RE: The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it
well even Dan commented he'd like to have an up vote only system. He simply has not come up with a way to do it that couldn't be gamed. We have had cases of "sock puppets" before where accounts were created and from day one post received huge rewards from some whales, and on every post they wrote, and in many cases they were very mediocre posts, and in some cases were actually plagiarism. We had community members catch onto it though and we were able to respond and combat it.
In those cases it was the down vote that was able to eliminate the ability to abuse the system that way.... as those post were rewarded their steem power grows, and they could be used to up vote other sock puppets. So eventually you'd have all the power syphoned to a small group of people.
Up Vote only could potentially lead to that. So whatever exists would have to somehow address that. It's not an easy problem.
Nice post and the comments reveal the trickiness of the problem. I'm just thinking that this is a case of a few bad apples; the vast majority of the community would like to be able to address the abuse. I think a large part of the problem is that most are unaware of who the culprits are in order to even mobilise themselves into action against it.
Can I just summarize where I think we are to help break things down and simplify the issues from what I’ve read:
Is this correct? I’m not a techie so please bear with my ignorance but is it not possible to totally ban/impede bots? Can we not have some kind of unique human thing attached to the voting mechanism? I’m probably guessing not, as I’m pretty sure someone would have thought of it, but thought worth asking.
Secondly the whale problem; the above post by @lifeworship gave me some clue as to how we might go about this:
“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.”
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? 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.
Just a few top of my head thoughts…..
Got you! Makes sense.... and correct not a problem easily resolved. It is a pity that where ever monetary matters are concerned there are always people looking to 'game' the system.