Reason 342 to not trust centralized platforms
So I was reading this article about the Twitter CEO possibly being biased about Bitcoin lately (which in case you haven't noticed, there's been a lot of tweets about Bitcoin coming from him and when others suggested Eth or another alt he would go for a "No, only Bitcoin!!" Now this is all fine, everyone has their own opinion, one is not going to win someone over in an internet debate without even knowing all the info involved.
The article was about the @Bitcoin account on Twitter and how it has possibly gotten shadowbanned: Article from Coinspice called @Bitcoin Twitter Account Claims Shadow Ban, Jack Dorsey Bias and I have to admit I didn't read through the whole article but something did catch my eye considering the Steem blockchain. This part:
Imagine you're on your favorite platform, but you're going to miss a lot of tweets from accounts you want to see on your feed because someone else has a bias towards what that account is tweeting about. In this case talking about BitPay also accepting BCH now so Steam should reconsider adding Bitcoin (in this case Bitpay so BCH maybe more than BTC when they want to spend $5).
The question now though is that either @Bitcoin really did get shadowbanned and these stats are real:
oooor they were botting it up before that and Twitter caught their bots, thus they taking this narrative instead thinking proving the bot use is difficult to do. This is a common problem on Twitch as well, streamers can just say "a fan was doing it to screw with me/want me banned". Either way to an investor it would not make it an easier choice which one to trust, but if they happened to be on Steem, all this bot use and shadowbanning would not exist in the same way. Someone is going to at some point create a pattern recognition software that detects bot votes & comments from normal ones, right? Especially if you can see their history and especially if all your other friends are all verified through a front-end on our blockchain and already trust eachother there, hell they may even only show votes from pre-approved users on their list, how cool would that be? There's a free idea for you to get rid of that bot/advertisement "spam" by upvoting you. :)
All I'm saying is, there's no end to know what is going on on current centralized platforms, I've noticed the same thing on Reddit lately, the subreddits are all up and down cause the incentive to pay people to shill coin A or B is worth the profit it could generate come next bull run even if the coin is doing nothing special or having any actual users using it. There's so much vote manipulation going on it is impossible for moderators to find out, even if they could see all the logs which only admins can. There is so much leeway for doing whatever the fuck you want with the platform and getting away with it most of the time, if not all you lose is an account that takes 1min to recreate at no cost.
Farming accounts and blackmarkets pricing all accounts in real money is not something new for platforms that don't allow selling or buying accounts. I remember there were black markets for ingame gold in World of Warcarft, of course there's gonna be for the giant social media platforms and of course it's gonna be on Steem the same way too, but here at least we can even find out if someone has changed their key since activity came back but this account was suddenly behaving weirdly. There are so many benefits to just being open and public with all your actions and you being aware of the fact and being comfortable with using it anyway.
That's the inevitable future we are headed in and it looks really damn good to me, too bad others will continue to prolong their failed experiment cause advertisers are giving them so much incentive to.
Advertisers are not giving them incentives. Most platforms are bound by fiduciary duties, which more often than not means the boardroom requires maximization strategy.
Twitter for example, particularly Jack, has stood up longest for freedom of speech. Pretty much until he couldn’t else anymore. He is after all an advisor of Stellar too.
I’m not saying these platforms aren’t wrong. I, with a steem related account — an account which had been in good standing for many years and was just restarted contentwise — have also been banned from Twitter. Overzealous mods enjoy the power, too often sadly enough.
But being publicly traded companies they are sort of obliged to. We first would have to change the focus and expectations of shareholders from maximizing to building the future.
Which would be ironic considering all the manipulation happening in this part of the internet we participate to.
A reputation system built on slightly more sophistication than Steem has now would be brilliant.
There’s one thing rather funny in the story of the account this post was contextually created on: it always happens to the same people. Funnily enough, that exact person is one of the biggest “oligarchs” in the world of crypto.
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a good exp is Alex Jones
Twitter was the last mainstream website to kick him out.
Jack tried but caved in and as such Twitter is a censorship hub.
Gab can try to be better but if it reaches Twitter size the same thing will happen
But no one can stop the blockchain 😛
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It was even Jack who overruled others at Twitter. Only because of Jack did Alex Jones stay on Twitter as long as he did.
But Jack could easily have said “Frak it, fire me if you really think that’s what needs to be done. I’m not banning. I have earned enough in last decade.” :D
😂
He sell it for bitcoin of course 😉
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He’s Stellar advisor. So he would definitely buy more XLM for Square. ;)
He also one for LN/major investor of it
he can do it for bitcoin and stellar lel
lol first time I see the tts bot do a comment :D
A glitch in the matrix.
Took me 357 gazillion years before they found me, now I have a stalker. LOL.
Ehh...it's bullshit double speak and everyone knows it.
First of all, shadow banning doesn't really exist...because that's not what they're doing. They're doing a number of things to decrease visibility of profiles due to a whole host of reasons. You could call all of these things together shadow banning...but individual accounts might be subject to lowered visibility in a number of ways and not others. It's not really likely due to some political reason as far as I'm aware...though I'm sure they're dumb enough to give the power to individual employees, allowing a whole mess of abuse.
There are various terms that are outright banned from search. That's utter bullshit if you ask me. So if you search for a number of things, like adult related things for example, or things that could be adult related, you won't see jack shit, or you'll see a severely limited set of results. When you look at the results though, and what is censored, it's pretty obvious that their code is shit. Now, having an adult filter of some sort is understandable...but a user should be allowed to disable it. Twitter is, after all, by their own TOS supposed to be only for 18+. They don't just censor adult related things from search though. They don't publish anything about how their search is censored either, so people don't really have any clue what is censored. Unless there's a list out there someone has compiled of banned search words. Not everything is outright banned though. Some things just have somewhat censored results.
There are also a number of activities that set off things in their code to sort of bury accounts in various different ways. Of course they don't tell you any of the things that might set off their code to censor your account from feeds or search or have somewhat limited visibility. But, they are censoring or "shadow banning" accounts.
This is kind of understandable, because there are tons of idiots out there pushing for these sites to censor in certain ways. They want them to get rid of supposed terrorist accounts that spam bullshit for example, because to those idiots, their hundreds or thousands of followers sounds like a lot. Likely the majority of them are bots being followed by bots though. The irony is that if they weren't idiots, they could actually use such activity to be able to find wannabe terrorists and actual terrorists easier. Hell, they could even actually load up spyware onto terrorist machines, if they don't already.
They have a massive platform and they have quite a number of things that they want to censor for quite a number of reason. Maybe bot spam. Maybe russian spam bots. Maybe porn spam bots. Maybe just normal porn. Often the adult content is one of the first to suffer the censorship. It's amazing we're still reproducing at all considering how much we wanna deny that we use sexual reproduction.
I know enough from looking at what they do and do not block in different ways to know their code is absolute shit. The activity people are calling shadow banning is actually a number of different things and different levels and they pretty much completely ignore the massive number of accounts that are completely missed or are falsely tagged, unless it catches major press, then they deny it at the same time as reversing it.
Basically they got really shit code and some kind of flags that go off to make accounts less visible. The reason for the controversy is because the code is shit. But, it should be controversial regardless, because they are censoring accounts, not just spam bots. Hell, they do a horrible job of actually catching the spam bots. It wouldn't even be that hard. They musta spent all their money on server admins and code optimizers and not hired a single regex expert.
I know the bitcoin account was banned or shadow banned once before.
This was because what's his name that started bitcoincash was running the bitcoin account and kept saying things like bcash was bitcoin and trying to trick people to purchase bcash thinking it was bitcoin.
I could see banning the account for the shady crap he was doing.
For doing that I would find it acceptable if they banned it according to their rules.
Technically they could ban the account for being impersonator. :D
I doubt that was the reason. That would actually make sense and be responsible. It was probably due to some overzealous keyword search due to scammy crypto spam bots and the idiots accidentally flagged the bitcoin account.
I talk to my grandma on Facebook and my other grandma on Twitter. That's all.
Pfft, I go to Twitter and Facebook regularly to either meet chicks or bring people to steemit. They talk about "freedom of speech" then end the sentence with a "but" clause. They work in the background, manipulating shit and playing all that sneaky politics, we know all they care about is their profit at the end of the day.
The Bitcoin Twitter account does raise issues on who can be who.
Twitter could of just deleted the bitcoin Twitter account and since it promotes BCH it could of very well be justified to do it in the case aka taking someone identity rule...
But amazingly the fact the account stayed but shadowbanned is pretty bad...
But I won't talk about what exactly going on but something that makes me wonder...
How can blockchain/decentralized social networks deal with stolen identity. Who decides what?
Love to have your viewpoint
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I guess you can easily prove if you're the real user by verifying through other projects where you've used the same name before Steem. Other than that I think at some point there will be front-ends or companies that will require KYC and some users won't mind doing that and then they realize, hey we could give them a mark that shows they're verified through us and others can see that.
Now imagine a dapp that incentivizes people to verify their identity so they can have "more legit users" than the competition. :)
It should never surprise us at this point as it is clear that we are the products for these platforms. We all know that in business, bad products can destroy a brand and that is how we are being treated; a product. No surprise the bans are active and “shoot first, ask questions later!”
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PS. I wonder why both Steem accounts got suspended recently on Twitter. Hmm. (Are now back though, but still)
Had some issues with Twitter as well with my @steemfiction account. I got it resolved and I'm now using the Tweetdeck interface which is actually pretty sweet and allows multiple people to use my account as long as I add them.
That's pretty interesting, similar to Steem you can give people authority to use our accounts with their own posting key. :)
@cannabis-news came here just to keep everything safe from censorship!
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Well, at least the twitter ceo isn't a massive proponent for XVG / DOGE / equivialant shitcoin 😂 also, I was wondering how I'd go about getting whitelisted for ocdb? Not really a bot user but would be nice to be on the list.