Compact Broadcast Node: Low Cost Infrastructure to support Keychain, Splinterlands, Steem Engine and Future Apps
This past week has been a relatively rough week for witnesses across the board, but running Steem Engine and Splinterlands has made it especially grueling. These are businesses and we make money on the chain. In the case of Matt and I our livelihoods are completely dependent on a functioning Steem blockchain. When the chain goes down we have no products or services to sell and we also get slammed with concerned customers while working to restore the chain. It's a high stress time and an exhausting time for any period, but especially when it extends over the better part of a week.
tl:dr - seed.steemmonsters.com
Seed.steemmonsters.com is a seed node with blocks, account info, and broadcast plugins enabled which allows it to get a handful of key functions of an RPC up and running in short order. It's sitting behind jussi and nginx so it can handle most calls sent it's way. If done with SIAB enhancements from Privex it can be setup like this out of the box with easy to follow prompts and commands.
It's at least ~24 hrs for a full Mira replay, but runs on a $50/16gb server. The non-mira version replays in 4-6 hours on a $100/64gb server.
Apps that don't need post/vote data or account history can run completely off of a $50 or $100/month server. Though there are still lingering issues in the ecosystem to figure out if even that's enough.
Splinterlands during the hardbork
Splinterlands went from the all time high number of games played in the new rules (which were introduced in Feb) to the second lowest number of games played in company history.
We also went from the most number of players in company history to the fewest number of players in company history.
A week of difficulties
The challenges weren't just a single day of chain halt, but persistent for roughly a week with down time, limp time, and up time. This causes major challenges with game play, getting players to be there consistently, sales slow down or don't go through, and even just getting things to work at all is challenging for the players and devs.
Obviously when the chain is halted nothing on Steem happens. However, during partial uptime some things are possible, but we learned the hard way that as things currently stand the ecosystem is still extremely reliant on Steemit RPC nodes.
Some nodes were up but Splinterlands still wasn't really playable
The back-end for the Splinterlands game has been primarily running off of the RPC node set up by @anyx for some time now, and it has a robust system to automatically switch between various other available RPC nodes if one should experience issues.
Roughly 25% of all transactions are now coming from Splinterlands and Steem Engine so we've been working to reduce our footprint on steemit nodes (25% by raw number of transactions, but our transaction are also very low memory/rc usage so they relatively inexpensive to the chain).
Based on features of the anyx.io RPC, we thought we were covered in the event that the Steemit RPC nodes went down, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. While our server was still running and processing blocks (using the Minnow Support RPC which was one of the first ones back up), most players were unable to broadcast any transactions since tools like Steem Connect and Steem Keychain all use api.steemit.com by default :-(
@stoodkev is currently hard at work updating Steem Keychain to support things like automatically switching to a different RPC node if the current one is not working, and allowing apps to specify an RPC node to use with each operation. We hope to see Steem Connect and other tools do the same so that in the future a Steemit RPC node downtime will have little to no impact on the ecosystem.
Getting Nodes
Even with updated tooling, there are still a pretty small number of usable RPC nodes available in the ecosystem, which is not ideal. One main reason for this is that the focus is often on providing full nodes, which include all or most of the available plugins. This either makes the nodes very expensive to run, tricky to run, and have unreasonably long replay times. The last part is also a business killer when the chain needs replays.
Many apps and tools don't actually require a full node if they aren't using vote/post operations or need account history. I spent some time investigating what is needed at a minimum and what resources are required to run apps like Splinterlands and Steem Engine that don't need those plugins...
Mira
Mira is an amazing advancement for the chain, but it also comes with a major difficulty: replay time. If you happen to have a saved state file it can shorten the time significantly, but not everyone saves them and not every save point will still be valid for replays. The benefit of course is that server costs can be drastically reduced because the reliance on expensive RAM is decreased.
Non-Mira
While Mira is great for high mem RPCs it doens't do much for cost savings for withness/seed server operators. The main advantage of non-mira boxes is that they replay quickly. Instead of a 24hr+ replay time for a witness or seed these can replay in 4-6 hours.
Needs
What we ultimately decided that we needed was a node that could broadcast, get blocks, and get account info. We don't actually need a full RPC and it turns out we don't even need a high memory or hivemind version nor do we need account history. Those features take lots of RAM and/or take a long time when replaying. It turns out what we need is pretty simple.
Privex
After scoping lots of options I defaulted to the best answer out there: Privex. Not only does privex have reasonably priced servers but over the years @someguy123 et al have been extremely helpful team members to me personally and continue to develop tools to make running Steem easier. He's a fantastic asset to our business, this blockchain, and the service provided is above and beyond "cheaper" virtual servers out there.
He already had a Seed node operational with a few things running on it- https://steemseed-fin.privex.io/. Testing showed that it wasn't quite up to speed for our purposes. It needed Jussi and nginx to start working nicely.
Mira-Witness Node Converted
As it turns out I have 3 witness nodes. 2 non-mira nodes and I've rotated in the backup mira-node a few times. We decided to cannibalize the node. It's a seed node with a few extra features (or an RPC node missing a lot of features). Someguy took a moment and added some pretty handy features to make jussi and nginx work out of the box.
The node now has get account info, blocks, and broadcast enabled. It's behind both Jussi and nginx. This should serve as a Compact Broadcast Node.
Works currently with Steem Monsters and Steem Engine; most of the functionality of Keychain
So far I've been able to test this box on Steem Monsters. I purchased a pack using keychain and then opened it.
I've managed to make a few steem-engine market purchases with it.
So far it does everything I normally do on these apps except it can't show me Steem history. It says "errors." That's a very small price to pay for an extremely light node that with some changes in the rest of the ecosystem could get us up and running very quickly after a hardbork.
Major Break Through
My grandmother always used to say "When working with blockchain technology and life gives you lemons it's time to make a low cost, functional, RPC node that can service your current needs and be expanded to future chain apps." She was ahead of her time...
Steem continues to amaze me. Trying to do this on other blockchains could literally cost a fortune every month. Here, we can have our own compact broadcast node that can offer nearly all of the functionality we use in the game and for the exchange. It can help service the entire ecosystem. 24+ hr replay version costs $50/month and 4-6 hour replay versions cost $100/month.
I feel like this is a pretty good discovery that many apps that aren't focused on posting/curating, like games, can function on inexpensive broadcast hardware. Hopefully, Steem Monsters and Steem Engine can demonstrate this in the wild, and we'll help show others how they can eaisily and inexpensively build their apps on top of Steem.
Gratitude
This post is only possible after a lot of discussions with people from around the chain. Thank you to Justin from Steemit. I had a lengthy discussion with him trying to scope out various versions of this along the way. Thank you to my fellow witnesses especially smooth, blocktrades, gandalf, anyx, markymark, netuoso, drakos, and someguy123 who had various pieces of advice along the way. Narrowing in on our app needs and what I'm deeming high priority ecosystem wide improvements wasn't easy to weed through.
Thank you for your input! I'm hoping that the outcome is something that can really showcase how inexpensive and easy it can be to build apps on Steem.
What's next?
Now that we have a compact broadcast node up and another on the way soon the next piece is to campaign to fix the rest of the ecosystem. The libraries and a bunch of tooling need upgrades. We want to see the blockchain functioning even though steemit nodes are not. If everything remains partially or completely dysfunctional because the rest of the ecosystem can't function without steemit nodes then this blockchain is entirely too centralized and dependent on Steemit. Updating libs and tooling to allow multiple RPCs and seeds to broadcast and also support failover doesn't appear to be an extensive amount of work for any one project, but I think the challenge in this particular case is that it needs to happen in lots of places over the whole ecosystem.
I'm working on it and focusing on it. Should be fun!
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The Node which we can choose inside the KeyChain, has an impact on revenue of the witness server behind it right?
Not really. Some voters may choose to vote or unvote people because of hardware they run, but no one gets paid directly for running anything other than a witness node.
btw. what is a Hardbork?
I'm currently defining it as a hardfork that halts the chains, but I don't think it has a hard definition.
This is awesome to see. It sucks that you guys have to pave the way, but I think this will be great for other dapps on the platform to learn about so when people can't post they may have other content to keep them busy on the blockchain. It's also nice to know that in the future, hopefully, others won't have to deal with the same headaches either.
Hi @gniksivart. Glad to see you active back on Steem & Splinterlands and I agree with your comment above.
We're looking forward to you completing some daily quests in the Crypto Class Action Knights Guild. We need your help to reach Level 3 Quest Lodge.
I'll get to work!
Downvoted in response to be what appears to be unnecessary vote buying. A worthy update like this would probably get plenty of organic votes and exposure. Why not give it a chance?
I'm just trying to get it seen on trending. I stopped buying so it would be 4th or something. Many of my posts these days earn $6. Just don't think it's terribly likely to get the eyeballs I'm hoping for without promotion and I don't think promotion is bad a thing even post EIP. I think this post and this work is a really nice addition to the ecosystem.
That said I also expect a few flags. It'll be ok either way.
I disagree about eyeballs. You have followers who would upvote (including me) since yes it is a good initiative, and things have changed a lot on trending itself. The barrier to trending is a lot lower (and the fewer bought votes are used the better it will get).
Agreed and flagged by a minnow
Posted using Partiko Android
Hey smooth, witch-hunting people that promote their posts is not going to be as effective as it may seem, a decrease in bot promoted posts is not going to bring the masses to Steem, that in itself is not a value proposition. It may actually serve to alienate more people, however If the content that was promoted is trash then that is a different story.
I agree on the non-necessity of downvoting posts simply because they've been botted. Promotion is a perfectly valid use case for bid bots. In fact, it is the original use case and it is meant to increase demand for Steem Power. Excessive use of bid bots or to just maximize ROI, the byproduct of which is the pushing of unworthy posts into Trending is grounds for relentless downvoting. But this particular post contains valuable information to those people who are not @aggroed's followers, too.
In practice there are only a few slots per day on the top of trending, maybe 5-10. Yeah everyone thinks their post is the best thing since sliced bread, but if other organic curators and stakeholders aren't voting for it, there is objectively a reason to be skeptical. So just having some "valuable information" is not enough.
I also think it is a valid use, but I find it hilarious that those who have been providing blind upvotes in exchange for money are suddenly against blind downvotes.
If they don't like it they should "counter" the votes, that's been their message to the community for 2+ years.
They should take the lumps and brainstorm ways to make their businesses less destructive to the community and content creators.
I have say that I have changed my opinion after having listened to arguments for downvoting bid botted content in Trending. Boosting posts to Trending should always happen at a financial loss. Paying people for putting stuff into Trending is madness because it leads to the prime real estate on Steem being filled with garbage. Trending should have the best organically supported content on Steem to draw eyeballs, which is when advertisers would actually want to pay to put their ads in there.
I think it was @nonameslefttouse put it perfectly:
https://steemit.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/the-state-of-the-nonameslefttouse-address-another-month-down-with-some-time-off-in-between-for-thinking-purposes
Don't agree with the "witch-hunting" name calling ;)
Promoting is fine. But the amount of the reward pool used for doing so still matters. People can find ways and places to do so that don't engender opposition from people such as myself who understand the systemic problems which can be caused by too much promotion.
Trending is a scarce resource. The posts cycle maybe every 12-24 hours in most cases, which means there are maybe 5-10 slots per day at most (depending on screen size and UI of the viewer, but obviously higher is better). People can take a step back and be a bit circumspect about whether their content is not only useful, but really one of the 5-10 most worthy of exposure on a given day out of every single post on the entire platform. I would submit in many cases the answer is no, especially if other stakehodlers don't agree with the merit enough to give organic votes.
Finally, too much promotion undermines what we are trying to do with encouraging people to invest in curatation initiatives. Not only does it reduce the reward pool (for both curators and authors) but it makes curation less effective and meaningful. Do you honestly believe that every one of those 5-10 daily slots should be filled by promotion, leaving none to be filled by honest curation? My second question would be how many posts would you say are currently being heavily promoted daily and is this a healthy balance? I don't think so, not yet. So some push-back is healthy.
So, no, I'm not flatly against promotion, in specific special cases where the promotion is exceptionally needed and useful, but it can easily be, and has been, drastically overused. Until that is no longer the case (or it becomes clear that EIP did not work and the dominance of paid voting and self-voting will remain the norm), I plan to continue applying some downvotes to encourage change.
#NewSteem on, mate!
My take is there is not much demand for the trending real estate, I've seen days go by without much new stuff on trending. If new content wants to appear in that real estate space then it will have to outbid what is there, which is healthy, creates a demand for SP or demand for Steem to purchase votes. I do agree with you that we don't want every post on trending, certainly not in the top slots, if promoters ensure their post is just off the trending page but high enough for them to still get their message across then that is great, perhaps this post was overpromoted. Promoting is good for a kickstart to get visibility and then be pushed up further by curation consensus. Promoting yourself to #1 takes away an opportunity to discover what organic votes your content might get and thus a valuable opportunity to gain user metrics and sentiment is lost by overzealous promotion.
Everything in moderation is fine, I don't agree with-over promoting myself, but I do feel promoting in general is more liberating than a case where users would have to beg and plead whales in multiple private DM's to let their content have a voice.
If there were no demand then sincere and success-minded Steemians such as yourself and @aggroed wouldn't be redirecting the reward pool simply for the purposes of visiblity!
The time it takes for Trending to refresh is a function of both the parameter of the algorithm (which is why Hot refreshes faster), as well as the amount of votes, largely paid votes, piled onto the posts. With less paid votes being misused for this purpose, it will cycle faster.
But to the extent it doesn't cycle that fast, it means there are even fewer slots. Now you have to argue that one's content being pushed up there is among the most worthy 3-4 posts on the entire platform in a day (or top 5-10 for the first couple of pages). Occasionally, this may be true. Often it is not.
We will have to simply agree to disagree. Paid voting is not healthy for Steem. It undermines curation and the value of Steem as a mechanism to give rewards to worthy contributions.
As I said, we agree there is a role for some promotion, but treating the biggest reward payouts as being a matter of "outbidding" is unhealthy.
We didn't double curation and introduce free downvores for no reason (and further introduce a non-linear curve which has a heavy cost on smaller reward-earners and communities, but necessary in order for EIP to have a chance to work). That would all be completely unnecessary if we were happy with the paid voting model and 'outbidding'. We did it specially to shift the emphasis away from vote selling and toward curation.
The dichotamy of vote selling vs. begging is a false one. I would suggest that you redirect your considerable entrepreneurial skills away from pure vote selling and toward creating vehicles for people to get their content in front of curators and vehicles for promotion that don't also involve redirecting rewards in an unintended and unhealthy manner (for example, perhaps we could have an ad-network where people can pay for visiblity across Steem-related UIs, just a quick brainstorm).
We actually have planned to add advertising to Ginabot notifications where people can purchase ad slots which come in after x notifications, Ginabot has 8000+ registered users.
The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them, i think there were some curation centric websites that for the life of me I cannot remember the name, but likely never used. Whales are few on Steem and not enough to cater for the demands of a growing userbase, there are lots of active minnows but their votes aren’t worth much, even cumulatively, the distribution on steem is not great so curation defacto won’t be great.
I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say, new users won’t even stand a chance to get anywhere near, post promotion at least puts new users on equal footing with insiders and people who know the system, the power to get visibility is in the hands of the user which is what crypto is about, empowering those without a voice, not subjecting them to an oligarchy that determines according to their own bias whether your voice is worth something or not.
The other narrative I subscribe to is that Steem is no longer a one-trick-pony as it was in year one, authorship and curation is not the only use case, we have games like SM and nextcolony, steem can be used as a stateful backup of your wordpress data and gamestates too, we have forums that use the rewards model as tipping rather than for visibility etc.
The Steem community should be focussing on efforts to rather build business grade wallets, easy multisig, hardware wallet compatibility, merchant integration, debit card integration, gift cards, referrals/affiliate programs etc. Focussing on downvoting to me is a race to the bottom by alienating people that could later have been buidlers and by making steem look mediocre with lower post values on trending.
Edit: There has been some user sentiment discussion in slack where it seems users don’t want their content value to be determined by the “rich people”, that is quite archaic if u think about it. I think Steem should try push in the direction of Proof of Human and individuals having equal weight in voting content and number of human votes determine value and visibility, if we can solve that problem while still keeping identities self-sovereign then steem would have solved that which giants like twitter cannot and would once again put us at the forefront of innovation.
The way to get (some) higher values is with less promotion. Let the occasional exceptional post get voted highly by the stakeholders. The more that is spread out by a lot of people buying promotion every day and the more the total pool is drained by people buying promotion every day, the less an exceptional post will be able to earn even if it does get exceptional support.
All of the other stuff you mentioned about multisig wallets, theoretical proof-of-human models, etc. its all great but has nothing to do with voting on the reward pool. I'm all in favor of Steem not being a one-trick pony (which is why I'm totally in support of applications like Steem Monsters which don't rely on the reward pool at all, will be in favor of strong SPS proposals to work on multisig and such, etc.), and I would add to that promotion models other than using rewards (including some of the ones you mentioned), but as long as the reward pool does exist, and is a signature feature, we should also make the most of it, not abuse it for promotion.
Whales with busy lives can delegate to curators instead of vote-selling.
Or just not vote, which distributes influence to those with less busy lives. The less prevalent it is for everyone to monetize their votes, the less critical it becomes to monetize all of yours in order to keep up. Just being a passive investor relying on Steem price appreciation is a lot more viable. Which is a good thing because for most of the world of investors out there we want to attract, that's what they want, not needing to participate in some convoluted scheme involving vote selling.
I'd like to chime in and add that the curangel announcement reached 3rd trending before it was featured by steemit solely through organic votes. By coincidence I added one with ~380k stake that was delegated to the project right after that (I didn't expect it to return to me in that moment, perfect timing), but I doubt it would've been necessary for that to happen. If you have some followers and a post that people really see as valuable, there is no need for promotion at all.
Thanks for your tireless engagement smooth!
Good input!
Atm the 'NEW' section is not very busy, content creation has dropped alot so it is easier for good content to be seen and upvoted by the few people we have active with any decent stake, if/when Steem becomes busy again alot of authors are going to fall through the cracks, post promotion helps them get visibility above the rest. Another idea is burning SBD or Steem to get a featured slot on Steemit.com or some trending page ranking.
You seem desperate to justify your business model as something useful, which it simply is not.
Earlier you said whales are too busy with other things, now they're suddenly scrolling "new". Both is wrong. Trending topics happen through word of mouth. Nothing goes viral by itself, it happens because people talk about it on multiple channels.
A lot of things fall through the cracks. That's how it is on the internet. To become successful, you need to build an audience and have that show your work to others. You can write the most hilarious tweet or produce the most awesome youtube video, if you didn't build a follower base to get into a network it will never be seen by anyone.
"Promotion" (buying votes) on steem was an abnormality, which let those who were willing to pay you guys the most money block the real trending topics. Without the downvote efforts of smooth and others, my post would have never had a chance to even make it to the first page of trending, as the votes it received would've been worth less, and the barrier to get up there would have been higher. You killed off the real trending.
There is an option to burn SBD to get a featured slot in the promoted section. Guess why nobody looks at it? For the same reason everybody kept saying "I don't look at trending" over the last years. Nobody wants to see shit which gets shoved into their face. The argument of providing visibility is a marketing slogan, nothing else. It might work if the interface put an occasional promoted post between organic content, but the way it was only helped you (and delegators, which includes me after I gave up and supported ocdb as "the lesser evil" eventually) to make a lot and the buyers to make a little more steem.
I would argue that tagging is still essential. Steem does not allow for much discovery without tagging potentially interested people. It can be annoying, but right now its that or some other annoying technique to gain community awareness.
No idea, I don't tag and I certainly don't react to being tagged. I may have a look at it when I'm bored and check Steemworld for mentions, but I don't vote then because I don't want to encourage that behavior.
Just added to my last comment
'Trending' literally means 'being the subject of a trend'. Trends involve multiple people supporting / doing something. If you put posts into the trending section yourself through payment, you are denying the real function of Trending. Vote buying, in that sense, to reach 'trending', is like designing a new hat and then paying people to wear it.. then saying that your hats are important.
That is assuming that trending is 100% efficient in terms of wisdom of the crowd and whales aren't already voting their friends or self-voting their alt accounts to get to trending. In an ideal world the trending page should be as you describe it, but in reality bots give the average user a fighting chance to get noticed.
Also see below my reply to @hobo.media
There's not much demand because trending is entirely filled with other advertisements and garbage that get paid to be promoted as well
The more you bid, the greater your exposure and the more money you're up in total after your post pays out. On the other end vote sellers can expect returns in line with full self voting. Think about it, is this sustainable for a healthy content discovery and rewards based proof of brain system?
The value of trending depends on the quality of content on Steem. As the quality of content on Steem improves people will flock to Steem, and the Steem ecosystem will raise in ranking and awareness online. This in turn improves the value of getting on trending.
Bot services provide an immediate use case for STEEM/SP, this is true. But focusing on Steem being a place for high quality information sharing is a long-term focus, which the bot services can, and arguably have already stifled.
Human curation programs are the ideal way to move forward. This can create jobs for real people, more than just curator jobs too. If quality becomes evidently more important than quantity, people may hire and compensate professional writers, editors, translators, artists and musicians to improve the quality of their content, and they might begin using STEEM directly for those services.
I don't agree that quality content is going to be a silver bullet to bring the masses, I think somewhere along the way Steemians got brainwashed by that, in reality if I put up a website and put up the best content earth, yet did not market it or have affiliate programs, pay influencers to push my website, hire marketing agencies, have good onboarding funnels etc, I can have all the good content I want but it will never be a successful website.
It takes more than just quality content to make a website successful and become a household name, usability is also another factor, this mindless drive to get good quality on the page is unlikely to help the Steem price, if we get Pewdie Pie or Lady Gaga (the real people) on the front page, now that sells!
Also who is to say that content being promoted is not quality, I too am against promotion of rubbish quality, but if it is not rubbish then I don't have a problem with it being promoted with realistic values that are not over the top, it also stimulates activity on Steem, where there is currently not many value propositions.
The general consensus for using promotion services now is to decline rewards. Bot services are not quality oriented at all, they upvote what they are paid to upvote.
There are better ways, such as the new Curangel project, and the HoboDAO project that we're building is a decentralized contest curation system that allows a group of human curators to decide the top 5 daily posts submitted to the HoboDAO for review and curation rewards.
Contests and human curation services are ultimately a lot better of a system. However, if the bot services wish to continue, the community is recognizing that it is acceptable if rewards are declined. Ideally, #NewSteem should just embrace new human curation programs and give up on the idea of bot services, which is a point many outside commentators have criticized Steem for having.
I think setting @null as beneficiary to burn a portion of the promotion rewards is also an interesting idea, in such a case since burning is involved maybe a 50% burn would be acceptable.
Everyone that ever made a post here would have liked their post to be seen on trending. When you make that call yourself for yourself beyond your stake you reduce the chance of others to get there organically, you break proof of brain and you drain the reward pool.
You should know better as a witness.
Downvoted.
Maybe steem needs special reward pool + special trending page only for witnesses, so we can peacefully shake hands and do our thing
why don't you screw off? None needs you here - your super negative and you make me angry.
Thanks, it's not necessary though. Smooth is literally one of the dudes I'm thanking for his help in this post. It's his stake he has a right to flag whatever.
I don't think less than a week of functioning uptime on hf22 is enough to change the culture. But honestly, I haven't seen a smooth vote on one of my posts in a year. If he's voting again, even if it's a flag on my current post, this is a major win for EIP.
Problem is that people are leaving STEEM because of the downvotes and these STEEM justice warriors don't get it.
@kawaiicrush is the latest example that I saw today, having a hefty downvote battle and now leaving. He has taken 4k Steem to Blocktrades already and another 6k will most likely follow in a few days. This is real, their purpose does not justify real damage that is done by burning active members.
If I see one every time I search for it, damn.. how much of a % can I see? Nothing...
In life, we can have 100 reasons to stick with something and still one reason against it might be enough to turn around. So @smooth it is not o'right what you do. This is not about being right or wrong. If you have a neighbor in real life, you can choose. You agree or you evade, you don't warship anything, unless you want one of you to leave in the end - in that case, go downvote anything you think he does wrong.
I really don't get where this idea is coming from. In my personal life, I've been voting since I was 10 and had to choose a student representative. Never ever was there an option to downvote, no never. Vote or don't vote. Now we can fight corruption and abuse with downvotes, B U T none should play justice warrior, that will most likely emergency evacuate anyone who gets targeted/suppressed.
10000% agreeing, downvoting is never useful
Steem is better off if kawaiicrush leaves 🙂 and if you don’t know this, then you are speaking without even taking 5 secs to look.. which is not beneficial.
If you don’t understand downvotes and why they are important, then you don’t understand the rewards pool. Rather than raging, take a few moments to educate yourself before attacking others.
There are no justice warriors here, there are people using up and downvotes (based on their stake) which then reaches a consensus and the inflation is paid out based on that.
Downvotes are part of a healthy ecosystem and this one is valid.
I totally understand the system and the goal that is behind that. What I don't do, is to mix up strategy and empowerment. It's the perspective of the power balance in this system that makes it dangerous. The way I've seen downvotes generally used in HF21/22 is fantastic, but I don't think it will stay that way.
The Steemians with the biggest stakes can now enroll a lot of regulation, as they could have since a very long time. But until now they would do that very selective and not based on systematic, or maybe even fully automated rules. Only with the free downvotes, it really makes sense to build downvote systems that strive for a better STEEM environment for . . . . B L A N K S P A C E . . . . .. they can choose for whom.
My father told me once, the best political system in the world might be a perfectly just King. I still don't believe in that. People have different needs and opinions and the people should be the real King.
If you really want to have a giant ecosystem where big STEEM stakes do good for everyone, there might have been less intrusive ways of doing that. Maybe limit the maximum size of upvotes/downvotes or create even smarter curation curves that can perfectly adjust to soft parameters, improve the UI to showcase extensively good content based on upvotes per views or general overperformance of an author. But who am I to suggest such things, I'm sure you already get the idea.
@justineh You seem to have that back to front from my perspective.
Are you really unaware of the negative impact your buddies bernie and marky have already had on chasing away investors?
He is the single largest abuser in terms flagging for fun, shit posts, self voting account farms! and you support that?
Marky is so pathetic he goes through peoples accounts to flag any rewards that he can find to demolish lol The level of thinking that goes on to produce that behavior is staggeringly childish.
You get plenty of people coming to look at the drama sure, and they quickly decide to stay the fuck away with their money.
Flags are fine, the level of abuse being dished out is obscene and extraordinarily self defeating.
Unless the plan is to kill Steem which seems highly likely given the behavior
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
Where in my above comment to I support abusive behavior? Stop reaching.. I don’t play those games.
Downvotes are good for the ecosystem, no form of abuse is.
Hey @justineh thanks for replying. It is appreciated.
I agree with you, abuse is not good for the ecosystem. I would add that it is especially not good for the individuals on the receiving end.
I can also agree that flags most certainly have their place and valid uses as a last resort.
However I have only seen the valid use of flags rarely.
So the real question I have is, when are you going to stop ignoring the rampant abuse of the system through account farming/self voting/shit posting and abusive flagging of the bernie group of accounts?
The behavior is a clear violation of the terms of service and is clearly not conducive to a healthy ecosystem.
After all, that's what want, a healthy ecosystem that will attract investors right?
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
Well I can’t really do anything about TOS, I don’t own the site. I also believe there are many accounts doing more harm than the “Bernie ones” you mention.
I’m aware of his downvotes to specific accounts and even though I’m not a fan of downvoting due to disagreements, I also think our actions have consequences and many accounts feel they can troll and attack then cry foul when it’s returned. I would argue these accounts who are causing harm are also driving investors away.
So, I’m one who feels the situation is not as black and white as it’s painted to be.. with that being said I’ve flagged his accounts many times and hope he finds a more positive path.
It’s not my fight, I do what I can.
(And when I tried to make it my fight and solve the “turmoil”, your buds are the ones who viciously attacked me 😉... so maybe you guys need to look in the mirror a bit.)
i disagree with you a a few things in your reply. I will only bother to address the two most personal to me.
If you are unaware of the driven away investors, you have not been paying attention.
And, the ''your buds'' comment I take a personal slur on my character.
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
lol @kawaiicrush.
I learned from the best! Just helping you to keep Steem thriving!! Wink wink! Be a dear and send my regards to the AI would you?!
Thanks!
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
Upvotes and downvotes are powers people receive for staking on the Steem network. No one has the authority nor the right to tell you, Smooth or anyone else what they can or cannot do with their upvotes or downvotes. Voting is a matter of subjective stances on issues, and there is no official policy nor should there be an official policy for what you can do and not do with your votes. If there was an official policy that was enforced by a single entity or a power circle, curation would then not be a decentralized system indicating wide community sentiment.
I 100% agree about one week not being long enough. I expect this process to play out over several months and I'm still not sure what the outcome will be.
As for my votes, I had steadily delegated out (nearly) all of my SP over the course of HF19/HF20 as I saw that voting was largely useless and it became a pay-to-play dominated system. I kept a token amount undelegated to be able to engage on comments, downvote spam or clear abuse, etc. That's why you didn't see my votes, because I mostly wasn't making any.
Since HF21, with the hope that the culture does change, I have undelegated most of my SP (some is on long term leases and my current plan is to let them cycle out). I plan to vote/curate/downvote. But if I see that the culture is reverting to one of paid voting and self-voting then I will go back to delegating it out like everyone else (self-voting would be another option, largely economically equivalent, but too much trouble for me personally).
Where this goes? Easy to tell:
Whales or their account holders will use advanced downvote tools to censor the whole rest of the network, just as it pleases them and for free. Meanwhile, the trending page is full of Like-Train posts.
Sounds like a good platform to be on, right?
At least some of us can now not only search for content to upvote, no they can also search for contet to downvote. That's a cool new hobby.
Hard no. The graph does NOT show the number of users, it shows the number of accounts which is not even close.
It also includes Steemit in the whale section, which does not vote (at least not for the undelegated portion of their stake) and is entirely irrelevant and misleading.
The categories are also pretty arbitrary and all of the bars are large enough that even modest changes in the cutoffs would start to shift a lot of the mass of one bar from one of these arbitrary categories to another.
And finally, none of this really matters for the purposes of proof of brain being preferable to paid votes. As long as stakeholders reach a consensus on payouts which align with value added to Steem then the system works. Whales have at least as much incentive to support that sort of alignment as anyone else. The people who don't have this incentive are vote sellers and self-voters who make more personally by undermining the system for everyone else.
It is good to fight abuse in all possible ways! Anyway, it will not stop there. Downvotes will take their independent purposes and we'll see where that goes. Especially considering automated downvote bots.
My organic range is so small, you could automatically silence how many accounts of my size, just with your free downvotes? Let's say if I'd posted every other day once, what would be the number?
and if you think I'm talking out of the blue, you might be a bit wrong at least.
I can't play NC anymore, because attacks are too cheap. It's Vietnam all over the place...in the very same week that HF21/22 implements free downvotes and systematically downvoting just starts. Trust me, it's scary for small members of the community.
You might wanna check out my latest post about that: https://steempeak.com/palnet/@manniman/9-weeks-of-nextcolony-game-over-now
This is the result of adding my name into an automated system and then forgetting about it. So I'll leave NC behind and I would have to do the same with STEEM if my name would end up in a downvote list.
I don't know anything about nextcolony but if you don't mind how about a brief intro and tell me why you can't play it any more and what if anything that has to do with HF21/22. Thanks.
The attacks just burn my earnings, so I can't progress anymore. They are made by an automated attack bot, and I can't dodge them efficiently. My fault at this point is, that I'm too small to fight that guy and now I will never ever be big enough.
The same could happen with all my author earning if I'd end up on a downvote list. Also, just a single person could be enough.
Sounds to me like a flaw in the game design. Thanks for the feedback. I do understand that people can get frustrated when they are assaulted by too much downvotes, undeserved downvotes, etc. No one wants that.
If they are invested, they will get frustrated. Usually, they will just go back to Facebook or Reddit and start talking bad about STEEM.
I often talk to people Face-to-Face about STEEM and why they should join. I don't expect that people are that responsible with their downvotes, as you would be.
If you read my comments, you must think I'm insane. But tomorrow I'll fly to a meeting, where influencer onboarding to STEEM will be a big part of the agenda. We're on the same team.
rep of 69, keep going to enforce your moral judgment to everyone and you'll be at -1 soon
@netuoso what did I do to you?
No words just downvotes, that is how STEEM roles now? You don't like my opinion, so you censor me by downvoting, great job 10/10. @ned Take that to your next meeting.
@ned goes to meetings ?
did just read about that today, too - from that Bernie guy
I'd be a complete and utter ass hat if I didn't put a brief explanation to why I downvoted. I've done this on all other posts I've downvoted since HF21/22.
I've always maintained that trending is the first place new people are most likely to make a judgement about steem. The dogshit trending we had has improved since HF21/22 but there is a big hurdle to get over for steem to start bringing more new people to the platform and that is the steem-centric content that dominates trending.
I showed this post to my girlfriend, who is reasonably technically proficient, and I said to her '"tell me honestly what you think about this post? Would it interest you and encourage you to join this platform?" To cut a long story short, she didn't understand a word of it and said it put her off immediately. I barely understand about 30% of what this post is talking about and I've been on steem 2 years.
This is the only reason why I downvoted it. I think everyone needs to be judged to the same standards, and I'd ask the same question of my better half about any steem-centric content that was boosted to this extent. By the way, I have explained to her much of how steem works to my level of understanding so she isn't clueless.
What I mentioned above isn't the only consideration I have when looking at trending content and thinking about using a downvote, my biggest consideration is the boosted shit posts. But they are getting less and less, which I think everyone can agree is a very good thing :)
Agree with most if not all of what you said there.
It is both fascinating and ridiculous to see top-quality post like this which enlightened me a lot, got downvoted. I don't know. Perhaps those precious free downvote power can be used against real reward pool raper like Haejin' non-stop spamming.
Unnecessary vote buying or not, that's controversial. For excellent post like this, that's totally fine in getting some reward from vote buying as well as the organic votes. Compared to this controversial bid bot issue on an apparant high-quality post, there are tons of spam posts raping the reward pool hard, why not combat those instead?
Of course, if your mission is solely for “educating on correct use case of bit bot” or “bringing justice to the Trending page”, down voting this post might make some sense. But again, I don’t see a problem for good post like this getting more reward and the Trending placement is utmost deserving. We should use more focus on the real damaging source of reward pool, those little but frequent spam post of all kind from all sources, that the spammers would not pumped to Trending so it can be shot down as an obvious target.
IMO you are obsessing over something unimportant and uninteresting.
Everyone gets 2.5 free downvotes per day and is entitled to his or her own opinion on how to use them.
My opinion was to use it here, yours is not. That's really all there is to it.
Vote buying is itself a systemic risk. It's marginally worse if done on bad posts but still bad no matter what. If you don't agree, that's fine (although it indicates some lack of understanding of the economics), use or don't use your downvotes how you see fit.
I like the way your grandma thinks 🤣
Lol
Posted using Partiko Android
We've talked about the vote selling at length and why it's economically equivalent of self voting. You're literally one of the most popular and respected people on the platform and I really wish you weren't contributing to this market after Newsteem has given us the tools to pivot entirely towards honest curation.
You have certainly decreased your paid vote this post since last time and I appreciate it. I did not downvote this time but would likely have upvoted it and be talking about the content of the actual post had you not bought any votes at all.
Peace,
I did read it, it was worth nothing.. you owne me 25 seconds of lifetime for writing this comment.
Smdh
Posted using Partiko Android
Thanks for all your hard work that you and your team has put in into steemit and your projects keep the good work up....we all here to support you guys 🥇
Upvoting because possibility of getting organic votes doesn't exclude option to promote the post for better visibility.
!tipuvote for 75 steem
So if I want to run one of these compact broadcast nodes on hardware I have lying around (i5 8400 with up to 64Gb RAM & NVME; i7 6800k with out to 128Gb Ram & NVME SSD). Is there a simple “Steem in a box” solution?
Posted using Partiko iOS
Yes. Check someguy123's github repo.
Posted using Partiko Android
You can follow the exchange node guide in the official repo (also using docker): https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/doc/exchangequickstart.md
An exchange node is basically the same as a seed node, you can just skip the part about tracking account history for a single account.
That hardware is more than enough to accomplish this.
I would love to do something like this as well if it helps stabilize and decentralize the blockchain further!
Posted using Partiko iOS
Definitely appreciate the hard work that you do behind the scenes... each time I read your updates and under the cover posts I get more excited about Steem and the ecosystem that is in play. Even after this week ;-)
Put a lot of plans back a week or so, but it's extremely reassuring knowing we have a cadre of visionaries looking at improved processes and whats down the road for that ecosystem.
Keep it up and know it's appreciated.
This reminded me, I haven't played #SteemMonsters since before the Hardfork... Time to fix that!
Thank you for your really good explanations. Greetings Michael
I think you meant to write hardFork, not Bork, but I cannot tell if that was a typo or if it is just more of your comedy skills at play.