RE: In defense of the flag wars
That's what I have been missing from the idea:
I have very little interest in hypotheticals other than if I can think of an obvious exploit. If the exploits are not obvious then really the best thing to do is to try it out.
We can work out exploits to an extent before it's implemented, maybe I am missing some that are obvious or some that need another more veteran perspective on it.
Selling the idea is a challenge, but I can code a quick website with user registrations and we can have a go at it with a flag war or two..
I also cannot find the article by dantheman, or dan, and the one post he resteemed doesn't discuss anything comparable to my ideas
https://steemit.com/steem/@bitcoindoom/why-down-votes-and-flags-are-an-unavoidable-consequence-of-game-theory
He would have covered it in these two posts... I didn't have time to proof read them this morning but I could at least find them...
https://steemit.com/politics/@dantheman/the-politics-of-negative-voting
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/negative-voting-and-steem
And he may not have covered it completely in those so I'll include a few more that might be relevant.
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/curation-rewards-and-voting-incentive
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@dantheman/our-corrupt-sense-of-fairness
I skimmed through the numerous comments and couldn't find one instance of countering flag and I believe that is a very viable solution. Tying it to a ratio of 2:1 allows people to counteract flagging and affect the reputation of the flagger if it is perceived as abusive. By making a piggyback rule to both flagging and counter flagging people couldn't flag or counter flag excessively. The buttons could be greyed out but I believe they should be allowed to piggyback without effect simply to show support.
Yeah it wasn't cancelled here on the blog. It appears to have occurred in some internal debate perhaps between Steemit, Inc. and the Witnesses... I'm not sure I was not involved, I just read Dan saying it was voted against.
Thank you, I'm reading them right now :D
He didn't cover everything you proposed. Yet some of your features he himself proposed. He was the one who could have coded it.
Yet apparently it voted against by people dictating what code changes should happen.
I understand but perceptions change, I think it's time for a new system instead of going about with the failing solution of renaming downvoting to flagging.
The one issue I see with my solution is curbing the downvote first by increasing the amount of voting power used and then with the ratio of 50% or 66.67% less then an equal upvote, which could be removed, or it could be tied into the flagging system itself. It could be equal to the equivalent power of a upvote when a flag is applied as well. These might not be issues though because of the suggestion of repeated flags being more taxing. The offenses could be punished independently so that spamming could be one category, abusive(general) could be another and plagiarizing could be the third, so as the person engages in each of these (some perceived) abuses the more they get flagged the more each subsequent flag in each category would be worth, independent of the other categories. The same is for counter-flags, the more someone is counter-flagged successfully the more it will affect their reputation with each successive counter flag. Of course flagging and counter-flagging shouldn't have a charge like upvoting/downvoting, they should be able to be applied without limit to counteract the growing community and therefore the growing spam/abuse/plagiarizing.
I have to make a post about this and see what the developers feel like, as well as the witnesses. A change is needed and I think it's very viable or at least worth trying and seeing the results.
Yeah at this point like I said we should be willing to try many things. In trying them we will learn things that we didn't consider, and either confirm/dispute our suspicions on outcomes.
We need to be willing to take a step back.
I'm one of those that ideally I'd prefer there to not even be such a thing as a down vote/flag. I'd like a way to report abuse, spam, plagiarism and call it good.
I don't actually think we need a flag/downvote/report for anything beyond that.
The counter to that is the people that say it is the only way to counter someone powerful taking advantage of that and exploiting it.
Which is true...
Thus if you can convince the powers that be (those that control the code) to try out some/all of your ideas... I'm willing to participate in such experiments.
All I'd ask is a willingness to change our minds if it reveals other problems. Unlike modern governments we need to be willing to go backwards and ditch ideas and try new things if once we try them problems are found.
Governments and people can become to fixated on "their legacy" and be highly resistant to tearing down their ideas and creations if problems are found. We need to not do this.
Also the flagging system with the relatively very short lock in window for the votes is needed so that people only have time to remove accidental flags/counter flags, but once locked in the only way to go about nullifying a counter-flag would be to petition other people to flag the post simply to remove the counter-flag, and this could be done because there could be a 30 day time window since the creation of the content for this petitioning to happen, same for flags, the counter flags could nullify them under the same time frame or outright counter flag the perceived abusive flag.
A likely problem you will encounter is if your "solution" increases in complexity the people that have to code it are likely to become more resistant to the implementation. Their resistance might even be directly proportional to the complexity.
So if you can lay out STAGES that could be accomplished to reach your end point that'd likely make it more palatable to the people that actually have to code it.
This is a complex problem from my point of view, it has many issues that need to be addressed, flag wars, abusive flagging, repeated offenses, and it's all the problem of addressing spam, abuse and plagiarizing, on top of collusive or self voting, or better stated the problem of the community policing itself.
The stages that could make this easier would be first to tax the voting power for a downvote to 10x that of an upvote, incentivizing upvotes for large stake holders, as that is the only problem, minnows and dolphins would also suffer in draining their voting power but they have little influence over payouts to begin with.
A simultaneous step is implementing the flagging system.
The steps for this could be broken down but I don't see the benefit over a complete system instead of breadcrumbs. It would need to include the piggyback rule to deal with excessive flagging/counter-flagging, and these things are simplistic from a programing point of view. Granted something like this hasn't been seen by the community since it's inception, it's slow gradual adjustments that have got us here, that doesn't necessarily mean this idea of a separate flagging system could be implemented in the same manner. It should be one of the few changes in the HF that includes it, the perfect HF would be a flagging system along with a better, more balanced voting curve.
I do believe we need to see a different voting curve. I'm fairly certain that is something we will eventually see.
As to the rest... work up details on your stages and start writing posts with as many details and examples on the functionality as you can, and you'll at least have people like me advocating to at least try it.
I am one of those that doesn't think we should do a lot of ideas in a single HF. It makes it more difficult to accurately state with certainty which change had which effect.
I instead am an advocate for more frequent but smaller hard forks.
EDIT: And yes it is a very complex problem.