RE: The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it
Unfortunately while what you described was not simple, it is still not even that simple.
I'm just thinking that this is a case of a few bad apples;
For now yes. Yet we want this platform to grow and more people to join. What happens when a rich jerk buys a bunch of steem power and goes to town? What happens when a SJW manages to get a lot of power or just a lot of SJWs and they go to town flagging ?
What happens when people get angry at a person and start intentionally flagging all of their posts without reading them?
What happens when someone else flags all of another person's posts for RETALIATION for flagging?
These types of things tend to happen in other places with a down vote. There is no reason to assume this would not eventually happen here as well.
Whales are only the problem NOW because when one of them down votes something it can be like a giant kicking a peasant and sending them flying across the room to smash into the wall.
As far as bots. They are also doing a service. Without them things got out of hand very fast. They are not all bad. Programming an effective bot can be tricky. There are times they will false flag, make mistakes, etc. The Cheetah bot is actually pretty effective. It does make mistakes, but if you let @anyx know he will typically correct those. Before Cheetah it became almost impossible to curate for awhile due to the sheer amount of garbage posts posted by what appear to be bots themselves on an almost every 5 minute basis. This is also why the 4 posts per day thing was implemented so if anyone DOES spam post like that they will fairly quickly lose the rewards of doing so without a bot.
You also don't see many "Watch this video to see how you can work from home and make $20,000 per week" ad posts because things like Cheetah deal with that.
“i have created, for myself a practice i call flag mining. i spend at least an hour a week finding flagged posts and seeing what's in them. normally if i see something flagged, i just move on. sometimes, paying deliberate attention to only flagged posts has yielded some interesting results. i can see patterns in what gets flagged out of opinion. i also get to see which whales chronically misbehave. sometimes i just find cool posts.”
That is an interesting approach. Have you considered writing a post as kind of a flag report and highlight the posts that seem to have been flagged simply for opinion?
Some of us might like that. It may be too late to fix it for the 24 hour payout but perhaps we can get it some payout from the 30 day payout. It also might help people start to learn patterns without having repeat the laborious process you are already doing.
Is it not possible to publish on site the instances of flag/downvote instances? Maybe the top 100 by damage done to the reputation/potential earnings etc?
Just as all the other steemtools.com tools were made, something like that could likely be made.
Can this be done algorithmically so that at least the larger community would be made aware of the larger abusers? I think this could help motivate the 99% to address the abuses of the 1%? Would the threat of thousands of minnows attacking the main abusers have a positive effect? The 99% would then have the power to make their own minds up and help redress the balance. The consensus of the majority would then play out, rather than the minority.
Hard to say. It is worth considering and if someone wishes to make such a tool we might be able to see what can be done with it.
Interesting and thanks for the info - I know nothing about coding btw or even what an SJW is.
So what I'm getting from this is that it is possible for a bot to deal with spam and plagiarism, at least to a degree. The main nub of the flagging issue though I think, is that there seems to be absolutely no point in having such a system without moderators. A flag is used to draw someone's attention to it, then make a subjective decision - something a bot can't do. A flag in and of itself, should have absolutely no impact on a post, it is a neutral thing as no decision has been made yet. This seems to be the nub of this issue.
So, who makes the decision in lieu of any moderators? I would say the community should.
I think that this, as someone else said is going to require some out of the box thinking. I think I'll just make some suggestions for others to "pick the bones out of" to get the ball rolling, not fully thought out ideas necessarily requiring feedback.
I think what has been created here has been built around similar not fully thought out ideas, probably based on Libertarian principles. This is fully understandable, however Libertarianism is an untested ideology on this kind of scale. Personally, I'm Libertarian only insofar as my Liberal principles allow, I see many unworkable aspects to this ideology and would maintain that we are seeing them play out here in a "survival of the fittest" way. There can only be one outcome in this environment, a kind of Capitalism on steroids.
We need to keep the ideologies out of this and as far as possible make it equitable for all users.
What we have here is a Wild West situation with no law and order......I suggest we introduce some. I expect that the Libertarians among us first response would be to fight against authority, however if that authority is de-centralised to all users, then this complaint disappears. It already has been accepted that we have a kind of Liberal representative governance in the way the witnesses work. I believe we will actually eventually end up creating such a model here as it appears to be the most equitable and has an inevitability about it. We have plenty of carrots, but no stick......this is a major concern and the root of our troubles I think.
The community already votes for witnesses to perform a particular community task, so how about we introduce a Court system and the community vote for the jurors? The evidence against the worst offenders can be presented transparently in one place.
I would suggest that there are terms introduced to expect users to submit to the Court of their peers. So what about restitution or fines, how would we go about that? Off the top of my head I would suggest that rewards are not immediately paid out but that there is a waiting period of a few days, if nobody brings a case against you then you get paid out, if they do then you await judgement. I believe the reward pool is a separate pot which is paid out weekly - can this be done like this weeks rewards go to last weeks authors? Is it possible to code this?
Lol, anyway, I said it was outside the box.....maybe it will stimulate other ideas and thought processes?
Edit: Actually the jurors should be randomly picked each week to prevent whales voting their mates in......
The goal of @dantheman and the people making steem is that is should be able to exist without them. Dan is an Anarcho-Capitalist (at least that is the closest fitting label) as am I. That generally is someone that is Libertarian that eventually decides that ultimately we don't need rulers.
That is all fine and dandy, but how do you implement that in code. That is tricky.
The reason to do this is even if you have moderators, they are human, with bias and eventually they too will abuse their position.
So how can you fix this? It is NOT an easy problem, or someone likely would have already done it, yet that is the position that Steemit is in and trying to think of solutions.
Moderators ultimately do not seem to be the answer either. You end up with places they are moderating becoming their subjective kingdoms.
People should never be getting downvoted/flagged for opinion. We don't need that.
Yet how do we insure that is the case?
Replying to latest post here:
"The reason to do this is even if you have moderators, they are human, with bias and eventually they too will abuse their position."
I totally agree and not suggesting moderators. However just to say that if these were voted in and could be voted out, then it appears to be exactly the same argument as for witnesses.
"Moderators ultimately do not seem to be the answer either. You end up with places they are moderating becoming their subjective kingdoms."
Agreed.
"People should never be getting downvoted/flagged for opinion. We don't need that. Yet how do we insure that is the case?"
I would say the only way to ensure this is to remove both flagging and downvoting, then deal with the 1 remaining problem of upvoting, rather than 3 problems. Perhaps we are looking at the problem arse upwards?
This 1 remaining problem could then be addressed by the court system/delayed payment idea I mooted perhaps.
@dantheman just resteemed this post which seems relevant... https://steemit.com/steem/@bitcoindoom/why-down-votes-and-flags-are-an-unavoidable-consequence-of-game-theory