Why I'm against Bid Bot Abuse - How to Find & Take Action Against Bid Bot Abusers
Abuse Category
Bid Bot Abuse
Repository
https://github.com/anthonyadavisii/steemflagrewards
Almost everyone who has been an active member of Steemit for a while, knows that some people choose to artificially increase their post rewards through the use of Bid Bots. While it could be argued that there are legitimate uses of those services, fact of the matter is that they also get abused quite a lot.
There are people who's only goal is to publish low-quality posts and buy big upvotes for them, in hopes that they get upvoted by people who don't take the time to actually view those posts.
It's a fact that each person has different views on what a quality post consists of, that's why I will be focusing one one particular type of abuse which is very easy to recognize. There is somewhat of a consensus that posts with a single image and very little text, are not worthy of high artificial payouts. These are the clear-cut instances of Bid Bot abuse we will be targeting.
My Personal Gripes with Bid Bot Abuse
When you're against something, it's very important to know exactly why you're against it. I've thought a lot about why I'm against using Bid Bots for low-quality content. At first glance, the answer seems easy - I don't want content that required no effort to receive a high payout.
It's a bit more complicated than that... Actually I'm more worried about the effects that these high-payout, low-quality posts have on potential new users of Steemit. You don't want to give new members the idea that you can just post a single picture and easily earn +$10 for that. They'll just get discouraged after finding out that their posts don't get the same sort of rewards - or they'll start using Bid Bots themselves because they see it could be profitable.
That's why I think it's extremely important to try and make this form of abuse unprofitable, by actively flagging low quality posts on which Bid Bots have been used.
Finding Instances of Bid Bot Abuse
Scouring Through the Hot and Trending Sections on Steemit
This is the easiest method to find instances of Bid Bot abuse, since you can just use Steemit.com and take a closer look at suspicious posts. You just go through the Trending and Hot section of Steemit to spot suspicious looking posts. Photography related tags are definitely hot-spots for Bid Bot abuse, so it might be beneficial to focus on those tags.
You basically want to single out high-payout posts (1) that have a low number of upvotes (2) and check what sort of content they have. So, we're looking for picture posts that have very little text added to them.
In the example above, you can see that this post has over $8.00 in rewards, yet it only has 14 votes. You can also see that it's likely to have very little text, since the text preview is very short.
You then view the post itself and check whether Bid Bots have been used, by clicking the down arrow right next to the number of votes it has received. There's a list of bid bots on Steem Bot Tracker where you can see which accounts are Bid Bots. You'll notice that a lot of Bid Bots have somewhat similar names, so they're easy to recognize, some also leave comments under the post.
This particular post just consisted out of a single image with 1 line of text. Classic low-quality post that has received more rewards than it deserves.
Targeted Search Using Steemlookup
Steemlookup is one of my personal favorite tools to find overvalued posts that likely have been upvoted by Bid Bots. It's a tool that enables you to query the Steem blockchain, without having any programming skills. It features an intuitive interface that allows you to filter out certain types of content, just by adjusting different parameters.
For more information on how to use Steemlookup, check out my In-depth Guide to Steemlookup
When I'm specifically searching for posts that are likely low-quality and might have been upvoted by bid bots, I usually adjust the settings similar to what you see in the image on the left-hand side.
In this example, I've set Steemlookup to only search for posts that have a payout of at least $7.00 and are less than 7 days old (10080 minutes).
The maximum number of words that the post should contain is set to less than 50 and I've also set the maximum number of images to 2.
Since low-quality posts upvoted by Bid Bots usually do not have many votes in total, I've set that parameter to 50. Meaning that the search will only include posts with less than 50 votes.
Now another tweak that I've recently found very useful, is to exclude posts with the Dtube tag. These posts would often pop up among the search results, while they're usually not the sorts of posts we're looking for. Dtube posts also have very little text and sometimes high payouts, while they're usually not spam.
Taking Action Against Bid Bot Abuse!
Reporting Abuse to Bid Bot Owners
Most Bid Bots offer a way to report abuse. You just need to join their respective Discord channels and report the abuse to one of the moderators there. Now, not every Bid Bot owner takes these reports seriously, but the ones that are engaged in the Steemit community usually do. You can usually find the Discord channels of Bid Bots by going to their Steemit profiles or by asking certain people in some of the different anti-abuse communities (such as @steamcleaners & @steemflagrewards)
I know for a fact that @buildawhale for example has an active blacklist that includes Steemians who have abused the Buildawhale Bid Bot for promoting low-quality content. It's the same with other popular upvoting services like Smartsteem and Minnowbooster (which aren't technically Bid Bots, but it's pretty much the same concept), they actively fight against abuse of their services.
Reporting abuse to Bid Bot owners tackles the problem from the root. Once perpetrators are added to a blacklist, the abuse usually stops.
Flagging Posts Using Steemflagrewards
Steemflagrewards is a community-run initiative that rewards people who flag abuse on the Steem blockchain. I would suggest popping into the @steemflagrewards Discord channel to get more information on how to flag abuse.
Generally, you can flag low-quality posts that have been upvoted using Bid Bots and @steemflagrewards will refund the value of your flag. They do this by upvoting the comment you've added under the flagged post.
To flag a post for Bid Bot abuse, you just add the following comment under it:
Flag for bid bot abuse @steemflagrewards
Before you start flagging for @steemflagrewards, definitely visit their Discord channel first, which you can find on their @steemflagrewards Steemit profile.
Reporting Bid Bot Abuse to Steamcleaners
Now, @steemcleaners doesn't exactly focus on purging low quality posts upvoted by bid bots, but there are definitely some instances where you can report these posts to them.
A lot of these Bid Bot upvoted posts with just one image, contain an image that has been plagiarized. When they do, you can report the post to @steemcleaners for plagiarism, if they are posted under an artistic tag such as #photography #art #artisteem #animalphotography etc.
You can report those posts here:
http://steemcleaners.com/reports/new
You can use the website Imgops to check whether an image has been used on other websites. This is the best method I've found to do this, since it enables you to use different reverse-image-search services at the same time.
Also pop into their Discord to ask for advice, it's a very friendly community that will give you advice on how to submit a good report.
Conclusion
I hope that this guide has given you enough information to take up the fight against Bid Bot abuse. I'll leave you with the advice to not take matters into your own hands immediately, but to ask advice first in of the different anti-abuse Discord communities.
Some abusers might have a little bit too much Steem Power of their own, which makes it possible that they'll retaliate against you. That's why it's better to make this a coordinated effort and invoke the help of others.
Definitely think about taking action yourself if you want to help improve Steem as a platform!
Image Sources
Featured image contains content from Pixabay, released in the public domain. Also the @steemcleaners logo.
flag bag Robot
Hi @daan,
Thanks for this very informative contribution to the Utopian anti-abuse project.
I was actually unfamiliar with steemlookup.com by witness @curie and it looks like a very nice tool for any abuse fighter to put in the ol' toolbox.
Not to be a stickler but Steem is the platform. Steemit is but one of many interfaces or gateways to it. I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly and we know that bid bot abuse is quite the blight on our blockchain. We must do something about it and much more than we have.
Thanks for bringing this concern to the forefront!
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[utopian-moderator]
No, I'm glad that you mentioned the small error, it's just a quick edit. Should've seen that one during proofreading...
Thank you for your review, @anthonyadavisii! Keep up the good work!
Great effort @daan. I have three things to bring up.
The biggest problem I have with bid bot votes for users is it artificially raises the rep of those buyers destroying the rep system.
We have tons of crappy accounts with high reps because of it.
This is a big deal you can not report all plagiarized photographs to @steemcleaners. They must also have certain tags along with that Plagiarized photograph for @steemcleaners to accept that report.
Please check with @steemcleaners about this and correct it. @guiltyparties @pjau @logic @patrice can you help me here?
If you have not used steemsql why would you bring it up? You have 0 experience with steemsql fighting abuse. How can that tell anyone what they need to do? That is not the purpose of this Initiative.
Please stick to what you know.
I gave you an upvote but since steem is so low have a !rabbit too!
We only accept images/photos if they are unsourced and are in an artistic tag such as #photography #art #artisteem #animalphotography etc.
They can be reported here: http://steemcleaners.com/reports/new
Thanks for the info!
Sourced from giphy.com
@iamstan - Removed the part about Steemsql and added a correction for reporting to Steemcleaners. On mobile' so I hope that formatting is still alright. Will recheck tomorrow.
Thanks for fixing that. It is very important that we share very accurate information here. Any slight error can cause long term problems.
Many types of abuse stems from wrong information. As abuse fighters we need to get it right before we post it. Now that you have become more active in abuse fighting you will learn this stuff. Stay active things change daily.
An interesting summary of (potential) bid bot abuse. Although I sometimes have an issue with accepting decisions on what a person can and can't do because there is no real way to define stricter rules globally on the blockchain which could be easily followed, I appreciate that you included a part of setting up steemlookup to find more obvious cases. Sometimes I feel there is no way to do anything with the trending page because some people are bashed that they use bid bots for visibility but many others that are liked by the community or they have a larger fan base are good doing the same.
Do you think that bid bots would be more acceptable in general if people paid, let's say, at most 3 different accounts (services)? I am aware that other people can also buy a vote for somebody else but throughout a few experiments, I saw that was never a popular thing to do.
I also liked that you included a tool for "verifying" image originality. Do you use other tools other than imgops and what features of it do you use than actually searching for the image? I'd like to add one more tool for anyone interested in searching for images for any reason. NooBox is a browser extension for Chrome and I think that you can find it helpful. I like the option to search for a selected area so you can take a screenshot online instead of doing all the edits offline and reuploading.
When you mentioned buildawhale having a blacklist, did you check or looked for similar lists at other bots? Would you possibly recommend other people using the list made by buildawhale and if so, why?
I completely get where you're coming from. It does sometimes seem as though this effort is a little bit like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble. As long as there are no structural changes to prevent this sort of abuse on the 'blockchain level' (if that's even possible), it's basically up to someone's biased opinion to check whether something is abuse or not. That's why I've purposefully chosen to highlight only the most obvious cases here, something that most Bid Bot owners agree upon (single image posts with little text).
I'm not sure if that would work, since there a very large difference in upvote value that each Bid Bot offers. If someone picks 3 services and manages to purchase the largest possible vote for each of them, they can still end up with a +$100.00 vote for what might be perceived as a low-quality post.
Imgops is currently the only tool I use to check whether an image is original. I'm one of the few people who still uses Firefox as their main browser, so NooBox isn't something I've heard about before. Might have to give it a try with Chrome Store Foxified, the ability to just take a screenshot would definitely be very useful.
Yeah, there are definitely other lists as well, I'm not sure if other bots use them though. I know that Steemcleaners uses their own list for example and Smartsteem definitely also has their own list. The reason why I only mentioned BuildaWhale's blacklist is just because @themarkymark is pretty active in the anti-abuse community, so I trust his judgment. So, yes I would actually recommend other people using their blacklist as well.
Very thoughtful and nice comment @espoem. Thanks.
Very good questions here. What I know is that @themarkymarks list is available to everyone. Many bid bot owners dont care. Most of the good ones use themarkymarks list. Most of them share information about abusers.
I use many different image tools and the abusers are getting trickier all the time. For me google image works the best.
I have nobox but it seems like it doesn't function properly with my VPN and Linux computer even inside the Chrome browser.
When it comes to bid bot abuse I rarely flag for this reason. I have but not much. One time I will flag any size bid bot vote is when it is on a comment. I don't think comment should be able to buy bid bot votes.
When someone buys multiple bid bot and its not for the intended purpose(adverstisement) its wrong. Most bid bot owners claim their services are for advertisement. That is one of the worst kinds of bid bot abuse. Most bid bot buyers are just trying to get more steem and sbd not trying to advertise.
Many of the abuse fighters are opposed to bought votes that artificially raise the rep of scammers and people who share.
One of my pet peeves here lately is dtube videos with almost no text! I wish they had to write 100 words, so we can have a clue without watching their random unknown videos.
You method misses the people that don't want to get on trending. There are many who do not start on the bots until the end of the 2nd day or the beginning of the 3rd. They can get all the votes, but you do not see them. They they get what they can in the last days after that and then poof! Gone.
I don't think it misses those people, I mean you can just adjust the settings in Steemlookup, to look for posts with lower payouts, right? I don't think $7.00 is too big of a threshold.
You make several very important points here, and I appreciate that you are differentiating between bidbot use to promote good posts and bidbot use to promote lazy posts. If people are increasing their SP in this way, they will be empowered to hit back at the flaggers, so that's another reason to try and stop them in their tracks early on.
Coincidentally I just discovered SteemLookup, which is a great resource, and this is a great way to use it.
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"There are people who's only goal is to publish low-quality posts and buy big upvotes for them, in hopes that they get upvoted by people who don't take the time to actually view those posts."
And the even more sad fact is that they are right.
Or at least they are right in some level.
There are a lot of people, who don't even read the posts, but they often write (spam or spam-like) comments, and they upvote their own meaningless comments INSTEAD of the original post.
They are completely ignore the original posts.
Steemit is a good social experiment.
Whenever I saw a one picture post with a higher payout higher I suspected bots were involved. Thanks for an informative and useful guide on this topic.
Great post. Lots of good information here. I was one of the newcomers that fell into the pattern that you wrote about. Saw the big rewards on trending, tried it myself, got discouraged, started buying votes. It is a sad cycle. :P