Let's Fix This
It's no secret that I'm not a fan of how SteemIt's reward system works.
I feel that it has a number of massive problems including:
- Incentives for junk posting / voting (Quantity over quality).
- Difficult for new members to gain visibility on the platform.
- Automated voting, self-voting, and paid voting, all of which completely break the idea of post curation.
That's a lot to tackle, and I don't think I have nearly enough influence on the platform to really sway anyone on any of these points.
That said, I hate the way the SteemIt platform does a lot of things when it comes to the distribution of wealth, and I hate some of the blatant abuses of the platform that are taking place.
@SteemCleaners is a great community effort that is working on identifying spammy posts, and abusive accounts, and downvoting them. They're one of the few effective spam-fighting measures I've seen on the SteemIt platform.
Want to help? You can report content abuse (Plagiarism or copy/paste of articles from other authors) to SteemCleaners using this link. If you make a good report, they'll reward you with some Steam Dollars (SBD) for your contribution, plus you'll be helping to clean up the platform!
SteemSQL is another great community tool, allowing for anyone to easily query the blockchain without having to know about how the blockchain actually works. The average person with a bit of SQL knowledge can dig into SteemSQL and find a lot of useful data.
I'm working on developing a number of tools that I hope will be useful to the SteemCleaners team for identifying abuse of the system and hopefully making their cleanup efforts a little easier. The tools are going to use SteemSQL to query the blockchain for instances of abuse and present the findings to the SteemCleaners team for review.
Some of the abuses that I'll be looking for will include:
- Vote spam
- Post spam
- Post theft / plagiarism
- Bot accounts upvoting one another, or upvoting specific users heavily
- Many bot accounts that funnel funds to a primary account
I hope that through this small contribution I can begin to change the SteemIt community based on my vision of how the platform should be operating, and hopefully it will spark some positive change in terms of making the platform better for everyone going forward.
If you enjoy my posts, don't forget to upvote and
-Matt
@pjau
@trinitystarr
Bot abuse is hard to deal with, but if you see obvious content abuse (copy-paste abuse or obvious plagiarism where you can find the original article) you can report it to SteemCleaners here:
https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/
They're cool people and will send you rewards if you make good reports, so it's definitely worth your time - Both for the sake of cleaning up the platform, and for the reward incentives.
Ah great, yeah I would love to do my bit. Bookmarked the link!
These are all definitely things that need to be addressed within the community. I actually just read another user's post who is upset about some of the things you mentioned. It is sad to see bots controlling so much voting and non-original works being upvoted despite going against what Steemit is really about. I hope that your efforts take hold.
@OriginalWorks
Interesting. How does the @OriginalWorks bot work? And how will you prevent people from abusing it?
I guess it doesn't work if the comment is on another comment? Or maybe it's case-sensitive?
The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @weaselhouse to be original material and upvoted it!
To call @OriginalWorks, simply reply to any post with @originalworks or !originalworks in your message!
Does @originalworks only evaluate posts, or can it also evaluate comments? Can it evaluate its own comment?
This is great, I'm pretty new here but I have witnessed a tonne of what you have mentioned. It's just crazy.
Cool idea! Lots of work but would definitely be Worth it. This has been my first week still trying to figure it out but I have noticed the things your talking about. Could definitely use some tweeking.