Farmers. Farmers. Farmers. One thing that removing downvotes did is bring in the farmers. And there's no way to fight them. On Hive or Steem they could get downvoted to 0 making their farming efforts useless, but not on Blurt.
I'd like to introduce you to a farmer that I saw today, Tom Hall.
You can visit him here: https://blurt.blog/@tomhall
While value is fully subjective, there really is no way to police it. If anyone wanted to, they could spin 10 posts a day and start self voting it. There's nothing that can be done to stop them and better yet, they now get liquid rewards so they can grow while doing this. A solution to this needs to be enacted.
Downvotes might have been bad, but they might be a necessary evil after seeing that. I'm sure there's probably even smarter farming operations going on all around Blurt.
Thats just going to hurt Blurt long term, especially since the farmers gain more stake. I hope that a solution to this can be brought forward. And hopefully a decentralized one(downvotes were decentralized).
There are solutions that have been proposed. Some decentralized, sort of. And others not so decentralized.
One things that was proposed was to have wardens that would be elected the same way as witnesses are. Those wardens would keep a list of farmers and plagiarists and so on, and this would all be on-chain. Whenever 2/3 of the wardens would have a certain name on their list, that user wouldn't be able to receive votes.
The not-so-decentralized way would be to keep a blacklist and setup a proxy on the RPC nodes that would reject vote operations for users on the blacklist.
The second solution could be bypassed, but it would take a lot more effort to do so.
The first solution is what was proposed many months ago, but it hasn't started being worked on yet.
I agree with you regarding the down side of not having downvotes.
I don't downvote just for fun or to be a prick like some do, but I do downvote on Hive, especially if it's someone who plagiarizes or someone who is obviously abusing.
If a solution can be bypassed, it might still be worth pursuing. A deterrent is better than nothing, and right now nothing exists. The not decentralized nature of it is bad so probably don't pursue that.
The wardens thing sounds better, but sounds damaging. Not getting votes at all will probably be damaging, especially to those who use it as social media(not saying they'll get banned, but it needs to be treated as everyone can get banned). Still not fully decentralized, but if not adding downvotes is the goal, I guess it might be the best way to go forward. Have any other ideas been put forward, and if not, is there an ETA on this? Letting abusers stockpile now can just lead to more harm for the future. Compound interest is a thing.
The wardens solution would require a hardfork and would be an on-chain solution. I don't think there is an ETA so far. It's something we talked about long ago.
wardens is my preferred route
algorithmically handling this is preferred by Richard.
His argument for the solution he favors is a good one and I understand his point of view.
How does algorithmically handling work?
Ok thanks for the info. One more UI thing for you to tackle, the vote worth displayed when voting is wrong. It shows 0.21 for me, but when I press the button, only a 0.14 vote was applied.
Yeah. I'm working on that. It's still on an old formula from way back. It has changed a few time since then with all the hardforks.
I'll probably have a release sometime tomorrow with that and a few other things fixed or improved.
Hey happy day to you.
You are absolutely right about the farmers. We have discussed a couple of solutions and so I guess that it can be summarized by saying that Richard prefers some kind of automated solution that limits farming algorithmically, and I prefer some kind of manual censorship, essentially allowing users, maybe the witnesses, to actually dictate that certain accounts are not able to receive rewards. This would not affect the accounts ability to send their blurt anywhere, or affect the ability of accounts to upvote.
Neither is complete yet I'm sorry about that part.
I don't want you or anyone to feel that the farming isn't an issue.
It sure is.
An automated solution might be the best, if designed well. If it causes too many false positives, it can lead to some very bad results.