Case study: 4 ways to deal with piracy and hateful content on Blockchain

Necessity they say is the mother of invention. The willingness of people to use Blockchain platforms to publish and monetize hateful content, adult content and pirated content means that we will need to somehow moderate these platforms.

In this report @BlockRush will simply discuss the four obvious models and let you decide which one you think will be best - that is if they are necessary at all.

1. Community moderation; the case for DTube

In the update notice for @dtube version 0.2, @heimindanger has said that he expects the community to deal with hateful and pirated content by downvoting any content which they do not deem fit for the interest of the community.

However, this might not work at all for two main reasons. Consider;

1. While some people are downvoting, other would be upvoting. The fact that you hate far right political arguments should not be the basis to censor them. Democracy means freedom of speech for everyone, including those who you do not agree with.
2. Again, DTube is just one client and another client could be setup and dedicated to pirated content and hateful content. On a client built to be the blockchain version of Pirate Bay, pirated content would get all the upvotes from anonymous accounts.

2: Moderators; The case for Steemit

On Steemit, the case is quiet different as we have manual moderators who moderate both the sign and account approval process to the use of tags.

@Steemcleaners are one of the manually operated moduration units of Steemit. They watch out for posts that use unrelated tags such as "Steemit" and "introduceyourself".

First time offenders are given a public comment warning while the repeated offenders are put on blacklist for flagging or downvotes.

This model is also flawed as it is difficult to tell who the moderators are, what their intention and allegiance are. Humans being are prone to prejudice, bad judgement, corruption and being naive.

Putting human moderators on blockchain community might has well defeat the idea for blockchain technology as blockchain technology advocates for automated and unmanned systems.

3: Police bots; the other case for Steemit

Yes, we have "police bots" too on Steemit and the most popular is the plagiarism bot @cheetah. This bots searches for similar content on the web and on Steemit and reports any content it finds similar to your post.

While useful sometimes make it impossible to quote parts of an external article for reference or even part of your own posts as any similar content will get your article notified.

While first time offenders are upvoted, repeated offenders are put on blacklist and receive a negative comment for each of their posts. They are also liable to whales who love downvoting.

Bits are not very accurate and the @cheetah is known for notoriously putting perfectly fine accounts on blacklist. This model of bot governance obviously will not work as machines are not good masters over men.

4. Self-censorship; another case from Steemit

Self-censorship is another way to deal with regulating content which might not be in the collective interest of a Blockchain community.

Have you noticed the NFSW(Not Safe For Work) tag on Steemit? Whenever you use it, your post is given a different look to warn users that the content could be nasty or too hot for lunch.

This tag is mostly used by the adult community and has become an official way to still legitimately publish adult content to the network without offending others or attracting down votes.

What do you think of this model? Should Blockchain platforms provide the means for people to kind of self-censor content which might draw in a negative reaction from the community?

Steemit talk

• Do we need to censor some content on the Blockchain?
• Which model of governance will be best suited for the blockchain community?
• How do we collectively govern the Blockchain?

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