RE: Poll: Enhancing the "Mute" Feature
There is a difference between one person being concerned about hidden opinions and the systemic effect of posters being able to unilaterally hide opinions from most of the readers. Defaults are powerful and there is a good chance that if the default is not showing, the most people won't ever see. That has a systemic effect on the nature of consensus, and not just an effect on individuals.
That being said, of course, these options are on a continuum. It is clearly better to have an easy place to click to see hidden comments than to have to go and dig through a chain explorer, try to find criticism in different posts altogether, or use some alternate interface. I'm still uncomfortable with the unilateral nature of it. A blog that participates in a shared reward pool is not the same as a personally-owned blog that is standalone, and I'm not sure that the same model of unilateral control by the blogger over conversations should carry over.
BTW since you brought up the issue of downvoting for reward and downvoting for visiblity being bundled, why are you proposing to bundle muting? I don't think it really makes a lot of sense. What I don't want to see is distinct from what I might want to hide from readers of my blog. Bundling them would seem to degrade the value of both. I might decline to mute someone I would prefer to mute because I have no intent to hide their comments from others, or I might decline to mute for hiding because I personally want to see it even if I think it detracts from my blog if displayed there. These are really quite distinct.
I've taken a look at how other platforms handle muting and blocks/mutes are generally just applied to your own posts (well, also prevents mentions/DMs). I can block someone on Twitter and they can't respond to me but I can still see their comments elsewhere (as well as view their feed). This also happens to be more efficient for the backend. For the sake of simplicity and efficiency, my preference would be for a user's mutes to be applied only to the discussion threads a user starts, and no longer across the site. This gives the author more control over what kind of discussion they want to highlight, at the cost of having to see comments by the same user on other parts of the site. IMO it would be a net gain.
As for using comments to discuss reward disagreement, it's convenient but not a guaranteed ability. There's a
disable_commentsoption incomment_optionswhich doesn't allow anyone to comment. I don't agree this was a good idea, but it's one way ability to comment on a specific thread is already not a guarantee.It's hard to have any control over basic ordering in your own discussions as a normal-staked user. You can try to flag junk but there are a lot of users who can override your preferences by force, and this is often done not to bring light to valid criticisms, but rather to "mess" with the author.
On this continuum is also the option to whitelist certain accounts, like community-supported bots fighting plagiarism. Listing the muted comment authors in order of highest SP to lowest would be an interesting way to display the most interesting mutes first. Users would see patterns and if they were engaged in the site long enough I'm sure they would explore the muted side of discussions.
A large proportion of users come to the site just one time. Regardless, the impression anyone gets from the discussion may determine if they see any value in engaging further. An unordered mix of spam and harassment among the discussion may likely increase the echo chamber effect. It's just not welcoming.
Twitter has both mute and block, they are separate functions. As well as 'report' which really should drive home the inherent differences in a centralized vs. decentralized system.
As far as
disable_comments, I'd be in favor of removing that altogether (the easiest approach, and seems quite reasonable to me since no one uses it) or disallowing it unless rewards are disabled.Again, you seem stuck on the idea of unilateral control (over ordering here), vs. voting by the community, of which you as the author are still only a part, even if you did create the post at the top of the tree. My answer to that would be if you want unilateral control, don't do it on a blockchain with a global community-based rewarding scheme.
Of course, steemit.com is a centralized web site and can do whatever it wants. I hope this doesn't get implemented in the form described on the centralized web site which happens to be the most used window to the Steem blockchain though.
Yes, the approach discussed here does give the author a stronger voice, but calling it unilateral is extreme. Comment rendering is influenced by a variety of signals. The inspiration for the OP was to explore if existing mute data/UI could be modified to achieve a net benefit in a very simple way (immediately).
What does your ideal “main window of Steem” look like? Does it cater to prospective users by showing the best of our community? To creators by providing an engaging and productive experience? How are posts and comments ordered? How is spam and abuse addressed?
Spam is addressed primarily at the blockchain level. Without question it has vastly improved since RCs and is hardly a huge problem at this point. I used to get dozens of spam comments on my posts (either my rare personal posts or burnpost), now I get a small handful. Even those often get downvoted (and hidden by UI) by others or by anti-spam efforts like mack-bot before I even see them. I think my experience is typical.
As far as abusive (in the sense of harassment), I think muting by the reader and potentially by the reader subscribing the curated mute lists is a sufficient remedy.
I don't think posters need or should have a much of a special right to curate/block/hide replies their own posts on a fundamentally shared platform. To the extent they're able to do this it should be less than absolute (and subject to community disagreement), for example by conveying some moderate bonus virtual SP to their downvotes.
Communities could change this dynamic, especially to the extent they shift to rewarding their own community-specific tokens and not global inflation. That becomes more of a "my house, my rules" situation and communities could set all sorts of rules on this (of course, more richness in this regard would be significantly harder to implement).
Spam has never been less of a problem on Steem than now, and with free downvotes upcoming, we may see that abusive (in the sense of harassment) may meet with a similar fate. At a minimum I would wait to see how free downvotes affect things before assessing anything.
Taking a deeper dive, I agree that the spam situation is not bad, aside from a few concentrated pockets. I do wonder if part of it is decreased usage. Free downvotes will certainly help, especially if there are crowd-sourced and crowd-driven downvote programs. As far as I can tell, efforts to neutralize spam/blatant abuse are led by a small number of people.
It would be great if simply sorting comment threads by pending payout would produce the most useful result. But in practice, (a) many decent comments get no votes, (b) a few low-value comments get some votes, and (c) some insightful comments are downvoted far below 0.
Increased curation rewards (and interest in the platform) could lead to more intelligent automated voting which would help smooth out the difference between (a) and (b). There's a history of trying to solve issues with more complexity, where a simpler solution would suffice.. at scale.
Curated mute-lists could be part of a solution, though I'd imagine UIs picking a default mute-list for guests would be a further source of contention.
They may be (though some of this is probably the larger efforts being more visible) but by far the biggest improvement was simply the switch to RC which cut spam by some very significant percentage overnight (my guess would be 80%-ish).
This could be an example of solving a problem with an arguably more complex system, but one which was well thought out and had broad application (unlike many of the tweaks which were more reactive and impulsively made in the past, but had the effect of layering on unstructured complexity in a more harmful way).
Anyway, I do think we should assess the effects of HF21 which at this point we can only make rough estimates ranging from very limited to profound across the platform.