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RE: Hey Steemit. Let's Talk About Flagging. Again.
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.
This is an interface issue.
Spam happens on a blockchain. If natural usage outgrows bots, spamming will become more and more expensive.
I didn't read all your text, and won't comment any more.