Abuse is normal

This is something I've been saying for years, and I think the history of Bitcoin and its usage has a good track record of it, albeit people didn't know any better back then knowing how easy it is to trace bitcoin transactions and thinking it was "anonymous". Most of the early initial usage for bitcoin was drug trafficking and gambling, one could say the latter is still a majority usage of its daily transactions seeing as there's quite literally nothing else you can do with it than store your money and speculate on its future price.

What's prompting me to write this post was a recent report someone had noticed a farm ring that had been using Hive account@peakd's snaps recently. As some of you active there may know, at the end of the week when the container of a peak snap pays out it goes to Hive account@commentrewarder and tips all the users based on certain unreleased metrics, most likely based on engagement and voting activity placed by others. This ring had received some rewards from those tips because due to the large activity of snaps (over 600 per day), the creators had opted to automate the tip distribution process rather than manually curating it. I don't really think there's anything wrong with that given the quantity of snaps and the large spread of tips - even the most active accounts I doubt make more than a couple $ in tips.

The thing that annoyed me were comments like "this service enables abuse".

First of all, what doesn't enable abuse in this day and age?

Stomping on a service/tool because a small minority of it can get abused, and in this case mainly due to the fact that its being automated, is not the right way to think about things in my opinion. It's kind of a big stifle on innovation if your first thought is to attempt to combat and put down the service itself just cause a tiny fraction of users attempt to abuse it.

In this case a simple solution is to have the account in charge of distributing the tips blacklist the accounts attempting to milk a few tips with fake engagement. It really was not a lot of value being drained either by the looks of it:

I kind of noticed some time ago an increase in new accounts posting to snaps but due to lack of time I didn't go into depth to check if they were a ring orchastrated by one person to attempt to sybil attack tips by pretending to be many people. This was recently brought forward that it was the case.

Another thing I think would be nice is if peakd could add a reputation number next to account's on snaps as well so we could be more careful with who we vote there and if need be report abusive accounts to not receive commentrewarder tips by the automated distribution system.

Either way, I kind of welcome any and all new services, ideas and projects being created on hive because there may be some value there. I'd argue that abuse is normal as long as you can combat it itself rather than attempting to boycott or prematurely shut down the service itself just because some of it may happen. We can't be perfect when it comes to these things, I'd reckon we're still far from perfect in terms of curation as well and there's room for improvement there.

In general, I'm quite happy with how well commentrewarder has been used and the additional usecases people have come up with using it for such as marketing by Hive account@hive-echo and Hive account@coldbeetrootsoup, etc.