This Post is More or Less to Entice Community Discussion, I am Having a Few Concerns Arise for the Future of Steemit
Lately I have been noticing this crazy rash of finger pointing going on within the Steemit community. A lot of reporting, snitching, or whatever you want to call it about what users are doing with this platform. While some of it I get, plagiarism should definitely be policed and sharing bootlegged media as well, but now we are creating flagging bots for self upvoters when the system allows self voting? Are we going to far or is this really what the community desires for this platform?
I will admit I am not even close to on the in when it comes to what bots we have running around and what ones we aren't but the other night a huge drama ridden discussion within my community hit over some bot called smackdown.kitty and by that conversation alone and the one that proceeded it, seems a huge divide is happening about this one. From what I gather this bot autoflags people's posts down if they vote too much on their own comments or posts. But mainly tied to whale up voters and those with anything above 1000 SP by what I was told...don't quote me on that because I am still trying to grasp what this is for and why.
What I gather is the concept of self voting is being deemed immoral by a small crowd of Steemians and the targets are more on those with whale power status are up voting too much on themselves and not others. I do grasp the issues with HF19 knocking down the small guys with less voting power to spread around but not really catching onto the need to run around and police how users upvote just yet. Personally maybe I am just a keep to my own business kind of guy who doesn't care what others do by nosing in their business but to me having a bot on autopilot running on algorithms to black list posts seems a bit too excessive for the future of Steemit.
Concern number one I have, I self vote as well and I am close to that 1000 SP mark. Since HF19 my payouts went from doing pretty decent to barely scraping change. I have toughed it out through this period and kept at it but honestly without my own personal upvote on my own blogs, I would literally be seeing pocket change a day. I feel I have the right to support myself due to the downfall in my earnings, I have saved back every dime to invest back into SP and do not feel I should be punished by having what little earnings I do get get flagged away by some bot. Second point, Steemit allows self upvoting...its an option we have so who really has the right to run around and cut people's income completely out for them trying to make it through this rough period in Steemit? This I just deem as overstepping some boundaries. Last issue I see, this new bot is only focusing on dolphins and whales, which means no equality at all within its algorithm. Is it fair to punish those with more power but make it okay for the little guys to self vote? Though equality was meant to be a standard in this community??
How Far Are We Going to Go to Turn This Into a Facebook Like Drama Fest?
I don't know about you but I came here to makes some money and to have a home that was censorship free. I abandoned Facebook pretty much at this stage because I thought Steemit was decentralized and a platform to encourage free thinking and free choice in how we use this. Lately though I am hearing so many knit picky rules on everyone that I wonder if its just human nature to take all platforms and try to control people that use them? Don't get me wrong, I commend policing units like steemcleaners for cleaning up the theft and abuse content, that is needed but the policing an telling people how to use our accounts is to me really getting me to dishearten how I feel about this place lately.
I am unsure if people are grasping crypto and what decentralized means. The concept is simple, open source involvement and giving of free will to provide better positive enhancements for the community we are involved in. The finger pointing games are negative and could ruin this platform if it keeps spreading. I honestly think we should be less about calling out the wrong doers and more rewarding the people doing this right. Positive reinforcement always works way better than stirring up drama and playing the holier than thou card in most cases.
Flagging should be for some serious misuse of Steemit, putting improper material out there or stealing others content to make money on it. Upvoting should be free choice for all to do with what they want because its a part of their investment options here and it makes no sense to me to start this rule of turning something that is okay by system standards into a moral conquest to hurt peoples income. Simple solution, just don't upvote users you deem are doing something wrong but let others support them if they feel they right about it for themselves.
I am going to stick to my own moral code and compass, it has served me well in life and don't need a babysitter in life or in Steemit to point out what is right and wrong...especially a bot. I have to survive and to make financial sense of continuing to use Steemit and if I have to upvote myself to keep going so be it until some support levels return with upvoters. I write original content, I give sources to all images I get from the internet and I uvpote as much as possible that my voting power will let me for other users. I also run a free service here to help Steemians out that I do 16 hours a day with my fiance. Who is some bot to tell me how I use my allowed upvoting privileges ? I think the community really should think more about the effects of stuff like this because I can tell you right now, I am meeting more opposed to these things than are actually for it...we might want to get these things in check before its too late.
The problem is more related to people upvoting their own comments, in such a way that they use 100% (or close to it) of their voting power on themselves.
When users use all of their voting power on self-votes, that really isn't good for Steem. But I don't think anybody will flag you for self-voting a few of your original posts each day. I have been open about upvoting myself 1-2 times per day at 100%, and nobody has given me crap about it.
I totally get that concept and view that version of self voting as a huge issue, and I personally don't believe once in my time here I have every upvoted my own comments. I am like you though I do upvote my own posts, more so now since HF19 due to payouts declining so bad its literally went from an ATM to a change machine lol.
My only view against this bot and bots like it, is the bot flagging posts. This area I think should be always human interaction. A bot alerting a dev team to an issue I can back but letting it run around on its own flagging I just don't back at all.
With that said, one key issue though I am also seeing....user on user policing is insanely out of hand lately. I run a project here called Steemit Blogger Central and in our own SLACK i have seen numerous attacks and reporting on other users for stuff they deem not in consensus of what Steemit should allow here. Personally I always felt that is what the upvote and not upvoting system should be for. Just reward what you like and don't support the guys abusing this because without pay they will either conform to doing it right or get out of here due to no profits to be had. I am a bit of a decentralized purist though, I live completely on crypto other than fiat when I have to pay a bill and cash out some Bitcoins to my Bitpay card and in my odd viewpoint to be a true decentralized platform we shouldn't be all looking for material to censor, just ignore and not feed them the upvotes. I just have this fear of this turning into a drama filled Facebook 2.0...people constantly policing the system and making the freedom this could be a washed out system where you constantly have bots hounding you. Got users in my SLACK being commented on constantly by a bot for their own photography lately and its just to me getting so far removed from what I figured this could be if we keep the finger pointing game running.
I believe in the Swarm Wise belief system, open source community that freely works together and only encourage the positive aspects and non reward the negative. It works so easily that way without drama and need to constantly call each other out on wrong doing. Money talks way more than people telling you that you did something wrong. If my pay stops coming in I will either move on or try a more rewarding way to conduct business.
Wow, I will flip shit if I get flagged for voting on my own post. I don't upvote my comments, but I sure as hell am upvoting my posts. Worked to damn hard.
That is what I am saying, this is not a bots place to make a judgement call. This is going to kill the heart of this being a decentralized platform to its core if we keep making policing bots like this. I don't upvote my own comments either but I sure as hell upvote my own posts and don't give a damn what anyone thinks. I am scraping change lately on here due to the HF19 fiasco but one bot issue flagging me for trying to survive to stick with the platform and war will commence lol. This is just over stepping boundaries. I think we got some Facebookers with no sense of what the heart of decentralized crypto is but have a few tech savvy skills to censor us for fun. Why people would back this bot is beyond me but someone delegated 100K to it so it can slam people out of Steemit existence for self voting. Steemit allows self upvoting so in my opinion no one here can police or has the right to infringe on that right we are given. If we don't want self upvoting then we tell Steemit as a community to fix it...not joe schmo bot creator.
I haven't caught the more recent discussions. I know a week or so ago when by default the system still had you up voting your own post was not about you voting on your posts. It was about some people who were up voting every one of their own comments as high as they could. "Good Job" up voted several dollars by themselves. Often they wouldn't even up vote the post they commented on. If you had a back and forth discussion with them it was even worse. Every single one of their replies would be up voted by themselves and you'd notice that they dropped a little bit each time as they burned through their voting power.
This ends up being a pretty heavy drain on the reward pool, and if we ALL followed suit steemit would die a very quick death. It was this activity people were complaining about. Rightfully so...
It's a very simple litmus test. If the activity you choose to do is done by EVERYONE will it hurt the platform? If we all up voted our own comments 100% at the moment when it is all in the same reward pool as everything else it'd likely kill this platform.
Yet, most people that were talking about this were NOT condemning up voting your own blog post, only the comments. I do think there were some people that were condemning both and that could be why we suddenly have it no longer by default voting on our own posts.
Issue is I looked at that very bots down votes on steemd....flagged a lot of little guys votes for upvoting their own posts and no comment upvotes by the little skimming I seen today. That is what bugged me about it, we can call it hiccups along the way but still some people got needless flags. I get it though on the issues and honestly if they pulled the upvoting yourself factor on everyone but people found a way around the system in place then I would agree with policing it but right now that is not the case. It probably does ruin the reward pool and I am not saying its right or wrong how people do it in that way. Its just of my opinion that its really not our business how someone uses this system with their personal upvotes due to it being how it is right now.
For me its just getting too over policed lately, its not just this bot its a bunch of drama I been noticing piling up in the last few weeks. We got people running around calling out users, reporting users, making blogs about users in order to shut people down. Its rather logical to me to just not upvote those you feel are doing wrong and go on about your day. I am just concerned everyone is on this go get everyone making money down played off the system or jealousy of those of us doing well will start to become a flagging game and abuse of that right to have. I guess I view these things different, never been too fond of people that tattle tail or snitch too well. Its just childish when we have in place the opportunity to just not feed those doing wrong upvotes and reward those using the system right with upvotes.
Kind of why I wanted to openly talk about this, I am kind of on the fence about this right now, few conversations I have had spawned drama so that tells me there is a split decision inside of the community if policing so constantly is good for the system or not. I came here out of hope this would remain a decentralized platform but policing to me feels no different than how Facebook polices our freedom of speech on their platform. Just concerned it can go too far.
I do think bots flagging people for up voting their own POST is a bad thing. Ultimately I think bots auto-doing any of this is bad. If someone wants to use a bot it should be as some type of sensor to tell them posts they might want to take a look at. Then manually deal with it.
The people that were abusing the votes were NOT that big in number, some of them simply were powerful. It doesn't need an across the board FLAG brigade. That generally doesn't work at all.
I just wrote a post partially inspired by your discussion.
I am about to check out your post my friend. That is mainly my concern, no bot should have the power to flag, that should be physically looked at by human eyes and then decided on. Abuse is going on, that I get with upvoters and I see it in my own payouts and why I have no choice to upvote myself lately but I think we are starting to over police ourselves here. Think too many are used to mainstream social media policing and implementing those ideas in this platform too much.
Decentralized social media will not run like what we are doing here, the concept is so free form that people will not grasp it yet all at once but I think in some areas we are not even close to nailing that sort of structure and in others we are. Worries me a little because I truly do believe in Steemit and I believe in upholding its future as best as we can
the @cheetah bot actually has done a service because it can flag. It keeps tons of spam and such at bay that would otherwise flood the site. @anyx coded @cheetah and he tries to tweak it so it doesn't give false positives. That is a good bot and does us all a service, and it wouldn't work without being able to flag. It deals with so much content you'd have to hire many people full time to try to keep up with what it checks.
See I am all for that one and for what steemcleaners does because plagiarism, content theft without sourcing, and sharing videos of other peoples work for gains is wrong. That is normal make sense policing and a common sense you shouldn't do that thing here. Its the nit picking stuff though that has me worried, literally we are getting bots a day it looks like running around after people for views, for things the devs don't like but all personal taste issues. Add a flag to that kind of bot and your literally just trolling with a bot and ruining peoples chances to enjoy this site. There has to be a line I believe and I just don't think this recent bot fits in the moral realm. I think Steemit needs to really look into this stuff and figure out what they officially want for rules and toss out the need for user bot creations. Now I do know this, a bot does need approval by Steemit per the TOS guidelines but i know most of these guys never go that route.
Well if you looked at the reward pool a month ago and the reward pool now. You will see that something bad is happening. I get what you're saying. I'm a libertarian. I firmly believe in leaving people alone. However he is completely right when he says if more and more people do this, it will kill Steem.. Additionally. As far as I knew, the kitty only flags comments.. Posts not included. And it should matter to you probably, because with the influx of new users and the diminishing reward pool due to these things. It could be bad for steemit as a whole.
And yes I told them they needed to remove their downvotes from people who provide quality posts and even comments.. But when someone is upvoting their own bad comments for a couple hundred a day, its not good for steemit. Its not social, its not media. It staking a coin. There are lots of POS only coins..
And I don't think it so much matters about the little people or new users upvoting things that add value to Steem and its future. some with 100k steem is more powerful than 1000 new users. Except the 1000 new users will potentially invite other new users if they have a good experience. Increasing the userbase, and value of steem.. If every person only upvoted themselves 10 times a day, what would this place look like?
I concur with focusing on the good parts though, I get it.. If only those people who upvoted their own comments instead posted a legitimate post and upvoted it. Something that makes this place better.. They would make money and add value to the platform, making the money they made worth more at the same time..
Trust me I may seem close minded about this stuff in some areas but that is more or less just that inner decentralized freedom fighter in me, I am open minded about some need for policing and not encouraging bad behavior here.
I think my issue is with the bot doing the flagging itself, I just view that as a situation that human eyes should be really the judge on and not a bot. Its like letting a bot decide does a man get the death penalty or not...a bot can weigh the facts of the case but can it really view the whole concept of why a person upvoted themselves or what kind of reason in comments they wanted to lift their comment up a little?
The reward pool for me is riddled with trouble as well. I literally almost quit Steemit and powered down a week ago because of it out of discouragement. PreHF19 I was on the fast track, after...I am literally scraping change a post. But I am talking i with most of my followers because I also run a community in here called Steemit Blogger Central and our slack is full of talk about the problems due to us trying to sort better ways to help our users. All I hear is that 5% take away from voting power with the slow recovery is why no one can upvote as much. How the reward pool effects that I am unsure but I do think a slight tweak to the recovery time and keep that 5% as is could fix a lot of issues. Not a day recovery speed up, just a little tweak where its not a week later and still recovering if you zero out...because trust me newbs are seriously killing their VP with no realization there is a recovery phase in there...see them ask about it too much why their votes don't count as much and I enlighten and they are stunned to know about the vp side to things.
I am grasping a little more about what you say this bot is doing and I get the targets its after but I still think too much policing is going on for this to be considered a decentralized platform. Its concept is simple and I think its getting over complicated. I live all crypto in my personal life, no fiat at all minus to pay a bill from a Bitcoin cash out and I try to back decentralized ways of thinking. Worrying too much with what other people do and trying to sway them into a form fit way of guidance is more to me censorship and central thinking than being open sourced and live and let live decentraliized.
I am just concerned, don't hate the devs for making these things, don't hate users that back them, I am just kind of on the outside forseeing a possible issue rising if we aim for non censorship and decentralization. But this is Beta and we seriously need a few real tweaks in this still anyways. So I just hope we get it right and so far from what mainstream social media does.
And I can concur with that, I stayed out of it up until now to.. If someone is acting amoral then it is your right to protest them. and according to my libertarian heroes even my duty to do so.. I would rather have my 3000 steem become worth 40$ a piece and steemit to thrive, as opposed to my 3000 steemit being 3100 steemit after self upvoting my comments for a few weeks and contributing nothing to the platform causing a decline in quality of steemit.. I agree that maybe its not a bots place though.. thank you for your comment. Its not all black and white, that is for sure. and bots are bad with grey's
Same feeling lol. Its really very much a grey area in these things. I am like you though I do just want the best for this platform and see it also thrive in a way it upholds a standard. I do not like the abuse of it either but in that middle road of trying to sort what is really the best avenue. I will say this though, self moral compasses go a long way in this area. I don't do what the bot is against minus some self upvotes on my main posts to survive due to low payouts all the sudden, content is still pretty much the same when I was making more but its a mess due to markets and voting power issues. Other than that it would probably never mess with me anyways, I just want to be sure this is what we all want as a unified community. Figured express my concerns and get an open discussion going so I can see all angles from others. I appreciate you comments as well on this, totally get you on this....and I guess we just have to ride it out and see what comes for us all
lord have mercy lol...another bot I was not aware of. Man we might as well create bots to write for us while we sit on the exchanges to feed our bots more Steem so they can write our masterpieces lol. Now a photography bot? Wonder how that deals with sourced material we give props to the original content makers?
lol sorry I been trying to keep up with the comments and just now got to you my friend. I am just on the fence about this one, the bot flagging side mainly but the policing going on lately been in full force since people's payouts been wishy washy. Just want to see this stay decentralized and unlike mainstream social media so I have to put it out there that I have a few rising concerns and see what this community feels
That is my opinion, we should just push the good aspects and all this negative finger pointing game stuff should be swept under the carpet. I am too old for the drama lol. How I feel as well my friend...kind of why i had to write this to see where everyone was at on this topic. Looks like more or less everyone is on the same path towards keeping Steemit decentralized and censorship free thankfully
lol you sure did, for the first time in a week I am above $2 on a post lol. Thank you my friend for that. Think we had a very nice discussion on this post with a ton of great comments but it didn't fair too well. I finally just got back into my account just now. I am going to see how this pans out tomorrow but I am so discouraged its not good. Maybe cash out a little, buy a miner to add to the collection and speed boost this thing up...unsure. Thank you for looking out my friend and if roboflagger here comes at you let me know, at this stage I got not much to loose so always game to stand up for my friends who get messed with on this thing
I was out of the house the last few hours, late getting back here today, replying to people now, msgd you on Fedbook too about the donation so LMK back if you still want SBD today.
No-one should be pressured to not use Steemit how it's intended. I think abstaining from self voting is a good thing for whales and dolphins to do but no-one should be pressured. Fuck 'em, use it how you want.
Exactly, I just don't think this platform should be a platform for constant bullying and policing people. We do wrong we just won't get the upvotes because most likely people see it and won't back it. We do right we get the upvotes, its a very simple concept. But all this finger pointing and annoying bot policing is making Steemit a joke...its honestly something people should really be sure they want in here.
So far as the system allows self voting all these shouldn't be an issue.
Steemit needs a way to address wrong flagging..... like the the person who flags wrongly gets penalized for wrongful flagging........
I think that would help somehow
Spot on suggestion, it should be that way where a review board or something decides in an appeal situation of a false flagging to have happened. And those abusing flags should seriously be losing some reputations marks or something for abuse. This to me with this bot and a few others I seen are turning this thing worse than Facebook, spawning a lot of drama and over stepping rules. The system gave us self upvoting so one person or team in Steemit should not have the right to call the shots that they don't like something and enforce it on all of the community
This isnt totally related but it really pissed me off today. There is this new bot spamming #photography post with this @photography-help
Hello @soonidrift. Thank you for sharing your photos.
Friendly Reminder:
If you shoot this photo yourself but share at other web site before post on Steemit, please remember to link back to the web site because Cheetah is very clever.
If you share someone else photos, please remember to link back the sources of the photos and add some value by adding your own thought or comment.
Photography Slogan: A camera that puts a world of possibilities at your fingertips. Literally.
The problem is this gives the impression i stole the work. I take great pride in my work and spend many hours in tick infested heat to get my photos. Who ever thought of this never once considered the negative impression this leaves on a post. All of these off the cuff ideas meant to help the platform are half baked with no insight into the harm it can cause. In just a few weeks ive seen so many of these things and i makes me wonder if i invested in the wrong platform. Jist my 2 cents probally only worth one cent.
@soonidrift yeah that bot has been showing up any post with original photography from the user. A lot of users have flagged the bot and hopefully this will get resolved asap!
I was just made aware of this one as well buddy. Its ridiculous. These bots are more of a hassle then an enhancement. I say keep it simple, you don't like something don't upvote, you like something support it...really that is all the policing this place needs.
I've seen that bot on other accounts, on accounts I know are people to trust and post original content. That's taking it too far. It's just a little too smug for my taste as well. That's a bot that definitely needs some tweaking.
I agree, all its going to do is run around making users question other users constantly for false reasons. I am a little sick of the finger pointing and bots running amok, but hopefully we can all start to realize the tactic should be positive reinforcement first and policing as a last resort. I think we are doing this way backwards lately and just creating drama like mainstream social media...I did not come here for this
Hopefully this gets people thinking about what we are doing to this great platform, I am very concerned for its future and hope everyone at least looks at every thing going on inside of it a little closer so this can be here for everyone and in a headache free way lol
@sflaherty you raise a good point. In your writing I think 2 separate points of discussion come out: 1) the usage of bots (for self voting or another purpose) and 2) self-voting itself (manual or using a bot). Just wanted to separate the two points for further discussion
This bot kind of doesn't differentiate between the two from what I understand. Mainly I believe its about self comment upvoters but i seen already it attacking upvoters on their own posts manually. To me this is a bit too far with usages of technology to police this system. If Steemit lets us upvote ourselves than there really should be not one person policing that and using a autobot flagger? That is going to destroy this platform if we keep allowing such non human decision makers of law. Very centralized and censorship ridden I feel.
The problem is more related to people upvoting their own comments, in such a way that they use 100% (or close to it) of their voting power on themselves.
When users use all of their voting power on self-votes, that really isn't good for Steem. But I don't think anybody will flag you for self-voting a few of your original posts each day. I have been open about upvoting myself 1-2 times per day at 100%, and nobody has given me crap about it.
I totally get that concept and view that version of self voting as a huge issue, and I personally don't believe once in my time here I have every upvoted my own comments. I am like you though I do upvote my own posts, more so now since HF19 due to payouts declining so bad its literally went from an ATM to a change machine lol.
My only view against this bot and bots like it, is the bot flagging posts. This area I think should be always human interaction. A bot alerting a dev team to an issue I can back but letting it run around on its own flagging I just don't back at all.
With that said, one key issue though I am also seeing....user on user policing is insanely out of hand lately. I run a project here called Steemit Blogger Central and in our own SLACK i have seen numerous attacks and reporting on other users for stuff they deem not in consensus of what Steemit should allow here. Personally I always felt that is what the upvote and not upvoting system should be for. Just reward what you like and don't support the guys abusing this because without pay they will either conform to doing it right or get out of here due to no profits to be had. I am a bit of a decentralized purist though, I live completely on crypto other than fiat when I have to pay a bill and cash out some Bitcoins to my Bitpay card and in my odd viewpoint to be a true decentralized platform we shouldn't be all looking for material to censor, just ignore and not feed them the upvotes. I just have this fear of this turning into a drama filled Facebook 2.0...people constantly policing the system and making the freedom this could be a washed out system where you constantly have bots hounding you. Got users in my SLACK being commented on constantly by a bot for their own photography lately and its just to me getting so far removed from what I figured this could be if we keep the finger pointing game running.
I believe in the Swarm Wise belief system, open source community that freely works together and only encourage the positive aspects and non reward the negative. It works so easily that way without drama and need to constantly call each other out on wrong doing. Money talks way more than people telling you that you did something wrong. If my pay stops coming in I will either move on or try a more rewarding way to conduct business.
Wow, I will flip shit if I get flagged for voting on my own post. I don't upvote my comments, but I sure as hell am upvoting my posts. Worked to damn hard.
That is what I am saying, this is not a bots place to make a judgement call. This is going to kill the heart of this being a decentralized platform to its core if we keep making policing bots like this. I don't upvote my own comments either but I sure as hell upvote my own posts and don't give a damn what anyone thinks. I am scraping change lately on here due to the HF19 fiasco but one bot issue flagging me for trying to survive to stick with the platform and war will commence lol. This is just over stepping boundaries. I think we got some Facebookers with no sense of what the heart of decentralized crypto is but have a few tech savvy skills to censor us for fun. Why people would back this bot is beyond me but someone delegated 100K to it so it can slam people out of Steemit existence for self voting. Steemit allows self upvoting so in my opinion no one here can police or has the right to infringe on that right we are given. If we don't want self upvoting then we tell Steemit as a community to fix it...not joe schmo bot creator.
I haven't caught the more recent discussions. I know a week or so ago when by default the system still had you up voting your own post was not about you voting on your posts. It was about some people who were up voting every one of their own comments as high as they could. "Good Job" up voted several dollars by themselves. Often they wouldn't even up vote the post they commented on. If you had a back and forth discussion with them it was even worse. Every single one of their replies would be up voted by themselves and you'd notice that they dropped a little bit each time as they burned through their voting power.
This ends up being a pretty heavy drain on the reward pool, and if we ALL followed suit steemit would die a very quick death. It was this activity people were complaining about. Rightfully so...
It's a very simple litmus test. If the activity you choose to do is done by EVERYONE will it hurt the platform? If we all up voted our own comments 100% at the moment when it is all in the same reward pool as everything else it'd likely kill this platform.
Yet, most people that were talking about this were NOT condemning up voting your own blog post, only the comments. I do think there were some people that were condemning both and that could be why we suddenly have it no longer by default voting on our own posts.
Issue is I looked at that very bots down votes on steemd....flagged a lot of little guys votes for upvoting their own posts and no comment upvotes by the little skimming I seen today. That is what bugged me about it, we can call it hiccups along the way but still some people got needless flags. I get it though on the issues and honestly if they pulled the upvoting yourself factor on everyone but people found a way around the system in place then I would agree with policing it but right now that is not the case. It probably does ruin the reward pool and I am not saying its right or wrong how people do it in that way. Its just of my opinion that its really not our business how someone uses this system with their personal upvotes due to it being how it is right now.
For me its just getting too over policed lately, its not just this bot its a bunch of drama I been noticing piling up in the last few weeks. We got people running around calling out users, reporting users, making blogs about users in order to shut people down. Its rather logical to me to just not upvote those you feel are doing wrong and go on about your day. I am just concerned everyone is on this go get everyone making money down played off the system or jealousy of those of us doing well will start to become a flagging game and abuse of that right to have. I guess I view these things different, never been too fond of people that tattle tail or snitch too well. Its just childish when we have in place the opportunity to just not feed those doing wrong upvotes and reward those using the system right with upvotes.
Kind of why I wanted to openly talk about this, I am kind of on the fence about this right now, few conversations I have had spawned drama so that tells me there is a split decision inside of the community if policing so constantly is good for the system or not. I came here out of hope this would remain a decentralized platform but policing to me feels no different than how Facebook polices our freedom of speech on their platform. Just concerned it can go too far.
I do think bots flagging people for up voting their own POST is a bad thing. Ultimately I think bots auto-doing any of this is bad. If someone wants to use a bot it should be as some type of sensor to tell them posts they might want to take a look at. Then manually deal with it.
The people that were abusing the votes were NOT that big in number, some of them simply were powerful. It doesn't need an across the board FLAG brigade. That generally doesn't work at all.
I just wrote a post partially inspired by your discussion.
I am about to check out your post my friend. That is mainly my concern, no bot should have the power to flag, that should be physically looked at by human eyes and then decided on. Abuse is going on, that I get with upvoters and I see it in my own payouts and why I have no choice to upvote myself lately but I think we are starting to over police ourselves here. Think too many are used to mainstream social media policing and implementing those ideas in this platform too much.
Decentralized social media will not run like what we are doing here, the concept is so free form that people will not grasp it yet all at once but I think in some areas we are not even close to nailing that sort of structure and in others we are. Worries me a little because I truly do believe in Steemit and I believe in upholding its future as best as we can
the @cheetah bot actually has done a service because it can flag. It keeps tons of spam and such at bay that would otherwise flood the site. @anyx coded @cheetah and he tries to tweak it so it doesn't give false positives. That is a good bot and does us all a service, and it wouldn't work without being able to flag. It deals with so much content you'd have to hire many people full time to try to keep up with what it checks.
See I am all for that one and for what steemcleaners does because plagiarism, content theft without sourcing, and sharing videos of other peoples work for gains is wrong. That is normal make sense policing and a common sense you shouldn't do that thing here. Its the nit picking stuff though that has me worried, literally we are getting bots a day it looks like running around after people for views, for things the devs don't like but all personal taste issues. Add a flag to that kind of bot and your literally just trolling with a bot and ruining peoples chances to enjoy this site. There has to be a line I believe and I just don't think this recent bot fits in the moral realm. I think Steemit needs to really look into this stuff and figure out what they officially want for rules and toss out the need for user bot creations. Now I do know this, a bot does need approval by Steemit per the TOS guidelines but i know most of these guys never go that route.
Well if you looked at the reward pool a month ago and the reward pool now. You will see that something bad is happening. I get what you're saying. I'm a libertarian. I firmly believe in leaving people alone. However he is completely right when he says if more and more people do this, it will kill Steem.. Additionally. As far as I knew, the kitty only flags comments.. Posts not included. And it should matter to you probably, because with the influx of new users and the diminishing reward pool due to these things. It could be bad for steemit as a whole.
And yes I told them they needed to remove their downvotes from people who provide quality posts and even comments.. But when someone is upvoting their own bad comments for a couple hundred a day, its not good for steemit. Its not social, its not media. It staking a coin. There are lots of POS only coins..
And I don't think it so much matters about the little people or new users upvoting things that add value to Steem and its future. some with 100k steem is more powerful than 1000 new users. Except the 1000 new users will potentially invite other new users if they have a good experience. Increasing the userbase, and value of steem.. If every person only upvoted themselves 10 times a day, what would this place look like?
I concur with focusing on the good parts though, I get it.. If only those people who upvoted their own comments instead posted a legitimate post and upvoted it. Something that makes this place better.. They would make money and add value to the platform, making the money they made worth more at the same time..
Trust me I may seem close minded about this stuff in some areas but that is more or less just that inner decentralized freedom fighter in me, I am open minded about some need for policing and not encouraging bad behavior here.
I think my issue is with the bot doing the flagging itself, I just view that as a situation that human eyes should be really the judge on and not a bot. Its like letting a bot decide does a man get the death penalty or not...a bot can weigh the facts of the case but can it really view the whole concept of why a person upvoted themselves or what kind of reason in comments they wanted to lift their comment up a little?
The reward pool for me is riddled with trouble as well. I literally almost quit Steemit and powered down a week ago because of it out of discouragement. PreHF19 I was on the fast track, after...I am literally scraping change a post. But I am talking i with most of my followers because I also run a community in here called Steemit Blogger Central and our slack is full of talk about the problems due to us trying to sort better ways to help our users. All I hear is that 5% take away from voting power with the slow recovery is why no one can upvote as much. How the reward pool effects that I am unsure but I do think a slight tweak to the recovery time and keep that 5% as is could fix a lot of issues. Not a day recovery speed up, just a little tweak where its not a week later and still recovering if you zero out...because trust me newbs are seriously killing their VP with no realization there is a recovery phase in there...see them ask about it too much why their votes don't count as much and I enlighten and they are stunned to know about the vp side to things.
I am grasping a little more about what you say this bot is doing and I get the targets its after but I still think too much policing is going on for this to be considered a decentralized platform. Its concept is simple and I think its getting over complicated. I live all crypto in my personal life, no fiat at all minus to pay a bill from a Bitcoin cash out and I try to back decentralized ways of thinking. Worrying too much with what other people do and trying to sway them into a form fit way of guidance is more to me censorship and central thinking than being open sourced and live and let live decentraliized.
I am just concerned, don't hate the devs for making these things, don't hate users that back them, I am just kind of on the outside forseeing a possible issue rising if we aim for non censorship and decentralization. But this is Beta and we seriously need a few real tweaks in this still anyways. So I just hope we get it right and so far from what mainstream social media does.
And I can concur with that, I stayed out of it up until now to.. If someone is acting amoral then it is your right to protest them. and according to my libertarian heroes even my duty to do so.. I would rather have my 3000 steem become worth 40$ a piece and steemit to thrive, as opposed to my 3000 steemit being 3100 steemit after self upvoting my comments for a few weeks and contributing nothing to the platform causing a decline in quality of steemit.. I agree that maybe its not a bots place though.. thank you for your comment. Its not all black and white, that is for sure. and bots are bad with grey's
Same feeling lol. Its really very much a grey area in these things. I am like you though I do just want the best for this platform and see it also thrive in a way it upholds a standard. I do not like the abuse of it either but in that middle road of trying to sort what is really the best avenue. I will say this though, self moral compasses go a long way in this area. I don't do what the bot is against minus some self upvotes on my main posts to survive due to low payouts all the sudden, content is still pretty much the same when I was making more but its a mess due to markets and voting power issues. Other than that it would probably never mess with me anyways, I just want to be sure this is what we all want as a unified community. Figured express my concerns and get an open discussion going so I can see all angles from others. I appreciate you comments as well on this, totally get you on this....and I guess we just have to ride it out and see what comes for us all
I like toast 🍞
This bot is really annoying!!
lord have mercy lol...another bot I was not aware of. Man we might as well create bots to write for us while we sit on the exchanges to feed our bots more Steem so they can write our masterpieces lol. Now a photography bot? Wonder how that deals with sourced material we give props to the original content makers?
What account is the bot attached to?
I'm not asking who made it...I'm asking the bot itself username
Nevermind.
I'm friends with some of the backend guys around here.
I know whose bot it is now.
lol sorry I been trying to keep up with the comments and just now got to you my friend. I am just on the fence about this one, the bot flagging side mainly but the policing going on lately been in full force since people's payouts been wishy washy. Just want to see this stay decentralized and unlike mainstream social media so I have to put it out there that I have a few rising concerns and see what this community feels
All good buddy.
My best recommendation is to continue to focus and promote the good.
All societies will have their flaws.
That is my opinion, we should just push the good aspects and all this negative finger pointing game stuff should be swept under the carpet. I am too old for the drama lol. How I feel as well my friend...kind of why i had to write this to see where everyone was at on this topic. Looks like more or less everyone is on the same path towards keeping Steemit decentralized and censorship free thankfully
Full power UV for you -- with what I have in the tank man.
You are one of the most sincere and best Steemians going.
Period, end of story.
You know how I feel.
Shoot, I was almost able to double your payout here LOL.
lol you sure did, for the first time in a week I am above $2 on a post lol. Thank you my friend for that. Think we had a very nice discussion on this post with a ton of great comments but it didn't fair too well. I finally just got back into my account just now. I am going to see how this pans out tomorrow but I am so discouraged its not good. Maybe cash out a little, buy a miner to add to the collection and speed boost this thing up...unsure. Thank you for looking out my friend and if roboflagger here comes at you let me know, at this stage I got not much to loose so always game to stand up for my friends who get messed with on this thing
I was out of the house the last few hours, late getting back here today, replying to people now, msgd you on Fedbook too about the donation so LMK back if you still want SBD today.
No-one should be pressured to not use Steemit how it's intended. I think abstaining from self voting is a good thing for whales and dolphins to do but no-one should be pressured. Fuck 'em, use it how you want.
Exactly, I just don't think this platform should be a platform for constant bullying and policing people. We do wrong we just won't get the upvotes because most likely people see it and won't back it. We do right we get the upvotes, its a very simple concept. But all this finger pointing and annoying bot policing is making Steemit a joke...its honestly something people should really be sure they want in here.
So far as the system allows self voting all these shouldn't be an issue.
Steemit needs a way to address wrong flagging..... like the the person who flags wrongly gets penalized for wrongful flagging........
I think that would help somehow
Spot on suggestion, it should be that way where a review board or something decides in an appeal situation of a false flagging to have happened. And those abusing flags should seriously be losing some reputations marks or something for abuse. This to me with this bot and a few others I seen are turning this thing worse than Facebook, spawning a lot of drama and over stepping rules. The system gave us self upvoting so one person or team in Steemit should not have the right to call the shots that they don't like something and enforce it on all of the community
This isnt totally related but it really pissed me off today. There is this new bot spamming #photography post with this
@photography-help
Hello @soonidrift. Thank you for sharing your photos.
Friendly Reminder:
Photography Slogan: A camera that puts a world of possibilities at your fingertips. Literally.
The problem is this gives the impression i stole the work. I take great pride in my work and spend many hours in tick infested heat to get my photos. Who ever thought of this never once considered the negative impression this leaves on a post. All of these off the cuff ideas meant to help the platform are half baked with no insight into the harm it can cause. In just a few weeks ive seen so many of these things and i makes me wonder if i invested in the wrong platform. Jist my 2 cents probally only worth one cent.
@soonidrift yeah that bot has been showing up any post with original photography from the user. A lot of users have flagged the bot and hopefully this will get resolved asap!
Lets hope so, thanks for the update
I was just made aware of this one as well buddy. Its ridiculous. These bots are more of a hassle then an enhancement. I say keep it simple, you don't like something don't upvote, you like something support it...really that is all the policing this place needs.
I've seen that bot on other accounts, on accounts I know are people to trust and post original content. That's taking it too far. It's just a little too smug for my taste as well. That's a bot that definitely needs some tweaking.
I agree, all its going to do is run around making users question other users constantly for false reasons. I am a little sick of the finger pointing and bots running amok, but hopefully we can all start to realize the tactic should be positive reinforcement first and policing as a last resort. I think we are doing this way backwards lately and just creating drama like mainstream social media...I did not come here for this
Well done post thanks for sharing
Hopefully this gets people thinking about what we are doing to this great platform, I am very concerned for its future and hope everyone at least looks at every thing going on inside of it a little closer so this can be here for everyone and in a headache free way lol
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@sflaherty you raise a good point. In your writing I think 2 separate points of discussion come out: 1) the usage of bots (for self voting or another purpose) and 2) self-voting itself (manual or using a bot). Just wanted to separate the two points for further discussion
This bot kind of doesn't differentiate between the two from what I understand. Mainly I believe its about self comment upvoters but i seen already it attacking upvoters on their own posts manually. To me this is a bit too far with usages of technology to police this system. If Steemit lets us upvote ourselves than there really should be not one person policing that and using a autobot flagger? That is going to destroy this platform if we keep allowing such non human decision makers of law. Very centralized and censorship ridden I feel.