Community post

dMania Controversy and Counterviews

I decided to write the post, because I felt like it was important to show how two people can provided the same evidence, and come to different conclusions based on that evidence.

Update

After publishing this. @zombee published a post that dMania is being shut down.

If you haven't read @equ1l1br1um post it is located here: dmania-owner-zombee-is-abusing-steemit-delegation...

I going to take each one of what I think his main points are, and provide how I see each of them. I'm also not saying that how I am viewing it is totally right. I might be totally wrong. However, it is important to have additional insight for people who use dMania as well as those that don't to make their own decisions. I encourage everyone to only take what each of us are saying with a grain of salt, and make your own decisions.

I'm also not going to dive into accusatory statements that are based on feelings.
Excerpt from the post

This guy was probably a friend or a guy who he made a deal with as I didn't find direct connection.

Like the above statement I can't really have a different viewpoint than a person feels.

My Motives

I know I will probably get a bunch of responses that are going to say that I have something to gain from defending dMania, and @zombee, and they are right.

I recently just had to take my cat to the emergency room. My cat is 16 years old, and pretty old. Her kidneys are failing. I had to spend hours in the emergency room. While thinking about the fact that I might have to put down an animal that I have had for a good portion of my life, and dealing with the possibility of having to tell my two children that they no longer have a pet. I found a lot of solace in dMania. It was a way to pass the time between having vets, and staff come check on the cat, and ask me how far I want to take keeping a cat alive that is probably going to die pretty soon anyway. dMania was an escape for those "in-between" times that I would have otherwise just gotten more upset at the reality of my situation.

In the interest of full disclosure. Even though you can see it on the supporters page. At the time of writing this I am currently third highest delegator in dMania. So, I do get a kickback from dMania. However, before delegating 80% of my SP to dMania. I had it split between dMania, and smartsteem. I decided to move 80% to dMania, even though I was taking roughly a 30% cut of possible direct profit by not delegating to Smartsteem, because I think that dMania was a better use.

My Viewpoints

I currently at the time of writing this don't have @zombee on my friends list to message him directly. I haven't been able to personally talk with him. So this is coming from a standard user just with a high delegation.

If while I looked into this, and I felt like something wrong was happening. I would pull my delegation. I can bring in more profit delegating to smartsteem. So, in my mind it is in my best interest to look at the data, and make a decision with what to do with my SP.

Let's get into it

Here are many of the points I believe @equ1l1br1um was trying to make an my views on them.

Taking to long to remove abusers

Excerpt from the post

Some abuse that I have reported to him : One guy with at least 11 accounts who received a lot of rewards and was at that time ranked 3 in rewards/year : discord message zombee + another one with at least 5 accounts : discord message zombee. For this ones it took him like 2-3 days to blacklist them, even with the solid proof.

When I think about the length of time it takes for @zombee to handle the issue. I personally think it's an acceptable amount of time considering the life of the platform. I think about Overwatch, and how those guys have an entire dedicated team to handle abuse. They have had over 2 years of development to learn, and I still can't get people in Overwatch to stop telling me to suck their dicks. It even took that whole team a year to even implement as system for the console to report abusers.

Maintaining an entire platform when you are just one individual can be daunting task, especially when you are dealing with a technology like blockchain, and really plodding new territory. Abuse is always a problem in the early stage, so unfortunately I put up with it in it's early stages for those sick dank memes.

I'm not saying it's acceptable that abusers get any money. What I'm really trying to say is that it takes time to build abuse systems in place that can accurately work, and work rapidly.

The search for proof

Excerpt from the post

So I said ok, he wants to improve the algorithm, but it felt strange when he said this with the 3 accounts thing : discord message zombee and last week he said this : general section dMania discord - this was the moment when I started looking for solid proof against him .

When I read this line it reminded me specifically of confirmation bias. If you don't know what confirmation bias is, this is an excerpt from the sciene daily link I have included.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.

This along with something know as patterncity can make really strong cases against things that might not necessarily be there.

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise

Am I not saying that this is actually what is occurring with @equ1l1br1um. Personally when I read statements like the one above, it always indicates on my side, that I personally am going to have to do more data gathering. Just in my experience if you are set out to find a villain you are going to find one.

Viewpoint of abuse

Excerpt from the post

What happened after the dMania bot V3 upgrade and how @zombee abused the delegation from steemit inc.

Excerpt from the section

On the 1st of march, @zombee released the dMania Bot v3 - Curation by dMania supporters . This update put the users who delegated to dMania in power, meaning that users who delegated would decide which post will get the upvote. So if one user delegated let's say 10000-20000 STEEM POWER at that point, then he could control all the upvotes that the bot does, because how much you delegated counted also.

This is technically incorrect.

I did think that this might be an issue which is why I started looking into each of the supporters accounts (including my own).
On the upvotes tab of everyone's profile you can see who they voted for, and what the rewards are for. Here are the links if you want to check them out.
https://dmania.lol/profile/upvotes/snubbermike
https://dmania.lol/profile/upvotes/cnts
https://dmania.lol/profile/upvotes/datapotomus
https://dmania.lol/profile/upvotes/vonabell
https://dmania.lol/profile/upvotes/zombee
https://dmania.lol/profile/inertia
https://dmania.lol/profile/chef.cook
If you look through my upvote history it's almost as if you wouldn't want a vote from me.

Based on these you actually probably want a upvote from cnts the most. He seems to have the largest percentage of bot related upvotes.

Then looking through the dmania profile the bigger issue is still at this point to me is still bid-bots. It still seems like there is to high of a ratio of people getting rewards from the dMania bot that are also using bid-bots.

Multiple Accounts and abuse

There is three pages of content on @equ1l1br1um's post that I have attempted to distill down to a couple of sentences.

@zombee created multiple accounts, and the bid-bot upvoted those accounts. This leads some people to believe that @zombee was responsible for abusing the system with these multiple accounts.

Quoted from the post .

This 6 accounts as you can see in the links above are : @coindeluxe; @sinsister ; @puppet-master ; @terimar ; @ready-player-one ; @tank-girl

Also @garanger

I did start looking at these accounts, and my conclusion wasn't that abuse was happening from them. Of all the accounts in question have the lifetime rewards highlighted.

https://steemworld.org/@sinsister
https://steemworld.org/@coindeluxe
https://steemworld.org/@puppet-master
https://steemworld.org/@terimar
https://steemworld.org/@ready-player-one
https://steemworld.org/@tank-girl
https://steemworld.org/@granger

The grand total for all of these accounts is 137.73.
So the account in total made around 120 $over a 4-5 day span, and that was the only time this happened. So you are talking a profit of$ 28 dollars a day.
Lets take for example the dmania account that just collects curation.

The bot in the last 7 days made 668 SP in curation alone, and another 483 in benefactor SP. So the thing is netting a 1100 SP a week. In my mind it doesn't make sense to jeopardize a revenue stream that literally netted you 4k in USD in one week just to attempt to get a couple of account some SBD.

Even if one of the accounts did hit top ten, it isn't near what the bot makes on it's own.

I also looked at some of the accounts themselves to see what they were posting.

This screenshot of posts show some stuff tagged as NSFW that is just cartoons. So in my eyes since @zombee owns those accounts he is most likely testing the NSFW flag for content.

This other one is of comments left on a post.
https://steemit.com/dmania/@garanger/what-dreams-are-made-of-zg1hbmlh-w1c6i
I literally did the same thing as this when I was testing populating data in a system one time, but I used the lyrics to “Baby Got Back”.

Flagging the accounts multiple times is also just testing the flag functionality.

From my viewpoint this isn’t a dev who is trying to scam the system. This looks like a dev that is testing in production.

Under normal circumstances testing in production is bad. However Steem does not have a test system that can even remotely mimic the production system.
I came to this conclusion before @zombee responded to @equilibrium. From my viewpoint I take @zombee’s response as truth.

One criticism I do have is that @zombee probably should have announced that he was testing a possible new system for the bot upvoting.

I do get why he didn’t though. If you are wondering how I could understand here is a great example of why you might not want to announce stuff before it is ready in the crypto world.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/litepay-merchant-solution-ceases-operations-litecoin-foundation-apologizes-for-hype/amp

However, for this exact reason it would have been best to announce that a new system was being worked on.

The Mining Script

Excerpt from the post

dMania.lol domain running mining scripts situation and why I do think zombee did that to his own users ...

There are actually two ways I know of that this can actually happen without your knowledge. One, is that you can be using a remote javascript library that was modified at the source, and the developer wasn't aware of it. How to load a remote javascript library is explained here. If someone else maintains that script, and modifies it on the back-end. Guess what? You get it too.

The second is your hosting provider which @zombee actually did a better write up.

Why do I believe @zombee?
That shit happens all the time. Ars actually did a pretty good article about it.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/
Granted @zombee's wasn't ads, but there are multiple attack vectors that this can happen with.

In Conclusion / TL;DR

In some ways @equ1l1br1um does bring up some pretty good data points about the dMania platform. However, I don't come to the same conclusion with those same data points. Do I believe that the dMania bot is being abused? Yes. Do I think it is @zombee who is abusing the bot? No. I think that @zombee was trying his best to solve that problem, and when he was trying to solve that problem a number of users including @equ1l1br1um became collateral damage of that effort.

@zombee tried some things with curation, and they didn't work out. He probably should have told people that he was trying stuff, but I don't believe that his heart was in the wrong place when he was trying them.

I also really wish people would stop using anonsteem to create accounts. It just looks bad.

So where do we go from here?

Still waiting for @zombee to make a decision about the platform. I personally am for completely getting rid of the bot. Let @zombee keep his 10% rewards for build a great platform. To me, I just think that the bot is more trouble than it's worth.

All of these issues started with the bot, so maybe it is best not to have a bot at all.

Replies (99)

Hello @datapotomus, sorry to hear about your cat, I have one also.

Moving to the subject of the post, I think you are skipping my parts of my post to dilute the evidence, high lighting only small parts without continuing with the other proof. I don't know if you are doing it on purpose or not. So let's see why you're points don't add up :

1.Taking to long to remove abusers - section from your post

You only mentioned one thing, the one with the lesser damage, skipping the other serious abuse and the most rewarded one of droucil, which got a lot of votes from him and his alt accounts and made a ton of money from getting the votes from the bot. It took him one month to blacklist this one, even tough many people reported it. You skipped blacklisting circlejerkers, even tough the rule was in place after dMania bot V3 and evidence was sent. For detailed specifics you can read it in the post here

Besides the other things that don't add up to your point, we need to see the most important stuff :

People sent him this informations for free, they spent the time looking for the abusers and wasted their energies. Why didn't he detected it himself to protect his platform? With such a huge delegation he could have done that or put other people in place to prevent and fight abuse. I don't think he wasn't expecting that abuse won't happen.

2.The search for proof - section from your post

Don't know what confirmation biased means, but will look later. To me, it just looks like a contradictory thing to say. Don't think I need to explain this further, we are all grown people here, we are not in kindergarten anymore.

3.Viewpoint of abuse - section from your post

First this is the link to : dMania bot v3 upgrade

In this place you've put the top delegators accounts that weren't active in posting or voting in dMania, except zombee. This users probably delegated because they believed in the project, like I did and make some returns on their delegation. Also probably they didn't have the time to post here to much or to vote on other memes and gifs. The most important thing is that, even if they could abuse the platform with their delegated power, they choose not to do it, because they have good ethics.

I won't take them one by one, but if you looks closely in their profiles at upvotes or posts, you will soon realize that they don't post to much and neither vote to much. For finding this out :

go to posts on their profile and see the dates when they posted
go to upvotes for each profile and click on the posts that they upvoted to see the dates

The most active powerfull supporters, that were active daily where : zombee on the first delegator page and the ones on the second page, where I was also.

So your point doesn't make to much sense.

Don't forget here also that there where many circlejerkers after this update that didn't got blacklisted, even tough there was a clear rule against it.

4.Multiple Accounts and abuse - section from your post

I think you missed use steemworld, I ran a check on steemdb and there are different results than yours. I have left a link for every single one to confirm the source of the images :

https://steemdb.com/@sinsister/data

As you can see there are 53.612 SBD and 40.129 STEEM in rewards, not 44.03 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries

https://steemdb.com/@coindeluxe/data

As you can see there are 52.286 SBD and 21.053 STEEM in rewards, not 42.10 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.

https://steemdb.com/@puppet-master/data

As you can see there are 50.510 SBD and 20.627 STEEM in rewards, not 41.25 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.

https://steemdb.com/@terimar/data

0 for terimar because he was stopped by the message sent to him, to warn him about the fact that we suspected that he created multiple accounts. Didn't had the link to account garanger then, but it was obvious because he was upvoting with 100% and with less other accounts.

https://steemdb.com/@ready-player-one/data

As you can see there are 11.738 SBD and 5.714 STEEM in rewards, not 11.42 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.

https://steemdb.com/@tank-girl/data

As you can see there are 10.628 SBD and 5.173 STEEM in rewards, not 10.35 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.

https://steemdb.com/@garanger

Here you made a typo, you've put account @granger, don't know if you made it on purpose or not, but the correct account is @garanger

Either way this account was not used for rewards, just to create the other ones.

You also forgot to mention account @meme-maniac, which belongs to him also and got rewards in the past. It's in the post also :

www.steemit.com/@meme-maniac, scroll through the post to see the rewards, for some reason they don't show up. Probably used his account as a beneficiary directly as he created, as shown this account, through his main account.

The account @garanger was used for testing most of the times as you can check his posts, that doesn't mean those other 7 account where used for testing, because there's no proof there, quite the contrary.

Let's not forget about the fact that he was stopped from using this accounts, because of the message that was sent to him by more users, where we suspected that those accounts belonged to him, but didn't had the direct connection with account @garanger at that point. If he wasn't sent that message, would he had continue to make rewards ? What do you think?

As you can see there are more rewards involved that you have mentioned. I didn't understand it also, why put the project in danger for some rewards, but with all the points presented it made sense in the end. So this point of yours about the rewards is automatically invalided by the presented facts.

The mining script - section from your article

That is just my opinion and I could be wrong, like I mentioned in the post. I just wanted to let people know in order to investigate further, because based on the other proof that I showed in other cases, it can be a posibility that he did this also. So I'm not accusing him of this problem at this point regarding this matter.

Conclusion : This should clear everything up and I hope he will make the right decisions from now on. Being so inactive in discord and not hearing people opinions didn't help either. Censoring them made it worse. I hope he made the discord link available again (because it was on expire) and takes the right decisions from now on. Cheers !

**Update **

My Motives

My Viewpoints

Let's get into it

Taking to long to remove abusers

The search for proof

Viewpoint of abuse

What happened after the dMania bot V3 upgrade and how @zombee abused the delegation from steemit inc.

Multiple Accounts and abuse

The Mining Script

dMania.lol domain running mining scripts situation and why I do think zombee did that to his own users ...

In Conclusion / TL;DR

So where do we go from here?

This post, with over $50.00 in bidbot payouts, has received votes from the following:

That was a nice post and help full post

1.Taking to long to remove abusers - section from your post

2.The search for proof - section from your post

3.Viewpoint of abuse - section from your post

4.Multiple Accounts and abuse - section from your post

The mining script - section from your article

would you like to View my article too, It's very informative

Update