RE: Daily Opinion #10: HF20 - The balancing act of the misunderstood upgrade to Steem
Did you say you created a second account?
I'm kind of interested in that. I'm thinking about those kinds of things. You know, we can encourage people not to spam just as much as we can stop people from smoking, drinking, gambling, eating too much, or whatever.
Can we always stop people?
What is spam to you may be Gold Oatmeal to me. It is relative. Like making bad choices which can hurt people. There are consequences for our actions, like drugs for example. People know that but they still do drugs. Same thing here with spam, hate speech, or whatever it may be, OR BETTER YET, whatever we may think it is.
Try Your Best?
I agree, allegedly, generally, it seems that Steemit is getting better, and that RC is helping with that, that it is a step in the right direction. Will we see less spam like you said? Yeah, maybe. I'm trying to agree with you but I also just want you to know that I do not want to stop spam because that takes you down a path of maybe censoring free speech which may include hate speech, spam, terrorism, threats, or whatever. Because these words can be defined rather too subjectively, not objectively, which means it depends on who is defining the word "SPAM" or the other words, etc...
I'll try to address all of those points @joeyarnoldvn
On the topic of a second account, I believe Steemit Inc will give you one account (that they pay for) per valid email and phone number. I created and paid for this account using the anonsteem service. Steemit Inc won't give you the 15SP delegation 'training wheels' to get started with if you pay for your own account, though (and it wouldn't make sense for them to do so). The beauty of this being a blockchain is that you can get an account yourself and not even need them.
On the topic of 'what is spam': I agree that what I think is trash might be gold oatmeal to you, but, I think we can all agree that if a user sends the exact same message over and over again in an automated fashion, that is spam. That is what type of spam I'm referring to in this blog post, and that is the type of spam that this hard fork will likely do away with (for the most part). Unless accounts are able to fund themselves, they probably won't be able to spam very much - that makes it not as advantagous for people to come here and abuse the network.
Thanks for trying to 'see the positive' here. I get what you're saying about censorship, but this isn't at all censorship. It's not stopping anyone from posting anything that they want - it's just stopping people from posting mass amounts of that something all over the network for a very low cost, and I believe that is a very very good thing.
I disagree with automated messages being spam. I disagree strongly. Why, because you do not know what is being automated or not being automated and to which extent. Is it spam to say hello or to say how are you? You can write, "HOW ARE YOU?" many times. So, is saying "HELLO" spam because it can be said again and again. Where do you draw the line of what is spam or not? Which words? Which phrases? What if it SPAM was able to reword and rephrase the SPAM to make it look like it is NOT SPAM? Then, that would be another problem, if you were to try to stop SPAM, that is if SPAM became smart enough to hide, to appear not to be automated, repeated, SPAM, hateful, or whatever. I favor free markets.
I kind of like RC. That is good, it seems.