The Sunday Purge #3: Is Flagging the Solution to Abuse?
By now if you haven’t been that involved in it you probably have a wrong view on Flagging and its purpose on Steem, but it’s beneficial. When @ned and @dan design this platform they put the possibility of Flagging there for one reason, self-sustainability, so the users can make the shitty posts “disappear” or at least take all of their rewards. Since Steem is a blockchain, there is no way to delete a post, so flagging is crucial.
Lately, with all the fuzz that’s been around self-voting and vote-buying, Flagging was a solution brought up pretty frequently.
Disclaimer: What I'm saying in this post may be right, or it may be just my hallucinations from too much tea but to know for sure, you will have to research everything on your own.
One thing is for sure, and I want to underline this point from the beginning that as long as people are abusing the reward pool, we will need flagging.
Flagging is a needed operation since maybe as you have seen in my first Sunday Purge post we have people on Steem that are boosting their shit posts, quotes to more than $10, making more than the average minnow without any effort. For this type of situations, flagging is the only option.
Also, flagging is needed since other Steemians are stealing other people’s work and getting rewarded for it. I stumbled upon a few people that were doing it, and I’m telling you it’s a nasty business. It’s sad what some people are willing to do for some instant gratification.
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I’ve been chatting with @patrice a few times for the last couple of weeks, and I can tell you that her work is just impressive. The amount of time and energy she’s investing into flagging is outstanding. She’s controlling the @spaminator and @mack-bot, two bots that are continually flagging spammers, taking away all of their rewards. I urge you to check her work out.
We need more projects like hers since there so many people abusing the reward pool with their shitposts and spamming everybody that it's tough to discover the actual quality posts.
Maybe, if some whales instead of powering up the vote-selling bots they would “invest” their SP into flagging spams, then the reward pool would be bigger, and with the help of curators like @OCD the minnows would always make more. It’s like a redistribution of wealth from abusers to undervalued content creators.
I firmly believe that people are going to do something similar shortly.
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A topic that was brought up a few times on the dark side of Steem was flagging overvalued content since a few people are making a shitload of money on not so quality posts.
I must say that this is a sensitive topic since the value of a post is mostly subjective. When you're looking at a post that it is spam is easy to realize that it has no value, so it's not hard to decide if you want to flag it or not but what do you do for a post that has some content, some length, even if it's shit.
I must say that this is necessary too since as you maybe have seen there are quite a few people that don’t deserve to make so much, and there are minnows or dolphins making pennies on high-quality content. I can’t complain about myself since in the last week my blog started to take off, but I have friends who are trying so hard and are still making nothing.
I think that making a team of about 20-30 quality Steemians to review the posts and decide if they are overvalued or not and how much of the rewards they should take away is the only solution. Such a task cannot be handled by a single human since someone may consider that a traveling post is worth $500 and I may consider that it doesn’t worth more than $100.
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This is a vast subject, and there are a lot of factors that come in play when you have to decide what’s valuable and what’s not, luckily there are already people investing their resources into things like this.
Flagging, done correctly, is not a bad thing at all but a necessary one. We need more people to get involved in it; you can help even if you don’t have SP by reporting the spams to @SteemCleaners, where a team will check them out.
I do hope that in the future will be a better balance between flagging and curating since both of them are needed. It’s like yin and yang, one is taking away the rewards, and the other one is redistributing them.
One thing is sure that a single person can not do jobs like these. Thus we need teams; we need more people to get involved. You may think that matters like these don’t affect you, but they do since we’re all sharing the same reward pool. We are a community, and we have to act accordingly, we have to work as a team.
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Hopefully, the situation will get better if not we can all start to spam seven Utopian contributions and ten memes and quotes per week and become Steem Millionaires.
Also, if you’re interested to see my views on other similar matters, feel free to check out my other Sunday Purge posts. There are more to come.
The Sunday Purgem #1 - Spammers - Plagiarists - Cireclejerks
The Sunday Purge #2: The solution to spamming and vote buying - Manual Curation?
plagiarism and theft of photos and content is Steemit's biggest scourge. It also occurred on TSU (a socials that paid) but there was an authority that if you were stealing several times you banned from the platform. Unfortunately it does not happen here ... and even the reports do not always work or have followed. This is the most annoying thing for me. See posts that earn a lot with photos downloaded from google ....
I get what you mean, but I think that the problem with the usage of photos can be brought if you're having a photography post, where the picture gets all the attention. In a writing post, I don't think is such a big problem since all the focus is on the writing.
Also, take into consideration that most of the people using Steem are not bloggers as a background thus they have no idea about things like this. They are probably just trying to fill the gaps in a large writing post like I just did. :D
There needs to be a downvote button. Not only upvote or flag.
There also needs to be a setting for what you're flagging for which some kind of admin can at least go through the most obvious stuff.
A system where you can only say "I love you" or "DIE" seems to be the problem
The flag is the downvote. That sounds like an interesting idea but it would deprive of the freedoms of the blockchain, and it would be considered censorship by some.
That's the situation we have NOW though!
I'm suggesting something that can signify some kind of dislike. It doesn't need to MEAN anything on the blockchain just so people can see dislikes.
This would also help stop "flagging abuse". To help that more there should also be different types of flagging. Is the content copyright infringement, child abuse, bullying, terrorism, Jamie Dimon?
The problem is literally black and white!
Haha, Jamie Dimon, that is funny, lol.
The situation is vast, there are a lot of things on the plate, so it's hard to take a decision, but something has to be implemented.
Inviting more people to this system is good for all
I see a lot of complaints about downvoting or flagging overvalued posts. In the past I've stayed out of the discussion since I firmly believe "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Some of us are rewarded more based on what we do than what we post.
Then came bid-bots & vote-bots. I believe that flagging to remove enough payout to discourage those abusing it is warranted for unoriginal content.
As I told @guiltieparties (which resulted in a literal crap post) in chat I have no problem up-voting 100% original low quality posts or the occasional use of bid bots to up vote it. If it isn't original it shouldn't be getting big payouts.
Exactly, the value is usually subjective, but something has to be done about it. I like that, taking away the rewards generated by bots.
The same thing with the vote-buying, it's good as long as the post is of quality, but that again is subjective. The problem is with the spammers that are putting no effort into their posts and are buying votes just for ROI.
I have not or have tried the flagging options. I would say that term flag should be changed to downvote instead. It's a free market, anyone can do anything with their stake :) let the free market plays beautifully and we've seen it happening.
I know sometimes there are quote posts that don't make any effort at all. For some people they like it but I don't. The thing that I am strongly against is the plagiarist. Steemit has no plagiarism checker and it's getting difficult for a curator to check the originality of a post.
I hate the quote posts. Plagiarism is hard to check indeed, I know it's not easy to do it for OCD.
I love this aspect. The team should be composed of steemians from diverse background in terms of country, area of specialty and language. Talking about OCD, I observed that most of their curated contents are in art and photography category. This does not seems to be good enough. Anyone with a very good camera capture a decent picture and get loads of rewards. I am a scientist, I sit down, think, research and write for hours just to make one posts and it sometimes get up to $1. We need more of OCD projects on the platform
Something similar is going to be created soon. Maybe you are right, but we are a team of 30 curators, and everyone decided what a valuable post means for himself. Thanks for your feedback. ;)
It's always a pleasure. Great work you are doing for the community
Thank you. :D
Flagging is always gonna be tricky subject when it comes to value of post. Sometimes it's obvious when some post is not worth big bucks even if received it. But sometimes it's not obvious and I think we shoudn't flag any post because we disagree with it, no matter what is $ value of it. For example I see @berniesanders flagging anti-vax post with no explanation. That is bs to me. If you disagree with it, just comment with arguments and that is it.
Flagging is always subjective since the value is subjective. I am not going to say anything about @berniesanders since there are a few people that he flagged and deserved it. His methods may be unorthodox but he's doing a pretty good job sometimes. ;)
For flagging to work correctly, the community needs to work together and decide what's valuable and what not.
I think one of the things to consider when thinking about downvoting someone is how many views did the post have, how many comments did the post receive, then how many votes it received. Votes are the iffy part, there are people that do buy votes, (but it is hard to figure that out), and then there are those voters that just follow along on someone else's coat tails for curation rewards. So yes value is a subjective thing, but if a person looks at the whole post picture, then they may be able to make a subjectively valuable decision. I will use your/this post as an example: 88 Views, 19 Comments, 57 Votes. Value=$138.68. Is this post really worth $1.57 per view? Some may think not. Is it worth $0.57 a view probably more realistic. So where did the really valuable votes come from?A whale, a whale curation trail,or purchased votes. I don't know, if I spent two hours researching I might be able to find out. So yes it is all a subjective decision when deciding to downvote, I have heard people say the samething about upvoting, but that is not true and an entirely different topic. Just my $0.030 point of view.
If a post has a higher potential reward, it will appear on trending/hot thus more people will be able to see it. If they open it and comment that is their decision. From personal experience, I get more comments on posts that are shorter than on the longer ones since there's not so much content people have to read, so it's easier for them.
If a post is of quality and it gets hit by a curator but it still has only a few votes does your system still applies to it? It's an interesting idea but it's too automated, there are many more factors to be taken into consideration.
I think that the only solutions are an organized team/community who can deal with the flagging.
If you flag someone, does the person you flaged know who flaged him/her?
There is a way of finding out, in the url of a post if you replace the "steemit" by "steemd", you will see who has upvoted or downvoted the post.
As @ronahi said. ;)
When you flag someone, you're supposed to leave a message to tell them why so that they can correct the issue. Sometimes new users aren't malicious, but just don't know better.
I agree @guyfawke quality over numbers but I feel sorry for those flagged they might not recuperate from it
If they change their activities, they have all the chances to recover. :)
Unfortunately there is another dimension to flagging that can get into the abuse of power. This is when you flag something then the flagged user starts retaliatory flagging. This becomes a problem if the user you're flagging actually has more power on Steemit.
That is true. Sadly, people can't set their emotions aside when they are dealing with stuff like this, but I think it will get better soon. :D
It's dangerous for a soldier to flag a captain or admiral. If you're a minnow, it's best to leave the whale flagging to other whales. Fortunately I don't see many whales being objectionable.
The last thing I want to see is some SJW or feminist flagging my post because it upset their feelings. Which is exactly what is happening on Twitter and YouTube.
Uh, that would be nasty. Let's hope it won't happen. ;)