear.

Taking opposite positions?Hm, is it enough?

great answer. i was scared about the exact same thing.

Currently Steem/Steemit founders control large amounts of SP thus this attack is impossible. There isn't enough STEEM traded on exchanges to do an attack.

When Steem becomes bigger it will be more decentralized and attack might become theoretically feasible, but very costly. It is unlikely somebody would like to burn billion dollars just to destroy Steem.

Wow scary thought!
Maybe we could fight back somehow. Unless they had a massive amount of people I feel like they wouldn't be able to overthrow everyone. We may grow quicker, Unless they strike early.. Although I've got to admit, I don't fully understand all the functions of this site yet.

Valid question. Conde-Nast (company that owns eddit) could afford to do something like this, and Hillary's superpac has openly admitted to paying an army of trolls a few million dollars to make it look like people actually support her.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/21/1518537/-Clinton-SuperPac-Admits-to-Paying-Internet-Trolls

The TrollCo would have to buy up enough Steem to compete with the big investors, which would drive the price up. Once that account was caught and became known, one of the big investors or developers would have to use their bots to fight the TrollCo account. Which would probably end up making them realize that some kind of bot prevention mechanism is needed to prevent damage to the ecosystem.
That sounds like a win-win situation!

The TrollCo would have to buy up enough Steem to compete with the big investors, which would drive the price up.

With the big ACTIVE investors! (That actually curate content)