Steemit Idea: Flagging Abusive/Malicious Users
Problem
I've run across a user who has apparently made it his mission to try to flag posts just because he's having a bad time here. He happens to have 10MV, so since I have more, I can single handedly "remove" all of his flags. This is all well and good, but is this sustainable?
I got thinking about it and thought, "what if we could flag a user as well as a post?" Who's to say that one day, someone joins and gets something like 1000MV, only to act in this malicious way? It would take a lot of us to keep them at bay, and it would be around the clock work. What happens if dozens of large accounts appear and start doing this?
Potential Solution
What if instead, we could actually flag a user? This flag wouldn't earn any potential money, but would still cost voting power to discourage abusing this feature. A meter would appear showing what percentage of Vests have flagged the user. Once, let's say, 50% of Vests flag the user, the user's account would be "locked" from voting. Maybe the cut off should be higher, I'm not sure. Perhaps 70-80% would be better to prevent potential, unlikely whale abuse. These flags would be with the account for the life of the account, unless the person who flagged the user changes their mind.
These users would still be able to interact with their Steem, Steem Power, and Steem Dollars, but would not be able to vote. They could also still post and reply, so that they can defend themselves. However, perhaps their reputation could get tied to this "vote lock" ensuring that they would have little incentive to try this tactic if they are in the wrong. By taking away their voting power and crippling their reputation, we are neutering them on the site, while not taking away their ability to access their funds or content.
@steemitblog mentioned revoking voting permissions and I wonder if they are already on to an idea like this, although it seemed it the post that this would be more of an optional function a user could enable/disable on their own account for various reasons.
Clearly there are users who will join this platform with the sole purpose of doing all they can to bring it down. I'd say that rather than fighting a never-ending battle against these users, let's ostracize them together as a community. The damage these type of actors do to user retention could really be huge in the long run and I feel that this could be a way to stop a really big potential problem before it gets out of hand.
Meantime
In the meantime, try to read posts that are greyed out when the user has a new or above average reputation. Most likely they are being needlessly harassed. After reading the post and checking it out to make sure it's OK, upvote it to bring it to the light. If you don't have enough vote power, reach out to users like me and we can help.
I have no patience for people who want to hurt our experiment here with actions directly targeted against new users. I feel this may be a solution of sorts and just wanted to throw it out there in case I was on to something. Let me know what you think!
This was originally one of the features planned for 0.14.0, but after a massive backlash about censorship, the feature was dropped.
People were completely against what you're suggesting. View the discussion about it here: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/279
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
willbanks made a great observation:
Really interesting discussion and I'm glad you pointed me there.
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Update: I didn't mean to upvote myself. It was a slip of the finger, but now it won't let me undo it.
So what youre looking for is to bring bills of attainder to steemit. Well, i supppose thats one solution.
But if you really look at the user you were talking about, thats exactly how all this nonsense started. He got cheetah banned because some people in the abuse channel didnt like him, and all his posts were greyed out, and misery loves company so he went and got himself some.
No, i don't agree with what he did, but it was entirely predictable.
For problem flaggers, including the self-styled good guys, the best solution seems to me to be simply adjusting the UI to ignore them vis a vis visibility. Make it so that if you flag enough posts that eventually become visible, your flag just doesnt count toward greying a post out (which is a feature thats in the UI not the blockchain). Voting privelages are bought and paid for. they shouldnt be suspended in any case.
Very good points. I'd love to see a way to reduce the influence of problem flaggers through the UI like you mentioned.
Flagging users would also cause the same problems if the flagger were to create multiple accounts just to get someone banned. There needs to be some sort of payment for flagging or IP banning solution by the admins to prevent these flaggers.
I wrote on this subject a couple weeks ago: https://steemit.com/steem/@sean-king/don-t-be-a-downvoting-dunce
I don't like the idea of targeting people rather than posts. In the end it encourages the very type of destructive and vindictive behavior that we don't want. Good posts should be upvoted regardless of the author, and vice versa.
I read that post and I agree with it 100%. With the vote slider I can in essence tip my cap or I can push real value when I see real value. I've tried to really start to watch my voting habits, as I don't want to play favorites. I've been trying to spend more time in "new" as a result.
This r4 guy is definitely not helping things here. I've had a lot of people reach out to me and it appears that we have lost a good amount of new users because of his actions. This is what got me thinking about how we could discourage this sort of behavior. I just think it's way too easy for someone to do what r4 is doing right now, and so I've begun trying to reverse a lot of what he's done.
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I agree. I had one attach to me like a lamprey. Didn't down vote me just harassed me. Yet I have seen what you are talking about.
This same troll downvoted me here: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@ottodv/is-the-need-for-inflation-a-myth
I decided not to retaliate, because the guy probably gets a rise out of making people react. Not sure what the best solution is for Steemit as a platform though.
I just got my first downvote, maybe a bot did it, but it still hurt!
r4fken is the user I was talking about. He's pissed because he got placed on Cheetah's list. Rather than working on improving himself and proving to the community that he's a productive user, he's decided to flag and hurt people like you on this site.
Anyone else flagged by him, please let me know here and I can "remove" his flags essentially. I don't want new or early users getting pushed away from the amazing things we're doing here just because someone can't act normal.
Thank you. This place really is amazing, I appreciate you.
It would be nice if someone would make an upvote bot to follow along behind him (and other potentially abusive users) and clear the damage. I just went through and upvoted a bunch of people that he downvoted 'til my voting power is down to 80%, but it would be better to be able to do it automatically, and I don't have much weight to begin with. Also, as you noted in the main article, that's not a sustainable solution.
I'm planning to learn to write a bot, but it may not be soon.
Awesome idea remlaps! I think we can handle this a lot of different ways, but clearly this is something that we need to be discussing and working on. User retention is key to making this site truly grow and this seems like a legitimate obstacle that we can handle.
That scoundrel just flagged ANOTHER of my posts- I noticed that his rep rating is in the negative numbers now. Someone just came along and gave the post a nice upvote, so it is showing again now.
He is derekareith,
I was flagged yesterday and also noticed the user who therealpaul mentions, who makes naturepictures, so i started looking into him,
when you look at his history, he wasn't very succesfull, untill he posted some Graffitiartists work and got Steempower(plagiarism), which he now basicly uses to gain curationbonus by flagging.
He was mentioned also in a blackmailcase of a user.
As you said, sorry for this outgrown puberal behauviour in a guy that should be more capable. If indeed it's his true profile.
(In the meantime he flagged all my posts.)
Anyway take a look at his profile https://steemd.com/@r4fken
you can mention him in Steemitabuse on Steemichat!
I had a post of mine flagged by him in the last hour, I was trying to help my buddy out by entering one of his recent posts in the steemit photo contest and now its hidden because of this asshole. Here is a link to the post and please do something about this asshole: https://steemit.com/blog/@kingarbinv/steemitphotochallenge-entering-my-buddy-chadcrypto-live-stream-pixelmon-ft-chad-and-i-9-4-16 and also see my idea on this issue to discourage people like him from doing this https://steemit.com/blog/@kingarbinv/downvoting-should-cost-sd-to-discourage-assholes-like-this
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I tend to mix the terms up when I talk about it, but yes it's the same thing here.
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I just saw that he flagged your post too. I upvoted it. If he harasses you with more flags, let me know or go to the steemitabuse channel in steemit.chat. Maybe there is something else they can do to help you that I missed.
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No problem! Steemit is amazing and we can't let people like that scare off people like you. We're growing together here, even if others try to hold us back.
Thank You @derekareith! I spent many hours writing that blog and making the gif for it!
I got flagged by him on my newest post, "Embracing the Serpent" if you could cancel out his flag I would be so happy!
The same thing just happened to both of my recent posts and it was r4fken. Here's my two that were flagged and one is now hidden. https://steemit.com/art/@dailybitcoinnews/dark-stars-burn-bright-my-series-of-original-artwork-paintings and here https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@dailybitcoinnews/meet-daemon-my-superhero-ferret-friend
I was flagged yesterday and also noticed the user who therealpaul mentions, who makes naturepictures, so i started looking into him,
when you look at his history, he wasn't very succesfull, untill he posted some Graffitiartists work and got Steempower(plagiarism), which he now basicly uses to gain curationbonus by flagging.
He was mentioned also in a blackmailcase of a user.
As you said, sorry for this outgrown puberal behauviour in a guy that should be more capable. If indeed it's his true profile.
(In the meantime he flagged all my posts.)
Anyway take a look at his profile https://steemd.com/@r4fken
you can mention him in Steemitabuse on Steemichat!
so now he is going and flagging comments on this post trying to prevent us from getting articles unflagged. I suggest @derekareith go through the comments here carefully. I have had almost half of my comments flagged by him in the last 30 min.
You know Derek, you poached my post! Lol, seriously though I was going to make a post very similar. That's why I asked you about him. But either way yes we need a way to control this, I've been watching him flag tons of people for a few days now. I know we lost at least five members. Not cool at all.
@someguy123 directed me to the convo they had on this over at github:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/279
Didn't see some of the potential issues with this theory in regards to censorship...
Oh don't get me wrong, no matter what you do there will always be people who find a way to abuse it. Which in my opinion is just saddening really. I think I really need to sign up for github, right now I'm only on bitbucket. I understand the potential issues with censorship but at the same time we should be able to decide as a community whether or not a user is healthy for this forum and yes it's all easier said than done and also requires a great amount of trust in the public; But isn't that kind of what this site is all about?
Right on dude! I wish I spoke their language when it comes to coding, but it's great to have someone like you who can actually better understand some of the technical inner-workings. I can read a white paper, come up with some ideas, but I can't actually come up with practical ways to implement them.
Github will treat you well. I think you'd add a lot. Plus, you will find many projects outside of Steem that interest you on there as well.