Today's Edition: Flag War, Steemitzens of Steem, Keeping Steem/Steemit Clean, Holiday Wreath

Flagging War: What The Hell Do You Have In Your Mind? A Short Term Solution To Fix a Long Term Problem?

I think Hive account@elear is addressing the problem of downvoting in the context of the recent dust ups between Hive account@blocktrades & Hive account@nextgencrypto as well as Hive account@transisto and others downvoting what they see as overvalued content.

Any solution also needs to take into consideration spam & abuse prevention. It seems for every problem that we attempt to solve we create more by not considering all the aspects.

Stop the voting/downvoting bots completely and force manual curation in this platform OR only allow specific ones based on a consesus of the community. There are many technical ways this can be achieved.

As long as bots are allowed to post this isn't a realistic solution.

I spend hours a day running data queries & using that data to manually curate accounts I feed to Hive account@mack-bot & Hive account@spaminator.

Hive account@mack-bot 'marks' 1000 to 1500 posts/day a day with downvotes. Hive account@spaminator downvotes between 50-700 posts/comments 6.5 days later calculated by a vote bot to use just enough VP to remove payout. Doing that by hand used to take hours.

I don't have time to manually curate (upvote). Hive account@patrice follows a trail that is manually curated. I like to know that in a small way I am contributing in a more positive way than just downvoting abuse. The only account I bot upvote a 100% is Hive account@zoee to help increase her SP & VP to support the community by upvoting.

YOU WON'T NEED TO FLAG ANYONE SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY WILL STAY IN THE DARK.

From my perspective that is actually more of a problem. If it is out in the open then the community can see it and flag it. Hive account@dart operated behind the scenes for more than a month. Check their withdrawals. They withdrew 81,851.07 STEEM & 6989.747 SBD since about mid April I believe. And that is just what we can see directly withdrawn fromt the account. They also tried to hide their minnowbooster abuse with transfers directly from exchanges.

Note: I've refrained from posting the amounts withdrawn from the Hive account@dart account since it highlights a very negative view of STEEM & steemit.com and isn't something that will attract investors.

I think it is more important the that the community realise the scale of abuse Hive account@steemcleaners, Hive account@spaminator and other groups are trying to prevent.

Fintal Though I actually had a lot more to say on the topic but on further thought, I think the soluiton will have to come from communities & SMT's.

As I understand it communities using SMT's exclusively will have the ability to build their websites (and community) with total control over all aspects from membership, upvotes/downvotes & reward distribution. This will alleviate what some see as a drain on the reward pool by certain types of content & perceived value of content if they do not use the STEEM token.

Steemitzens of Steemit

I dropped by the Virtual Weekly "SteemFest" after a personal invite from Hive account@sircork yesterday for the debut of his new SteemStar Network. The show will air every Sunday and operates on an informal drop-in basis. I think that a lot of interesting viewpoints were aired by witnesses & steemians. I look forward to participating in the future.

Keeping Steem/Steemit Clean

If you missed it, I'm still doing a little bit of a happy dance over the fact that monitorcap, appbliz, & trafficmonitor have stopped their 200+ posts a day. A curation project is a lot more than automated bot posting X number of posts every 5-6 minutes.

After reading my previous Steemit Dredge Report, Hive account@themarkymark told me he was going to make a post of his own to gain additional visibility of the problem.

Hive account@themarkymark generously donated 200STEEM to help fight spam and Hive account@sostrin donated an additional 100STEEM! Virtual Hugs to you!

Thank you to everyone who used their valuable VP to help stop this spam!

Hive account@spaminator

Looks like Hive account@dart is back at it. I'll have to do some data analysis to see if they have added more accounts.

I've add around 100 new accounts yesterday fitting a known Russian Spammer. Looks like I missed a few in my last data sweep when they changed things up a bit on me.

After further thought and review, and input from the community I have added cryptomonitor to my list.

Hive account@mack-bot

Hive account@mack-bot is now posting daily logs to help support the bot. It is struggling right now to keep up so I temporarily removed a few accounts that are -1 and automatically hidden. Since this is temporary and does not affect anything I'm not asking for donations, delegations or upvotes.

Holiday Wreath

Martin's cousin Joe makes these wreaths by hand. He placed one on Martin's grave the day he was buried and graciously sent me one. For the last 4 years Martin & I have received wreaths that we hang on the front porch and leave there year round for the birds to build their nest. It's sad to know this will be the last. I hope that I am still here in the summer to find birds nesting in it.

Black Friday #3 update

The computer still hasn't made it into the case yet. I've been too busy dealing with different issues.

Witness Voting

You can vote for my witness here.

Wittnesses I vote for and support:


Hive account@abit	Hive account@guiltyparties	Hive account@someguy123
Hive account@aggroed	Hive account@jesta	Hive account@steemgigs
Hive account@anyx	Hive account@lukestokes.mhth	Hive account@swelker101
Hive account@arcange	Hive account@neoxian	Hive account@teamsteem
Hive account@ausbitbank	Hive account@netuoso	Hive account@themarkymark
Hive account@chitty	Hive account@nnnarvaez	Hive account@timcliff
Hive account@drakos	Hive account@pfunk	Hive account@wackou
Hive account@fubar-bdhr	Hive account@reggaemuffin	Hive account@good-karma
Hive account@ats-witness	Hive account@riverhead	Hive account@yehey
Hive account@gtg	Hive account@sircork	Hive account@followbtcnews