[Photo by Mathias Appel, public domain]
Since some back-up witnesses (witnesses beyond the top 19) have started doing updates, and I know a lot of people are interested in @cheetah stuff, I figured I'd do one this week. So here's what I have been up to.
Fighting Plagiarism, ID Theft, and Scams
This is the main thing I do, all day every day, to keep steemit as clean as I can.
I wasn't thinking about doing this update this week, until about yesterday, so I don't have complete statistics on how many cases of each I have caught. Next week I will keep a log, 'cause numbers! Plagiarism is in the hundreds, ID theft and Scams are in the dozens, and a couple cases of sock-puppet cartels. The cheetah section will have some numbers.
This fight is, thankfully, not alone. There is a small group of other abuse-fighting vigilantees, in the steemitabuse-classic channel in steemit.chat. Without this group of members, you would be shocked at how much garbage would be appearing if we didn't kill it before it gets traction.
Cheetah Bot!
I have done several upgrades to Cheetah bot this week, all under the hood. You will notice there are a lot fewer mistags this week than last week, without sacrificing the catching ability.
One of the coolest things that is in progress, with the awesome work of @originate is a website to watch cheetah and the detection, which will hopefully consolidate efforts of manual abuse fighters. My post today is not an official announcement of the site, but if you want to preview / beta test feel free to join us in steemitabuse-classic and I can give you the link.
A second cool thing is also in progress. Some people know... but I don't want to give too much away on this yet. :)
Some interesting statistics on Cheetah bot this week:
- Cheetah made 772 new comments this week.
- Cheetah is now the #2 commenter on steemit, with 4,022 comments.
- Cheetah made about $1 in comment rewards this week.
In regards to the comment rewards, I realized this week that the reward pool does not pay out unless the reward is greater than 2 cents. First, this sucks for minnows. Second, this sucks for cheetah, as was not able to "pay myself" anything for cheetah comments, and the reward cheetah gets from comments is a spit in the bucket compared to the cost of running the algorithm. Too bad.
Funding for Abuse Fighters
I have been thinking the past few days for strategies to incentive abuse fighting. The issue is that people who do, use their Vote power, to hunt abuse are very rarely rewarded right now -- in fact, they are usually flagged in retaliation, so not only is there an opportunity cost (no curation reward), there is a TRUE reward cost for flagging abusers. I had a few thoughts on how to solve this:
- Top 19 witnesses make >1000 steem power daily.
All we would need is one of the top 19 witnesses to attribute their funds to a pool of rewards to give out to abuse fighters, and they would be rewarded quite nicely. (If I were a top 19 witness, this is what I would do with my funding.) - Fundraising drives for abuse hunters.
This could be done either by post reward or donation, and a respected member of the community could hand out the money based on participation of abuse fighting. A clear incentive (bounty) to hunt abuse would make people much less afraid of retaliation on their posts.
So that's about it. Since I don't have a formal solution for funding abuse fighters yet, the best I can do today, is the following: