[Steemhunt] Patterns of abusing at Steemhunt

When building up a service and especially if you have something to give as an example like a reward, there are always attempts to abuse the system. I would like to list up a few of them to show with what kind of abusing you will deal when building a service based on Steem and SMT. But any other system that is rewarding the user in any form will see similar patterns of abusement in their system.

0. Repository

https://github.com/Steemhunt/web

Source: Pawel Janiak

1. Steem reward abuser

Steemhunt is both airdropping Hunt tokens and also rewarding Users with upvotes for their comments and hunts under specific terms. At the beginning of Steemhunt, the ranking was directly coupled with the upvote power. This resulted (with a much higher Steem value at that time) in an upvote for the first rank over 100USD and more. This started a rally for the rank with hunts, where the quality doesn't matter but only the ranking itself.

a. Ranking abusement

Source: Miguel A. Amutio

If you have a ranking system that gathers the ranking based on the Steem system it will be at the end whales who get the highest ranking and also the high upvote. Whales could use their self-vote or also bots to boost their ranking to a higher place. And in reality, whales arrived at Steemhunt and took the higher ranks for themselves.

b. Vote 4 Vote abusement

Source: Brandi Redd

Sometimes you can see in the Steem economy, that there are rooms, chats, groups where people ask for a vote and give based on the vote a vote back. This may have no big impact in the Steemit economy but for a ranking board, this is pure manipulation as both sides are gaining higher places in the ranking.

c. Circle Voting

Source: Stanley Shashi

A lot of communities within Steemit are supporting each other, following each other and voting for the content from their communities. Often these communities are based on nationalities or languages. As the same problem here for a ranking board like Steemhunt is, that it impacts directly the ranking where the core is that somebody should only vote if they really like the PRODUCT and not the HUNTER.

d. Alt Account abusement

Source: rawpixel

Due to a limited Steem upvote weight, Steemhunt needed to adjust the strategy what and how many hunts or comments they can upvote on a daily base. In the current moment, the Steemhunt bot upvotes the top 100 ranking hunts, based on the hunter score. Only one approved hunt per hunter is upvoted per day. Up to two comments are upvoted. These comments have also a ranking, like the hunts, based on the upvotes they get. Only the top 100 ranked comments get an upvote. Source: Steemhunt

e. Countermeasure for Steem abusements

The abusements above where the main reason that the development of an own ABV started. The current development is now on a stage where this ABV is combined with a hunter score and where the hunter score is the basis for a hunters upvote weight in both directions. It means that the hunter score is responsible for the Steemhunt upvoting weight, which is now decoupled from the Steem upvoting weight. Also, the reward from Steemhunt is leveled based on the User Score the hunter gains with their activity on Steemhunt. Alt accounts are heavily effected together with Circle voting based on their activity on steemhunt and penalized on the user score. Additionally, the community reports suspicious activities which are then analyzed manually and banned from the service if needed.

2. Hunt token airdrop abuser

Steemhunt is running several kinds of Airdrops to keep the hunters engaged and have fun during their hunts. But as always when there is a reward, abuse is not far away. The airdrop for Hunt tokens is based on having active and engaged users and reward them for their engagement. Additionally, it is used to get more engaged users on board. But some users used the system weakness to milk the reward pool.

a. Chrome extension abusement

To reach more people and give them an easier access to the Steemhunt platform, a Chrome extension had been released. With the release, it was possible to gain Hunt tokens only opening the extension once a day. You needed to input your username (without any posting or active key) into the extension and you got a daily airdrop. Users realized that they can now easily use their alt accounts to gain additional hunt tokens. And is was abused from a lot of users. Even users running nodes within the Steem community abused this airdrop to maximize their gains.

b. Countermeasure for Hunt tokens abusements

Steemhunt decided to revoke the Hunt tokens airdrop for permanently blacklisted users. Users could be blacklisted for the following reasons.

Operates multiple alternative accounts to take an advantage for HUNT token airdrops

Creates spam posts or comments

Plagiarises

Based on this decision almost 3000 accounts have been permanently blacklisted and about 1.4 million Hunt tokens have been revoked.

3. Conclusion

Due to these different abusements and partly successful trials of milking the system the team behind Steemhunt needed to react very fast on every single case. In about 6 months they have iterated the ABV system from 1.0 to 2.0 to a hunter level. It is now melted all together into a hunter score which is taking care of most of the issues mentioned in this article.

Greed can destroy a reward system and if the system does not countermeasure abusements fast enough it will be milked until it does not anymore exist. I think that Steemhunt did a fantastic job creating an ABV system from scratch and adapting to the behavior of the community. It is at the end about leading the community to the picture Steemhunt is drawing. And that is a Hunt token economy earning and spending them, while hunting and buying cool and new products.

"Keep the hunt on"

Thanks for reading!