05 Oct Symbol blockchain news update – 05/10/21: The votes they are a-changin’
Welcome to Tuesday’s Symbol Blog update! As you may have seen on Twitter there have been some voting irregularities on the community sentiment poll which really sucks so I will attempt to explain what happened and why the voting seems suspicious to say the least.
EDIT: sorry guys, seems that I lost all of the images for this post including the analysis of votes after the alleged vote rigging so I have had to regenerate everything from the final poll results.
What happened?
You may remember we reported on the community sentiment survey last Friday. Which showed an overwhelming dissatisfaction with NEM Group, NEM Foundation and NEM Trust. Well it seems that yesterday suddenly a lot of votes were received that completely changed the outcome. Apparently those that supported the Trust, Foundation and NEM Group waited several days and then voted en masse to show their approval of the way that NEM has been run in the past 😆
The numbers
On Saturday 2nd October @UcchinCrypto reported on the sentiment poll in Japanese and took screenshots of the results. Let’s have a look at how things changed between Saturday and today.
- How do you feel about the performance of NEM Group?
Results 02/10/21:
Final results:
2nd Oct: 87.3% negative (654 votes)
Final results: 50.3% negative (1538 votes)
Breakdown of new votes cast after rigging event:
2. How do you feel about the performance of NEM Trust?
Results 02/10/21:
Final results:
2nd Oct: 80.6% negative (622 votes)
Final results: 48.6% negative (1384 votes)
Breakdown of new votes cast after rigging event:
3. How do you feel about the performance of NEM Ventures?
Results 02/10/21:
Final results:
2nd Oct: 80.6% negative (613 votes)
Final results: 48.5% negative (1420 votes)
Breakdown of new votes cast after rigging event:
As you will notice there are very few (no?) additional votes in the “very satisfied” category and a deluge of additional votes for “satisfied” in each of the three poll questions.
Vote rigging?
So anyone that has ever run a Twitter poll in the past will know that the vast majority of votes are usually received within the first day of the vote going live. Why? Well it is fresh in everyone’s Twitter feeds and is being actively retweeted. It seems a little fishy that several days elapsed before the majority of votes were cast.
In addition, all of the additional votes occurred within a very short time window on Monday. I am trying to think of a legitimate explanation for this but I am really struggling. I guess that there could have been some coordinated campaign by hundreds of NEM Trust/Group/Foundation supporters (who are these people and where are they hiding?) who all voted for the “satisfied” option at exactly the same time. Seems very unlikely though, such a campaign would need to be advertised yet there was no sign of anything on the usual NEM channels.
By far the most plausible explanation here is that the votes were rigged. It seems that you can buy paid votes for Twitter polls and I guess that this is what happened.
Whoever did this did not do a very good job as it is blatantly obvious what happened. If the votes were cast in small numbers across the course of the poll then it would be hard (impossible?) to spot. However, as all of the votes were for exactly the same option and occured at the same time it screams vote rigging.
Who did it and why?
Short answer, I really have no idea on either and we will likely never know. I guess it was either someone that desperately wanted to rig the vote to make it look as if the community supported theNEM Trust/Group/Foundation or it was someone trying to mess with the result either for fun or to deliberately invalidate or cast doubt on the final outcome.
What this actually achieved was to upset the community who wanted to share their voices and opinions. We were given the chance to vent our frustrations and concerns but this was put into doubt by somebody rigging the results.
Going forward
I think that this shows that Twitter polls are not the best place to gather community sentiment as there will always be someone that wants to fix the results to show what they want to see. We know that NEM has a voting option in the desktop wallet but there is no equivalent for Symbol. I guess if we are just looking at vote numbers rather than weighting in a system similar to PoI then sending a transaction to a specified Symbol address might be a better option but this is a faff when there are multiple questions.
Maybe creating a simple website that requires you to send a transaction from your NEM or Symbol wallet to register and sends back a unique voting token as an encrypted message which would allow you to sign into the site and cast your vote would be a better idea. It would be possible to add in additional checks like account age and minimum balance if required too.
I think that the number of legitimate votes would drop dramatically as well if a more sophisticated system was implemented as it requires extra effort to participate. For me it is more important that the results are reliable and can be trusted though.
Thanks!
Thanks for reading and apologies for the rant. This really annoyed me so I wanted to put my thoughts down on the blog today. I will be back soon with another update 🙂
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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