Hello fellow Steemians (or how we are called).
I recently joined Steem and this is my first post. But I have been browsing only for 10 minutes here and I feel like I already found a loophole in the whole STEEM reward system.
The problem
It seems to me the page here is already flooded with STEEM farmers, who create lazy and bad content. They, on their side have some followers, which simply upvote their content to earn STEEM and create a symbiosis between them, in which both are rewarded with STEEM for nothing. This as a whole could create multiple STEEM farms with bad content and high upvotes, which spams the platform.
In those 10 minutes I have already seen content with 60$ worth of upvotes, which basically was 3 pictures and 4-5 sentences about how the person likes reading books... and the comments were also like: I agree with you.
Another problem is that people are going to enrich themselves with original content they never created.
The solution
This could be tackled by moderation. But how?
Let's say we introduce a new "report" button, which works like the upvote button. But if the reports exceed the upvotes, the post gets hidden/deleted and the reward for the post gets transferred to the reporters.
But if we reward moderators for these removals, we only manage to move from the STEEM farmers to the STEEM farm farmers. It would only add another step required: The farmers can simply report themselves and cash out again.
So we could go further:
We could take a "winner takes it all" approach for successful farm reports. Let's say the winner is chosen randomly. (We can't split it up. The farmers could simply report themselves again to cash out.)
This would prevent people from farming, because the farmers can't simply vote against themselves, because most likely someone else will get the STEEM, which makes farming not interesting anymore.
Possible dangers
Posts in an early stage could be easily killed. --> Solution: Allow reporting only at a certain threshold.
EDIT: I have just discovered the flag option. But I think my solution is quite nice, because it is scalable to millions of users.
I hope I was able to start an intersting discussion.
Greetings
@freethoughts
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