My husband and I invested in Steem. What SP we have, it's mostly paid for by our savings as investment. So far, it's not looking good. But we're hanging in there because we believe in the potential of this platform. As investors, we have a great incentive in fighting abuse.
Abuse
The spammers grow daily, multi-account holders are all over the place, you submit a new post and here comes 30 new followers that you don't want! That said, a few good things have happened recently with the irredeemables and Steemit Inc taking away their delegated SP to these irredeemable accounts. But just the number of irredeemable accounts accepted is astonishing - 17k initially from what @sneak committed in GitHub.
We were involved through @steemflagrewards by @anthonyadavisii fighting some of these everyday irredeemable abusers. Being part of steemflagrewards and us being connected to steemcleaners - we see all kinds of crazy abuses daily. From large account holders to new accounts. My question would be who hurts Steemit more by abuse - a whale circle-jerking and self voting or a new user spamming comments?
Downvote incentives
On the downvote incentives, I kind of agree too. We use some of our SP to downvote abuse and use the rest in upvoting quality content. We really don't like to downvote but we're the kind of people who see trash, pick them up and throw them to the garbage. We don't like it but we do it anyway since no one seems to care. Like @dwinblood, we don't downvote for disagreeing, there's a better way to show disagreement than downvoting. The necessary downvotes are reserved to the abusers - copy/pasters, plagiarizers, spammers, scammers, phishers and the accounts that think it's ok to threaten others with physical violence.
How difficult is it to integrate a plagiarism tool within the posting process? Like so, before the post is accepted it was ran through plagiarism software but there would have to be a way to appeal because of folks like us who have a YT channel/blog and we're moving our content here.
What kind of downvote incentives will enable us to actually fight abusers but not allow abusers to abuse more? We can't think of a solution for it that doesn't require some kind of moderator. And who would that be and would they do the same thing to everyone? People will favor their friends even when their friends are wrong. So this is a difficult task to accomplish. Who is going to set the guidelines for what abuse is and who is going to define those types of abuse so everyone has access to it in their own language.
Language Barriers
Another problem we're having in fighting abuse is the language barrier. We have many Germans, Polish, Chinese, Turkish but not any Spanish or any other languages helping us fight abuse. If we want to help somebody and teach them that copy/paste is not ok, we have to be able to communicate with them. This is a big issue on the platform.
How difficult would it be to integrate a multi-lingual TOS with definitions of unaccepted behavior included?
There is a lot of activity trying to bring new accounts on the platform. Many of these new users languages are not supported here. Wouldn't it be wise to support the language first then promote amongst that demographic?
Increased curation percentage
I would say yes on 50% curation rewards and that would motivate many who are selling votes now to curate. I'm manually curating now, somewhat auto-curating using SteemAuto because I actually read the posts of the people I support.
Let me know your thoughts on my thoughts :) And by the way, thanks for this great post. I hope we can get all these issues resolved.