Disclaimer

I've been thinking for quite a while about current issues on the Steem blockchain. I love it but then there are obvious weak points.

Please take note that, I'll use @berniesanders and @chiefmappster just as examples to prove a general point, nothing more, I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with them on a personal level.

That said, @berniesanders has shown us how he/she can influence people by taking their revenue away. And it should be noted as a fact that @chiefmappster likewise apparently upset quite a few people by his actions too. And both are scary thoughts. But further than that I won't go into. Because I frankly don't care about the who or what is wrong or right, or what has happened, because it's not the point.

Centralization of power

The point being that it is possible for one person or an army of bots to not only take away author awards but to destroy reputation as it is counted on the blockchain. I see this as a form of centralization of power. And we can all see it's effect in the real world too. Those with money call the shots and there is a huge amount of manipulation behind the scenes.

First I thought it should be prevented that there is too big of a difference between Steem Power (SP) but all the sollutions sounded very much like Communism. Still I think that it would be nice if all the fallacies of the 'old' world wouldn't be living on in the Steem Blockchain. But this is a very naive idea. Steem is made up of ideas of people but people and only people are running the show. Not so much bots or pure Artificial Intelligence, allthough bots do play big roles on Steem.

So what first would need to be addressed is that a few shouldn't be able to ruin others. If there is really something bad going on then the downvoting should have a real effect when done by many people, not just a few powerful. Because it would still be centralized.

Robin Hood - Not in Nottingham

Democrazies

In a democracy - in theory, votes count, not people's wallets. Not so on Steem and that's not a bad thing per sé until you experience that people are affraid going against the mainstream. It's not up to one person or a few to decide what is good or bad. No, it's up to the many and thus flagging or downvoting should have an effect only if it is done deliberately by a large group, with a shared or common goal.

Reputation should help with this because - taking for example @berniesanders, his/her reputation has taken a huge hit, yet he/she is still able to wield considerable power. Power which he/she uses to downvote people even with a negative / very low reputation. That's odd isn't it? It shows a lot of people disagree with him/her still his/her power is not affected. I'd like to see cases where this makes sense because I can think of no cases where it isn't for the greater good other than that @berniesanders would be 'right' and the majority 'wrong'.

Therefore I'd like to see in the next Hard Fork (HF) that people with a low reputation cannot affect much eventhough they have a lot of Steem Power (SP). The same way that money can't buy you luck or happiness directly. I.E. you have to know what to invest it in which could make you happy.

Reputation should also be gained slowly so that one or a few cannot easily setup an army of bots. Either way I guess the opposite is true as well, reputation could be lost only if many people downvote not just one or a few, regardless of Steem Power. Of course those with more Steem Power either deserve it or bought it but their reputation should be high too in order for them to have real power in the community.

So if you'd were to be downvoted by a lot of people with high reputation, either the community can fight back or everyone is against you.

But if the community could fight back and lower the reputation of a bully quickly then the bully would be powerless and it would take a long time to get that reputation back.

A good community is what makes or breaks a society but there should be always room for individualism. Because really the individuals are those who are often the first to be ridiculed for their ideas and later they tend to be adopted as heroes. Hence the famous quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860) :

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Or similarly by Nicholas Klein:

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

Not rules but incentives

It is necessary to understand that best practices and incentives make a good community. If people are telling other people what to do or how to be - that's not a very good idea. If people are robbing others because they are poor then the sollution is not to put them in jail but ask for the rich to help the poor. Or provide equal opportunity so that the rich can't become too rich in the first place. No need for people to suffer when others are living in abundance. That's just unnecessary in my opinion.

Robin Hood - Prince John "Rob the Poor to Feed the Rich"

Delegation

One of the bots which downvoted @chiefmappster, aptly named @chiefcrappster, has gained a high reputation due to delegation of Steem Power. Delegation thus seems to be another way to grow a network quickly of bots which can then downvote.

How quick? Well creating good content takes a lot of time. If you invest a ton of your own money into Steem Power apparently you can get to a high reputation a lot quicker. However delegation works like a form of escrow, you lend out a bunch of Steem Power and the receiver can use it for an allotted time to either upvote others or by voting on themselves. This can propel people providing quality content to the top but apparently also without quality content, and this is where it goes wrong for the 'Steem experience' in my opinion.

Robin Hood - Skippy's Birthday

How can bullying pay off?

What's worse is that those bots earn more by upvoting their own comments than @chiefmappster earns with his projects for example! And this all automated, without hardly any human effort. This can apply for anyone!

I've noticed before that there's something not quite right on Steem but I didn't know where it came from. Some people were obviously favoured but their content was not all that good. The must be there from the beginning and belong to the inner circle and that's fine but some people do actually analytics. And there you could see that the distribution of Steem Power was very skewed. And not linearly descending in any way if you'd order all accounts by SP.

Measuring human effort

So even when it took someone a year to get to say reputation 60, if someone can get there much faster by just delegating Steem Power, isn't that sort of cheating? I mean it doesn't necessarily mean the quality will be good but the user will be much more visible by being in the hot or trending pages.

But measuring human effort or Proof-of-Brain might be hard work. There is a lot of content to sift through and you might not know what good content is because you can't read or experience everything at the same time.

Tools could help however and artificial inteligence or better machine learning tools will definitely be used as filters, spell and grammar checkers, summarizers, analytics to judge quality and paint an overall picture of the ecosystem. Also services like AskSteem could provide to be very beneficial together with machine learning tools to measure engagement and effect of comments.

I think it's good we have @SteemCleaners or @Cheetah to fight plagiarism but also they are quite centralized being just a few bots with a lot of Steem Power. And they would have to be run by different people to have an equalizing effect.

There could also be a committee who whould look at downvotes and individual cases but again they could only serve to make such things more visible not be a centralized authority. However I do see maybe some SP delegation being used like a form of voting but maybe there should be a form of round-robin of the committee members.

interview with Vít Jedlička the first and last president of Liberland

Is centralization a bad thing per sé?

If you have a good king and you are a good citizen centralization is great. Likewise if you have a bad king and you are a bad person, again centralization is great for you.

However some centralization or better difference between money, power and influence can be good. We would never have had castles and churches if there never had been any centralization. However in retrospect those legacies might look good but I'm sure it was not fine & dandy to have a vastly different opinio from the church, state or influential few.

Conclusion

• Big power brokers with low reputation should not be able to destroy others
• Self voting shouldn't be so lucrative, it's one thing to make your comment visible but another entirely to destroy anyone's livelyhood while making money on self upvotes. That's just perverse if you ask me or am I missing something?
• We can gain more visibility with machine learning tools or commitees like @SteemCleaners
• It should take a long time to get a high enough reputation, with human effort, not only Steem Power. So no botnets please.
• Provide equal opportunity so no pre-mining and such.
• Delegation should affect reputation differently: borrowed power = borrowed reputation.
• Or there can be different reputations per niche for example. Like someone's niche is "counting birds" for example.
• Proof of Human Effort: it's should be easily provable that content has quality and that it has been provided by a human.

Steem is just the beginning

• People could co-create, like creating and managing Wiki's for example.
• Author rewards can be split.
• Disputes settled.
• Easy escrow, to put the money where your mouth is.
• Granular upvotes, i.e. upvote parts of the content, (slightly) downvote bad parts, same for audio and video.

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Disney's Robin Hood Movie Alternate Ending

top ten Disney movie endings

If I forgot something or you have good ideas or comments, please share them!

Remember the freedom of one shouldn't be the suffering of another.