RE: Punishing Rabid Self-Upvoting of Comments
So . . . . with HF19, which overall was awesome, we have a new, and apparently reasonably major, threat to the community.
Then the HF was not awesome.
Full linear rewards + 4x vote power = Much larger potential for abuse/exploitation
Neither of these changes were necessary. Full linear rewards, in and of itself, represented a serious issue for mitigating self-voting and sock puppets/collusive voting. Add the ability to give a 4x weighted vote, and it presents an environment that's ripe for "draining" the reward pool on spam and other useless/worthless content.
We've all seen what has happened over the last 12 days. I think it's safe to say that the changes have so far reversed some of the "social" aspects of the platform and have created a much more lucrative opportunity for spammers and the "get-rich-quick" users who have no interest in any long-term viability. It has simply sparked a furious cash grab and the reward pool fund and general behavior of users have demonstrated that.
This HF should be rolled back, as soon as possible.
I agree with the majority of the witnesses that the hard-fork was too much, too fast.
On the other hand, n-squared rewards was abusive and went on FAR too long -- so rolling back the change would be a really detrimental idea. It would have been far wiser for the developers to have suggested something between the two (and I believe that collusive voting between whales was reduced by the change far more than the change increased the sock-puppet/collusive problem).
The 4x weighted vote should have only been given to the smaller users and should have been part of a separate fork.
There is nothing "abusive" about n^2, but it was far too much in terms of calculating post payouts. Pretty much everyone agreed that n^2 needed to change to a more linear algorithm. But there wasn't much agreement on a full linear algorithm, and self-voting/sock puppet voting was one of the reasons why. Many people spoke out against this change precisely because of the behavior we're seeing now.
With a more-than-linear curve, it would be much harder to give yourself large rewards without other voters agreeing on rewarding the content. Obviously, full linear requires no such agreement from other users. So having a more-than-linear algorithm is at least a moderate deterrent to naked self-voting for rewards.
But the 10-vote target was a "solution" for a problem that did not exist. And rather than make things more "fair" or "equal" for smaller stakeholders, it simply allows spammers or anyone else to siphon rewards into their own pockets with minimal content that requires not even the slightest bit of consensus...or any agreement whatsoever from even one other user.
It's the combination of the two changes that really exacerbates the effects/problems. Even if they were implemented individually, either one would still create similar problems. That's why I say they should be rolled back.
Change the full linear algorithm to less than squared but more than linear. (STINC has claimed this is too hard to do.)
Get rid of the 10-vote target altogether. It was completely unnecessary.
10 x more blogs each day this past month prior to the first 4/5 months of the year and a '10 vote target'.....
Bog it, i'll just vote for myself mentality!
This comment is also for @ethical-ai and all the others commenting here on the post. I place this comment here for visibility.
I do not agree the HF should be rolled back. Next HF may need to be adjusted.
Disclaimer: I started writing this comment having in mind to list only a few items and not more than 100 words, but it became a really large comment; Since I went into depth here and there, doesn't mean I expressed all the details I would express when we would have a long debate; I may also not have mentioned some exceptions to the rule. And I certainly did not mention all the things that are 'wrong' - in my opinion in this community - wrt who gets votes and who not; for sure a fact is that some of us get enormous rewards given by high SP holders ALL the time and ending up in Trending ALL the time and many good authors and posts do hardly get any votes/rewards at all - just to name another topic of total disproportional imbalance.
Long comment with valid points.
I always liked the idea of "social exposure" with warnings first, to have a chance to change the so called "bad" behavior.
Good comment and valid - enjoyed reading the whole thing - even though it was long :)
Until a few hours ago I thought HF19 was a success - now it seems not so much now.
It's a shame there isn't a way to test these changes before going live with new code. I'd agree and say voting culture is at the core of this.
Testing is not really possible, other then try in the field and decide next HF to implement something else or step back to what we had.