Clarification for some people RE: Flag vs Down Vote
I've seen a thing in anti-flag or just flag discussions that I think needs to be cleared up. I'll see someone like @everittdmickey talk about doing away with the flag.
This or similar statements to it will often be met with "That is just a UI fix and easy to fix".
The fact it is a FLAG is not what they are asking for. So changing the UI will not fix anything. They are calling it a FLAG only because that is the shape it appears on the UI. They are not asking you to eliminate the shape.
They are asking for the elimination of the impact a down vote can have on someone. I was once a very vocal proponent for an up votes only system with a way to report plagiarism, spam, and abuse, and call it good. I wrote about such things for many months.
I realized with the current system that is not as easy to do without leaving the system open to even greater exploits. So, I stopped calling for up votes only. At least until someone thinks of a way to do it that cannot be further exploited. It may change the current exploits, but will it open others in the meantime.
Instead I chose to discuss the issue the only way I knew might change some minds. With words. If I could convince some people not to DOWN VOTE for purely subjective reasons then that would have a similar effect, yet it would leave the tool there to address exploitation when it is encountered.
I think I did reach some people. Others have no interest in such words.
So for those of you saying it is just a UI fix. That is not what they are asking for. They don't want people cancelling out the rewards they chose to give someone with their steem power. They don't want their reputation dinged. These are all functions of the down vote whether it is shaped like a flag, an arrow, a bullet, or a dripping bloody knife.
So a UI change will not resolve that. Furthermore, some of the people evoking most of this reaction by their power level and their gleeful wielding of the flag don't even use this UI to do it. Some of them do it by CLI. Some of them do it with a bot. Some of them do it from steemd. Changing the UI won't stop that at all.
Many of them like me tend to see the flagging, down voting, etc as a very negative Public Relations move for the platform. It is almost like negative marketing. It is almost like shouting "come to steemit if you like jerks who decide if you are permitted to be rewarded or not" and for some naive reason thinking that is actually good marketing.
So when people express being anti-flag. It is extremely unlikely they are talking about anything that changing the UI will resolve...
Consider these statements in the future...
"Sorry man, I really liked your post and hope you do more, but someone with more steem power than me decided your post should not be liked by people, so I can't actually reward you anything with my steem power."
"I am leaving and stopping, because I can no longer afford the time and production costs to produce these posts, as someone with power has decided they don't like the topic."
Sometimes censorship doesn't occur just due to deletion. It can also occur due to barriers. If censorship resistance is something we like to market, and a lot of people on youtube right now are talking about how ads are pulled and thus they can no longer afford to make their videos and they are calling it censorship and it is being accepted then how can a powerful person deciding a topic or person here does not deserve to be rewarded be any different?
We will have people coming to steemit and expecting anti-censorship. Yet if part of their censorship issues are inability to be funded they may still encounter that here as well due to the way the down vote is often wielded.
History is written by the victor. When certain people have over powering weapons then they will generally always be the victor, and thus they will get to decide what the history actually is.
Steem On!
Thanks for talking about this, @dwinblood. After nine months, I wrote my first post on the topic as well. I don't think there are easy answers to the problems this creates for those whose comments and posts are hidden not due to violating any community standards, but because someone with a lot of Steem Power wanted it that way. I see it as an important challenge for the system to overcome (among many) if more people are going to use it. Centralized systems have authorities people can complain to. Here, we just have the blockchain.
There's also the UI vs. blockchain discussion to have. Steemit.com hiding posts is a UI aspect of the platform (and I'm grateful for it). One tweak which might be helpful is a way to configure a setting which says "Don't hide posts if they are downvoted by accounts whose downvotes I want to ignore." That might be a nice way to make more people happy. We could share blacklists of people who use the downvote abusively to hide content which has violated no community standards from accounts who have no history of doing so either. That, combined with mute, would let individuals view Steemit however they want, without having to unhide things which they feel shouldn't be hidden in the first place.
As to rewards, that's a more difficult topic, I think.
It is not an easy problem. It is also why I have some sympathy and understanding over the fact it has not yet been resolved. If we can resolve it then I think Steemit would become a very nice place for anyone with any idea to share and be rewarded by people interested in similar things. As it is now it is that as long as the thing you are interested in is not something unattractive or belonging to something ideologically opposed by someone with a lot of power. The hiding aspect IS U.I. based and is not too difficult to overcome. The reward/rep dings over subjective flagging are a more difficult challenge.
I think your ideas would be workable for the hiding aspect.
Yeah, it's been interesting for me lately as I've become more of a target. Helps me better understand how others feel when they get downvotes for reasons that are non-sensical by someone with over $350,000 worth of Steem Power. I feel bad for those who are just getting started and don't understand why all their posts get hidden because of the downvotes. We have a great thing here, but those with low emotional IQ can still mess it up for others until we have code solutions in place to deal with the problem.
Yeah I've always been one that sticks my neck out for the underdog. I started talking about this towards the end of July when I saw it happening to people for subjective reasons and could tell how it was impacting them.
With a little forward prediction I could see it was likely a very big problem.
I also understood the Negativity Bias from observation in life without actually ever encountering actual support for my observations until I read your article.
I knew that overall the actions were not good for steemit, even for the people doing this. In fact, potentially worse for them as their actions likely have direct impact on the chance for steem to increase in value. It is like having someone actively doing negative marketing campaigns and running anti-retention programs at the same time the rest of us are trying to determine how to market getting more people here and retaining them.
EDIT: Somehow I've managed not to really become a target of the bad whale. He mostly leaves me be though he and I have had words back and forth. I hope maybe it is because I kept it respectful. I also do think they have a right to vote how they want, I just wish I could reason with them to help them see the harm they do. You could be right though, perhaps they enjoy the drama and harm. That sounds like a wealthy, powerful troll, wielding their power with glee.
Your link to your post in that comment is actually a link to my post. You may want to edit it and correct that and let me know and I definitely want to check it out. I could check your profile too, but I generally enjoy reading your works so I suspect other people will as well so editing it is for the benefit of people other than myself.
Ah, shoot. Sorry about that. I had
a herfinstead ofa href.Thanks for the compliment and the heads up.
Check out my proposed overhaul of the system, I also wrote a brief summary in the post by luke which is a more thorough approach dealing with spam attacks against the system and including the one thing I left out in the post that I addressed in the comments, the curtailing of the curation system, if you would be kind enough to give it your critical thoughts and tell me what you think.
https://steemit.com/community/@baah/a-solution-to-the-downvoting-flagging-problems-on-steemit
I believe I've looked at it before. I'll look to see if it evolved. I couldn't tell you much then other than to tell you that things can be tried, if they don't work we stop trying them, if they work we push forward. I told you it was the long term exploits that we may not see now that could be the issues. That is the problem with most solutions they solve one set of problems now, but tend to open the doors to other ones. Sometimes those other problems are obvious, other times we might not realize them until we give it a try. Or perhaps the problems will not manifest. I also told you that I am not in a position to push your ideas forward, it is steemit, Inc. you would need to convince of that.
EDIT: and no... this one is new... reading it now.
It seems like your idea has evolved some... this is good. I will respond there.
Well written, I understand they need the functionality to assist when and where there is abuse. There doesn't really seem to be any effort to fix the abuse of the tool to fight abuse. :)
Pair that with "public shaming" of anyone who complains about unfair treatment and you have an environment ripe for abuse.
If you get flagged, take it like a man!
Unless you are a super powerful flagger who suddenly gets flagged by someone with more power than you. Suddenly it is a bad thing. ;)
The flagging system needs to be removed or made so it does not effect rewards at all. We will never see bigger name people with controversial opinions make a home on steemit just based on this principle alone. Can you imagine if someone like Sargon Of Akkad were to consider this platform? He would instantly dismiss it the second he learned some SJW can mass downvote his posts into oblivion.
The fact that the people who added the flagging system at all dont understand how it can and will be weaponized is very sad. I say that there should be a way to downvote stuff but it should be cosmetic in nature.
Also hiding posts from me is childish, I personally gain NOTHING from having to have extra clicks added to see a post that was hidden due to low score. That is not only insulting to ME as the unlooker but its fucking annoying as hell.
I FUCKING DECIDE WHAT I WANT TO SEE. NOT YOU, NOT ANYONE ELSE. I DO! ME!
Got it?
I am fine with the REVEAL for NSFW post but hiding is stupid. If I want it hidden I'll MUTE them.
I do think the down vote should have no effect on rewards. Though the counter here is then that Imagine Bernie then wrote a post of his, commented on his own post, up voted his comment 100%, commented again, up voted that one 100%, etc. Could also do multiple posts, or just up vote his posts from his other accounts.
Pretty soon he has an exponentially growing flood of income from this process and there is no way to counter it.
That is the ONLY legitimate reason for a down vote to impact rewards that I can think of.
Now if we had a reliable mechanism for reporting abuse and that abuse resulted in payouts being reduced to zero that might work.
The key think here is that the goal is to remain decentralized. That is partially what makes the problem more challenging. Creating a central group, or people that have a job of handling the abuse actually CAN centralize power if we are not careful. In such cases it could be possible to take control and censor, restrict the blockchain.
We don't want this. Which makes the problem more challenging because "traditional" techniques used in a centralized environment may not work as well here.
I would prefer the down vote have ZERO impact on rewards. Yet, due to the exploit and gaming opportunity that opens as I presented above that is not feasible yet. Trying to find a way to make that feasible without adding centralization is a goal worth pursuing I believe.
I've been a proponent of Up Votes only for a long time. Until that exploit became clear. Yet really I don't care about down votes other than the fact they cancel out the interest of other people as though that interest does not exist. So if they kept down votes and it had zero impact on rewards then I'd be pretty satisfied.
As far as the reward pool... let it balance itself based upon what people are interested in, not based upon a war for which ideas people are allowed to be interested in.
I think I already said it before:
Reduce flagging impact to 1/10 of upvotes.
Spam will still get downvoted enough.
But someone on a rampage will only lave a few creaking doors, but no burned villages.
Spam cannot be effectively countered by a system that has to recharge voting power, someone can spam endlessly and bottleneck the system because these things can add up in a matter of hours, think about it, I can create a huge post and spam that numerous times, granted my content will be hidden there is nothing to stop the spam or counter it, and it's pathetic to attempt to do such a thing and waste one's voting power.
If downvotes are 1/10 of an upvote, then 'abusive' upvotes cannot be countered. This means the whale 'non-voting' experiment couldn't work.
Sadly the whales non-voting experiment should have been done at the code level. The counter acting votes for that experiment should not have been needed.
However, that was what I was hinting at in terms of exploits. If a person could exploit and gain 10 for their exploit and all the person opposing them could counter is 1 then that is still a profit of 9.
Sounds kind of like the Well's Fargo situation... scam billions from people and be fined only a couple hundred million. Nice profit margin, let's do it again.
But by (code) definition there are no abusive upvotes.
There are only upvotes you don't like.
Yep, but my main issue here is that I've seen people talk about the flag to be answered that it is an easy "UI Fix" When the issue the people they are talking to have with it actually has nothing to do with the UI other than the label they are giving the icon.
I'd be willing to try anything. If it works keep it. If it fails revert it.
I don't think your solution would actually solve the current problem as the people doing the down voting are way more than 10x as powerful as the people they down vote. In fact they are not even having to do close to a 100% down vote at the moment.
So if power were more evenly distributed that might actually help some. As it currently stands it won't do anything to the heaviest wielders of flags.
It also counters the ability to use it fight exploits, which is the only reason I haven't been calling for Up Votes only anymore.
If the "power of the masses" cannot counter a 1/10 then it cannot counter the whales in whatever way, except a "socialist" one account one vote policy. Which would mean thousands of bots just voting after one main account.
With the current curve the big whales are more powerful than thousands of smaller users. Perhaps 10s of thousands. It depends upon what the average power of the smaller users is.
With the new curve they are talking about (linear) then the difference is not as huge... but it is still bigger than 10x.
Take for example... Bernie... he is said to wield generally around 1.5 million steem power.
I am not quite to 15,000 steem power and I am not a smaller person. That means he is currently on a LINEAR curve 100x more powerful than me. It would take 100 of me to counter him. Currently we have the exponential curve so the difference is FAR larger than this. Thousands of me could not counter him at the moment.
You are at about 1082 (almost) at the time I write this. Bernie with delegated power from his various accounts is just shy of 1.5 million as I write this. That makes him a little over 1386 times as powerful as you.
Reduce that by a 10th and he is still 138.6 times more powerful.
The 10th sounds good until you start doing the math and see just how vast the power differences actually are.