I've been noticing some vote-trading going on again and I just felt the need to write a quick post reminding people of why this should be frowned upon, some examples of where this is bad, some examples of where this is okay, etc. I'm sure there are others who've noticed it too and I'll be talking to some other curation projects if they have any idea of how we could deal with this. I want to mention here though that dealing with it I don't encourage people to "zero" posts out completely, vote-trading happens for a reason and one reason only, higher ROI (which I will explain below) so small downvotes to encourage curation instead of mindless automated vote-trading is better in the long haul and causes less drama and alienation of those users practicing it.
For starters, a short reminder of what the EIP consisted of.
Change from 25/75 to 50/50 curator/author rewards.
A "tax" curve gradually diminishing in power up to 20 hive rewards of total vote value.
25% additional downvote mana.
Not gonna keep this long, most of us remember how things were like pre-EIP. Most stake was being delegated to bid bots, they were selling profitable votes to authors. If you weren't delegating to a bid bot you were losing out on a lot of rewards, bid bot owners were taking a cut for themselves and authors had to pay to receive very low ROI on their posts than receiving genuine curation. Some didn't delegate to bid bots and wanted to eliminate the "middleman" which was understandable back then because, why give these bots a cut if you can just vote-trade your way to the same ROI? Now this is what I want to point out cause bid bots (after some downvote initiatives pushing them to not sell profitable votes but only sell votes if the authors really wanted the attention/promotion which let's be honest not many wanted cause of a small userbase and barely any bids are happening anymore) stopped operating the same way and the EIP didn't make it feasible for them to attempt to sell profitable votes and they had to settle for "curation" instead. Vote-trading is not as easily identifiable as tracking bids and votes being cast shortly after and seeing if they're profitable or not, so let's talk about that.
User A with 100k HP is often voting on User B with 10k HP and vice versa. Is this vote-trading?
In a way but also no, user A is not receiving the same or similar value back from user B. If this was point blank vote-trading the two users would be in a similar class of stake/ vote strength (could be delegated/leased as well).
User A with 100k HP is very often voting on user B with 100k HP, they are both consistent authors and share interest or have similar genre content. Is this vote-trading?
In a way also, but here's the difference to "abusive" vote-trading. These users have a lot of things in common with each other. If they both post about the same things, in the same niche communities and often read and interact with each other there's not much you can do to try and break that off. Let the penalty curation curve handle it (by that I mean front-runners that will continue to push the front-running earlier and earlier into the 5min window meaning the "vote-traders" will eventually face lower and lower curation rewards until at some point they decide they prefer voting on other authors because of ROI - if not, if they value each others content so much or the vote-trading/author rewards then that's also okay because they'll be losing out to others who are earning more curation rewards from them or others)
Now let's get into some of the abusive cases.
User A with 100k HP votes on User B with 100k HP not just very often but on each and every post and they are both consistent with the posting. Furthermore, looking at their content there are no similarities between the two, they may be speaking different languages, posting about completely different topics, etc. The abuse here is that the only thing they share with each other is imilar stake and vote-strength and an agreement to vote on each others posts to either get past the 20 hive tax curve so they don't lose out on that or to constantly get attention/trending and not lose out on voting late on other posts/not front-running because they receive max of both curation rewards and author rewards.
What you need to understand here also is that having a bigger circle of vote-trading agreements means it's pretty much the same as voting for yourself 10x per day. Remember the change to 50/50 and the curve that rewards you more for being early to upvote content that will earn a lot of post rewards, they make this incentive obsolete because they're earning both author and curation rewards.
Here's an example, two users with the same stake always voting each other is not a big problem, unless their votes are so big that they both pass the tax curve. This can of course happen with stake that's a little lower if they incentivize front-runners by voting past 5mins or later, but the real problem is that smaller stakeholders have now realized that by grouping together they can avoid the tax curve and still vote-trade even 1 post per day of each other as if they were self-voting with high enough strength to reach the tax curve 10x per day.
Think about it, a 5 hive vote vs another 5 hive vote will just get you to 10 hive rewards with your self-vote included, you'll face some of the tax penalty only reaching it halfway (exact amounts don't necessarily have to be 20 hive but for the sake of this example let's say that's what it is). So what they do here is add more similarly large stakeholders into the group to get another 2 votes to reach 20 hive and at the same time also vote them on their 1 post daily. You can see that they'll just need 10 users in their circle with a max vote of 2 hive to maximize it on all fronts with just one post per day.
Now naturally the way you can notice these accounts is that
Now why is this wrong?
Well, with the EIP in mind each account has to either settle with a highest ROI possible by curation, some do this by front-running, only voting on posts with no prior votes, having a large trail behind them, etc. This all requires curation, though, some work and if they suck at it or vote up garbage on purpose just to maximize they'll risk receiving those downvotes which the downvote mana pool was mainly added for.
Vote-traders circumvent this by autovoting each other on an agreement they've made. This means that there could be accounts that have only leased hivepower that are now receiving the same benefits as accounts with skin in the game earning ROI for both curating and also posting, even if their stake is way lower than being able to just self-vote themselves to the 20 hive tax curve barrier. They ignore the curation competition and content discovery completely, they don't care about maximizing curation rewards or helping distribution to more unique accounts because they're already receiving minimal curation returns but max author returns. An agreement of 5-10 accounts voting on eachother's one post per day is already enough (depending on stake) as to self-vote 10x per day, remember that.
So the question then, what can we do about these "obvious" vote-traders that have nothing in common with each other and keep ignoring "the rules of the game". Well, the answer is downvotes, disincentivize them from just vote-trading on eachother by removing part of their author rewards and curation rewards. At the same time they'll have to start curating content from other authors because the sole purpose they were vote-trading and created this agreement was for ROI anyway so they'll look for ROI in other ways.
Now of course this is easier said than done, retaliation is possible either by directly downvoting your content or votes you're casting at others no matter if those are genuine or not. As you can see this would cause a sort of war where collateral damage would occur from authors who have nothing to do with it starting to receive downvotes just because you've been voting them up.
Rest assured that this has happened before, though, and on the previous chain it was way more difficult to control because there was a big split in stake and how they viewed the EIP, genuine curation and treated our rewardpool like a brain dead proof of stake shitcoin, go check out steemit.com front-page if you want to see it in action.
Now having said that I realize things aren't perfect here but they're a lot better and we should try to improve constantly in the ways that the rules of the chain make it possible. Smart downvotes can already do a lot to incentives better behavior and less "abusive" vote-trading.
My advice is that if all you care about is stake ROI than this is not the best dpos chain for you. So instead of leasing hivepower and agree with folks similar of your vote strength to practically self-vote 10x per day and shit on our distribution and at the same time curators who don't care about ROI but curate with the best intentions of trending, distribution and retention in mind... sooner or later you're going to have a bad time and regret it. Realize there's another path to receive votes on your content. Try to engage with the community, connect with other likeminded users, share the love around and realize this chain is strongest with a better distribution. Taking shortcuts just to get a few K more hive at the end of the year while having your posts look like a deserted ghost town that someone for some reason still rewards will both make your few K hive worth less in value or you'll get others to dislike you cause you're just riding on their efforts back without providing any value yourself.
Anyway, this was kind of ranty as I'm a little worked up by some other issues I'm annoyed at lately so take it with a grain of salt, I'll come back to this issue with a calmer mind later and discuss it with some other stakeholders of the best way to proceed with discouraging this kind of vote-trading.
Have you noticed some of this vote-trading lately? I mean the great thing about the blockchain is that everything is public and can easily be traced. Wouldn't surprise me if we had analytical tools in the near future that would set out to search for these kind of activities and alert people once a certain quota of what might be considered "abusive" votetrading is filled. No need to name names, most of us are aware of who they are because the tax doesn't let very small accounts maximize on vote-trading and those who do are easily noticeable, but just wondering if you've also noticed it and wondered what could be done to discourage it then this post will hopefully let you know that there are ways and others are also noticing it and wanting to do something about it. We just gotta handle it with care and not go apeshit on their rewards cause there's enough drama to go around already over the rewardpool, so much so that some are considering if it would be best to eliminate it completely. :rolling_eyes:
