With HF21 coming up and talk being the EIP is going to be pushed forward into this HF, the day that, next to some other things I won't talk about in this post, we will get a separate down vote pool in STEEM, and with it as good STEEM citizens, the distributed responsibility of using these free down votes responsible and for the good of the platform.

One of the prime problems with the STEEM platform today is false curation. Self up votes, bid bot votes, vote bots that work on delegation basis without even as much as algorithmically evaluating the content quality. Groups of sock puppet accounts circle voting, etc. You could help the platform by manually hunting down abuse and down voting it, or you could delegate your posting role to a DApp that targets specific ways of abuse in a way that would (hopefully) at least partially shield you from retaliation.

I am currently doing some tests for just such a DApp. I am not sure yet if I am going to actually build it because I don't know if anyone would actually be interested in using such a service. I hope the results of this poll will help me decide if I am going to build this DApp.

The idea for the DApp is as follows:

A simple bot runs in the background and gathers info on different types of false curation accounts and account pairs.

• bid bots
• delegation based up vote bots
• self votes
• likely automated puppet account circle votes
• comment spam

Further the bot uses a white list for content based algorithmic curation bots.

For users of the DApp, the DApp would offer the option to have your account participate in false curation attenuation and/or to use an auto muting service. Both settable for each of the above forms of false curation.

The idea is to counter random false curation up votes with a down vote of up to about one third of the total false curation votes done on the post on the last day before pay-out. If possible (if there are enough accounts available to participate) this would be done using small down-votes from a cluster of accounts to do the down-vote, combined with a comment from the main DApp account explaining the purely attenuative nature of the down vote. I hope that the post combined with the cluster down vote would keep the risk of powerful retaliation on individual participants low.

A second feature I would like to implement if I end up creating this DApp would be auto mute. The idea is that your key would be used to mute falsely curated accounts (bid bot users, self up voters, etc) up to ten days after the last false curation.

So my question: if this DApp gets created and after HF21 we have our separate down-vote pool, would you use use it? If yes, then how? And if no, why not?

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Not sure yet, I'll wait and see first. (24.14%) 7 / 29 No, Down voting sucks, please don't build this DApp (20.69%) 6 / 29 Yes, for attenuation of false curation by bid bots. (10.34%) 3 / 29 No, I'm way to scared of retaliation either way. (10.34%) 3 / 29 No, other (10.34%) 3 / 29 The yes above only as part of a cluster down-vote (6.9%) 2 / 29 I'll use the auto-muting service. (6.9%) 2 / 29 Yes, for attenuation of false curation by likely voting circles. (3.45%) 1 / 29 Yes, for attenuation of false curation by delegation based vote bots. (3.45%) 1 / 29 Yes, for attenuation of author up-votes on comment spam. (3.45%) 1 / 29