Cyber bullying and the centralization of power on Steem
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.
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.
It shows that a Founder of STINC has downvoted them heavily, at times without even considering why they were doing it, outside of they just don't like berniesanders. =)
Agreed, it was only the scandalous people at the top who abused their power and downvoted bernie. The same people who are making large sums of money are struggling to take care of the issues at hand but are working on the next money making projects.
Also if people were to look at the people that bernie downvotes, lets get real now. There are a lot of scammers on SteemIt and STINC is wasting their time downvoting the person who is attacking and taking care of these scandalous people. Consider who is downvoting him and lets start from the top and see who is wrong in this.
So how can we make it better together?
Good point! I think it is hard to tell who did what and I think kuddo's to people who want to solve it. For now all I can think of is having escrow services and people vouching/being witnesses maybe. Just like when signing contracts there are witnesses. (I don't mean Steem block producers)
I have resteemed this post because it opens a world of discussion that needs to be had on steemit.
With no rules we all just have to sort it out among each other and what is acceptable to one is not acceptable to another.
Like you, i also don't care who done what, but i dont like double standards. Steemains need to be educated on whats going on so they can make an informed decision on what they believe is acceptable and how they wish to behave.
You should check out the work of the business intelligence steemt team - you might enjoy some of the posts over there #bisteemit
Exactly. I'm glad you noticed this post @paulag!
I know, we chatted in the past, I was in BI before. Now I'm more into #machinelearning. But thanks I will keep in touch via that tag. Also there is now #utopian.io and they have an analytics section too.
oh I so love #machinelearning, steem on.
Great, happy to hear that! Any ML tools that you are using?
I was using microsoft cognitive services. Hay just thinking, if you are into ML and crypto have you looked at numerai?
Hmmm
But that's not Natural Language Processing that I'm looking at...
NLP projects:
"I've been working on several natural language processing tasks for a long time. One day, I felt like drawing a map of the NLP field where I earn a living. I'm sure I'm not the only person who wants to see at a glance which tasks are in NLP."
The whispers say that if you have an algorithm that beats (Numerai or one of the other ML-Cryptos) then you're better off using it to trade for yourself.
@nutela, we know each other a little, and I feel that we have had very respectable interactions with one another.
I feel strongly that your post is biased against berniesanders and distinctly 'pro' Paul - chiefmappster, regardless of your claims to not have a personal opinion on the current controversy.
Even I have heard the stories surrounding berniesanders and their loss of reputation. Of their flagrant flagging and 'attacks'. And then, as I presume intelligent adults like me do, I asked questions of people whom I respect, and listened to their thoughts and opinions on the subject.
Then I waited and watched. Paul first threatened and bullied a mutual friend, then both of us - his partners. Over and over again, Paul has left a trail of hurt. He has lied, stolen and bullied.
berniesanders doesn't know me. However, they are currently standing up for me and for other minnows like me who might be taken advantage of by someone like Paul (chiefmappster), just as you hoped whales would in your post.
I hope you can rethink your post and your (not)stance on the paul/bernie situation.
I'm not going to rethink anything because it's crystal clear that all of you guys are making a mess. Is it somebody's fault? Sure could be. Do I blame somebody? No of course not.
I'm just saying we need better tools!
All I want is something that works and happy people. So how can we create that? Together?
I like your thoughts @nutela, wonderful post. I think there is still much to be done on Steem, sometimes I get upset when a see those bots, shouldn't the content be read, evaluated and consequently upvoted by humans, I love automation but this is not where we want to see it.
I still see a lot of bad content getting a lot of upvotes and more people are following this path where they believe in upvotes more than sharing relevant content to the community.
Obviously there still more to be done and believe that coming up with solutions as a community would benefit us all.
Cheers,
@davidfumo
I'd love to have the ability to mute bot account comments - except on their own posts. This I see as a UI feature though.
Just to clarify this. While it may seem like bullying if your ignorant to the situation, in this case it is not. If this situation was one were he was trying to inflict paint just because, then yea. But that isnt what is happening. He is trying to prevent a scammer from taking advantage of other people. It wouldnt have been hard for this particular individual who cries bully to have dealt with this. He was given many opportunities to fix his ways. And he laughed at these attempts.
You dont see bernie going and downvoting the minnows who are writing content, like STINC devs do. The blame here is in the wrong place. Bernie is doing Steem and SteemIt a favor.
Though it is hard for those who got caught in the middle, those who participate in his contests. That is unfortunate, But that is just the reality of things.
Like I said it doesn't matter to me who did what and for what reasons. Frankly I don't want to know!
The issue I have is that this is possible. And I'd like to know how to prevent it and have better ways on working together creating a better experience on Steem.
Yes, you do. He does all of the above, some of which is approved by you, and some of which is not. If you want particular examples, I can provide them.
OK thanks for the honest admission.
Great post and I appreciate your intentions to shed light on these issues, like numerous others.
Yet, I'm more often than not, missing the means of solving these issues. I'm not saying you definitely should give a solution, but the lack of one leaves me with some discomfort after reading such posts.
Issues should be created on the GitHub repo of the blockchain or proposals should be contributed on Utopian, or something like that.
Like politicians can barely works without acts, here on Steem, we are the politicians, since it's democracy, the rule of the demos, the nation.
At this point, it is our responsibility to act against centralization if it becomes a threat.
Thanks! That's nice to hear.
Good point, do you have a link?
Well, it's hard to get rid of people once they are in power since they can manipulate the system to actually stay in power. I'm not sure what to do about that other than a Hard Fork what @themarkymark suggested. Because then all the accumulated wealth loses value for the whales who leave in the old & rotten system. Of course for them it's great to stay there because the system actually benefits them.
GitHub for the blockchain, ideas on Utopian.
Eh, I'm not sure if it's acceptable, I would hate seeing all my hardly accumulated SP lost. We shouldn't harm the community this way.
Oh no it's not about harming but who chooses! If there is a Y-split like what a fork does, the majority will end up somewhere where they like it and that would be the end of it. Democracy as it's best, I'd suggest reading how it supposed to work. I didn't know how it worked too.
I've seen something about the Utopia project but I wondered if you would like to talk about that and maybe Github for the blockchain, say during the #BeyondBitcoin #Whaletank?
Nah, it's much better if you check out @elear's posts about it. He's one of the authors
Thanks for mentioning it, I like it a lot! It's incredible, I mean not exactly an original idea but great @elear has founded it!
Thanks, I'll check it out right now.
Thank you all for your comments! It makes me happy that you guys care and want to make this or any social network better.
What happened happened. Let's not let it happen again. Let's rather focus on sollutions then problems. It's good to identify problems but then don't waste to much of our precious time and fix it. We can look at Utopian.io for example or any other project you like, please make it visible, here or elsewhere. Thanks!
Good luck with getting rid of the army of bots that destroy content. I've had a run in on occasion with these assholes and the majority of anything I post here gains nothing,thanks to one of these bots.
Well yeah, I'd first like to know how one can grow such an army of bots in the first place. Wasn't there a problem with fake FaceBook (bot) accounts as well?
I think you cannot prevent the creation of bots/accounts since there has to be a low barrier of entry but Proof-of-Brain is definitely something to look at because now it's just an term without meaning. Proof-of-Brain ≠ Proof-of-AI or bot
This is an argument over where power lies. Without central judges with enforcement powers then unfortunately, this is what justice looks like - warfare.
But, i am against concentrating power on the blockchain. First we ban this, then we ban that, then we're no different to anywhere else (twitter, cough, fb, cough). I am making this a bottom line of which witnesses I support; if your witness supports censorship at the level of the blockchain then no support from me.
What I do support is better tools and Steem UIs making these decisions over what they show their users. That way communities can build the tools they want with their own norms about what is and is not allowable speech. I don't believe there is a one size fits all solution to allowable content, but neither do I believe in giving up and allowing everything always.
For example, I would love a setting where I automute accounts blacklisted by steem cleaners. I love to just not see comments that are obvious spam.
I'm glad more people realize what I'm talking about!
That's a good point, I'd be careful but willing to try. Remember @steemcleaners is also centralized because it's just one bot but you could also say there's a team of people behind it.
That group of scumbags that run @steemcleaners have been harassing me and a few others too. Speaking for myself, I tend to use the posts from my long held blog here and if there are other links in the post I attribute them to the creator. Sometimes these assholes will send their bot network to down vote enmasse just because they can.![image](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://img.esteem.ws/3snagc8twx.jpg)
You can sort it out with them on Steemit.chat did you know? It's also linked right here in the comments.
Exactly. They don't take anything off the blockchain though. So, if steemcleaners started "cleaning" asparagus farmers (for example). Then I either turn off steemcleaners in my preferences or I make another site for Freedom for Farmers of Asparagus.
Well, yes, I'd maybe even 'mute' @SteemCleaners to which maybe I'd say to the blockchain:
And with that I'd maybe lessen his influence for the time being? Maybe a mute could be temporary or have a barrier effect; only votes over a certain amount would make the comments visible?
What do you think?
It's worth a try on the level of the UI.
I agree, I wonder how it might look like though... Any suggestions?
I guess that's up to each community to decide. It's worth having an expanded "mute" interface. A way to to subscribe to "mute"ing accounts.
As for the threshold over-riding a mute; you're into AI / ML so I guess you'll get the point the Follow, Mute, Unfollow, Upvote, Flag are all indications of user preferences. Given enough data on user preference you could predict when to override or when to pre-emptively not show content.... given enough data and good predictions, a user might never need to mute/unfollow/flag or downvote ever again.
Good point but then it would make a Google-like filter bubble. If you can edit this bubble then I think this is a great idea! Thanks.
yes @eturnerx, Things here should be done differently compared to other social media platforms and the way things are done society which many cases isn't fair.
With Blockchain we have the chance to do different and we should do so.
cheers,
@davidfumo
What do you think could be done?
I can still mention others but the fundamental here it's to make sure we are building a community, not a cash pool.
We all want rewards, but before that, let's guarantee we are promoting good content.
Cheers,
@davidfumo
Thanks for engaging.
I don't think it's possible to eliminate bots on Steemit. So, we rather learn how to use them to our advantage. I personally have bots I use to make my time on Steem more efficient so that I can focus on the human interaction.
Equal power votes means what? Equal power rewards? So, somebody makes a zillion smurf accounts and wins all the reward pppl? At least this way, voting power is tied to stake and stake must be earned or bought. I guess, if you'd like to try then soon you can make and SMT with exactly these properties and a UI to go with it. Then see how it goes. I'd be interested to see the results - but I'd put a quiet bet on it not going well. Nothing I like more than being proven wrong when it comes to the success of others.
I agree with you about the UI/UX. I'm current starring at an after-dinner mint Post button. THough, one great thing about Steem (the blockchain) is we can layer custom UIs on it if we want to build them.
I have my own rants about the UI here - essentially that earning anything worth a damn is ages away for most posters and they are here for the community. Since community is the main value proposition then a UI that enabled community more, I think, would be better.
I love the tipping bot and there are all kinds of cool stuff we can do with them. But maybe those accounts could be all pure human but we could interact with those accounts programmatically too.
Well I'd like to see real Proof-of-Brain because now it is more proof-of-"Look ma without hands" 2 sec. YouTube attention span.
And I don't blame people, I myself don't like to read all this stuff. There is too much info out there. Therefore: Machine Learning and summarize and digest, distil and then maybe I'd like to expand on the really good stuff. And on the other hand: often the really good stuff I'm just not ready for! Like a student is not a master, yet.
Exactly! That's why it might look like superficially that I don't care but the opposite is through. The thing is I cannot trust humans because they are just not accurate.
I'm for more ML in the UIs too. And specialist tools to help the jobs like curation for trails, getting an overall sense of hot issues. All those things.
Well I wonder if there might be something here for you:
"I've been working on several natural language processing tasks for a long time. One day, I felt like drawing a map of the NLP field where I earn a living. I'm sure I'm not the only person who wants to see at a glance which tasks are in NLP."
Well to add to that I think people are voting not on what they read but who they know.
I'd actually trust an AI more because it never gets tired and is more predictable.
It's a strange thing subjective quality. Yes, certain people you like are going to get more leeway when it comes to out-there content compared to an unknown. Without thinking somehow that quality is an objective measure, I don't think it's even desireable to totally eliminate the "vote for who you know" part of finding quality content.
However, I do agree that, at least within community niches, there are tacit agreements on what quality looks like and where should be making tools that allow that to at least get a chance in the attention-sphere.
I'm not sure, if we could do A/B testing, incentivizes people to upvote different people like by giving higher payouts when voting for different people that would be quite an interesting experiment.
I think @rycharde had a proposal that reduced the value of votes to the same author within a certain time frame. I think his proposal was mostly to discourage bot upvote rings though I can see how it might encourage more diversity in which authors one chooses to vote for too.
Well I'd say fair would be defined in a protocol and implent what you think is fair to you. Could be different for everyone else?