Steem Flag Rewards Mention Link Reports - Incentivizing and Promoting Community Blockchain Moderation!
ALCON!
The SteemFlagRewards Team has been busy using the Steem Flag Rewards Mention Comment Feature. We have been making developments and refining the bot. Our Discord community members have been flagging abuse.
Check out the comment history
The functionality is real simple to use. You can receive a comment and upvote for appropriately flagging content and also marking content for follow up. For example, this user may not have known about tag misuse so I commented to help educate them. I will check back in with them and, if they continue the tag abuse, follow up flags will be warranted.
Think of it as an escalation of force.
We absolutely prefer that users learn and move on to behavior that is conducive to value being added to the blockchain. Tag misuse makes it more difficult to find relevant content so should be corrected when you see it. Do the right thing... even when no one is looking.
Example of marking abuse
In instances of confirmed plagiarism, a warning shot isn't needed, especially if evidence of deception is apparent. No need to warn on these. Flag em, bag em, and tag em!
Example of Steem Flag Rewards Mention Comment with downvote
We are also working on reporting using the Steem Flag Mentions. The bot code was just updated to output each comment approved to a daily CSV file. We will work on further update to publish daily posts to boost situational awareness and facilitate community follow-up. This table below is just a peek but it will be adjusted to include a few additional data fields such as parent author and perhaps the body of the comment which would be nice especially those with the instructional value.
A Decentralized Social Media Blockchain benefits from a Decentralized and Distributed Approaches to Moderation
Our initiative is intended to supplement @steemcleaners hard work and efforts. We highly recommend using their reporting channels and consider voting @Patrice for witness for the awesome project. Its hard to imagine the state Steem would be in had it not been for them stepping up and cleaning things up. Efforts still need to ramp up as abusers have devised many schemes to advance.
The black hats are gaining a lot of ground and we must repel them. Complacency is NOT an option if you care about your investment. Maybe, they will implement code level changes in the future but we just are not there yet. We need to bring the fight to the spammers. It's about being proactive vs. reactive. I'll leave you with the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Please, continue to report as usual via their form and their Discord especially for your "vanilla" categories of abuse. @steemflagrewards mission has been expanded to deal with some items that are outside of their scope.
Here are the Abuse Posts and Comments our Members have Flagged today
We strongly encourage appropriate follow up action and additional flags if the abuser has not ceased. Also, feel free to drop of Steem Flag Rewards Mention comments an upvote to further support this activity.
Steps to use the SteemFlagRewards mention comment system
- Locate abuse that fits the following categories.
Ensure that your comment has at least one of these categories. These will be one of the fields added to the daily reports by the way.
'comment spam', 'plagiarism', 'spam', 'copy/paste', 'identity theft', 'vote abuse', 'bid bot abuse', 'manipulation', 'collusive voting', 'copy/pasta','death threats','threat', 'vote farming', 'post farming','tag misuse', 'tag abuse', 'phishing'
Mention @steemflagrewards in the comment body. This also helps spread the good word.
Join our Discord and drop you comment for review in the #mentions channel. If you have been authorized access to the bot channel, you will be permitted to use the approve function on our Discord bot.
Then, the magic happens in the background.
Too easy, huh?
This project will continue to evolve and we thank you for giving us this opportunity to serve you. If you would like to delegate to this project to help fund more flags, here is a link to a @justyy's delegation tool [here'(https://helloacm.com/tools/steemit/sp-delegate-form/)
@steemflagrewards I am not sure where to post this, but the user @ joeyarnoldvn (I have removed the tag so they do not see this post) has been gaining a lot of attention from the community for spamming, but I wanted to talk about some serious issues here that probably have not been brought up yet due to their complexity.
This particular user has just informed me that they are autistic, and after finding their YouTube channel I have confirmed this to be the case. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNx_jlVZqsHhQ4OABNhgcWg
Some of our moderators have been saying some nasty things to this poor guy, not realizing he has autism, and it is creating a problem we never really expected to run across.
This user gives out rapid-fire compliments to every profile he comes across (occasionally without reading the full post) and often saying the same compliments over and over again which he has been informed is unacceptable by steemit spam decection, however in this particular case we obviously need to be careful not to flag his posts that AREN'T spam, because in this specific case, this user is not intentionally abusing the system but is unknowingly, unintentionally abusing the system (and even then it becomes a grey area of what is defined as "abuse" because can this guy truly be abusing the system when he is unaware of the technical reasons why his comments are flagged? Does his content even count as spam? It's a really good question because he may post identical comments on numerous profiles, but he also follows up on every single person who responds, he never says anything mean, and he never says "hey go look at my profile" or anything spammy like that, he just provides compliments...so from a coding perspective, I have no clue how you would design a bot that could differentiate between this user's posts which are non-malicious, and actual spam)
So I don't want to see him harassed any further or banned or cause him too much grief. I attempted to explain why copy-pasting comments or saying the same comment over and over is not allowed on steemit but of course he is having difficulty understanding, and to be honest, at this point even I am having difficulty understanding how we should proceed. He should probably just be allowed to do what he wants on the platform unhindered, and my vote is that we should just consider him the steemit greeter and first friend of all new users, because that's exactly what he is, a friend to everyone.
Let this be our case study for the unknown variables that crop up when developing automated spam-punishing systems and make sure we don't accidentally harm well-meaning users, but still remove their spam posts while leaving the non-spam posts.
This will require community involvement, which will require people actually being rewarded for spending the time to investigate this stuff. I mean I just spent like 4 hours analyzing this guy's behaviour and trying to communicate with him before he revealed to me he was autistic and I was able to finally find his youtube account by searching "Original Oatmeal Joe"
Yet my account is now diminished due to how many flagged posts I made. This is not ideal.
Thanks for reading, please upvote for the effort I put into this, and keep an eye out for @ joeyarnoldvn (again, tag removed to protect him) as well as others like him.
Let other moderators know it is unacceptable to use harsh or derogatory language while flagging users for spam, because we might just hurt an innocent person like this :-(
you HAVE to be fucking kidding me
Bravo to you for taking the time to investigate this situation. It's probably more rare then not but yes sometimes it will require taking a closer look.
I hear you and I feel the same.
Also, oatmeal joey already has to deal with bernie's abusereports, I think that's tough enough!
Thanks for being outspoken about this issue @anotherhero!
the name that cannot be uttered, well unless if you got utters to milk like Disney with Star Wars
Duly noted. We will encourage correction in the spirit of gentleness and compassion and be mindful of mitigating circumstances such as this.
Is saying hello to people really spam? Keep in mind that it is not like you say a unique collection of random words to each and every person you talk to in real life, let alone the Internet. Solomon said that aint nothing new under the sun or the sea except oatmeal. You know, King Solomon? So, how often have you you said hello or how are you to different people? Is that spam or is simple unintentional repetition? How often do you eat the meal in your life? Is that spam? How often does Disney spam the Star Wars story or other stories?
I was put on a list again for saying hi too often. Nope, you cant say hellow. No way Jose.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by anthonyadavisii from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
I see this stuff all the time but am hesitant to do anything because there is no one stopping those same people from going to your site and flagging out of revenge. Flag abuse is a big issue on here to that isn't being properly addressed.
True.
Question: Is it possible to use multiple categories, and @steemflagrewards will pick that up?
Howdy.