Should voting be about controlling the reward pool, or about rewarding those who you think deserve it?
- The former engages in downvoting/flagging/(soft-censorship)
- The latter engages in rewarding only, and ignoring posts you dislike.
- So the big question is; what is the most healthy way to look at it?
- Do you want Steemit to be a system of rewards, or censorship?
There is probably room enough in this argument for both ideologies. Simply go ahead and vote your opinion, and or leave a comment below explaining your answer, so that we can all learn from you!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this very important topic!
Those are the same thing. Rewarding those you think deserve it is accomplished by exerting control over the reward pool.
If Steem is to survive, its stakeholders must exert their control over the reward pool to reward productive contribution to the network.
I'm heartened to see someone else talking about stakeholders who control the network. Sure, everyone has some small influence on it, but you influence it more than me, and the top 100 stakeholders dwarf everyone else by a scale that most people don't appreciate. Yeah, it's all decentralised or whatever, but certain stakeholders have the capacity to radically change the situation.
Thanks for sharing @troglodactyl. What about using the flagging tool as a weapon to punish people for their ideological leanings. Do you think that Steemit might suffer blowback from that type of behavior. Do you think that one day, people might jump ship and head over to places like busy.org because of it?
Man... I know what your problem is, you aren’t capable of thinking outside the box, or outside of already learned systems, and you don’t seem to be able to learn anything new, multiplied by a feeling of being overly grandiose.
Both busy.org and steemit.com are just interfaces with the Steem Blockchain. Many users use both. Your uninformed posts appear on both platforms, if you didn’t realize it yet.
LOL @fukako, thanks for letting me know what you think my problem is, and for telling me what you think I feel. I do know that the Steem blockchain is not the same thing as Steemit. However, I was unaware that the other platforms were independant interfaces.
Lets look at @troglodactyl's analogy of a browser, and we'll call the steem blockchain the internet. Anyone can have their own browser (or user interface) Steemit, Busy, etc.. etc.. However, just because you can build a browser to work really well, that doesn't mean that you should program into it functions that don't work well.
For example, I'm sure someone could create an internet browser where if you clicked a button it would emulate 56k speeds. Yet nobody wants that function because it is stupid and destructive. I think that most people see flagging in the same way, stupid and destructive except in rare circumstances like spam.
So it begs the question, will Steem allow an interface that omits, or restricts the use of the flagging tool? If so, how dire would the consequences be if Steemit did nix that tool? I think right now UI's are probably representing the flagging tool simply because it is baked into the functionality of the blockchain.
They took the existing features, and represented it on the UI. I would suggest, that they didn't have too, and that the creativity of the people would boost dramatically if they removed it, which would equate to more content for the blockchain, and more positive interactions on Steemit, and a better overall Steemit reputation.
If there is a flaw in that thinking @fukako please let me know.
Obviously, for it to work there would need to be a creative solution implemented in order to address spam, and the like.
I don't understand how you think that an interface like busy.org not utilizing a flagging tool would be any sort of solution. Anyone that feels like flagging can just jump over to an interface that does have a flagging tool, and there are plenty of flaggers who would still flag.
Flagging is important. It's not destructive to the platform at all. It makes sure that people know the risk of posting bad or plagiarized content.
If there were no flag feature, people would self vote all day every day without a care in the world, enriching themselves with nothing because they'd effectively be driving the value of the platform into the ground.
Flagging is just as important as upvoting.
The only "jump ship" that could happen, is if people went to an entirely different platform to get paid for their content.
@bitfiend thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter!
My concern is with genuine content being flagged, simply because the flagger disagrees with the opinions that are expressed in a post.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that plagiarism and spam needs to be dealt with, I just think it needs to be dealt with in a more creative way.
As far as self-upvoting is concerned, if it is a destructive thing then Steemit devs may want to consider discouraging the tactic by removing it as an option from the posting screen.
Yet if you think about it from a freedom perspective, we all have this ability to vote for whoever we want. This freedom to vote for whomever we want is what led to first the self voting, and then the vote bots.
It basically created a situation where the platform, and it's users had to rapidly evolve or respond to the fact that many whales simply stopped manually curating.
My contention is that Steemit should find a reasonable alternative for dealing with plagiarism and spam, and then implement that.
Then, they could either remove the flagging tool or change the way in which it functions on this UI so that people do not engage in blatant content censorship which tends to lead to hostility and downvote wars.
Update: I do realize that downvoters and flaggers will simply do it from another platform, and that is fine. You see the thing is Steemit sold itself as a censorship free platform by cleverly talking about characteristics of the block-chain itself when they promote their product.
That type of clever marketing is what caused liberty-loving people to flock to this platform in droves , thinking it was censorship-free. By removing or fixing the flagging option in this UI, they can become the product that they were selling to their user base all along. It would be a good way of preventing a mass exodus.
This is where people are mistaken about steemit and what it is. I never once read that this platform was censorship free. I did my research and understood there was a downvote system for disagreements with content or rewards.
If you talk about controversial topics you are bound to experience some kind of censorship no matter what platform or forum you use. Its a risk people take when they decide to debate on controversial subjects.
Just as easy as it is to get censored, its easy to get uncensored if enough people agree. There are more problems on stemeit than flags or the idea to remove the feature.
I can tell you that ned himself said that they are working on tools for moderation and to fight plagiarism and abuse. Don't know when these tools will be implemented but it is evident that the tools will be granted to worthy individuals so not everyone will be able to see these tools. I assume this is the first step being taken to resolve the issue you speak of but i doubt the removal of flags entirely is where they are heading with it. I think you will find it necessary to have the flag feature available as opposed to having to wait for a mod to resolve an issue.
Of course, flagging of content that is original is complete bs and I have seen it myself, but I mostly see it on posts that are generating thousands upon thousands of dollars a day.
Steemit sold me on original content. I never considered negative original content
I did consider this to be a conspiracy theorists haven because there is very little censorship.
The censorship you speak of, that we see on here, is not quite the censorship I've experienced myself on facebook or youtube, so it's still quite the utopia.
I can say that there is a certain part of the flagging option that does need fixing.
Of course I could be partly wrong. Maybe I missed the censorship-free part. I just see people doing the censoring instead of media or gov'ts which is what I consider a step in the right direction. It's us policing ourselves.
A bit harsh, but a necessary clarification. I tell people it's like the difference between using Facebook through Firefox, Chrome, or a mobile app. Same users, same content, same platform, just different interfaces.
This is actually a rally interesting question - one that weighs heavily on my mind. We pride ourselves on the quality of discourse and discussion on steemit - and I think there's some justification for that. But in the short time I've been here, I have not seen evidence of anything like the culture wars that have raged across other social media - twitter in particular. If that were to occur here, and if enough people joined, it would, how would the system cope? Can you imagine the havoc that a political party could cause by opening a stack of accounts and loading them up with SP purchased from their war chests?
Exactly @samueldouglas, I made a similar point here. It's exactly what I am trying to avoid on the Steemit platform. I'm just a nobody on here right now, but I have the foresight just as you did right in the above post to see what's going to happen months or years down the line.
ugh, posted the wrong link, it is updated now.
I read it pretty quickly, and I've not totally recovered from after-work drinks, (I don't know where you are, but it's Friday night here), but I really think you had some good points. I wonder if we could synthesise something out of what you wrote, combined with what I wrote here.
Good idea, i'll check it out. You know, I wrote this post while drinking (drunk) I had to come back to tidy it up a bit. It could have been allot more embarrassing than it actually was. I think the spirits were what was able to allow me to distill the core of the issue, and find the right question to ask.
Update: Wow! Amazing post! Very well thought out, great analogies!
As @fukako points out busy.org and steemit.com (as well as d.tube, steepshot, and at least half a dozen others) are just interfaces to the Steem blockchain. Moving from one to the other has no impact on how voting works, just as posting to Facebook through Chrome rather than Firefox won't change how many people like your posts.
I think use of voting to punish ideological leanings should be counter-voted. Social networks thrive on controversy and silencing one side of a debate is a missed opportunity for the network financially as well as being socially destructive censorship.
Thanks for sharing your opinion @troglodactyl. I agree with respect to the counter voting. As long as flagging is a thing, then counter voting, or counter flagging in self-defense if you have the Steem, is generally a Steemians only recourse.
I'd like to see a downvote button right next to the upvote button, but I think all it should do is count votes, not vote weight. It would help people to express their opinions in a healthy way without engaging in destructive behavior.
It's my goal to make downvoting an unpopular thing on Steemit. My hope is that it will become so unpopular that people will shy away from using it for the wrong reasons. Nobody cares if a spammer gets voted down. Hell, it wouldn't be a bad idea to turn the flag button into a spam button.
I look at downvoting for the wrong reason like a crazy person wielding a weapon, and Steemit right now is kind of like the wild wild west. When we steemians see someone acting crazy with the gun, wildly shooting down ideas they don't like, then we Steemians should be able to disarm them. Maybe abusive downvoters could be flagged and after so many flags their downvoting privileges would be suspended for a short time?
There are so many ways creatively that the devs could address the problem of abusive flagging. I really appreciated @fukako's information about the other platforms that run atop of steem. Now I'm wondering if those platforms have a system that is equivalent to flagging, or if it's only unique to Steemit.
If downvoting is a function of Steem itself, and all of these platforms are incorporating it simply because it is there, that would seem unwise. I don't have all the pieces to the puzzle, and I'm sure getting rid of the function would lead to some unforeseen ramifications. I guess the biggest query would be; would the pros out weigh the cons?
One argument for people who are against removing the flag tool is that they can simply hop over to one of the other UI's and do their downvoting from there. As an experiment it would be slick to see one of the UI's nix the functionality and replace it with something better.
It is a function of Steem itself. It's not possible to circumvent it, unless they change Steem itself.
But hey, really, do your own homework.
@sneak didn't downvote you, @thoughts-in-time, because he is crazy or malicious, he has downvoted you because your posts are completely uninformed. Personally, I think he is right.
Since you like analogies, think of the school system. If you talk complete nonsense about a subject you are taking (and by participating in Steem and thinking that you are writing critically about it, you certainly are), some students will find it funny and laugh and even cheer (the upvotes) and people who are actually busy developing the subject further (say, research professors) will most likely fail you (flag you) for wasting their and your own time.
I wouldn't even call what you write criticism because it's just completely uninformed.
The dithering and hiding of posts is not part of Steem. It's something that Steemit added, like you said before; one need only visit Busy.org and see their UI to prove that is true.
As far as the downvote itself: I bet you even though it's a part of Steem, that Steemit could exclude, or restrict access to the option from their interface entirely.
Think about it from a designers perspective. It is certainly not impossible.
I say if people really want to downvote, let them do it from a different UI. Then this platform could be a unique app on the blockchain, they could be a bastion of free speech.
yes, but you didn't know about Busy.org before me and several others told you about it.
Which proves my point. I can also downvote you from Busy.org if you want me to. It's even easier there, with the downvote button right next to the upvote, where I don't have to scroll all the way up ;)
Are you a developer? You are only voting for two witnesses by the way. At least one of them is often involved in plagiarizing other people's work for profit, and no technical expertise.
So, once again:
Did you do your homework?
edit:
There, I am editing this comment through Busy.org, and downvoting yours just to try it out :D
Doesn't collapse your comment on Busy.org XD
So there still free speech!
Actually, since Steem allows so many interfaces, and Steemit actually wants competition and helps it, you cannot say that they are impeding free speech.
That's how I do it.
That's how assholes do it.
LOL, I totally agree with you @funbobby51.
It would be so cool if Steemit would remove the asshole function from the platform, then their would be less assholes, less downvote wars, more community unity, and less divisive behavior.
Good discussion to try to start. Personally, I've never downvoted anyone, so you can guess where I'm at.
I downvote a category spammer in my posts. It's the only "person" that comments and it's some random and repetitive "dog fact" that is not topical to my content.
It irks me.
I do not think I would have the audacity to hammer a post that I felt was not good enough for the monetary value placed upon it.
@k9disc I feel the same way mostly, except there is one bot that I've adopted as a pet, and as cats do we mostly ignore each other, but cuddles always comes around for a scratch on the head every now and then. As far as user posts are concerned; to me it just seems so wrong, to try and muzzle them with a downvote.
Thanks @papa-pepper
MENTAL NOTE: The guy with the highest rep in the comment section has never downvoted anyone.
I tend to agree, thank you for sharing!
It seems to me that nobody should care what others do to the reward pool.
Everyone has a finite amount of juice. Let the chips fall where they may.
Flagging because you don't see the value in the post is not the way to handle it. Go give your juice to someone else. You should not be arbiter over how others allocate their juice.
The bots and whatnot should be handled by peer pressure. Use a bot, get excluded from the real humans club. Rules for the bot will be changed by human witnesses.
Flagging to allocate or control value is a terrible idea. It is a race to the bottom combined with Lord of the Flies.
Put your juice where it does the most good, speak out against the bot mentality to put the peer pressure on, and wait for the general mood of the human community to force the change.
You can't punish people into doing something.
I'd encourage you to reconsider for two reasons:
I think I'm a bit more Buddhist in my thoughts on this.
I can't affect them, all I can do is affect the rest of the situation.
I can flag someone and punish them; not stop them at all, as it's only going to cost them a percentage, and some money is better than no money.
Or, I can put my effort towards curating and developing quality content and making sure that good content gets rewarded.
Flagging content takes away from the opportunity to reward good content.
I think the answer is to get a bunch of people vested and working together and then approach STEEM with some leverage. A few whales getting bent out of shape is one thing. A bunch of quality content creators heavily invested in STEEM is another.
And I KNOW that punishing arbitrarily does not reduce undesired behavior. It just draws attention to it and makes it more likely to happen when nobody is looking.
And of course, I'm new here, but I have been highly active in online communities on touchy, passionate subjects for a couple decades now. ... that's friggin' nuts, BTW... 2 decades of online forums.
peace~
I'd add a third reason:
What you reward you get more of. If spam is allowed to be profitable on the Steem network, more people who create spam will be attracted. There's a toxic segment of the stakeholder population that leeches off the rest by spamming, upvoting their spam, and reaping the rewards. Such parasites cannot be allowed to extract too much or the host will die. As responsible stakeholders we must vote against these pillagers and render them impotent until they either give up and sell their stake or change their ways.
I very much get the problem. And my job is behavior modification.
A system that uses arbitrary powerful agents to subdue and suppress trouble on an ad hoc basis is a system with trouble.
I take it that voting something down at 100% cost the same as voting something up. How many of those votes does a whale get that day? How many of those burnt votes would be better applied towards quality content? Knocking something down by 30% could have been bumping something up 300%; could be the break some lucky minnow was looking for.
Seems to me that flagging shitty content is throwing good money after bad to no effect, as the tactic still works just for less rewards.
And now that whale money is out of circulation. Has been burnt to teach someone a lesson and cannot be applied towards quality content and grooming of honest actors within the ecosystem.
That kind of suppression and punitive reaction doesn't work to control behavior. The End. And systemically it is a guaranteed loser. Incentives, that's how you grow community. Leave the shit alone and groom the talent.
Best thing to do is to draw attention to nefarious actors and actions in timely fashion, support honest users, and build a tribe of honest agents to ostracize them.
Public service annoncements and peer pressure are great tools, and they work great when it is the foundational understanding of entry. Pretty soon bots and drive bys look out of place upon new user entry. Cool guys shitting on the bot and money grubbin' behavior ought to be plenty, if the community is healthy.
And take it on via architecture by strong-arming the STEEM developers with a threat of all the quality talent leaving; leaving them with a bunch of bots and 12 syllable sentence generators.
I make critters hop for a living. Whack a mole via Whale reduces all of our wealth and pours more resources into shitty content. And it won't work to suppress behavior.
Very interesting @k9disc!
I think you're misunderstanding part of how the rewards system works. Downvoting doesn't destroy rewards, it reallocates them to other content that has been upvoted. If I have a limited amount of time available to curate for Steem, I may be able to read and upvote only a few quality posts. Spam posts take much less time to curate and downvote. You're likely reading them and seeing the reward numbers on them anyway and just choosing to ignore the abuse, which means downvoting is minimal effort.
I upvote good content when I see it and I downvote abuse when I see it. Both methods effectively redirect rewards without either directly increasing or decreasing the total value to be allocated.
Hey @troglodactyl, I haven't forgot the last time you helped us to fight abuse. I think your efforts deserve to be highlighted and I fully intend to do that. What's up with these people not understanding what flags are good for. It's CRAZY!
I know what you mean. Seriously, I've been so depressed by some of the shit I've seen getting big rewards today, I just can't bring myself to write anything.
So go vote for some great content. There's some on my blog that hasn't been at all seen or engaged. ;-)
Upvote the good shit. Bad shit didn't happen.
Write a piece about the difference in content after you lift up a few minnows...
And not trying to tell you what to do, just throwing out what I believe to be the solution. You have look for and reinforce what you want more of or it doesn't happen.
Have there been any punishment trainwrecks that have HUGE dollars attached to them; or massive amounts of SP poured into them?
I bet there are though, and if there are not there will be. Meta loves a pie-fight.
I don't know if my particular sense of justice will allow me to not flag, at least occasionally. But I will agree to meet you halfway and say that I have noticed in myself a need for balance between discouraging and encouraging, and that it's something I'm working on. And yes, I will check out your content as I'm always on the lookout for something good.
"my particular sense of justice"... heh... so cool.
Sounds great.
Positive actions to vote what you like over negative confiscation from posts you don't like, apart from overt abusive behavior.
Thanks for sharing your opinion @krnel! I don't know if steemit realizes it yet or not, but the lion share of their user base is libertarian because they sold their platform as a censorship-free place. They did this by cleverly conflating the steem blockchain with their interface. Now they have a choice, they can live up to the name that they've created for themselves, or they can suffer the consequences.
Stay tuned for the great MEME wars of 2018! -or- How to Wake that 100th Monkey!
Rewards. I typically ignore stuff I don't like. Sometimes I'll voice my opinion anyway. I've had healthy debates, even once replied in a heated way, having been triggered, but clarified where I was coming from. The back and forth discussion resulted in following the person and truly appreciating our discussion and it brought a lot to me.
Jordan Peterson does say: "Always assume the other person knows something you don't."
I ignore posts about downvote wars, not because I don't care, but my health can't handle getting involved. No one has downvoted me and I have no intention in downvoting anyone.
I reward people who I believe should be rewarded, I reward even comments, I will reward until my vote is worth 0 because I want to show that I feel this person deserves it.
Steemit was made with the purpose for us to excercise our freedom of expression. If we bring censorship into it, then Steemit becomes Twitter, Facebook and anything but what it was truly meant to be: a platform for people seeking freedom.
Amen to that! Thanks for sharing your thoughts @binkyprod!
I think Steemit could encourage that type of attitude by simply nixing the flagging tool all together. People could still flag, but they'd have to go to a different UI to do it. I think it would make the Steemit community overall, allot more healthy by discouraging negative actions.
I agree! Steemit could imprement something that would make it less accessible to the trigger-happy and not just for the big fish who bear a lot of weight on the platform. It would have to be something that makes a downvote not work the same way as an upvote, in the sense that a small fish's downvote would have the same weight as a Whale's downvote, to make it fair. This would remove the "bully" aspect that a lot of smaller fish fear whales to be, and show them that they don't need to fear. We'd all have equal voice, just with various sizes of upvotes.
Hey, that's a really smart idea!
Thanks. It's something that seems fair in my mind. The question is how to implement it and who among our witnesses would be willing to try to develop a Beta version of it. Perhaps something that testers could opt in and out of at first to try it out.
I think that witnesses serve the blockchain in a different way. I think there duty is more about confirming transactions. It's pretty much just their computers running software. As far as influencing the beta itself, that would probably be more of something that we'd have to influence the developers on. I might be wrong, there is allot I do not know.
I think you're right on that. Well, the more of us make these suggestions, the more it can reach the developers. Who are the developers? Maybe I can tag them in a post or something. Sometimes I feel I'm just a small fish, will my idea reach them. But I truly believe it's something that could help the platform. So I want to make sure it reaches them.
Right and wrong is a very subjective term. There is no boolean answer to right or wrong. Everyone has a different perspective of looking at things. So I would prefer steemit as a system which rewards good content and ignores the bad. If a content is really bad, it will indirectly be impacted because not many will like it.
The main argument comes in when we talk about self voting and using bots. Its a big debate with no good answer. I think the platform will find its own solution eventually as it evolves.
Let's face it, the nature of Steemit culture has changed considerably in the past year. This used to be more of a "content platform that offered rewards," and has slowly grown into a "cash dispenser where content is coincidental."
This is not really surprising, since the world tends to underestimate the sheer depth of human greed. Greed works rather like a forestry company that clear cuts old growth forest "because it's profitable" and then the company workers end up all surprised (and butthurt) because there are no trees next time they go camping.
I am active manual curator and I prefer to reward quality content, which I believe encourages the creation of more worthwhile content. That said, I will flag spam, plagiarism and what I consider "exploitative" behavior... like those who just leave dozens of one-word comments on a largely blank post with no purpose other than to self-upvote the meaningless content.
So to answer your question, the term "situational ethics" comes up. "It depends."
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter @denmarkguy!
Yeah, I think that most people wouldn't fault you for flagging spam, or plagiarism. I would consider those one word comments a form of spam too. I just wish the devs would ditch the flagging tool all together or make it explicitly for spam/plagiarism/and the like. The way the up-voting and down-voting works though it's so weird.
60 people could vote so that some guy gets 10.00 in rewards, and then 1 guy if he's got enough Steem could be like nope, not happening, the whole thing seems illogical. It would be like if there was an election and 5 different people were running for an office. They count the number of votes and politician (a) wins with the highest votes, but then politician (b) who has more money says nope, and completely erases the efforts of the previous voters.
It's almost divisive in it's very nature. I think that Steemit should consider um, keeping the flag tool for spam, but removing the weight of the vote so that people focus more on who they want to reward vs. whose rewards they want to take away. It would probably allow for people in the steemit community to focus more energy on creativity, than they do on infighting, reward pool policing, and down vote wars.
I don't see a downside to that idea, is there some kind of downside I might be missing with that? I think @binkyprod's idea about removing vote weight from down votes could potentially be very beneficial.
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