ABV Journey
Previously, we created stake-weighted voting derived from Steemit to Steemhunt but this was an unfair ranking system because the top hunting posts were occupied by upvoting from bid bots, subscription bots, curation tails and self-voting, which is irrelevant to the hunting quality.
So, Steemhunt initiated an ABV (Account Based Voting) system last week (https://steemit.com/steemhunt/@steemhunt/steemhunt-initiates-account-based-voting-ranking-system). However, it was not easy to apply ABV on top of the stake-weighed voting system. The Steemhunt team (
- Pure 1-account-1-vote system is not possible to use because it is easy for abusers to create many alternative accounts. So we created differential voting weight based on the Steem reputation score. It is simple, sophisticated, and easy to adopt. We discovered that we need a grading system, so we decided to invent our own hunter level system that reflects the hunter’s contributions in the Steemhunt community.
- We designed a 5 hunter level system based on how many times the hunter is listed in the top 10 section. Everytime a hunter’s post is listed in the top 10, their level will be higher, so they will have more voting weight than others. However, this requires everyday snapshot for an individual hunter’s achievement. So, it’s not a scalable idea.
- We thought that the most important activity on Steemhunt was upvoting. So we came up with the Hunt Curation Score (HCS) level system. Whenever you upvote hunts with more voting power on Steemhunt, your HCS is higher so that you can gain more voting weight. To prevent inactive users maintaining their high level, everyday the HCS decreases if the hunter didn’t upvote that day.
- There is a very critical problem of HCS. In Steem blockchain, a user can almost make an infinitive number of upvotes. Even though there is a limit, called as
STEEM_VOTE_DUST_THRESHOLD, this dust level is very low so most users won’t be affected by it. This is a very crucial problem to make the ABV upvoting system because technically a user can abuse our ranking board by making many sub accounts and constantly upvoting all hunts with 100% voting power to maximise their HCS. - If we were able to know the user’s remaining voting power when they make an upvote action on Steemhunt, it would be easy to fix this issue because we could just set the minimum remaining voting power to accumulate the score. However, we can only access the following information when a user upvotes:
{"voter"=>"project7", "weight"=>622706, "rshares"=>"406089967416", "percent"=>10000, "reputation"=>"5834971324537", "time"=>"2018-03-03T06:13:03"}. - Most users do not make full votes more than 10 times a day (this uses approximately 20% of their total voting power) because it takes 24 hours to recover their voting power. So we came up with the plus-buffer-minus HCS accumulation range. A user can accumulate 1000 HCS per day. If they try to upvote more than 2000 HCS (1000 to 2000 is a buffer range), rather than increasing their HCS they will lose it.
- We felt this was getting too complicated. Simplicity is always the best. So now we have returned to our first idea - utilising the Steemit reputation score for the differential voting weight, and run a V4V (Vote4Vote) report bounty program so that we can manually kill the V4V attempt.
Introducing Diversity Score
Even though we have taken down many V4V pools, we still need to have a systematic solution to mitigate those attempts. So we created our own voting diversity score (DS) to alter the user’s voting weight based on their voting patterns. We adopted our DS from Gini–Simpson index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_index#Gini–Simpson_index).
DS ranges from minimum zero to 1. If the user only upvotes a small number of hunters, DS will decrease towards zero. On the other hand, DS will move up towards 1.0 if the user upvotes a variety of hunters. DS will also calculate the voter’s voting weights. So if the user upvotes many other hunters but uses a heavier voting weight only, for a small number of hunters, the score will be lower.
If the user is new to Steemhunt, which means the user does not have enough voting history on our platform, the penalty-weighted DS will be applied. On the other hand, the user will have advantage-weighted DS when he/she has voting history with a maintained high diversity score.
This DS will be multiplied to the hunter’s original voting weight. For example, if your Steem reputation score is 60, your voting weight on Steemhunt is x3. When you make a full vote on Steemhunt, your voting score will be 3. However, if your DS is calculated as 0.7 now, this will be multiplied to your voting score, so it will be 2.1 (3.0 x 0.7).
Steemhunt ABV with DS
To minimise all kinds of abusing attempts, Steemhunt’s ranking system is currently using the following tactics:
- Only upvotes via Steemhunt are counted for the the hunt score.
- Steem reputation score is applied to reduce the upvoting impacts from alternative/fake accounts.
- Self voting is not counted.
- Whitelisting and blacklisting.
- Diversity Score (DS) reduces the impact of group voters.
What’s Next?
We know that many abusers are very smart and always adapt to the new system quickly. There is no perfect system to 100% prevent these attempts. However, the Steemhunt team will continue to minimise these attempts in order to make a fair daily ranking board.
We are now preparing to develop an automated monitoring algorithm that detects abusive voting patterns, such as link farming, unnatural voting traffic, automated voting activities, unnatural client device movement (like no scroll navigation actions) etc. We won’t give up the fight to create a well-structured account based voting system on top of Steem blockchain.
This new diversity score-weighted voting system is effective from June 23, 2018 KST.
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