RE: Hey Steemit. Let's Talk About Flagging. Again.
It couldn't work for two reasons:
First they would need to create a bunch of content and have the rest of the community vote them up to gain reputation. They couldn't vote themselves up as the curation system will only be enabled at 30-40 reputation.
The second reason is that they couldn't gang up on anybody. If they for example flag one content with 100 flags, their flags will be invalidated with just one counter flag, in turn another counter flag will damage the first flagger's reputation. In that example for them to be marginally successful they would need to spend a lot of time and effort to plan each individual attack and create bots to flag as new counterflag add up to their flags. Eventually only 100 people would be needed to counter their efforts and reveal the content and not affect the authors reputation, and if they flag as each new counter flag manifests, 200 counter flags would punish all flaggers reputations, as they couldn't waste their efforts and flag without counterflags present because that would lock in their flags and count only as gestural flags. Plus the prospect is that 100 flags vs 99 counter flags will only affect the authors reputation as one flag, 1000 flags will only count as one flag, because it's one offense per content, not 1000, and the author would have 30 days to petition enough people to nullify the flags, so if the flags are malicious that effort could be stalled effectively.
In the other situation where they go on a rampage and counter flag legitimate flags in order to damage those flaggers reputation they would become targets of a movement decimating their reputation in no time and curtailing their accounts to curation and content creation only.
Of course those situations depend on them building high enough reputation by creating content and not by spamming, trolling or plagiarizing as that would be easy and rewarding to counter with flags, as policing the community should be, not a tax on voting power.
Tell me what you think, I believe that vests should be curtailed only for upvoting and that is not to say we keep the current voting curve, a flatter more balanced curve is needed, that was the main problem with hf16-17, and downvotes should cost 10x the voting power as you mentioned because they are negative actions overall and should be modeled after the real world where negative bias is evident, not a binary vulcan mindset. People would be incentivized to upvote more and bad actors will be drained 10x faster if they autoflag people.
This will create a whole clique within the community that will be happy to address bad actors with the new system, just the same as the chat channel for abuse, they will be given reports of content that wasn't flagged for justifiable reasons (as disagreement on rewards will be dealt with the downvoting system) and people could foster an environment geared towards reputation as a metric for good standing in the community. The great thing about this suggested system is that people can reverse other's flags or invalidate successive counterflags on valid flags with effectiveness and balance, not by money makes right.
Reputation is not consensus and cannot be used to limit operations on the blockchain.
As we can see with noganoo how abusable it is, the current system is too flawed to use it for anything but hiding negative value posts really.
What is that mean? Consensus is not reputation, yes, consensus is agreement, reputation is a system. But to say it cannot be used to limit operations on the blockchain is ridiculous as I want to know WHY and HOW that is, for one why can we not have a system of reputation that LIMITS operations on the blockchain, is reputation not a metric tied to individual accounts and used to determine numerous factors, and (how) therefore used to determine other factors as well?
"Consensus" on a blockchain means that every node in the network can verify it via code. This is not the case with the reputation, so it cannot be used to limit operations on the blockchain.
And it shouldn't be, because it's flawed. Not everyone with a 0 reputation is a spammer, not everyone with a high one is a saint.
Bump, maybe you didn't see my comment/reply to this but I am waiting to hear back.
I can't really answer that ;-) I assume that it's too costly to check each posters reputation for the witness nodes, but for an in detail explanation I'm the wrong guy.
What I do know is that its rules are quite arbitrary, and we already had multiple cases of rep abuse. That's why I'm opposed to using that metric for anything but GUI filtering. Maybe someone will come up with some better metric in the future, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I am not trying to be thick but the reason is at best a guess, and little if any understanding can be derived from that guess, so do you have anything substantial to back it up so we can explore this thoroughly or know a more suitable person who can offer such information?
I am also interested in what abuse you're talking about and if it's vulnerable as such what the hold up in addressing the issue. The other issue is why not fix it instead of creating a whole other system?
That's why I said I can't answer. I also don't know who can except the devs themselves ;-) All I know is it's not part of block consensus.
To speculate more, the reason could be that it was a quickly thought out concept to enable filtering users on the GUI level, nothing else. There has never been an intention to limit blockchain accessibility using it.
There are several cases where reputation of accounts was bombed by whales. If those accounts wouldn't be able to post any more, there would be no way for others to counter the abuse.
The other way around happens too. High reputation accounts start spamming, and due to how that metric works (higher rep beats lower) top reputation accounts cannot be fought with it at all.
Users (this includes the "majority") should never have the option to block others imo. Subjective proof of work is one thing, restricting usage another. Those people's accounts have a certain value, that guarantees them access on the blockchain level.
If we cannot have limits this place will be a mess when more people join. At the current rate someone can spam successfully without end at the rate of 70 mb a day, and that is just text from comments.
That can add up with just one account, and it multiplies with each account spamming ofcourse. The ghost spam that can happen with images has absolutely no way to be countered, someone can upload 100-1000-10000 images at once by bots in multiple comment boxes and not ever post one comment, and they could crash this place in a matter of minutes. Without limits abuse is wanton and without curtailing creation of content, curation and flagging when the community grows these abuses will magnify and get worse and worse.
As for the reputation of others being affected, of course these things happen, the issue isn't that they get nuked or that they wouldn't be able to post, as those things didn't happen like that under my suggested system and couldn't, every flag/negative affect on reputation can be countered, people couldn't pile on to one content and everyone's flag weighs the same, and neither could high reputation accounts start spamming and think they are invulnerable, they could be brought down and nuked with just a little bit more effort.
@Dan discussed how it makes no sense to compile the state into each block and why and how modeling the system after a MMORPG game, or any other online game where the game world and the engine is static and doesn't need to be included into the blockchain as it runs in the background would speed up the entire thing and help expose programming bugs as well. The transactions are the only thing that enter the network and they get computed in the end with the state.
That is one viable way to create such a reputation system that could bring about actual functionality and considering that this platform could explode at any time (consider that reddit, linkedin or that facebook goes away tomorrow, as any number of scandals or issues could pop up) we will be in a world of hurt and not a chance to fix it then. I may seem to be pandering alarmism but not many see the folly of no limits on these thing, in a system that is already designed with numerous inherent limits, like post and comment length and frequency, voting and downvoting frequency and others.
I still don't understand how reputation cannot be verified on the blockchain, it's not a metric that is tied to each individual account? So I guess the questions would be why is it not the case with reputation, and how is it not the case, unless I somehow didn't get the premise of reputation correct, it being a metric that is tied to each individual account.
Let's assume it is, then it can be used to limit operations, and it should be, because without limits we have no way to counter abuse, and limits require absolutes, while people aren't absolutes, it's not the point of who's a sinner or a saint then.
Because it is absolute it's not a detriment in any sense, it's because the current system has not implemented what I am talking about that it cannot deal with noganoo spam attacks, or any big whale wrecking accounts and engagement/retention.
I hope there is some validity to these assertions or explanation for them, right now they are without logic or rhetoric, therefore they fall down by the first gust of wind from critical questioning.
I wish I would have seen this comment days ago, somehow it got lost and it obviously didn't help not noticing/seeing it, but now that it's been addressed I hope it renewed a little discussion in this direction and in the problem of flagging as a whole.
Agreed, well commented @pharesim
I don't see why a system which treats N flags the same as a 1 flag would improve things. If 10 people are upset at what someone posted compared to 1 person being upset, those clearly have different weights, IMO.
Note, I said "person," not account. I think an identity system may need to be built into a reputation system for it to really function effectively. See my post on Privacy, Identity, and Human Flourishing for more thoughts on that.