Sometimes wealthy Steemians will wage their influence in order to stymie access to information that they don't agree with. Apparently, this nasty little ingredient called flagging was baked into the Steemit cake a long time ago. I call it soft-censorship.
Hopefully, more sensible developers of this platform will consider removing that ingredient, before the idea starts to spread, that the cake is a lie, or the cake is a pie, or the cake is actually just a goddamned social experiment in behavior modification.
Imagine, if you will, a busker whose been hard at work performing music for several hours on any given day. The busker sees that he now has just enough to rent that motel room, and purchase a little food, and right as he is packing up his musical instrument; someone walks up, pours gasoline in his tip jar, and then sets it aflame.
Well that's very similar to downvoting (or flagging) on Steemit, and maybe that's been Steemit's plan all along in order to thwart hyperinflation... Who knows?
Don't get me wrong, I think that downvoting is cool, if it's meant to express an opinion. However, the way in which Steemit has implemented it, it allows wealthy people to destroy value that other people have attempt to convey in the form of an upvote.
It's a very ugly, and destructive mechanic, and because of it: I plan to stop recommending that people come to this platform until it's corrected. I personally think that it violates the non-aggression principle, but I suppose, that's probably debatable.
As YouTube continues to bleed out, and more and more content creators come to Steemit. Steemit is going to make itself a target.
No doubt, you'll eventually have hundreds of (George Soros) paid instaWHALES trolling the fuck out of well intentioned content creators. It may likely result in downvote wars, which could spike the value of the SBD temporarily.
Yet, as the Steemit tax (downvoting) on free speech continues to grow higher, and higher; the downvoting wars will eventually morph into meme wars which could end the Steemit experiment overnight.
Memes are magical, they tend to trigger the 100th monkey effect. They can take the form of images with text, they can take the form of tweets. With memes; culture can be radically altered. I think that this has been proven without a shadow of a doubt.
Recently, Kylie Jenner released a meme in the form of a tweet that wiped out 1.3 billion in snapchat's stock value. That's pretty powerful, and all she did was point out the obvious.
Screenshot of Tweet
Apparently, Snapchat rolled out a new interface and myspaced themselves in the process. All her tweet did was highlight the fact that Snapchat myspaced themselves.
Steemit has this auto-destruct feature built into it, and they need to fix it before it becomes problematic. Once word gets around that Steemit allows wealthy users to maliciously soft-censor others, it could potentially get unpopular, very quickly!
That's just my opinion on the matter, what say you, can you convince me otherwise? Sound off in the comments below! If you are a dev, what was your intentions with the downvote function?
This post started off as a comment inspired by @clarityofsignal's post.
For the most part, people are flagged so that they won't earn money for their shitposts, and hopefully eventually stop shitposting. Your "apparently" is intentionally obtuse and misleading.
You seem to be confused. The money a post earns isn't the author's until the voting is entirely complete, flags included. It does not belong to the author until all the votes are cast.
It's not similar at all. Flagging can't take anything away from you.
If you want an analogy, it would be like believing you won an election when the votes are only halfway counted.
Wrong again. The rewards are distributed to other authors and curators—just not the shitposter who got flagged.
For the most part, people are flagged so that they won't earn money for their shitposts, and hopefully eventually stop shitposting. Your "apparently" is intentionally obtuse and misleading. - @sneakOkay, so if I am to understand you correctly, you soft-censored my comments because you thought they were shit? And you are a Steemit developer? Why the hell do you encourage people to come to this platform and share content if you are going to be like that?
Dude, we got Facebook and YouTube for those kinds of shenanigans. Why do you think we left those platforms? You sir, you are single-handedly putting yourself out of a job, and you don't even realize it yet. You are going to destroy the reputation of the platform, you are going to destroy the platform itself.
You seem to be confused. The money a post earns isn't the author's until the voting is entirely complete, flags included. It does not belong to the author until all the votes are cast. It's not similar at all. Flagging can't take anything away from you. If you want an analogy, it would be like believing you won an election when the votes are only halfway counted. -@sneakFlagging collapses the comment and dithers it, which makes it barely visible, or practically invisible, unless and until you hover over it, and click reveal. This is a form of soft-censorship, you should be ashamed of yourself.
It also redirects rewards that other Steemians have attempted to allocate to me based on the merit of my post. Why is your opinion to soft-censor and divert the rewards from my comments, so much more important than 7 other people?
Do you really think, just because you have the Steem power, that that makes it right for you to be able to soft-censor and divert the potential rewards that i would have earned had you not done so? Do you even value freedom of speech on Steem?
I mean what is your agenda as a Steemit employee, do you want to drive people away from the platform. Or do you desire to modify people's posting behavior? Do you like the idea of controlling what people can say?
At the very top you said: "hopefully (people will) eventually stop shitposting". Well I can assure you that I don't think that my thoughts and ideas are shit, and you know; it sounds as if what you want to do, is control my behavior, so that I will only say things that you do not disapprove of.
Your reputation is gone dude, you've got to back down before you are done. You are just destroying yourself. I keep trying to get you to understand but it's like you cannot comprehend.
Butterfly Effect: Steemit's Resident Troll @sneak Soft-Censored Me Today
You get my first downvote ever @sneak, congrats. This topic is real and the worst aspect of steemit in my mind and your lack of this understanding the issue does not bode well for the platform, especially if you are a developer.
WHO MADE YOU the CENSOR MASTER of STEEMIT? What makes your word and comments the law here on Steemit? Where do you get off in censoring others and making their comments and posts disappear? I don't see any insults in these comments or improper attributes in the targets of your downvoted posts.
I'm downvoting your censorships in disagreement! Shame on you as a Steemit DEVELOPER acting so HITLER!
What is the difference between you and BernieSanders the thug of Steemit?
I will also reverse your downvotes on which I disagree!
Thank you kindly for your support @haejin.
: )
Special thank you to @haejin for uncensoring this post!
Take a look @haejin's site to learn more about crypto trends!
are you seriously telling me this post was flagged as well?
TBH, with this one I couldn't tell at the time with any certainty if it was the post, or if it was a comment from the post. I wanted to err on the side of caution. The flurry of activity in down-votes and up-votes happened very fast, and it was difficult to keep up with. That's why I didn't post the other meme image in this thread.
I agree with you. Already see it happening today, people are just power hungry.
Followed upvoted and resteemed your post.
Hey, thank you for that @californiacrypto! Following you too!
I fully agree, and I've been saying the same thing for 18 months now - flagging is total bullshit and needs to go, but some of the most powerful people on Steemit are REALLY into it - at this point there is full blown censorship going on but we have clowns excusing it by saying it's not censorship because you can still see the post if you unhide it. Not censorship my arse...
https://xkcd.com/1357/
35 people in this community agree with me, which is why they upvoted this post. The only thing that you have going for you is that you can soft-censor people, and boost your own comments with your massive amounts of wealth.
As soon as people learn that Steemit is engaged in soft-censorship, they will sour against the platform very quickly. You need to be careful, your going to end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The word isn't out yet completely. However, once the word gets out, I can guarantee you, that many will simply leave. You ought to be even more concerned about the people who will never join because of the soft-censorship.
I don't know if you hate your job, or if you hate Steemit, or what the deal is. The fact of the matter is that Americans absolutely abhor censorship, and the snowflake minority is just that, a minority.
So yeah keep it up man, we'll see what happens, I'm predicting right now, that people like you will destroy this platform. The fact that you are a dev only serves to magnify the issue.
Pfff, @thoughts-in-time you really don’t understand what censorship is. I suggest you look it up in a dictionary.
I called it soft-censorship, what would you call it when your post gets hidden from view? Do you have a better terminology that you would suggest? "Flagged" is the action of marking something. However, the result of the flag, where the post becomes hidden, what would you call that, other than soft-censorship?
Oh so is it like soft-porn? Still porn, but soft?
The post or comments are collapsed but still visible. Any user who wants to check them, has a freedom to do so. It’s not even close to censorship.
The platform is filled with spammers, who use plagiarized content to profit. Don’t be surprised when couple of days later somebody will copy and paste your article to pass for their own. The only thing you can do about it is flag it to show your disagreement. There is no way to erase anything from the Steem blockchain, unlike on other platforms like Facebook, etc.
Steem is decentralized and that’s the blessing and the curse of it. I suggest you first read the white paper and learn more about the technology behind Steem before writing something so, err how to put it politely, meaningless.
Well, thanks for being polite. Yes like porn, but soft. Don't get me wrong, I think there should be a mechanism in place for spammers, and plagiarizers.
Yet, the problem with putting soft-censorship in the hands of anyone is that they tend to abuse it. They tend to simply down vote posts because they don't like the message.
Even you down voted this post because you didn't like the message. It wasn't spam, I wrote it. I sourced anything that I didn't write, or create. So with your flagging action how else am I supposed to interpret anything other than you simply didn't like what I have to say.
Do you really think Steemit needs to become like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Do you think we need that censorship-esque nonsense?
I did read parts of the white paper, what I found particularly curious was page 16 last paragraph.
It reminded me about that whole controversy that facebook was facing when Sean Parker came out to reveal the fact that they were exploiting a vulnerability in the human psyche.
Downvoted for unfair censorship!
Thanks for dropping in @sift666. Yeah, anyone saying it's not censorship is simply hiding behind semantics. They can't wriggle out of the fact that it is indeed at the very least soft-censorship, and that it's ugly as hell every time it's done to a non-spam, non-bot post.
I can already tell what's going to happen here. They're going to lose, another, better, platform will spring up that doesn't censor, and that'll be that. The market picks and chooses, and it's a finicky market. I remember when MySpace nerfed themselves with the shitty redesign that everyone hated, everyone stopped using it and migrated to facebook.
Now Facebook's reputation, and censorship tactics have become so bad that people are jumping ship from that platform too. Especially after the acknowledgement from their former devs about how they deviously planned to get people psychologically addicted. I fear it is only a matter of time, the sand is dropping through the hour glass. When Steemit censorship becomes so rampant that the memes turn against them, that'll be all she wrote.
You can fool people that censorship isn't censorship with psychological gymnastics for only so long. Yet this type of foolery doesn't actually convince them, in their heart they know, it's censorship. It would only take a few clever dank ass memes to expose that fact, and that kind of magical meme power is the equivalent to one little boy saying: "the king has no clothes". Everyone knew, but they didn't know they knew. The blinders had to be removed, and it's not a difficult task to accomplish.
It would be nice if they would abolish this practice, because it's the right thing to do. And of course their is the whole reward side aspect of it too, and I don't know how that plays into it. Where the rewards go, and whatnot. Say one large downvote subtracts 50.00 voting power for a given amount of time, and also redirects 50.00 in rewards. I don't know if their is some hidden benefit that someone like a lead programmer might be taking advantage of via that method or not. Anything in that realm would be out of my ability to comprehend at this point.
Just seems really odd for a dev to be acting like this.
I think there is some really odd stuff going on behind the scenes and as a big fan of Steemit I hesitate to start talking about my mad theories - they are paranoid and negative, and if they are true I have no solutions.
Lets just say that some people would be in a very powerful position if there was a shift from Steemit to a new platform - this could be a very dirty race - are we seeing flagging or dragging?
We really ought to get a group going. We're all reasonable here and can differentiate between wild speculation to prospect new possibilities (no matter how unlikely). And actual evidence based documentatuion of massive wrongdoing that could endanger the whole platform. Finding the catch is not a game, it's a duty of free thinkers who have been had one too many times.
followed.
One other thing. How long before Mark Cuckerberg and his corporate Silicon Valley "Instawhale" mates start messing around on here censoring views in order to destroy the competition. Corporations would pay big money to produce an army of downvoting bots to wreak havoc. I think you have highlighted a serious flaw within Steemit and it needs addressing.
I am reasonably certain that Mark Zuckberg and his mates don't give a flying fuck what you or anyone else posts on Steemit.
you have not addressed the issue again.
WHO MADE YOU THE CENSOR MASTER OF STEEMIT??!!
My downvotes will not stand idle to your censorships!
Downvoted for foul language unbecoming of a Steemian "Developer" or whatever title you deem fit for yourself!
Not just FB, but also Youtube, Reddit and Wordpress.
Absolutely, and when they arrive all hell will break loose.
You have raised a serious point that needs to be addressed. I've been to some Steemit etiquette platform where flagging was elaborately discussed and I think we all owe it to ourselves to blog about it and get stakeholders educated on its use. Some powerful jealous people can flag you down out of envy and gets away. The end is a bad business for everyone. I think 👇 vote is better or disagree button. Or options should be attached to ⛳ so you get to choose why you wanted to flag a post and it takes effect after some hours of investigation is concluded. It sounds clumsy but honestly the effect would be ugly if not addressed promptly
Thanks for your comment @loxside. I tend to agree with you, the platform is gaining popularity so fast, it would be sad to see them go the way of fakebook, or utube. They've got a good foothold for now, but I don't think it will last very long, especially with devs abusing the flagging mechanic.
See, I flagged you to collapse your comment. Somebody else might see it and wonder why the comment was flagged, they are going to click on it and might even upvote it, to disagree with my flag.
When you mentioned the George Soros thing a light came on in my head. You have just sent out a very powerful warning sign to anyone coming on here to put a lot of time and effort into making this platform a success only for destructive bankster and Commie mob rule to take over and wipe out the little man. So how is Steemit in any way different to real life? This absolutely could destroy Steemit as a bastion of free speech and information. Thanks for posting. I now have a bear inside my head playing a tug of war with a bull!
Thanks for your comment @anglotrucker. Hopefully, this will be something they will choose to fix on their own before it gets to that point. I'm catching some weird vibes though lately, I'm not sure Steemit is what I thought it was. For some reason I had the impression that soft censorship wasn't a thing here, but I stand corrected. I hope the right animal wins for you!
Thank @thoughts-in-time . I too came here because of the censorship from Facebook, You tube and twitter and I've been encouraging friends to join this platform, but now it's got me thinking because you could spend 2 or 3 years building value and your rep only to have a well financially supported Instawhale trash it in an instant. That isn't a way to encourage growth and long term success. Your thoughts @stephenkendal
Same. My intuition has been yelling at me for two days to the point that I had to stop my usual routines to find out if there is anything officially said about this.
Bad vibes for sure, something is not right, this is only the most recent chapter. We need more views on this, if there is a good explanation let's have it. So far I don't see any, I see continued disregard for the issues raised, reminiscent of trolls on youtube poisoning the comment section successfully by never actually backing up their stance with anything but insults.
If documentation of a staged shooting already means "we crossed the line" then most of what I came to Steemit to talk about will be flagged out of existence anyway. I get the feeling: You probably know the lies go much deeper than the occasional fake shooting and its subsequent coverup.
MUCH. DEEPER.
REALLY bad floor, I agree.
At least now I slowly start to see who is interested in finding the catch, and who isn't. If there is no catch, why do we have to press so hard to get an explanation?
no doubt!
In real life, people with money can silence you. On steemit, nobody can silence anyone else.
Hyprocritical! You censor and yet you state that no one on steemit can be silenced...ironic! Downvoted in disagreement!
On steemit, I simply click "Reveal comment" and it is no longer hidden.
On busy, it is not hidden at all.
The blockchain is open and readable regardless of how many downvotes you receive.
It's no more censorship than your posts spamming the trending page and pushing down more diverse content is. If you're ok with a whale the size of rancho upvoting you to the top of the trending page, then you are also ok with a whale the size of @sneak and @berniesanders bringing you back down. You can't have one without the other.
You should have listened to me way back when I first reached out to you. You'd probably be making mad bank and be one of the most loved whales on the platform. I told you being a jackass would eventually come back to haunt you.
Here's a real life example: https://steemit.com/@aluma
Check out the post history, comment history, and the rewards history.
@anthonyadavisii discovered and reported this abuse so it could be downvoted and taken care of. If this sort of thing keeps getting rewards we'll keep getting more of it. The supply of spam is more elastic than the supply of high quality content. Not only that, but seeing spam rewarded unfairly causes other potential users to react negatively because of the natural human desire for fairness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
Allowing spam to be rewarded both encourages more of it and makes real users more likely to reject the system as unfair and stop participating.
Hello @troglodactyl
Wow yeah, that sure is egregiously spamtacular!
Is that ultimatum game synonymous with -
game theory or just related?
@sneak got me again today in several comments.
It's unfortunate, I thought Steemit was better than this.
In fact that's why I joined to begin with, for zero-censorship.
Anywho, I'm pretty sure that dude is a snowflake.
At this point I'm strongly considering powering down
all of my steem and using it to fund contests that will
hopefully shed some light on Steemit's abusive Devs
and or how the mechanism itself can be abused.
I agree with you that spammy comments are a problem.
but they need a better solution, and the fact that their own
developers engage in soft-censorship just speaks volumes.
I can do a MEME contest, an article contest. Basically, they're
going to have to tweak the system in a positive way, because
when word gets out, and the word will get out. The truth of the
matter will result in catastrophic effects. At this point, I feel like
everything that I thought about Steem was just clever propaganda
and I should have been smarter than to have fallen for that.
The ultimatum is a game designed to study human economic decision making, so I guess it would fall under the broader meaning of game theory. It's not zero sum and it substantially involves psychic costs and benefits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_cost), so it seems a bit more ambiguous and subjective than standard game theory concepts.
I still think the biggest problem is the centralized distribution and the economic ignorance and immaturity of some of the large stakeholders. There are problems with the economic design as it is now too, but competent and reasonable stakeholders can compensate for a lot. I'm still hoping that it will survive through a combination of large stakeholders learning and selling out, but only time will tell. I think it's worth sticking around and trying to keep it afloat as long as possible because of its value as an accessible gateway to blockchains for a wider audience.
I think you might be right @troglodactyl. I'm still going to try and push to expose the soft-censorship aspect as much as I can, in hope that TPTB will consider revamping the system. I came up with an idea earlier, it probably wouldn't solve all the problems but it's an interesting idea.
I like to think about game theory in the realm of psychology. I found a clever quote on the internet about it, I think it came from a TV show or something.
You might like it:
"See in game theory, it serves you to be two-faced. Be everyone's friend till the moment you're not. You make them love you so much, that when they're up against it their loyalty will make them act against their own best interests. That's game theory. A cold, rational focus on winning. Even if it's at everyone else's expense." - unknownSometimes I wonder if that might be what Trump is up to, some high level game theory, and nobody knows until the end which way the cookie is going to crumble.
It's a pretty sneaky perspective, but I suppose ultimately it depends on if the individual using a tactic like that is working towards negative, or positive results.
That quote is almost straight Machiavelli:
So far I think TPTB's economic revamps have been in the wrong direction, but I keep hoping they'll improve. On Steem and the internet in general it's already a lot harder to completely crush and permanently silence someone than it was in Machiavelli's day, but there's lots of room for improvement. Until we can fix the centralized distribution, fix the economic incentives, and better educate more of the large stakeholders, I think our best option is to increase the linkage density of the social mesh. It's hard to silence someone who has a lot of followers in a large network without people noticing.
Once crushing is off the table, the discipline of constant dealings takes hold and reciprocity gains traction as a strategy. In the real world almost nothing is zero sum. You can usually cooperate for positive sum or betray for a negative sum outcome. Eventually rational people will gravitate toward cooperation and stop wasting time destroying each other for short term selfish gain.
I need to read up on Niccolo one day, but I'd rather watch a movie. Or cliff notes. I like concentrated info.
I am sure both of you are aware, but as long as the economic abundance of one is directly dependent on the economic scarcity of another there will be ample motivation for people with ill intent to justify their behavior through dystopic quotes like listed above. And there will be little to no reward for those who come with good intentions until they have given up on their ideals because of the rigged game.
It's not human nature, it's not unchangeable and not hereditary from what I can see and have experienced. It simply is part of the debt based fiat money structure that most of Western people have made a religiously integrated part of their psyche. We could also go further which would take us off-topic here for the time being.
@thoughts-in-time
Make a pool! Having read your mind (uhm... as in your postings ahahah, not quite there yet) I will definitely help out with sponsorship of the meme idea. And reading many other freethinkers' comment I would bet many more would be willing to give a bit of their earned Steem just to help clear up these issues for the future. you do NOT have to take this on your own shoulders, are we a community or what?
Had a great payout that I wanted to power up. I have just decided though that I will do no such thing until we get some actual answers here. Answers that pass not only the solidity- and logic-test, but especially the energetic-test to give it some cheesy name.
Pooling would also create a sub community in and of itself, giving participants opportunity to exchange ideas and to further gauge what the issue is that we are facing. We might be smart but only if we find a way to learn from each other's experience and views, no matter how "outlandish". Freethinkers can suspend judgment in listening to new and even dangerously-sounding ideas, no problem. A quality that I am missing completely with the notorious dev in question.
Yeah Dude, I'm already sure this is happening.
This has already happened to me, and it cost me a reputation point, and I was flagged by @blacklist-a for thought crime. These people have the thinnest skin! Freedom of speech exists no where on the internet. I thought Steemit was different. Turns out I was wrong. Now I can't even trade on the Internal market.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this topic @mathiasian. Sorry to hear about that, yeah I have to say I had a different perspective on steemit before I joined too. Then it took a long time for me to even notice the flagging phenomenon. Most people just don't mess around with it, because it' causes drama, and is rude, and discourages people from feeling comfortable to share their true thoughts on controversial topics.
In the HF20 down voting should be allowed, but only at the maximum vote power of the account you are down voting if that account has lees SP than you. That would change the dynamic completely.
Hey, that's clever! It would definitely cause less incentive for people to abuse the mechanic.
I think the amount of re-steems should be visible too. I think seeing the number of resteems would make it more likely for others to resteem in turn. Like Twitter, the more something is shared the more likely someone is going to be willing to share it themselves.
Excellent propositions. Where do these get listed for witnesses to consider?
That's a great idea!
Hypocrisy much, @mathiasian?
I feel sorry for you, that you feel you have to keep downvoting me for something I've done, cowardly, without telling me what it is that I've done to upset you. If I've written something so wrong, why don't you put in my place with an intellectual argument? You could even enlighten me. I'd be so grateful.
You want to be remembered as a bully-boy & a coward, then? Do you have your own children who some day you'd like to remember you this way? (I assume your online persona reflects your offline one. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't.)
So, yeah, I do feel sorry for you. Just probably not half as sorry for you as you yourself feel?
Reputation points are not currency, and are non-consensus, and aren't yours to control or trade; it didn't "cost" you anything. You don't own your reputation.
Yes, you earn your reputation! You earn you upvotes with good content and curation as they raise you reputation. Isn't that common sense?
Downvoted in disagreement as your staement is incorrect.
It is impossible to do away with flagging on a decentralized blockchain without it being overrun by spammers and hate speech.
Or if you disagree, how would you manage those issues without having a centralized party with the power to penalize/delete accounts?
@josephsavage, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I guess my main concern is with people who censor other people's posts. This type of thing really must be discouraged. Unfortunately today, in the age of the social justice warrior 'hate speech' can mean almost anything, especially in America.
I'm not sure what country you are in, but in America free speech is traditionally more important than polite speech. Because if you can censor people based on disliking what they say, then you create an environment of thought control, and tyranny. It's why the first amendment to the American Constitution is the freedom of speech, and of the press.
Maybe a mute function could be implemented somehow so that if I don't want to see posts from @racistdouchebag I could press mute, and I'd never see any of his posts or comments? Yet for other people they would still see his comments and posts, unless they pressed mute too.
There had to be some kind of middle ground that avoids outright censorship.
A mute function is a really good idea. I think there is something in place, but I have never used it so I couldn't really say for sure.
I do agree with you about freedom of speech versus censorship. With flagging, a 'sensitivity' group could prevent hate speech from being rewarded, but it doesn't stop people from saying what they want.
There is a world of difference between that and all the accounts being randomly blocked on Twitter and Facebook for expressing unpopular opinions.
The issue with flagging isn't that people are abusing their flags, the issue is that the power to flag is unfairly distributed because of the way STINC premined the blockchain.
Fortunately the distribution is improving gradually. Unfortunately there is still a long way to go.
SMT's will be a huge step in the right direction, because it allows individual communities a 'fresh start' where the content within their garden will be ranked based on their own chosen reward mechanism, instead of based on the SP of the super-rich.
You sound more learned on some of these topics than I am. I'm going to have to study Steemit more, read the white paper in full, and also start investigating the SMT situation as well.
I think the white paper is accessible for most people with a decent background in blockchain technology or game theory. Might be a little challenging otherwise.
The SMT white paper is a lot more technical, but you should be able to find some high level overviews breaking it down.
Downvoting does not destroy rewards, it reallocates them to other things that have been upvoted.
The estimated pending payout on a post doesn't belong to the poster, it's just a prediction based on the vote tally so far. Downvoting and causing that prediction to drop isn't stealing rewards from the poster because the rewards don't belong to the poster until the payout happens.
I disapprove of the use of downvotes to hide content or take away rewards based on disagreement with the ideas presented, but I think downvotes are a very necessary feature to take away rewards for spam and attempts to harvest rewards without producing anything of value.
There are real problems with the curation/rewards system, and much larger problems with the centralized distribution of SP. Those I think are the real source of the censorship/downvote abuse. I think getting rid of the downvote feature itself would be a serious error.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment @troglodactyl. You make a very interesting point with respect to the problem of spam. I think that many users overtime develop a discerning eye and pretty much ignore spam comments. Well, that's what I do anyways.
If Steemit were to keep the flag system because of spam comments alone, that leaves us in the same predicament whereby richey-rich the instaWHALE could downvote posts based on his or her ideological leanings.
In the age of social justice warriors, it's really only a matter of time before that kind of thing starts to happen, I think they'd get a real kick out of it to be honest. Some people just love to powertrip, they get off on it.
Do you think that the damage that spammy comments do to the reward pool are equivalent to the problems caused by soft censorship? I know that the soft censorship is really not a super huge problem right now, but I definitely see it getting to that point.
One of the things that really caused me to embrace Steemit was the fact that all of the other platforms were beginning to censor content. I think it's important that somehow, we find a way to protect Steemit from the same type of bad reputation that will ultimately lead to their downfall.
As far as your first two points, I will have to concede that you are correct in the technical sense. However, I think that you too might concede that most Steemians latch onto Steemit in a more simplistic way.
A comparative analogy might be: They can legally ban guns in America because the manufacturing industry has converted their guns into products, and products can be regulated. What they did, was an end-run around the constitution. It was very clever. However, people in America have learned that they can print, and mill their own guns, and it's completely lawful.
I would posit that the initial regulation of guns, went against the spirit of the constitution, and although they could technically get away with it. Everything was legal. It was, however, morally repugnant to try and trick Americans into believing that they couldn't own a arms without registration, and a permit.
There are allot of laws and institutions that are morally repugnant. For example civil asset forfeiture. They found a way to legally steal from people, but it's not theft if it's legal right? That's tricky territory, a slippery road down into the abyss.
Covert censorship is about to become so very unpopular, I think it's prime time that Steemit find a more creative solution, even if it has to put out instructive YouTube videos, that encourage people not to upvote spammy comments.
The survival of Steem depends on the majority of stake being held by good faith voters. I think that has to be accepted as a premise, as attempting to work around it and minimize potential abuse by a dominant group of stakeholders compromises the integrity of the whole system's design. If it becomes clear that abusive whales dominate the network and the distribution can't be fixed by adjusting incentives such that they either cease their abuse or sell out then I think a fork to a new distribution would be the required fix. I hope that's never necessary.
The community is beginning to swarm and unite against abusive whale behavior in many cases. Services like @freezepeach are being created to raise awareness about potential abuse, and I think steemit.com and other sites should add a controversial tab to help raise the visibility of posts with both upvotes and downvotes.
I shared some other ideas in my reply to @hmushtaq also.
Thanks for sharing that, I didn't even know about @feezepeach!
The sad reality of the situation is, the ability to buy heaps of SP thus empowering them to up or down vote content, is what gives the currency the current value that it possesses. Other than this what sets Steem apart from any other cyrpto? It's sort of the bane and beauty all in one. I for one am glad that at least everyone can click "reveal" and judge the situation themselves. Wish I could do that on YT or FB. (Lolz, who am I kidding I wouldn't touch FB with someone else's fingers)
LOL, I hear you @imjustsaying. I'd much rather believe that people are buying Steem as a means to promote their posts, or gain extra bandwidth, as opposed as a means to soft-censor the posts of others, but you're probably right.
No-doubt, by now some people may be purchasing Steem to flag posts, and I'm pretty sure that flagging in spirit anyhow wasn't initially intended for the purposes of anything other than removing spam posts, or abusive trolling posts.
One thing is for certain, if that worse case scenario comes to be, and I question if it isn't already in some cases, then Steemit will take a significant reputation hit. I think I realize why I had my initial misconceptions in the first place.
It may be that Steemit employees look at it is nothing published on the block-chain is ever censored actually, the problem is most people aren't reading the block-chain directly, they're using the Steemit interface to read it, and when soft-censorship happens in the realm of the Steemit interface it looks like censorship.
Another thing to point out would be, that people who engage in unnecessary flagging are actually working against the spirit of the platform, if they weren't the downvote function would be right next to the upvote function. It wouldn't be hiding in the upper right hand corner as a flagging utility.
It seems to me that the only reason they have 'disagreement with rewards' as one of the guidelines is because they simply have no control over whether or not people use the function as it was intended.
So that guideline write up in essence; is the ultimate out, it takes Steemit out of the loop in a weak sort of way, and puts the burden of frivolous flagging on the user who engages in it. In the future I see the problem becoming untenable, and potentially antithetical to the spirit of the platform.
I will have to go back and watch some of the early promotional videos and interviews that the founder has done in promoting Steemit, and listen very carefully and try to make sense of the exact claims that were made, if I am to make any sense of what is going on.
Thanks for your insight, into the matter!
I defiantly don't like it when I see it. But the first thing I do when I see a hidden comment is I click on it to see what's there. It actually draws my attention much more than normal posts and comments do. I HAVE to know why. often I end up bringing up the flagger's profile to see what other stuff they have been flagging. It's sort of a two edged sword, yes they can remove the payout but it certainly gets my attention. If I see someone serial flagged I usually follow them to see what transpires. I've yet to be flagged but I may get a string of them with my last post. I just couldn't hold my peace anymore about things I see as damaging to the community as a whole. If your interested I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
followed <3
I think the system should introduce moderators, who approve of flagging before a post is really flagged. I mean someone may flag a post, despite it being a proper post and not a spam. In that case, the user should have an option to file a complaint, and if moderators see that there was no problem with the post, the downvote should be removed.
As it is now everyone is a moderator, and I think that's as it should be. It should be a decentralized network, and the problem is the centralized distribution and the shortsightedness of some of the whales. Adding more centralizing features like designated moderators with special powers is only going to make things worse because that power will ultimately still be controlled by the stakeholders, amplifying the destruction of the centralized stake distribution.
I do think there should be curation penalties as well as curation rewards. If you use your stake abusively to upvote spam or downvote in order to censor, other stakeholders should swarm and counteract those votes. Just as you should receive curation rewards for upvoting popular content, you should receive a negative curation reward (a penalty) for voting against a strong stakeholder consensus. In any case the survival of Steem depends on the majority of stake being held by good faith voters.
Hey, that's a really clever idea @hmushtaq! Maybe if someone engages in soft-censorship too many times, they could permanently, or temporarily lose their flagging rights? That would put less of a work load on the moderator(s).
I think someone abusing the flag button that much (with malicious intent that is) must lose more rights than just not being able to flag.
I feel where you are coming from, but at the same time we don't want to turn into the people we are fighting against.
I think that you point out a major problem that the platform is but it's certainly not the only one. I just saw a lot of some of the people with the most steem power the other day and a bunch of the sames on their self vote and vote for each other. I think that investors are going to think twice about getting into something like that. If we were playing monopoly and someone buys up all the property we can't play anymore, we would have to start over. The same thing might have to happen here.
I hear you @read3986. Self upvoting, and voting for friends is actually pretty common place. In fact ever since whales started selling their votes to other users in exchange for Steem. It altered the whole spirit and dynamic of the platform to the extent to where people need to promote their posts via whale services in order for it to be seen. Otherwise there is not much of a chance to get noticed.
Learn more about that here.
I know it doesn't seem right, but unfortunately that's the direction that people have chosen to go with it. There's no way to force whales to engage in manual curation, although many still probably do from time to time.
what's nice here is that the down votes are public so everyone knows if someone is being a dick and then they can up vote to counter act the down vote and go downvote whoever is being a dick, it seems to be working pretty well so far. I have only had one guy who was so offended he had to be a little bitch and reach into my pocket with a down vote because he disagreed with me so maybe I would be more bitter if I had been down voted more but right now they don't seem like a huge problem.
@funboby51 I agree with you. Unfortunately though, it's only a matter of time before it starts to become abused rampantly. The fact that a dev is doing it, I see it as a bad omen of things to come. Plus we live in the age of the social justice warrior, and if you even so much as look at them cross, then you're a racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobe who is "literally Hitler" and wants to commit gendercide.
LOL, it was a downvote from someone angry I exposed the transgender agenda, you might get a kick out of my piece today about a girl on steroids wrestling
Wow, can't say I'm surprised. I'll check it out in a bit, thanks for sharing!
it turns out you were totally right, some asshole just hit me with a nearly $2 downvote and they didn't even leave a comment!
gathered more freethinekrs in the last two days around this censorship issue here than ever.
Amazing to see how the bad always comes with the good.
followed, excited to read your article funbobby51
wow, sneak and blacklist-a just proved you right, that's really sad.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
It should be made so that I can decide if someones opinion (their upvotes and downvotes) matters to me in the same way I can decide if their posts matter to me (follow or ignore)
@shmultz thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter!
Seems to me if people are concerned about rewards pool... rather than using flag the market can simply assign value by getting off their rears and actually upvote good content. I'm beginning to agree that the flag tool (as is) is nothing but a detriment.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter @jbgarrison!
Thanks for the post.
I've been here just long enough to start looking at the numbers and mechanics and trying to figure them out. I appreciate the low down on soft censorship, as I've seen some weird interpersonal shit on here.
I'm not very concerned about that. I can navigate most social problems, trolls included. But paid political trolls, on the other hand, that's a completely different situation.
Correct the Record will be here in 2018. Rest assured. As will some Astroturf Republican Troll Farm. It will happen here.
Thanks for your comment @k9disc, yeah it's bound to happen at some point, probably astroturf of all varieties. It's all about the divide an conquer, in the realm that billionaires play in.
Isn't the real issue, weighted voting? If everyone's vote were equal then these issues would probably not exist.
Good question @girthbomb. I personally think that downvotes (or flagging) shouldn't have weight, but I think that upvotes should. Realistically though, I don't know how that would effect the economy of platform.
I've written about this months ago. It's a long post. You can read it here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@vimukthi/a-philosophical-and-economic-outlook-at-steemit-sbd-and-flagging-and-suggestions-for-a-better-future-based-on-positive
The main point I make is that we need a constitution that highly specifically outline what to flag and what not to flag. The current sub-optimal system has created many stupid flags and flag wars with the biggest one being haejin vs berniesanders.
Please take your time to read the article and let me know your inputs on the matter.
Thanks :-)
Hi @vimkthi, I look very much forward to reading your post. I'm multitasking at the moment, but when my mind is less divided later in the day, I shall read your post and sound off in the comment section!
Wow. Thank you @thoughts-in-time for this amazing post. Following you now!
I am most impressed with the maturity and quality of the discussion/exchange here. You wouldn't see this on Facebook for sure.
I've only been on Steemit for less than 2 months, so don't know how everything works yet. But I am optimistic that the community, including the witnesses and those types who have more power, will opt for the true spirit of what Steemit was conceived for.
Best of luck to all!
Thank you for your comment @libertyacademy.
I shall follow you too, and am also very liberty oriented.
I'm hopeful as well that they're going to follow the spirit of it's conception.
Yet I find myself wondering sometimes, if I know what that is. Or if it is what -
people have claimed it to be.
Thanks!
Is there a post somewhere on Steemit that shows ALL the witnesses (and moderators? not sure how this all works yet) keeping track of their supervisory actions on the platform? I think some kind of increased transparency about these could help. Just my 2 cents.
This guy has allot of good instruction videos about Steemit. It's kind of a complicated platform, also here is the updated whitepaper which is only 32 pages. I'd pay special attention to the last paragraph in page 16, they don't exactly shine a big spotlight on that aspect of things, but one should be aware.
followed.
I knew you people existed.
I agree with you, but how do you deal with things like copyright infringement or spam.
Hello @fictionalfacts, I'd suggest the ability to mute people would be nice. This way if you mute someone, you cannot see what they say, but other people can. As far as copyright, I think Steemit already has a system in place for them to remove that from the blockchain.
What the hell guys? We can't have a conversation without bullshit flags down voting because you disagree with the content?
Flags are for correcting completely crazy valuations, and suppressing spam, not because you disagree with something.
I actually think flags are necessary but need to be used responsibly. Which... Yeah... No comment.
Sorry I was late to this party.
I wonder though, maybe trolls and pirates don't really care about flags. Trolls troll to troll, who's to say they don't have a real account somewhere that's well behaved, but they use these proxy accounts to do their dirty work?
And pirates... pirates can post links to files, plagiarize etc.. all in the name of making content available. People will always have access to it, just by clicking the show button. They don't think twice about rep/value etc..
The flag looks like it's gonna hurt real users more than the intended target. Again, if someone gets pissy, they'll use a proxy account to express their anger, trollery, not their real account (which they may execute caution before using it to speak).
The flag needs to be recoded and require maybe hundreds of users to click flag before it takes effect. Whales can probably keep their large inflence with upvoting, but flagging should require the collective effort. If you see a Disney film uploaded, identify it with the community and everyone can go kick it off the site to prevent some lawsuit drama. Community effort for cleanup instead of just 1 user.
Not a bad idea, I'll grant you that. I don't think the examples of trolls or pirates changes the discussion. If you use an alternate, you have to split your stake to do it, which in that case there's not much of a difference in treating this as two independent entities.
For now, it's what we have. Keep in mind that the community can and should counter the flag effects of a misbehaving flagger. But if there can be change to make this consensus better, I'm game. Same applies to upvotes in my opinion.
Hello @eonwarped, no need to be sorry, and thanks for adding to the conversation!
I think at the very least Steemit could remove the dithering and post hiding, and maybe replace that with some type of visual indicator in feeds that content has been flagged. This would give people the opportunity to counter the flag if they disagreed with it.
More radically I think they should nix it all together. People could still flag content from other platforms, but it would make this platform more positive in general. Of course they'd have to figure out an alternative solution for dealing with spam though.
But yeah, at the very least; the first part would definitely be doable.
Oh interesting.. I like the idea of the marker of shame instead of hiding the post. But on the other hand suppressing spam is useful... What to do what to do..... Maybe there's a way to accomplish both. Actually the fact that flagged comments go to the bottom should be enough of a censorship in itself? Hum. But then you can spam in response to a high value comment too. Dunno.
Interesting ideas, keep those wheels a turning! The more we question, and contemplate, the faster we get to the answers.
If flagging isn't the answer how would you suggest dealing with spammers, plagiarism, posting of porn without NSFW tags, and all the other things that flagging is intended to solve?
That's the million dollar question right there, I hope Steemit figures it out before people realize what a cancer the flagging tool has become. Nobody likes cancer, Steemit should fix it, or cut it out.
The cancer is the spam (lumping all the BS into one catchall name). It's WAY more prolific then flagging.
Multiple accounts upvoting themselves is spam. and let's not split hairs about it being "a spouses account" and all they do is upvote your posts never interacting with the community at all...that is a multi account holder.
Posting stolen information or photos is spam (and illegal).
Posting porn in categories other then NSFW to try and catch viewers is spam.
Posting over and over in a categories that your post doesn't belong in just to attract eyeballs is spam.
So without a flagging system which you want to do away with the spammers will have free reign. The concept of an open system without a body you can report people to and get them banned means you need a system like flagging to counteract bad behavior.
I get you taking a kneejerk reaction to the whole flag wars as on the surface level it looks bad, but that is tossing the "baby out with the bathwater" as my Grandfather would say. Just because you don't like one part of the system doesn't mean the whole system needs to go away.
Without the ability of people to use their votes to counteract what they may see as spam the spammers will dominate this platform in no time at all. You can't leave them unchecked.
Don't forget those that are flagging are using their voting power just the same as someone that upvotes. They have a limited amount of votes to use up or down for the day. The big difference is if someone believes enough that something is wrong to downvote they gain absolutely no rewards. Worse they tend to become a target from those who don't understand that it really is a necessity to make Steemit work (IMO).
So until someone has a better solution flagging is needed or you will see way more people leave due to the free reign the spammers would have.
This is a very good thought. I believe, that flags have a place to be, but should be used to express an opinion. If all start using flags, it is possible to crush a set of users, to clean competition and other bad things. Perhaps flags can be used against spam, especially if a person does not understand the warnings and even in posts about spam writes spam comments
Hello @naditinkoff, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter!
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