[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPw62smXvKgxT8cm2ZvqAGssFbZihTYUzZ6nHi1rGUq6A/image.png]
Hello,
if you are not familiar with the tool, here's the initial post : https://steemit.com/downvotes/@howo/introducing-downvote-control-tool-an-open-source-downvote-tool
Two weeks have passed and everything is going as planned. I have finished pretty much all of the biggest features.
You can already find all of the updates live on https://downvotecontrol.com
So here's the new features added this week :
Vote with your voting power
This one was heavily requested by @transisto. It allows you to set a threshold in order to limit the voting power you use when you do upvotes (if you counter downvotes). And it also allows you to use your voting power to downvote. It's very useful for those of you who use all of their downvoting power and want to keep downvoting.
Voting mechanism overhaul
This one was a big one, I basically reworked the whole way voting worked internally to approximate the new curve. This allows you to approximate as much as possible the vote you are either trailing or countering. This is a big advantage you have more steem power than the vote you want to counter because you will use almost exactly enough voting power to counter his vote instead of just voting with a ratio.
This means no more overdownvoting and more downvotes for you !
Here's a practical example :
Let's assume my vote is worth 1$. I am countering the upvotes another user which has a vote worth 10 cent with a ratio of 0.5.
Previously if the user upvoted with 100%, I would downvote with the same percentage * ratio, so 50%. which is way overkill since I would then send a 50 cent downvote to counter a 10 cent upvote. Now the system would calculate that I only need to downvote with 5% to counter half of his upvote (because of the 0.5 ratio). Leaving me with a ton of voting power that I can use for other things !
Preparation for a future history feature
I have started to store locally in a database all of the votes that were done through the tool in order to create a dashboard where people can see which votes the tool has done and easily unvote if you think something was a mistake.
Should I still do the bidbot percentage ?
In the original proposal I put this specific feature :
"In #newsteem culture, stacking bidbots is discouraged, this is an option that will allow you to set a ratio of bidboted rewards vs organic rewards when countering upvotes. And if the ratio of organic to bidboted is too high, you’ll downvote.
This option will be available for all of the current downvoting options (trail downvotes and counter upvotes)."
The issue is that there are two types of bidbots, transparent ones where you just delegate, those are easy to spot. And vote seller, ala smartsteem, minnowbooster etc. The issue with those is that finding out which voter is an organic vote and which one is a sold vote is near impossible. So this feature would most likely only harm the "transparent" bidbots, which will make them evolve into hidden bidbots like minnowbooster/smartsteem. Which will obviously not be positive for the ecosystem. Ultimately I think it's better to let you manually set which accounts you want to downvote (counter upvotes) without having this "bidbot percentage" feature which will basically always be unreliable. Which makes this feature useless. Same goes for the "clean trending" feature.
I will replace those features with other ones obviously.
That's it for this week. If you like what I do please consider voting for our witness @steempress and for the downvote control tool proposal : https://steemproposals.com/proposal/34
@howo
And seems like some of the owners are flagging their customers.
And kinda killed any chance at being independent. Like me.
I use smartmarket and they got hit. Tipu as well. Ocdb is sending out warnings.. that's cool but yeah no warnings just slapping flags around.
I'll be honest. If you are with a big group you get more rewards. And this kills the little people or small groups.
Now more personal malicious flags will come out.
Well this place is looking like decentralization is getting centralized in the group owners.
And attacking bidbots hurts the community.
Not profitable? So it's just that we should join groups and pay with delegations to earn votes?
Now why isn't the real abuse being stopped and more work being put into rewarding real content creators....
That's a big one... Why isn't the real abuse being stopped?
I agree with you that owners flagging their customers is crazy, I couldn't believe when I saw that happening recently. Way to get rid of customers yourself, but the honest way would be to just undo the deal.
The honest way to get votes is consistency and networking. Like on any other social media platform. Of course luck plays a role too.
Any kind of buying, be it with liquid steem or with delegation, is a form of abuse and shifts the playing field towards those who can afford that.
There are a lot of people fighting real abuse, and the amount of manual curation has risen too. We're not at a point where everything would be great yet, but we got a bit closer.
Regarding decentalization, in my view we could be a lot further with that if the big userbase understood earlier that paying middle men to boost their short term profits doesn't help, and the good way would be investing in their own SP instead. Every buy from a bot, every rented delegation, filled the pockets of a few who now have disproportionate power without having done anything for that.
It's far from being centralized, as different groups have different goals, but I too would wish for a much better distribution. Doing my part, as everyone else should see what they can do. Complaining about not being able to feed the giants any more is certainly not the way.
Yes I have started using the downvote/rewards redistribution tool a lot more since HF 21 and have been in heavy discussions this past weekend about it all.
On one hand you have "easy cases" such as massively over rewarded posts (I mean let's face it, on the whole, is any post really worth that much more than $50 around here?) that have a couple of lines of text and maybe a picture - this used to be prevalent pre HF21 - and plagiarising, spam, things like this where the downvote tool can be easily applied.
If that's what the tool is for, these "easy cases", then yes I think we all agree that it will be a good thing.
The grey area is based around perception of quality content if the downvote tool comes in to effect. For example (and this is just a fictitious one for argument's sake) - Someone may write something they have put a lot of effort in to (e.g. travel post in not their mother language) but it doesn't come across as high effort to someone who has their downvote trail set up and then the author gets hit with several flags from 20 random folks. No one has read it other than the trail owner and so this author is subject to a horrendous experience for something they may have spent hours writing.
Add to that the people following the down vote trail may have actually appreciated the post if they read it and the effort put in from the author for writing something in a different language that isn't their native one (in this example).
Don't get me wrong, I can see the advantages of having this tool and not poopooing the effort that must have been put in to make it. I'm just trying to see all angles here
