Hot and Vote Count can be easily manipulated

[riensen]

Both Hot and the Vote Count can be easily manipulated to make an article more visible and thus indirectly increase payout.

Using the API we can easily create hundred of accounts whenever a POW is found. In fact this behaviour is encouraged in order to mine continuously, or we are penalized. However when duplicate accounts are used to upvote content than it skyrockets in the Hot section. Also the vote count is misleading as it suggest that many low steem power users support the post although it is actually the same person.

The below image is a an example. It was upvoted with 150 Bot accounts and appears at the top of the Hot section although there is little payout associated with it.

[faddat]

This is giving me a thought:

What if bots had their own account type? Frankly, I like what isaac.asimov does, I think it's a shining example of what a lil bot fella could do. Still, you do have a point about these upvotes-- I figure it's best to distinguish between a bot upvote and a human upvote-- but will this make the best bots less useful?

[iamsmooth]

Easy solution: Remove the Hot ranking (or replace it with something useful, like SP-weighted voting).

A bit of historical background, the Hot ranking was originally the front page. It was moved to an alternate page because it was obviously sybil-attackable, in contradiction to the overall design of Steem's stake-based voting, which is not.

It is time to complete the process and put it (along with other applications of the broken 'vote count' concept) out of its misery.

[riensen]

I suppose there are two approaches on the table:

1. Replacing Hot Ranking with a new algorithm that disregards vote count e.g. SP-weighted voting or SP-Weight/Time_Since_Creation.
2. Vote Count itself is fixed by discerning between "bots" and "humans"
   or Both 1 and 2

Option 1 alone is the safest, but it might not be enough. In addition to the Hot category, the Vote Count metric itself is misleading. A high vote count suggests that a post has a lot of support from low SP users. A high SP user might be more inclined to read such an article e.g. in "New" and hence upvote. However, as previously discussed the Vote Count can be easily manipulated without leaving evidence of such manipulation. The same actually holds true for downvotes. Another smaller problem is that the Vote Count does not take into account the vote weight that it was executed with.

@faddat:

I figure it's best to distinguish between a bot upvote and a human upvote

How would you want to distinguish between bots/human. Are you thinking of fixing the Vote Count by only accounting for users above a certain SP threshold? If so then the threshold value is crucial; too low and creating a bot army is still possible with little financial impact - too high and low SP users lose their impact and the system becomes less democratic / harder to get into.

but will this make the best bots less useful?

I would not think so, because the best bots like cheetah rely on posting content which is unaffected by what is being discussed here. Bots that flag content may need to have necessary SP.

[mvandeberg]

Since this ticket the algorithm we use for hot has been updated to be stake weighted and is not easily manipulated.