Steem clone Weku looks a little shady
You might be a little confused about why I used the word Shady in the title. By shady I mean it is neither a scam nor a good project to invest in. It has some questionable aspects to it that looks suspicious.
let’s get back on track about the main subject. Weku is a clone of steem blockchain and it uses steemit’s legacy user interface as its blockchain interface. Weku rewards its content creators with its native token W$ / Wuku Dollar and powered up Weku (I will call it Weku Power from now on).
Rewards are split 50/50 between Weku Dollar and Weku Power. Users who sign up to Weku receive 100 Weku Power and those who refer new users also receive 40 Weku Power. Weku’s governance is highly centralized and has only one witness listed in its witness page: https://deals.weku.io/~witnesses . The only witness producing blocks right now is initminer.
Now, allow me to explain why it is a little shady. Here’s the CEO’s LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-zou-36b3581/ . The page looks like it is newly created and it doesn’t have a picture. The content quality of Weku is also questionable. There is a lot of spam in the trending page. Here’s a screenshot of the trending page taken at the time of writing this post:
As you can see, it is filled with spam. And the biggest problem of Wuku is that its system is gamed very easily. During its early days, many users were able to make a horde of accounts by using bots using fake emails or manually. According to a Wuku team member:
Every one is welcome to sign up and claim the signup bonus. In the case that the same user registers multiple accounts using bots and claims the bonus multiple times, the bot-registered accounts are not eligible for the signup and referral bonuses, and may even be flagged.
The WEKU team has identified a few users doing so by analyzing the IP/time/pattern combinations. From now on, registering 20+ users from the same IP address will be investigated.
The people that were able to farm rewards by using bots most likely have 10s of thousands of tokens and are obviously the most influential people in the Weku ecosystem. Since the Weku team isn’t using much voting power to vote posts, these people will have the power to farm more rewards out of Weku’s reward pool.
Therefore, people who invest in Weku will be giving free money to these gamers who can mint new Wuku tokens using their existing tokens. They are of course not scammers. What they did is game the system due to Weku team’s incompetence which deserves some praise in and off of itself. Lastly, I found this message posted by dev1993 (a Weku user) on Zeal discord (found it when researching about Weku):
… Weku ico will be hitting market soon
But there is a serious concern about this
There are lot of users especially From the Indian Subcontinent … who have created multiple fake accounts and currently having WEKU more than 20K
… So my concern is people with scamming personality will be ruling if weku hits ICO market
There are lot of discussion going around in SteemIT and this is the reason which stopping SteemIT whales to join Weku
When I checked the trending posts tagged scam, I found this post at the top. It mentioned 2 accounts as being scammers. I checked both of those accounts and they were farming rewards:
By farming rewards I mean, making tiny comments and up-voting them with their Weku Power. New investors who buy Weku will be giving free money to these reward farmers. The above stated reasons are why I think it is a failure and not a good project to invest in.
Now I will comment on a few things separately from my other response.
Those who refer new users used to receive 50 WEKU. Now they receive 40 WP and 10 liquid WEKU. Though, since it's done manually it takes a ridiculous amount of time to get it. I referred several people 3 weeks back and still haven't seen the bonus. Very inefficient.
I agree. I think moralizing actions like this is ignorant. Change the underlying code to make it resistant to abuse before you complain or try to shame people.
There are some other weird things. Check the patents that are listed on his LinkedIn page. They don't match the names listed as inventors on the actual patents. However, he is a real person as I found his picture on the Texas Association of Chinese Entrepreneurs site.
Hahaha, I know Gazi. We are aware of this but the WP the team delegated us is not sufficient to combat it and it takes a long time. Also, who wants to waste voting power to do it? The economic incentive to downvote is still not good enough.
To a degree, that's true. If the platform was balanced out, it might be relatively insignificant in the long run.
I would also not recommend people to invest in WeKu at the present time. Since I see these systems as games, I have bought some for fun because I find it entertaining to use this clone of STEEM that still functions off the bandwidth rules with lower inflation.
Thanks. I updated the post with that correction.
Hi @littleboy, thanks for bringing this post to my attention. I recently got appointed as a "Weku Community Moderator" by the team, which astonished me as I've been very openly critical about the Weku Team's way of running and developing this clone. Here's my profile over there since my @d-pend account was taken by an impersonator.
For me to detail my thoughts on Weku would take a very long post or series of posts, but I'll do my best to summarize here as brief as possible.
Issues of the platform:
and many more such as are present on STEEM. The system itself is a clone of HF19 version of STEEM with "extensive changes" to quote the response I got from Kevin Zou in an email. The main difference I know of is a lower inflation rate as of WeKu HF20 which was a few days ago and lowered the rate to 5% annually.
@initminer is their sole witness during beta, after which Kevin stated it will be a similar system to STEEM. Code will also go open source at that point. I'd recommend looking at their whitepaper if you haven't to see the difference in their alleged trajectory of development.
There's way too much to comment on right now, but here's my first report working as a moderator for a week or so. Soon, I will post about what I know about the current differences between WeKu and Steemit as well as the game theory dilemmas both share.
Interesting info. I’ve also been of the opinion that Weku is very questionable, so I’m not willing to sign up. Cloning Steem’s open source elements is great, but I can’t stand that the whole site right down to the FAQ is blatant plagiarism of Steemit. I don’t think that gives anyone a leg to stand on to fight plagiarism within the community.
Any info on why there are 3 different Weku front ends already as well? Deals.weku, news.weku, and one.weku? Just curious, either way I don’t see myself using it without a major revamp & reassuring developments.
Hey @bryan-imhoff, sorry for the late reply. Since this comment I've learned quite a bit more and met Kevin Zou and Eric Chen from the WeKu team in a video conference. Its legitimacy has increased quite a bit to me due to that, though I still feel they have very significant hurdles to overcome.
The reason for the different domain names is they have rolled out Communities like Steemit plans to in the future. Everything's on the same chain, but the front-end filters the posts out separately, so if you post on one, your blog will appear blank on the others until you engage there.
i got into Weku just to save my name cause i heard a lot about stealing usernames from steemit. Honestly i dive in having the best intentions and hopes about the platform.
i am a member of steemit for almost 2 years so i can pretty much understand easily certain types of abuse. If i had to compare the abuse levels that steemit had the first months it lunched with Weku's first months i'd say that Weku is 10000 times worst.
Everywhere you gonna see abuse, early "adopters" with some tactics like multiple accounts earned a lot of sp, voted their friends and make them what they are, as well as made tons of posts that give free votes
I saw posts that were literally a picture to gather 100 weku $ and even in my intro post most of the comments were "welcome" they upvoted my post with let's say 3/10 of their voting power and then 100% their own comments. I even tried to vote my comments too but when i realized what i am doing or become i quit.
Note and this is important that with just a random search i found curators and i repeat curators that abused the platform and those people are supposed to judge others people's posts. I informed the management and they said they gonna took care of it, but what management is that if they can't even choose a right curator. Add also that a bunch of scammers and abusers hold now tons of sp like a dolphin here and they are "the rules of weku" as you mentioned too. Knowing this there is no point in further dialog..... We know its future. i really hoped though because it was and is in the early stages that could avoid all steemit's mistakes but i was wrong
I guess this comes to show that while Steem is not perfect, it is clearly the leader in the space and is progressing forward with a great community. Many will cone to compete and some may also succeed as there is enough space for multiple platforms. However, the importance of continually seeking improvement is what has gotten Steem to where it is now.
Interesting, yeah I knew there was some gaming originally so they disabled referrals, didn't realize it was that bad
I didnt know there is just one witness...most likely the case here is a new platform still in first stage of development, but regarding the spam and trending pages is lol. Will send you later a link just FYI.
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LOL, check this out:
https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@rimonkhan/kinwa-polao
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STOPDo not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
You stated the obvious but every new community will experience such.
I believe things are putting in place to battle spamers and farmers.
And i believe they are open having more witnesses as a decentralised entity.
Weku ideas are great. And i pray they actualised all which will be possibly easy by human... So i think they still need more able hands for many great plans.
New projects are not easy to create. There are steps. Each step consist of success/failure. Only constant "believe in " makes it a success.
Weku want to put up some sub communities to still link to s super community. Like in scorum where you havw africa.scorum.com etc
Well as of now. Its a choice to believe in weku.