Challenge: How To

1. Develop your own post about supporting honesty or fighting abuse on the Steem blockchain. Your post should be as detailed as you want it to be.

2. Make your own challenge promise statement and banner

3. Tag the post with #supporthonesty

4. Nominate 7 people to attempt the challenge

I semi-randomly challenge @justineh @dreemsteem @jonyoudyer @theycallmedan @acidyo @steemitqa @crimsonclad

My Challenge Response

I pledge to incorporate the Global Blacklist API or part thereof into my project/ community/ dapp/ frontend. In doing that, I pledge to #supporthonesty on the Steem blockchain.

This is also a call to all projects to code in the Global Blacklist API into their dapp/frontend/tool to keep their project and community resilient against scammers.

The Informed Solution

The purpose of blacklists being made public and retrievable is information sharing. When we are informed we are united against those with malicious intent.

The time for all projects to carefully evaluate who they curate is now due to the author/curator split likely moving to a 50/50 model. The loss of curation rewards when a scammer is caught and rewards are removed will impact any project's bottom line.

Potential Gains

• Support of intended use of product/dapp
• Targeted and precise curation rewards
• Positive brand image leads to investor and member support

Residual Losses

• Diligent investors will recognize product/dapp misuse
• Product/dapp/frontend founders may be seen as liable within the ecosystem for enabling rampant exploitation
• Valuable resources are drained by scammers
• Discouraging factor to legitimate members using tools as intended

Problem

There are currently 61,797 accounts on the @Steemcleaners' blacklist. The largest of these is a group with 21,698 accounts. Second in line is 3,469 and third is 2,422. These are single-owner groups.

Over 18 groups in general have 500+ accounts in them. This is just a portion of the iceberg below the surface. There are still much undiscovered territory.

False Assumptions

• These are just minnows trying to make money [False: they are far wealthier than you are]
• They are also investors [False: most accumulated their funds through scamming]
• They are misunderstood or unfairly targeted [False: the group account owners usually have zero personal connection to the userbase]
• Most of those on the list are in appeals [False: the number of people who appeal vs the size of the list is relatively small]

Recent Incident

About a week ago two projects we all know, @DLike and @Canna-Curate, simultaneously became abused by a scammer with 30+ @steem -generated free accounts. The scammer created these fake accounts, even posted fake introduction posts on a few, and went on to "share" content from Smoke.io. That content was made by fellow Steemians who also posted it to Smoke. Why? To trick DLike and Canna-Curate into granting upvotes. Each post received approximately 0.15$ in upvotes. Each account made at least 5 posts. The total funds that the scammer could have obtained were in the range of $25.

That's insignificant, right? This is $25 per round. Scammers run their account post farms in multiple rounds until stopped. Furthermore, this is $25 in granted curation per round that did not go to legitimate users. The DLike app was misused and exploited for the small upvote it grants for sharing interesting content.

That's not all. The #canna-curate community tag was needlessly vandalized. When members went to read the posts, they found their own content was linked and monetized. That's not how we keep users on Steem. People don't appreciate having their own content monetized by scammers.

As a response to this incident, the curators of #canna-curate reported myriad scammer posts to the @Steemcleaners team and @DLike created a #dlike-abuse channel in their Discord for information sharing and reporting. Next steps are being proposed.

Victim Statement

"I FELT VIOLATED. THAT'S MY WORK, AND MY HEALTH. I MEAN HE'S NOT THE ONE SMOKING IT. IT DOES CARRY HEALTH RISK. WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE IS STEALING MY SHIT AND NOT PAYING ANY OF THE PRICE
ITS PLAGERISM, PERIOD. KILL THAT FIUCKER. THEE END" - @prettynicevideo

Projects that incorporate the Blacklist

Project Name
@actifit
@bro-rando
@buildawhale
@dtube
@postpromoter
@steemhunt
@steempress
@utopian
and more ...

How to Use the Global Blacklist API

Developers

• Follow the instructions in @themarkymark's post which can be found here
• Query and rely on all blacklists
• Query the blacklist that best aligns with your needs

Curators

• Install the Blacklist Notifier Chrome Extension developed by @themarkymark, more information can be found here

How to Contribute to the Blacklist

• Report instances of abuse to the Steemcleaners
• Keep track of scammers that target your venture by creating your own blacklist
• Share your venture's blacklist with @themarkymark so it may be added to the Universal Blacklist API

Disagreements

• Individual blacklists may be selected or omitted via the API
• Developers may exclude/include accounts as needed

A few words w/ @themarkymark

In this section, @themarkymark fields a few questions about the Global Blacklist API.

What's your vision for the Global Blacklist API?

The goal of the Global Blacklist API is to provide a simple and standardized interface that all projects can use to reduce the amount of rewards going to abusers.

The Global Blacklist API allows projects to share their own blacklist and benefit from the blacklists offered by other projects.

Last time I checked, over 50% of Steem related projects used the Global Blacklist API in some form.

There are currently 9 projects sharing their blacklist via the Global Blacklist API.

How difficult would it be for a jr developer to implement it?

I can't see it taking more than 15-30 minutes for any experienced developer to integrate the Global Blacklist API. Even a junior developer should have no problem integrating it within an hour.

You can find the endpoints available in the latest post.

Is it plausible for every Steem project and frontend to utilize the API?

Yes, I believe it is. It would be fairly easy for popular front ends to implement the same logic found in my Chrome extension.

My Chrome extension (Steem Blacklist Notifier) displays a small temporary banner at the top of the page when visiting a users profile, comment, or post pages on all the popular front ends.

There was some talk about adding this functionality to Steem Plus, but I see it as something that would integrate well with Steempeak and any future front ends. Ideally like most features, I would recommend a option in the settings page to toggle it on and off.

Acknowledgements

This post was made possible with the assistance and contributions of @themarkymark. Since a portion of this post uses information provided by him, rewards from the post will be distributed accordingly.

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