The last missing piece of the steem puzzle
I remember when steem started a year ago, the insane inflation, the reward curve, the 2 year lock in period,etc...we've come a long way.
I want to thank the steem developers who have taken all the feedbacks from the community and have done an excellent job to prepare steem for primetime..
However there is still one fundamental problem in the way steem works in my opinion :
Wealthy individuals/organizations can silence anything on the platform and remove monetary rewards from anyone.
Some argue that steemit is censorship free because content cannot be deleted from the blockchain. It is to some extent but there are other ways you can censor content indirectly. One of which is to cut funding, basically the type of censorship youtube is involved in and that we are trying to prevent.
If you search 'censorship steemit' on youtube you will find dozens of users complain that their posts have effectively been demonetized and that steemit is no different from youtube. Censorship is alive and well on steemit, because your rewards havn't yet been taken away from you doesn't mean it isn't happening to others.
For the reasons outlined above I would like to propose a change to the downvote function. Currently it is stake based which means users's downvote power is relative to their steem power.
This makes the whole system very vulnerable and at the mercy of any wealthy entity willing to attack the network.
That's why I think the downvote function should be modified from stake based to consensus based. A post would need to have majority consensus against it for it to be downvoted. This is where reputation, account age,etc...comes in.
Why only use consensus mechanism to downvote and not upvote?
Assume this scenario. Mark Zuckerberg buys 99% of the steem supply with the intend to disrupt and hurt the platform.
He first uses his voting power to allocate himself a huge portion of the reward pool. This would have basically very little effect on steemit, the price of steem would have adjusted accordingly. The community would be using only 1% of the existing tokens but there would be no real disruption on the platform as the dollar value would have increased a lot due to Zuckerberg buying it all up and steemians having to share only 1% of the supply.
After failing at disrupting the platform Zuckerberg attempts a new strategy. Instead of upvoting himself he decides to downvote everybody else on the platform. Now however this creates a real mess, the vast majority of users have stopped earning rewards on the platform, complain about censorship are through the roof, steem users are left helpless,..
What is the lesson here? The lesson is that a rich person/organization willing to attack the network would only be able to do so with the downvote function which is why a consensus mechanism is only required for downvotes.
Another important takeaway is that self voting does not really hurt the platform, unless everyone does it of course. But even then it wouldn't really hurt it per se rather would change its purpose.
There is no bad or good way to use your steem power, some people will be selfish, some rich kids will up vote pokemon stuff all day long, some advertisers will vote up their shitty products,etc.. people will use their steem power in many different way just like in society people earn in many different ways.
Everyone who owns steem power supports the network simply by owning a share in it and they should be able to use it in whatever way without being downvoted. Steem is a self regulating system where users who support steem by powering up rise up and those who don’t lose influence.
The ‘disagreement on reward’ thing is plain stupid, imagine if in society it was normal to beat people up when you disagree with them, that’s effectively what steemit encourages with this.
Only thing with wide consensus such as trolling, pedophelia,offensive content,etc…should be downvoted.
There are many other issues aside from censorship that comes with stake based downvoting.
Scalability
Only a handful of people have the ability to really moderate the site. As the platform grows it will be increasingly difficult for these individuals to moderate, in other words there won’t be enough eye balls to moderate everything.
Trust
We the community need to trust that those with influence are doing a proper job moderating and that they are not biased in their decision. Unfortunately they have proven many times that we can not trust them, if you give someone too much power he is ultimately going to abuse it.
Reputation damage
When a rich individual can ruin your reputation with only a few votes the reputation score becomes meaningless.
Centralisation
Whenever a user downvote content he is losing potential rewards.
This means that only a few people are in the business of moderation. Those people have been delegated whale power in order to moderate the platform. Similar to curation guilds basically. Only a few individuals get to decide what should be down voted, this is very problematic
We need consensus with at least 80-90% majority in order for a post to be down voted.
Steemit proud itself on being a community based website but is it really?
So far the argument I’ve heard against, is that it will reduce the utility of steem power. I’d would argue that it won’t, it may actually give people an extra incentive to buy and give steem power more value.
The proposal is not necessarily to create 1 steemian = 1 downvote but to bake consensus in.
Downvoting power could still be relative to steem power but there would need to be majority consensus before a post can be downvoted.
I was also contemplating the idea of having a moderation board. Basically a list of posts ranked from the most downvoted to the least downvoted ( in number term ) And all users would be able to easily participate in the moderation of the platform.
Anyway let me know how you feel about this.
I call it the only flaw in the jewel of @dan's crown. Even @dan and @ned have been accused of wielding their SP to cut out the tongue out of others recently. That is PLAINLY WRONG - no matter how much they disagree with them (unless it is plainly endangering someones life of course - but these cases are indeed a rarity.)
I'd hate to see Steemit degrade into a saltmined community where freedom of speech is curtailed by the select few. @ned and @dan's creation deserves better. UV/RS.
What are you talking about ? There is no actual censorship on steem thanks to the blockchain and the sorting via curation form the wisdom of the stake is what gives steem it's value.
There is a difference between curation and hateful, spiteful economic violence against others and you know it @transisto! Personal vendettas have no place on Steemit. Period.
If someone calls me a kebab for no reason, i wouldn't mind wielding "economic violence" against him.
I heard from Sneak one of the Steemit Inc guys, that there actually is a DMCA copyright takedown system in place which may actually just remove the cointent from showing up at all on steemit.com but whih may still be available to see on busy.org or other steem blockchain explorers, but i have since never heard anythinge lse about this "leak" he told me, and it scared me! i hate to even bring it up and i dont want tobe ruining ur arguent but i feel i should warn you about it and warn the community about it and i hope its just niot going to be enforced, but i believe theres been a few cases of copyright takedowns and peopel being sued for making profit off of posting other peopels photpographs and scarey lawsuits, steemit inc having to follow weird US laws and yeah its stuff that gives me a headache thinking about but I want to believe that the DMCA takedown notice siply flags the content automaticaly LOL I hope thats all it does , but i fear it does remove the content at least rom showing up at all on steemit.coim, but anyway, the way sneak said it, it was heart breaking to me, and i could tell he was Admitting that steemit has a weak spot there, buuuut i was talkingto people in discord steemspeak.com and i got the idea from @inertia and @adept that the copyright DMCA takedown mechanism may not really be activated even with a copyright claim, but hey, i just wanted to bring that up, ... anyway thansk for the upvote on a comment of mine on the Dmania.lol post by @zombee i really appreciate it and hope to read more from you!
It might be a good idea to have a tab for downvoted content to be reviewed by the community before it is deemed appropriate to do so. Once a certain consensus is reached based on total steem power is reached, the content will then be flagged.
That's a very good idea actually. I've added you to my voting bot.
Thanks, and I appreciate you adding me to your curation list. I spend quite a bit of time manually curating content and less time making posts. Its nice to know that when I do make posts they will have a little more kick.
@snowflake fun-fact: Your post got copy pasted by someone: https://steemit.com/moderation/@kingsteem/the-last-missing-piece-of-the-steem-puzzle-2017818t232124829z
Edit: Upvote for visibility
Yes, this!
It is an interesting proposal. I am unsure on some of the implementation details though. For example, how do you define consensus? What would stop someone from Sybil attacking and just creating a whole bunch of accounts, so they could be a 'majority'. Keep in mind, reputation and account age are not going to be valid ways to ensure 'one vote per user'. Also, how do you deal with the fact that a majority of users will not want to be involved in the moderation/downvoting process. I'm interested to hear more. Right now I'm just having a hard time imagining how it will work.
From @azfix
Seems like a good idea, what's your take on it?
@snowflake - this downvoting issue is only going to become more economically violent on Zappl, as they've told me they'll also have the flagging feature. Can you imagine the furore over a 210 character tweet (or Zap! as they are called) that takes over $300++?? OUCH!!
'Me too!' - 6 chars, $60. Think you are still winning buddy!
. =$10 - Nice! ... (awaits @ausbitbank flag! LOL!)
ahh you have a flagger. 😐 Don't worry, I'll gladly become the new filter!
P.S. You might be interested in today's Daily Dose :) https://steemit.com/steemit/@mindhunter/the-steemit-daily-dose-the-steemit-daily-dose-has-been-cancelled-indefinitely-due-to-whale-flagging-a-collectivist-communist
on my way now!
No, they are not flaggers. They are censorship basement dwelling manginas - the worst variant of social justice warriors. @craig-grant has already fled the exits because of them (love or hate him!) I feel many will follow suit until the flagging issue is addressed ... until then we live under a collectivist Communist system of control with economic violence as its main weapon.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-i-disapprove-of-what-you-say-but-will-defend-to-the-death-your-right-to-say-it-voltaire-334856.jpg)
Indeed.
I'm still of the opinion you can say what you like, just don't expect it all to be of (financial) worth!
How about a tab for the review of upvoted, two-worded comments greater than $50? 😘
Respect to you and MH for this one!
I'm not really opposed to something like that if it were done right, but it would be very difficult to implement in a way that wasn't prone to abuse.
Hi there @snowflake
Went back in your comments a few days, where things usually settle down and not much happens a day or 3 back etc...
Just wanted to say thanks for the vote tonite, and did not want to seem spammy about it LOL.
I appreciate it a lot.
Have a good day. Or nite.
I am not sure where you are actually LOL.
Since VP is weighted by SP, all that is required to successfully mount a Sybil attack on Steemit is money, not multiple accounts. In fact, there are those that state that the current monopolization of the rewards pool by a handful of accounts is exactly that: a Sybil attack.
It's hard to remain unconvinced of that, and perhaps only my ignorance of the minutiae of witness voting enables me to continue to hope that Steemit yet might become decentralized. Less than 50 accounts hold the vast majority of SP, however, and the numbers indicate my hopes are but fantasy.
You are quite right about defining consensus. It takes upwards of 10,000 minnow votes to equal one whale vote. This imbalance is enabling botnet raids on the rewards pool, since there aren't enough whales to crush the bots, and minnows have too little VP to do it in groups of reasonable and attainable size.
However, weighting VP with reputation, and precluding means of gaming reputation, would make those bots quite fragile compared to groups, even of new accounts, while also precluding the SEC from acting to regulate Steem as a security.
I recommend doing that. You, I know from previous discussions, disagree, and you're the witness. The price of Steem is not rising commensurate with BCC, for example, despite the use case of Steemit, and I believe it is because of the SP/VP issue.
We'll see, as developments continue, how things shake out.
This is discussed at great length in the whitepaper. It is basically the design behind Steem. Sure, you can design an entirely new system, or re-design this one, but it is hard to pick apart this one when it is the main premise that the system was founded upon.
Sounds like an interesting idea. I'm not really opposed to exploring it. To actually design/build this though is probably quite complex. You may be underestimating the difficulty of the problem.
It has stayed relatively stable compared to the USD. We are kind of in 'wait' mode right now with regards to the major items in the Roadmap, and some of the other changes that have been discussed. I don't know if expecting to gain a whole lot of value in the short-term is really the right expectation. It would be nice, but for now, not crashing (as we wait for the things that are needed to take the platform mainstream) is good enough for me.
It is certainly one of them. Others, such as rewards for content creation, and curation, are perhaps more integral to Steemit than VP weighting, in terms of design.
Whether Steemit amends the code weighting VP, again, as it did with HF19, or not, there are other platforms being created that are making changes in how VP is weighted, and taking reputation into account to do it.
You may appreciate that it is not I writing the code =p.
While my investment in Steem is limited to rewards, and I do not intend to spend them for the foreseeable future, I do care about the price, as it drives interest in Steemit, about which I do care a great deal.
I, too, will be happy if the price of Steem doesn't crash, as it will mean that Steemit doesn't. However, I am sure that all of us would be also quite happy to see the price perform as BCC has recently. I am unaware of any advantages BCC has over Steem as a currency, particularly given the potential of a social media platform to drive use of the currency, which BCC doesn't have.
Steem has advantages in transaction speed, lack of fees, and the social media platform driving it's adoption, over other cryptos, and it seems likely to me that the markets are cognizant of those benefits, and also it's flaws.
If we learn anything from the BTC fork, it is that a good forking resulting in twin currencies can be very good for the parent currency. Perhaps Steem might take advantage of this lesson, and spawn.
Exactly what I came here to say, what do you mean by consensus? I would rather have flagging be based on steempower than a pure number of downvotes. At least with the steempower you are putting the power into the hands of people who invested in Steemit and have some skin in the game. In theory those people should have some motivation to act in the best interest of the platform because its their money on the line if things tank.
I would rather have those people deciding than say noganoo and his bot army being able to decide what posts should be hidden.
That's why @snowflake believes that reputation should be used. You can have 1000 accounts but the reputation is only 25. You need to work hard to get a higher reputation. Would it be better if bernie decides what posts should be hidden?!
Except he doesn't say how reputation would be used, just a vague "consensus"...
Reputation is gameable. I believe that one 100% upvote from a user like blocktrades can take a brand new user from reputation 25 to 55+.
If reputation can not fullfil its purpose then we have a problem.
I believe reputation on steem needs to be redefined entirely.
It was really designed with a specific purpose in mind - as a tool to combat spam. If it was going to be used for something like you are proposing, you are correct - it would need to be redesigned. A redesign of the reputation system is a pretty large task in of itself. Not necessarily a bad idea, but it would be a lot of work.
How does it combat spam?
By hiding content from users with a negative rep. It isn't perfect at what it does, but it does do a decent job at preventing/discouraging/hiding some of the low level abuse.
Hello, @snowflake. :) I find your post very interesting. I joined steemit in June 2016 but became active only few month ago. The problem with moderation seems complex to me.
Censorship is definitely an issue. I am a third gender individual assigned female at birth, I am an agnostic and practising occultist, a left-leaning anarchist from a non-English speaking country. In addition, I live in a different country to the one I was born in. It's hard for me to find a common ground with others most of the time. :D
I am hesitant to blog about politics because I know that my views are generally not popular. Nothing I said ever got flagged, but most of my comments on the political subjects were ignored. This discouraged me from becoming more vocal. I refrain from expressing my point of view fearing the negative response. Why sweat at the keyboard writing about politics when I can get rewards from posting about making jam! :D
I do flag people posting inflammatory comments and ones begging for votes, but I do pay notice to how powerful the person is on the platform. Part of me thinks, I should act like a whale and not care. The other side of me thinks 'why harm my chances?'
If there was a downvote consensus like you propose, perhaps I would feel less vulnerable expressing myself. That said, like @timcliff points out, the idea might be hard to implement in a meaningful way.
This is remarkable work.
Thank you for your support in moderating. If it can make you feel better, you're way more likely to have your vote ignored by a whale and in case of unfair flag war, you'll find support from other whales through moderation initiatives. Check out the project @freepeach (not very active, but you get the idea).
... or find that your collectivist whale eventually gets flagged to death! :) e.g. @berniesanders
Thanks for your response. :) It seems that @freepeach doesn't exist. Is there a typo in the name?
https://steemit.com/@freezepeach
Cheers! :)
@snowflake Thank you for posting your thoughts on STEEMIT. I love STEEMIT and I hope that no one intentionally hurts the STEEM Platform. We in my opinion have a lot of GROWTH ahead of us and I always tell people to sign up and get an account and be active EVERYDAY, even if you don't create content initially make sure you comment and interact with others........
I have to disagree with your assessment that self votes, collusion, and various botfarming scams do not harm other accounts, so no action is necessary on upvotes.
The white paper envisioned 90% of rewards inuring to ~30% of accounts, yet 99% of rewards inure to ~1% of accounts (per the most recent data I have been able to acquire). This is orders of magnitude more skewed than predicted in the white paper, and strongly influences what people post.
While you're on the right track regarding downvotes, you have not really developed careful definitions of what you mean by consensus, and this leaves readers able to define consensus as what THEY mean by it, preventing actual development of solutions.
Rewards need to be distributed more widely, and demonetization should only be undertaken when the PLATFORM is under attack. If Screwtube only demonetized content for that reason, no one would complain.
Demonetization happens for ANY reason the flagger cares about, or none at all. This should be precluded, if Steemit is to become a platform than does more than just enable the rich to get richer, and the poor to adulate them.
Various means of precluding collusion and concentration of rewards into a handful of accounts also need to happen, or Steem needs to no longer weight VP (my preference). Also, Steem needs to not be a security, or we're going to deal with the SEC, sooner or later, and weighting VP with SP makes Steem a security.
Thanks for raising this issue, and making some good points.
How does it harm other accounts?
I suggest you read this post to get a different perspective of the one you are used to https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@jerrybanfield/top-10-cryptocurrency-questions-and-answers#@someonewhoisme/re-themarinememoirs-re-serggioc-re-lexiconical-re-jerrybanfield-top-10-cryptocurrency-questions-and-answers-20170702t180115037z
You need to think of the reward pool in USD term not in STEEM, because that's how we are going to scale in the future.
These devices extract value from the pool that would otherwise inure to content creating and curating accounts. What is difficult to understand about that?
Despite your contention that the rewards pool is unlimited over time, it is not unlimited at any given time, but fixed at any given payout moment. Payouts are calculated as a percentage of the pool relative to the VP of the curators.
This is how extractive mechanisms simply profiteering devalue content.
When you sell your VP, you are selling the rewards the white paper states will inure to content creators and curators of that content. You receive payment for delivering a common resource to the payer, which financial impact that extraction would have on your investment is more than covered by the payment you receive. Since the remainder of the beneficiaries of the rewards pool are not so paid, they - the entire rest of the community - lose the value in the rewards pool you sell.
This is financial harm.
You are personally contributing to the perception that Steemit is unfair, and Steem is a 'scamcoin'. You are personally acting so as to inhibit capital gains investors traditionally invest to achieve, by financially manipulating the platform, as warned against in the white paper, and for which the white paper specifically states that it designed downvotes to combat.
Read the white paper, if you care.
This sounds like communism. How do you define a vote that doesn't excessively use those precious common ressources?
Votes are purposed to be used to reward content creators for content people find valuable. While you find the payment for your vote valuable, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the post you are upvoting for pay.
The curation reward is designed to provide you an incentive to curate content. Vote buying simply pays better, and is clearly less work, as you never have to read the post you upvote for pay at all.
Since curation is the purpose of votes, such votes for posts you subjectively value according to your personal judgments use those resources as intended.
Since this is a community, with communal resources (the rewards pool is a common resource), there are considerations that are communal in nature. That isn't communism, but is community centered.
My measly $.04 upvote may not be precious to you, as it is clearly a tiny amount of money, but it is what I can share from the rewards pool, and I find that those receiving my votes appreciate them for much more than their financial impact.
Do read the white paper, because it clearly states that financial manipulation of rewards is an existential threat to the platform, in the eyes of the developers.
In England, back in the day, the commons were grazing grounds, and as the herds grazed on those communal grounds increased beyond the carrying capacity of the land, enclosure resulted in ending the commons. A guy with access to fenced off grazing land that was the property of the community that needed it to graze their sheep, who then sold the right to graze sheep on that fenced off parcel to those whose grazing rights were otherwise as limited as their neighbors, would have been hung.
People died in the enclosure movement. Fortunately for us all, Steemit isn't necessary to provide the meat and wool we need to survive, and mere downvotes have been the result of this adventure for you. I reckon you're way ahead of the game, neh?
However, the rewards pool isn't your personal property to sell, any more than the grazing rights to the English commons were back then. That isn't communism. It is honest capitalism, and respecting the rights of others according to the communal nature of the rewards resource.
Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should do a thing. Steemit is more than money.
Hey @snowflake, beautifully crafted post. Upvote or downvote, censorship or no censorship, the true issue at hands is the disparity of power amongst streemians. A very small fraction has power to dictate terms on the platform. And it's by design and really don't know if anything can be done to correct it. Or I don't know if it's even an issue.
Well the vast majority of users on this platform are minnows, who may not have Steemit's best interest at heart, because they are new to the community and just want to make money in most cases.
I'm generalizing the mindset of a minnow, but the recent epidemic of spamming, self upvoting comments, and entitlement that i've been noticing in our community makes me believe my opinion has some merit.
That being said, if everyone is just worried about making money, instead of growing a community, I believe many of the posts that need to get silenced wouldn't receive the required 80-90% consensus.
I like your idea, but I don't think our community is ready for that type of responsibility, but this is a conversation we need to continue to have if this community is ever going to reach it's potential!