Excellent post, up-voted and re-steemed.
I am only just starting to spend any serious amount of time on Steemit but immediately I see the very serious problem of misuse of flagging. I can see there is a rationale behind the flagging feature, but the problems seem to me greater than the advantages.
Just a thought off the top of my head - could there be some adjudicating authority that quickly assesses flags and removes them if there is not a sound reason (the 2 purposes you give above seem entirely reasonable to me).
Thanks, only authority on Steem are witnesses but you would need lot more people and also make it worth for somebody to evaluate the posts. Also quality of a post is subjective. I prefer no flags and I will try to convince others.
The ideal solution for me is personal blacklist to filter the spam and things you don't like. This way no one gets hurt and everybody is in control what content they see.
Your blacklisting idea makes sense to me on the face of it. The list would be constantly growing but I suppose it would be easy to write a program for users that auto-muted accounts as they were added to the blacklist.
Initially I saw Steemit as having great potential for freelance journalism, but some time soon governments are going to wake up to the existence of the platform and have a fit when they realize they can't censor it. One scenario I can imagine happening is governments (or powerful individuals) start secretly putting large amounts of money into influencing what's going on on the platform. Say you are a journalist who exposes government corruption, quickly you find that there is no opportunity for you to make money on Steemit as they are heavily downvoting.
Yes, government can infiltrate Steemit with a lot of money, they can downvote (flag), and that can discourage people. So, it is up to we the people to upvote those posts to outweigh the downvotes regardless of where they may come from. The downvoting does not delete (remove) the content off the blockchain of Steemit but it does demonetizes like they do already on YouTube. By the way, Twitter & Facebook banned me for sharing a Hitler photo.
Good points joey, those are certainly advantages over FB and Twit. As I understand it, someone could in fact design a different website to look at the Steemit data that showed all the flagged comments, and even who had flagged them. That would help us uncover attacks and co-ordinate remedial action.
I'm guessing you're not a fan of old Adolf though right? :-)
You have great ideas. Should I be a fan of Adolf?
Thanks joey. I am giving this whole matter of the flagging a lot of thought and devising a complicated strategy to counter the problem.
I've seen your picture of old Adolf, I see what you were driving at but we better not talk about THAT because we might get flagged!! LOL
Phones are giving people cancer. It is important to buy things to block the radiation and much more. More addictive than smoking.
Yes it would be an awful lot of work since people are abusing the flags so much. If people could be trusted to only flag posts for plagiarism and spamming, but clearly they can't ....