Hello ! As you probably know hard fork 21 is now live and with it comes a 25% downvote pool.

One main benefit of this is the ability to fight abuse without losing out on your own curation. However, it also means that you have to do "negative curation", aka find bad content to downvote. Thanks to the effort put in by many already to sort out the Trending page, this is already getting harder and harder to do.

Furthermore, the more clever abusers often use bots to make this even more tedious. Whether it is to spread their self votes on comments, time it near the 7 days mark, or abuse a bug in hivemind to change the order of their posts. So in order to make it easier for normal people to keep up, I decided to build a downvote trail tool and make it fully open source.

You can find it at : https://downvotecontrol.com

I believe it is only right that the normal community members have the same tools available to deal with spam as the spammers. The hope is that we can enable the community to make proof of brain cool again in a #newsteem fashion. No matter how small your stake is, if a thousand minnows find one whale abusive, they should be able to add up their votes to powerful downvotes. This in turn could help reallocate rewards from the hands of abusers to the hands of good authors.

Currently there are two features :

Trail downvotes

Allows you to trail the downvotes of a specific account and thus downvote any content they downvote at a given rate relative to the size of their downvote.

Example: If you choose to trail @abuse.control with rating 0.75, then if @abuse.control gives a 50% downvote to a post you will give the same post a 37.5% downvote.

This is very useful to give support to abuse fighting organisations without the hassle of checking their reports and downvoting content yourself.

Counter upvotes

Used to counteract upvotes from specified accounts, meaning that you will downvote anything that they choose to upvote at a given rate relative to their upvote.

Example: If you choose to counter upvote @baduserr with rating 1.2, then if @baduser gives a 50% upvote to something, you will add a 60% downvote to the same post or comment, while a rating of 0.5 would make you downvote 25%, etc.

this can be used for multiple things, counter a rogue user that continuously self votes over multiple accounts, reduce the earnings of a bidbot that doesn't have any quality standards or anything else, you name it :)

What features do you want next ?

I wanted to ship a very first downvote solution and improve on it over time with your feedback. Here's a few ideas that I had, feel free to write in the comments what are yours :

• Whitelist : do not downvote if the user is on it
• Bidbotted percentage : downvote only if bidbots represent x% of the payout
• minimum payout : only downvote if the post has reached x$ of potential payout
• Number of words/characters, only downvote if the post has less than x words/characters

I feel like having these kind of options would allow for a greater granularity and overall increase the chances of finding and downvoting bad content.

An open source initiative

The downvote control tool is completely open source so you can easily customize it yourself and add your own spin to it or just copy paste some code snippets that you find in there (like How to get the downvoting power of an user ).

The stack is as follow :

front end : https://github.com/drov0/downvote-control-tools-front
back end : https://github.com/drov0/downvote-control-tool-back
voting bot : https://github.com/drov0/downvote-control-tool-bot

I hope most will use their downvotes responsibly and still believe it is best done manually for the most part. I do, however, think that there are many who may want to help flag the most clear cases of abuse without going through the often negative user experience of looking for bad content. Hopefully, this proves useful to some!

If you think my contributions add value to Steem then please consider voting for our witness : @steempress