PSA - What is Voluntary Japan?
I had a run in with a self-proclaimed “voluntaryist” @kafkanarchy84. The steem name for his secondary account appears to be @voluntaryjapan. His style of voluntaryism appears to be that of the communism variety as his recent interaction with me was to extol the virtues of reward redistribution, also known as flagging for reward disputes here on steem.
Part of his first claim was that: “The creators of the platform made the downvote an available function to balance disproportionately rewarded posts.” His first claim is a half-truth or a full lie and I will explain why. On the first portal to the blockchain, the initial reasons for downvoting were threefold: scams, spam, and plagiarism.
These reasons held for about a year and by that time the first whale wars had begun. There was rampant misuse and abuse of the flagging tool. The only problem was that the developers had no control over how people used the tool. Once they put it out there into the wild it was out of their hands.
So, to address the problem without addressing the problem, the developers of the portal tweaked the definitions of the flag tool to be in harmony with how the abusers were using it. In one fell swoop, they legitimized bad behavior or abuse of the tool.
This wasn’t too dissimilar from when the EPA changed the acceptable levels of radiation in drinking water to amounts greater than those allowed in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The move created the illusion that there should be no panic, or that nothing is wrong when in fact, it solved nothing but rather covered up everything.
The new and “more progressive” flagging protocol on the major portal for the blockchain is as follows. Disagreement on rewards, fraud or plagiarism, hate speech or internet trolling, intentional miss-categorized content or spam. The only semi-legit categories according to the original rule set are fraud, plagiarism, and spam.
Disagreement on rewards hate speech, and internet trolling are subjective catch-all phrases that seem to be created for social justice warrior types and sometimes poser-voluntaryists who for whatever reason cannot comprehend standard voluntaryism as transliterated from real life to the blockchain.
How does standard voluntaryism transfer to the blockchain? It’s simple, you don’t flag people unless it’s in response to being flagged and even in those cases flags are carried out proportionally. That aside, flagging should not be used except for extreme cases of abuse such as scams, fraud, plagiarism, NSFW content, and spam.
Why do standard voluntaryists avoid the flagging tool? That’s simple to answer, as theft is the closest real-world equivalent to what flagging is on steem. Another parallel is sanctions or embargos, both of which are acts of war in non-digital real-world scenarios. The hostile act of using a weighted downvote against the account of a fellow steemian is a force that can strip rewards and even hide posts on some user interfaces.
That said, back to @kafkanarchy84 and his brainchild “Voluntary Japan”. To answer my question the best I can tell is that Voluntary Japan is a glorified collection jar for @kafkanarchy84 and his family, and if that’s the case that’s fine, as we're out here trying to create value for ourselves right? Yet, it takes a special sociopath-type of person to dress it all up and sell it as if though it’s something more than it is. Hypothetically, we could have a bunch of different @kafkanarchy84's here on steem. They could all have some flowery videos that convey that something else is going on, some kind of charitable work.
We could have a Voluntary Venezuela, a Voluntary Nigeria, Voluntary Korea, Voluntary Germany, Voluntary America, Voluntary Vanuatu. Create the right backdrop and imagery and you could have a lot of well-meaning voluntaryists donating to at what a first glance appears a charitable cause.
Now, in fairness to @kafkanarchy84, his Paetron account says voluntary Japan is not a charity. Yet, the way he’s been pimping his presence on Steem and if all you see is the one introduction video, damn sign me up, where do I send the check, I want to help too! The heart and soul of voluntary Japan lay within the mind of @kafkanarchy84. When you donate to his cause, you are not donating to a charity. From what I’ve seen, it’s smoke and mirrors, a house of cards.
He’s got a charismatic video presence which I am sure is working out well for his various crypto wallets. However, his personality on the blockchain, I’ve witnessed firsthand and it's very anti-social, abrasive, and provocateur-like in spirit. In fact, I had an in-depth conversation with him over a period of several days where I responded to every one of his comments as he instigated, insulted, and denigrated me over time until I fell into the same negativity trap as he, which resulted in me returning the same behavior back to him in kind.
That is when he abused the downvote tool and hid two of my comments. In the past, I’ve been around people who act like sociopaths and I know firsthand the many different masks that sociopathic-like people can wear. They can be chameleon-like, all depending on who they hang around. They can turn charisma on-and-off like flipping a switch. Now, I don’t know what his deal is or what if any damage he has. The only thing I know is that people should look deep into this organization before donating if they are expecting their money to go to a tangible and charitable cause.
Oh, and @kafkanarchy84, if you’re reading this our last interaction was when you downvoted me for not leaving your comment section, something that you consider your “private property.” If you believe comment sections on steem are private property, then you can consider yourself prohibited from mine. We shall see if you feel at all compelled to abide by your own interpretations.
UPDATE: kafkanarchy84's clever retort, much style,
nary substance. Is it the same with Voluntary Japan?
Myself being the bane of many ancoms on site, I can attest he is not of a communist variety, and holds well to the ISO Individual Self Ownership, and private property concepts pretty well.
I can't help but think yall are talking past each other more than engaging the relevant points of your differences.
Maybe so, reward redistribution and comment
spiking seem like very socialistic/communistic
behavior patterns to me. Thx for the feedback.
The reward pool is an odd construct, I have a tough time trying to resolve if it simulates anything close to what value exchange 'should be'. In direct exchange, without a reward pool, there aren't these social aspects to deal with.
I think of the reward pool similar to APR on a bank account. If you've got 2m in the bank and hold it there without touching it for a year. At the end of the year you can skim off 100k and you'll still have 2m in the bank. Obviously, this is something that would be done with multiple banks because the FDIC only insures so much.
So when someone pulls their money from the bank and forfeits their APR to bring it and invest in the steem blockchain. Instead of APR in return they get a valuable vote weight. If the person wants to recover the APR they would have gotten if they were banking that cash, they'll have to either invest in bidbots or resort to self voting.
This pisses of the pleab class because they thing every thing should be "fair". Some like myself even, have not invested a dime in the platform. So the idea that I could scoff at how much rewards an investor is pulling is absolutely ridiculous. Kafka talked about "disproportionately rewarded posts". Yet that does not touch on the fact that there are people who have invested disproportionate amounts of money in steem.
If we chase all of them off, we're totally fucked. This is why I am so vehemently against flagging because of reward disputes. The system has it mathematically calculated to a T and it probably assumes that everyone will use their full vote power, even though that most people won't. So when a heavy investor is trying to get their APR back. I look at that shit and say, thank you for investing in the blockchain sir. It's your money that makes this currency more valuable than it would have been had you not invested.
As they say, (greed) Capitalistm is good!
I agree with you though, I think they may have mixed and matched some systems that were never meant to be put together. Kind of like sweet pickles on a hamburger, that's just fucked up. Wendy's been doing that.
Most of my interest in capital systems start from a vantage point of tangible capital formation.
That model is considerably different from the APR model which uses existing pools of wealth to generate more wealth. Nearly all capital formations that are not tangible have some degree of social constructs which eventually turn into various socialism schemes around the non-tangible capital formations.
No capital survives socialism, and the lifecycles at best only survive approx. 100 years until total capital destruction, some survive less than a decade.
As model lifecycles are getting shorter, it is becoming more apparent the problems in socializing pools of capital formations, but that may be a discussion for another time.
The hard litmus of whether a person is true to capital formation is how appalling the thought is of destroying capital for marginally important reasons. The sketchy part of flagging is whether it represents a capital formation destruction. IMO it does.
Pretty deep, had troubles wrapping my head around that one.
Meh, that's not deep at all. If it is taken into account how 'chance processes' occur that create many of these investors, and those chance processes are often a result of social constructs, then inequality in wealth distributions due to chance processes are also a type of socialism(social gambling). That concept gets a little deep, it is mentioned in the last half of the video in this post:
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@joesal/the-pareto-problem-and-capitalism
(a little more depth in removing socialism:
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@joesal/removing-social-constructs-from-capitalism)
Hmm, trying to figure out where you're going with this line of thinking. Are you suggesting between this comment and one of those other posts that we'd be better off without social constructs?
If so, hypothetically, if all forms of taxation were abolished and alloy based money restored. Many social constructs would end naturally from a lack of funding. Yet even then people might want to pool their monies together in favor a various projects and getting things done.
In that collaboration aren't they simply making another social construct, except with real money instead of fiat? I'm trying to figure out if you are opposed to social constructs, or maybe if your beef is with the fiat system which enables too many failing ones that provide little to no utility.