Flags, Whales, and Bidbots
This is a follow up to a post made by a larger than life Whale last week, you will need to read this first:
https://steemit.com/bidbots/@fyrstikken/bidbots-they-do-not-drain-the-steem-rewardpool
edited from source
If you had a look through the comments, which are quiet heated in places, you may have found mine somewhere down the list:
Taking a trip down memory lane, you'll find plenty of posts with this arrangement at the top of the voting pile:
Flags were pretty common amongst the Whales, even when the voter didn't necessarily 'disagree with the post or think it isn't a quality post' - they were part of the norm.
@smooth's last flag was quite recent:
And yet, he's 20th in the voting list - with around 2.5 million VESTS.
Why? The funds are distributed:
That's cool. I would be shitting a brick with that in one account. But why the 'weak' vote?
Ahh.
Another from 'Trending' recently:
The 'wisdom of the crowd' (bar the Plankton front-running the Bots) was that this post wasn't for the top of the pile. Top witness, and @buildawhale owners main account included.
And @freedom? His last flag over a year ago:
Sorry, @kevinwong :)
Although, would it be much 'use' at present?
Not really.
I'm not making this point to have my account flagged to shit, or that I think you aren't free to do whatever you wish with your stake. But yours, and other whales influence has gone - gone to Bid-bots that whilst are not draining the pool, are also not helping re-fill it due to your stake not being at your side.
Not sure what the solution is, but it looks like we have a problem. @thejohalfiles, @fulltimegeek, and the occasional flags from other 'large' accounts aren't enough to manage the rewards pool.
Perhaps Bot owners can go with the general feeling of the post comments?
Maybe take the top 50 votes (excluding bots) to decide if a Bot vote should be removed?
Or maybe it's up to key delegators to say 'no to that one'? - Check Trending on Wednesdays and Sunday's and see what your stake is doing?
Thoughts?
You couldn't be more spot on @abh12345!
The whales did see the threat of the bid bots but also the investment possibilities! And they jumped on the bid bot wagon. It is for them the easiest way to maintain their position and to get rich on the greed/pride/whatever of others!
I have to admit that it is a bold but great post. And for the moment no flags yet. And why would they, you are just pointing out what everybody already knew and what everybody could dig up!
I did see you asking @tarazkp the question what he would do with 1 million SP. So what would you do with it? While I do know that you are a great guy (understatement, hell I would but you dinner when we will be going back to Mallorca (yes at Naan)), giving out a lot of free delegations, caring about the system and a real advocate of interaction and engagement here on the blockchain. A real example of what a witness has to do and how they should behave (there are more great witnesses like @dragosroua and so on, but I know your mission and can't support it more then I do).
So would you also invest some vests into the bots, knowing that it would make you more powerful, with which you could even support the others more?
Not that this is the reason why lot of the whales or doing this, in contrary!
But like you wrote, we don't care about the whales getting richer, they are whales for a reason. But we both regret that they are not taking part at the interaction of the blockchain. Nor do most care about the lower base of the ecosystem!
I also would like to see more active witnesses!
Cheers,
Peter
Thanks Peter, very kind of you :)
Well I guess this post is already off the radar so I could be safe. As you say, nothing new here, just my view of the state of play.
With a million SP, i'd probably delegate at least half of it to 5/6 people I know curate content, and rotate it around month by month so that different communities felt the benefit. If I had a million SP, I'd likely have a house without a mortgage and be fairly set. That isn't the case right now though and so I'd hope that some of the SP would come back to me, so i could buy a place at some point. Once that was covered, more delegations to support the people who act in a way I feel is right. And of course, they'd be monitored :)
I wouldn't delegate to a bot, and like now, the delegations would be free and without a restriction of voting your own work, if you felt proud of it.
Any good? :)
Good enough.
Really like the idea of a house with mortgage. 13 years more to go 😔
Also like the idea of rotating it! The more communities get stronger the better this place would be!
You can take back some of the free delegation you have given to me. I am now, with the delegation at 560. So no problem if you want to decrease it.
While I could do self votes, I am not planning to do it (often).
It would be an upvote of only $0.07 so it would be spilling a drop of water on a hot plate!
Cheers,
Peter
Ps: curious how I will do this week in the engagement league. I do aim at a top 5 place!
Exactly - building up each community :)
I'm in no rush to remove it, you are active and spreading your vote.
$0.07 - That's 25 self votes or a top 10 in my league :)
Thanks for leaving it 👍
I would always prefer a league top 10 above the upvotes. It has to do with pride and giving an example. People do look up towards us, while we only type some words!
The funny thing is that most of the frequent top 10 players are all commenting within the same pool while I am mostly on the complete other side of the blockchain!
If you're a whale, you have a couple options for using your SP:
Of these, delegating/leasing to the bot and lease market are by far the most passive and highest reward/work.
There is very little incentive to then turn around and use your SP to flag a post where you get nothing in return. There would be some incentive if you still got a curation reward for flagging, but I don't think that's the case. (I'd have to check to be sure though).
So I don't think we will see a lot of flagging coming back to the chain.
What might be more effective is pointing out to bot bidders that the profits have pretty well been arbitraged away. The bid bots function as a wealth transfer from minnows to whales, with not much in return for the minnows except visibility. But visibility for what? It's pretty rare that the vote buyers get any organic votes that are worth much.
I just checked the faq and curation rewards are not earned for flagging.
On a side note here: there's @steemflagrewards, rewarding flags with an upvote with slightly more value. The project is comparably young, still rather limited in terms of SP and by far no compensation for whale flags, but it's a great incentive for "small players" to use some of the stake also for flags.
I hadn't heard of that one. Thanks.
The incentive to flag is respect and appreciation :)
I would do point 3 in your list, and if the majority did the same, there would be no stopping this platform.
Sure you might, but most people will go with the highest reward/work ratio. It's just not realistic to expect human nature to change. Why do work and make 25% when you can do nothing and make 35%?
The real trick will be figuring out how to turn a bid bot into a positive activity for the rest of the chain gang.
There was a time where Whales would flag each other for excessive self-voting. Much easier to hide behind a BB which does similar, expect you don't even need to create the content - genius.
Get your thinking cap on - a major prize awaits the winner :)
I think it goes back to the quality scores we were discussing a few weeks ago combined with a 100% payout to investors.
Basically, create a status symbol on top of the actual vote value that would make users proud to qualify for an exclusive bid bot.
SMTs might be able to accomplish a similar function if they ever happen.
Creating brand value is always challenging though.
Is only the money and nothing but the money and that will never change no matter how many post we do about it. The Golden Rule applies here. "He who owns the Gold(steem) Rules"!
BTW great post hope you dont get flagged for it?
As long as selling votes is as profitable as manual curation (or moreso) then SP holders will be drawn to sell. So manual curation has to be made easier and more profitable. The Steemit terms actually ban bot use, but they have never been enforced.
I did recently make this post putting forward an idea to use Steemit's own tokens to make an 'official' vote selling service that cuts out the attraction for SP holders to try to compete with it. I'm not sure if that is a good idea or not since I haven't seen the likely outcome in terms of the maths across the whole system. It is possible that if it improves the situation that Steem's attractiveness will increase and its value will increase accordingly. This might also mitigate complaints about Steemit having Ninja mined those tokens. It's a bit of a gamble, but then so is crypto in general!
Hey
I've had a look through and have to bow to @mattclarke's superior knowledge and thinking. The point about the 'ninja-mined' tokens is pretty hard to get away from.
It would be good to reach a point where delegating to an SMT would be more profitable than vote selling - I'm not holding my breath though.
I think I have found an elegant and simple solution to this issue.. Simply return the money sent to buy the votes back into the reward pool:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ura-soul/a-way-to-neutralise-bid-bots-on-steemit-steem-while-still-allowing-votes-to-be-bought
I'd like to hear bot owners comment on this, and will need to think about it a bit more :)
This is really quite a hornet's nest @abh12345 because it seems like we ultimately end up back at the same place: (1) the code allows people to do whatever they will do and (2) no matter how "idealistic" some people may be, there's always going to be a "greedy" element that walks in on top of everyone else with combat boots on... and just not giving a damn.
Of course, we also have the great "battle" going on here... over whether Steemit is "A CONTENT platform that happens to pay" or "A CASH DISPENSER where content happens to be the method of dispensing."
Personally, I'm a content creator. If the only thing I cared about was money, I probably wouldn't be wasting my time with Steemit, I'd be off doing FOREX trading or something.
What's my point? It's easy to look to the Whales to be the scapegoats, but there wouldn't BE any bidbots if there wasn't a swarm of lower level lifeforms convinced they need to spend $1000s on something that isn't even particularly profitable.
The only reason I am not completely disgusted with the OP whale cited in the first paragraph is that he's a long term player in this ecosystem, at least if we're to take him at his word.
=^..^=
I think Steem/it could work as both a cash dispenser and a content platform, just perhaps not spitting out quite as much moolah as it is right now.
The cited witness is a long-term player and to his credit, has a lot vested here. Whether that is because he has millions elsewhere or remains pro-Steem, I'm not sure :)
Or maybe just bring back n^x rewards -.-
Way to kill my post off with a formula :)
sry
:)
The rewards mechanism is at fault, but people have gone blue talking about that one so you know - something without math here :)
I agree though, that's why you have my witness vote.
The portion of rewards being syphoned off was larger with n^x than it is today, it was just via a different method.
That's just not true.
It's absolutely true. There was a short list of people who were literally collecting together the majority of the reward pool consistently. Day in, day out the same accounts were on the front page, multiple times over. For example @steemsports on it's own took 5.7% of the reward pool in December 2016, and that was just one of the accounts consistently trending at that time. N^2 assured that the bulk of the rewards went to those few posts, ordinary users had no influence and the vast majority of posts would get a straight $0.00 because it didn't matter if they got votes from smaller stakeholders.
Morale was low and the network was going nowhere. It takes very rose tinted glasses to want to go back to this era of Steem's history.
I honestly don't know what types of glasses I would need to wear to see the new rewards function as an improvement in any way.
Far more of the rewards are actually going to ordinary users. The issue of vote bots and self-voting is a growing one, but one which today constrains the reward pool far less than it was prior to linear rewards. It will take active policing to get it under control, but changing the reward curve isn't going to improve things.
with linear rewards there is no incentive for 'policing'. ( with n^x there is )
my rough guess is: 80% of all rewards go directly back into boosters/are being distributed by boosters(bidbots) right now.*
*I made a post about this, where I could (with very simple methods) account for at least 30%.
80% is a massive overestimate. It's a growing problem but currently only around 25%
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/how-much-of-the-rewards-pool-is-paid-out-to-bitbots-v-s-organic-votes
I did enjoy reading this part of the original post:
The only bidbot owner I support is yabapmatt. I don't think I would use the term fine for many of the others. Perhaps they are, who am I to say? :)
Your posts are always interesting and insightful. Perhaps art-type posts are less controversial? ;)
Fine upstanding members of the community they are!
I don't think you'll see another #art post from me for a while :)
I guess by the sound of it, might as well give up fighting abuse, eh?
A go full-asshole? Never!
(nice haiku btw :D )
It's totally meme-worthy by this point.
I guess by the sound
Of it, might as well give up
Fighting abuse, eh?
- enforcer48
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
Do I actually think and type in haiku? This is not the first this has happened to me.
LOL!! First time I have seen haiku bot. Genius!
It is one bot I will support.
lmao! Love it, @haikubot!
I want to start a bot where its a fixed price, human vetted, and if the content quality isnt there; it is considered a donation and powered up. I dont have enough steem power or time to make this a reality, but it would certainly be an excellent way of taking sbd from people who only use it to upvote posts of questionable quality.
You'd need to have better returns than the ones that are less strict on content - all 400 of them :)
Therein lies the problem. It wouldn't really be a bot... it'd be paid, manual curation; which I'm not so sure would be admired.
This is the model @thundercurator uses.
Build a capcha value based on some scheme of taking the post's checksum and multiply by present time or somesuch. Make upvotes which pass the CAPCHA scheme, embedded in the blockchain, worth at least twice as much as non-proof of brain upvotes.
An option to prove manual curation and if weighted right could help trending.
The post is a bit 'bitty', but the main point is that the chief stakes are out to rent and are not policing, bar a few kind souls.
Perhaps flag rewards, or a separate flag pool is the option - whether this would be enough to put a dent in some of the shite we see at the top of trending, I don't know :)