Steemit cheaters & how to protect the platform against them by afilja

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steemit · @afilja · Jul 13 '16

$0.29

Steemit cheaters & how to protect the platform against them

We all know @wang the friendly bot that automatically upvotes a lot of posts and sometimes post replies (which are the same in every thread). I was wondering what kind of pull that bot had in this community so I had a look at the stats and it kind of shocked me.

http://i.imgur.com/BZRBVZk.png

This is a huge potential issue. You have newbies that try to upvote everything to get some extra steempower and that's fine, the will see that it's not worthwhile and stop and only upvote the good posts.

However I think the issue of bots is a lot bigger issue. Reddit already has an issue of **voting bots** and there is no real incentive yet, just making your post more or less popular. However when you introduce the financial aspect of Steemit in the mix I think we have a potential big issue.

This is just one bot and he has an estimated value of $ 130,000 which really is insane (kudo's to the guy who's managing it, you're quite the visionary). The platform needs to protect itself, there will always be manipulation but it has to be made as difficult as possible. It can be as simple as complex captcha's that you need to complete to post/upvote something. I'm not an expert, I'm sure there are people here with a lot more knowledge that can help the community.

👍 recursive, sonzweil, norbu, stephencurry, jonnyrevolution, afilja, michaelx, artific, thegoodguy, maurymaury, substance, persona-dynamo, metropolit, danalmar, theotow, mary777, pipertomcat, maximaug, cryptodev, brettah, morgan.thomas, ripexz, cheturetochka, salman, taggley, kell234, seagul, alona, mindhunter, karawalla, gjhi4552201, algo-rythm, diego24, vkoreshkoff, megabotan, fibonacco

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algo-rythm	66,327,726	100%
alona	133,283,751	100%
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artific	5,618,957,420	100%
salman	225,632,436	100%
ripexz	234,601,570	100%
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substance	932,482,461	100%
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fibonacco	0	100%

@alona · Aug 10 '16

I upvoted you.

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@frankenmint · Jul 18 '16

You can do some digging around and see that some users have __REAL__ manipulation power in comparison to the wang bot.

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@jonnyrevolution · Jul 13 '16

'friendly bot' haha

👍 samueth, chris0502

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@michaelx · Jul 13 '16

captchas mean nothing, I have been beating the shit out of Google and FB and others using captcha for years...

👍 kell234, chris0502, dougcrowe, usnewspress

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@afilja · Jul 13 '16

I know, it was an example, but you have to agree that this is an issue that threatens the entire community

👍 jonnyrevolution, afilja, chris0502

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@recursive · Jul 13 '16 (edited)

$1.17

Already proposed negative voting, but project leads don't care. I proposed also solutions to prevent abuses including plagiarism, account farming and account name trolling. They didn't care. Bottom line: they are fine with Steem becoming a pile of trash, have no plan to prevent it, and won't listen to people who propose constructive solutions.

👍 recursive, chris0502, dougcrowe, murh, abit

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@djleo · Jul 14 '16

Where are your proposals? I'm interested to read them.

👍 andretti

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1 reply

@mindhunter · Aug 22 '16

If it can be man made it can be man broken - that will always be the case. I read of one guy on here who had 14 accounts! TERRIBLE!!

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@steemas · Jun 6 '18

it is not so bad i know person who have 10+ accounts and want to make +50 to it and later +100

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@morgan.thomas · Jul 13 '16 (edited)

Yeah, the steem whitepaper talks about using negative voting as a way of protecting against fraud, but I'm not sure how it applies in this case. Votes are a kind of contribution, but I'm not sure mechanisms are in place to vote on them, which is what you'd need to apply the whitepaper's solution in this case.

 I guess you would need to write a bot which effectively downvotes all of @wang's upvotes, because they are presumed to be the votes of a bot. On the other hand, I'm not sure that solution even works as intended, because maybe then the person who owns *that* bot gets rich.

Not to mention, whoever wrote @wang could write a bot to downvote all of the good bot's downvotes. I'd have to learn the whitepaper more thoroughly to understand how this all shakes out in the end, but overall it doesn't seem like an incredibly promising direction.

👍 persona-dynamo, chris0502

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