Bullies on the blockchain
It was brought to my attention lately from a Steem user that there's a big account farming rewards and voting up spam, now while I realize there are many doing the same, accounts such as Haejin, this one seemed somewhat new and was under the impression that just because he had purchased stake it meant that he could use it however he wanted to allocate rewards from the reward pool.
Now don't get me wrong, I know about most of the "bad activity" that goes on on the platform due to the broken economics and lack of "proof of brain" and I may be a bit hypocritical when it comes to reacting to this account but ignoring others but I figured it would be a good warm up for HF21 and what's to come to act in this scenario. Basically the Steemian that alerted me about this case was being flagged for calling out his actions, his actions being such that he only voted on his own accounts on content that were a mix of a title with a sentence, a screenshot or just a short comment.
One of his posts was something along the lines of "I vote however I want", so I downvoted it and replied with "I am also voting how I want" and then some lovely comments explaining my action and then retaliation started. Now I normally don't care for votes, you could even say my content may not even deserve the rewards it is receiving but it's not always about just the content. Especially in a time like this when most stake is either being used on bid bots, vote-trading where the content usually has less and less effort due to the guaranteed votes in a similar fashion as autovotes, or blatant self-voting of short content like in this case.
Something I don't tolerate though and which kind of triggers me is when they retaliate on actual decent and worthwhile content just because those users dared to flag his shit content in the first place. This reminds me of the retaliation that went on in the early days with Haejin and over time made it so that not many dared to use the downvotes even if they wanted to and even if it cost them because they feared that their "Steem career" or earnings would be done for for good. Even with the change from flags onto downvoting it did not increase the volume of them, so here we are now with HF21 coming up and free downvotes and the hopes of normalizing them. If there is anything we should embrace the downvotes and not let people be punished for using them, especially not if it's blatant retaliation as in this case.
I was going to leave it be after a couple downvotes but noticed that he started it up today and even decided to include a post I had resteemed. Well, that's where I kind of draw the line and will halt my curation to make sure his damage is as little as possible and see if anyone else is up for helping me with countering his retaliations.
This is what it's gonna be about though, accounts like these that don't care about the rewards and just want to bully smaller accounts around even though their downvotes are not justified due to the content they land on is what will probably happen a lot more with the free downvotes. I know many have had these concerns but with every new opportunity and addition there will always be ways to abuse it but it's on us to work together and make sure that the positives from it will outweigh the negatives, such as decentralization in general.
So this will be sort of like a warm up for me for HF21. Am I losing rewards by doing this? Sure, but just sitting idly by and letting him retaliation on smaller accounts while he farms rewards from the pool by providing no content is probably worse in the long haul. At least I know that he'll be wasting downvotes on my posts instead of continuously leeching from the pool and bringing the price down further. We have a lot of these leaks going on nowadays and I really hope the next HF we will be able to tap these up and make sure that only deserving authors and content are getting rewards, no matter if they are big or small or have earned or purchased Steem. This is not a fucking proof of stake blockchain, it sure kinda looks like it now with all the ROI from bots and other services we have but that will hopefully change soon and bring back some kind of content discovery and distribution to effort. It's time people realize that it doesn't matter how much more ROI we can earn than our neighbors, what matters is how good we can govern our reward pool and increase the price of the currency, once we get that to go up there will be a lot more doors and opportunities waiting for us and a blockchain that's ready to take them all on.
I am still hopeful but we have to band together to make sure this becomes a reality.
Peace
Hopefully with free downvotes initiatives like Steem Flag Rewards get their time to shine and everyone starts downvoting just for a chance at earning returns from their downvotes. Im counting on them rising to occasion with HF21.
Want to get more people to "use" downvotes?
Make a delegate my free downvote option-watch as downvotes bots become a thing now
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Nice, doing my part too!
I flag him here & there, he does not flag back, or "flame" back or anything as far a s I can remember, so usually I loose interest and I move along! He's like flagging a limp fish-whale! lol I'll still throw a few that way, he is like a never ending pit though! Good Luck!
Have you thought that with Hard Fork 21 this guy will also get to downvote for free?
Yeah, we will need voting power to counter obvious retaliation and abuse.
We must put aside fear, have full confidence in our criteria when it comes to evaluating content.
It is important the initiative of support that you took @acidyo, that shows us that we are not alone in this task.
We are all responsible for the blockchain, so we must all make the best effort.
What a massive shame. This is what I feared all along with EIP with the free downvotes. How does someone get off on downvoting and pillaging the reward pool for spam content?
Posted using Partiko Android
I don't believe many will behave this same way like this particular "whale".
I'm being DV'd by the same account on both my main account and the @adsup curation account.
It is the price of fighting abuse and I hope a waste of his time.
Thank you for your active curation!
I often wonder the true costs of doing it as I still believe that value is better to be built up and realized over time instead of short term.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I sincerely hope people will wake up and stop looking the other way. Count me in!
Let me ask you a question. When you see shit like this, who is the real the problem here?
Yeah it's easy to spot him here: https://steemit.com/payout_comments
unfortunately it's hard for spaminator and other stakeholders to nullify those rewards, bid bot owners need to block them from using their services.
Good link! That is eye opening.
That's eye opening, that's small potatoes compared to this guy I wrote about five days ago, he was close to a couple thousand in less than a couple weeks of showing back up on the platform...since I posted that five days ago he's bid bot himself another 1,232.16 worth on his post which aren't worth the content he's producing. Since my critique he's went to adding one more paragraph but still the content isn't worth what is claimed for it. He must be someone mighty big on the platform that no one steps up to tell him he is way overboard on what he thinks his content is worth. Over the course of the next few weeks you watch he'll be right back up there bidding this stuff out for near a thousand dollars an article just like he was doing before he took a hiatus for a couple months.
https://steemit.com/palnet/@sunlit7/i-am-good-enough-i-am-smart-enough-and-damn-that-earns-me-the-right-to-rip-off-steemians
Great post! I drop in on him from time to time with some downvotes.
I'll also add the insidious thing about my example is he snipes rewards as the period expires, so it's harder to get a downvote in. He's not interested in promoting himself as opposed to chbartist, not that I agree with that either.
Posted using Partiko Android
The problem with saying hey that guy didn't use his downvotes right... is that downvotes and upvotes are subjective stuff. Steemit Inc. have even pointed out that the long-term goal for Steem is not to be a crypto Medium, its to be a reward platform that spans lots of stuff that might have nothing to do with long form content.
You're making the argument that downvotes are good, but people need to use them right. There is no right and wrong here, just power. When you buy STEEM and turn it into Steem Power, you bought power.
I get so puzzled how people that are pro-flagging don't get their hypocritical thinking. They believe their judgement is righteousness and so flagging needs to exist so that they can police the Steem ecosystem. But, inevitably someone uses their flagging powers in a way that the pro-flaggers dislike and it frustrates them.
Please read this while thinking of a high pitched, squeaky voice:
Oh, if everyone just understood that I'm right about the world and my ideas would make everything perfect!
That is never going to happen. Flagging is a personal decision made by people with biases, favoritisms, and subjective judgments. What you think is right is not necessarily right, it just is right according to you.
This is why I would rather people only had positive voting powers. When you vote for someone to receive rewards you are essentially voting against everyone else, but its done in a not conflict-invoking manner.
But hey, no one will listen, we're going to have a retaliation-filled Steem, and that's how things are going to be...
It's not just right according to me but according to the majority of users. We curate based off of content, posts are saved as posts on the blockchain but it's true that content can be a lot more things nowadays but not just blatant farming, if you don't want to curate based off of that then delegate your SP and let it be used for something else while you earn your ROI as he seems to be desperate to do. Retaliation and fear is not something we want to see happen here cause it's disgusting and I will defend anyone in the crosshair of that. Only a handful of idiots result to retaliation, did you read his comments? Did he seem like a bright bulb to you? Downvotes are becoming more normal over time and I've personally seen many understand why they got downvote and not result in dumb retaliation, mr. boosta over here thinks that doesn't apply to him because he's too big to be touched.
I did admit I was being hypocritical cause many others deserve the same actions towards them, but for now this will do and I hope come HF21 there will be specific projects to fight these kind of abuse. For now let's enjoy 300k sp less stake having an effect on the rewardpool.
Thanks for the support ... I like the idea of stakeholders coming together and balancing out extreme actions of other large stakeholders.
Very NewSteem
Flag away. I kind of started to enjoy it myself flagging those pricks hogging the trending page day in day out.
I never thought id be doing it but im past caring about retaliation especially when prices are so low.
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I have no problem with downvoting, but I am not into retaliation.
I also don't understand people who get upset at a single downvote worth less than a few cents or people who think new accounts behaving badly deserve protection. In my opinion as soon as you have used a bot, reached 50 rep or 100sp, or joined a curation circle that isn't for minnows and has any standards, downvotes are cool to dole out.
I've had people complain for downvotes because their account is new. Yeah sure buddy i can make new accounts once every few days and act like an ass too.
I'm a big fan of "I vote however I want." But if I believe that a particular vote (or pattern of votes) undermines the value of my investment, I have two options: a) downvote or b) dump.
Therefore, if you see me downvote, you should be happy I'm not dumping my stake instead.
Like in real life there are different personalities and different people. One is the group of people who live according the rules, create their posts, using their own words, pictures, or creations, luckily there are majority of users. The disadvantage for such users their accounts despite of amazing content will grow slowly receiving low payout and very often I can see many of Artist who started with me have already left the platform. Because they spent hours and days and at the end they have not been seen at all. But on other hand there always will be people who will use shortcut and help themselves with such tools like bitbot, self-upvote, it is allowed, there is no restriction. We all wanted to have decentralised system and here is it is with its own benefits.
If you want to prevent it there should be some rules that will restrict it in certain volume from beginning on so that people will be not tempted to do that.
I sure hope HF.21 does what it claims it's actually setting out to achieve!
I realize no matter what you do, there will always be shady players in the game, as well as those who look at something like the Steem environment and basically see nothing more than a glorified online "cash dispenser."
I suppose I can even deal with those who are purely selfish, but the whole retaliatory thing is troublesome... as a small account, I can disagree with someone's content and posting pattern to my heart's content, but I am always at risk of getting totally buried by a big account throwing some hefty downvotes my way for while. And it's not even about "the money," but more about seeing 18 months of work becoming invisible...
=^..^=
Free downvotes? Wow that's better if it won't affect the earnings. Haha. Making if free would allow us the option to show how disagreeable the post is without affecting the person's rewards. 😊
As for the reward farmers, as long as there are people like you around we minnows and redfishes won't need to worry as much as we should. 😊 Some just don't know how to grow up and behave better without other people correcting them.
Posted using Partiko Android
Oooof, i guess i'll try to stay neutral to avoid this travesty. I'll just curl back in my box and draw. #hf21plscome.