Steemit Is Ruled By A Communist Party - Flags Wars Look Worse To Investors Than The Rampant Abuse They Claim To "Fight"

in #steem7 years ago (edited)

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The current flags wars going on across Steem are a terrible look for investors, especially in light of the fact that they are based wholly on reward amounts without even an attempt to analyze quality. They are run like drumhead trials, with little evidence provided and much of it fabricated.

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At least this guy attempts to follow due process when possible.

My fundamental problem with "reward pool rape" as a concept is that it's basically Communist. Absent any logical argument wherein you analyze the quality of the work in question and provide actual auditable evidence, any accusation that someone is "raping" the reward pool, outside of plagiarism/actual shitposts, is an arbitrary opinion puffed up with deliberately provocative language to paint the "target" in the worst possible light, hoping to create a dog-piling effect.

The entire argument rests on the fallacy that there is some arbitrary amount of reward that is "too much", and the abusive anti-abusers are the apparent sole arbiter of how much that is. (Oh, and they won't tell you what that is before you cross it, either.)

Transisto Hypo.png

Don't worry, the rules don't apply to them. They're better than you, just like the PARTY.

Flaggers, you've made it impossible to support you because you fail to respect those you claim to be protecting enough to provide even a shred of unbiased evidence that what you do is right. You type out all-caps rants with foul language, and you promote them to the #1 spot on all of Steemit, yet you look like nothing more than an autistic child. While operating this way, you remain many of the single largest and greediest voters on the platform, and no doubt rake-in more than the vast majority of posters combined between your hypocritical services and your self-voting buffets.

Your morals are also transparently self-serving, and instantly for sale when a price feed changes.

Transisto Hypo 4.png

"Sometimes when I try to understand a person's motives, I play a little game. I assume the worst. What's the worst reason they could possibly have for saying what they say and doing what they do? Then I ask myself, "How well does that reason explain what they say and what they do?"

Transisto Hypo 3.png

There are like 10 more of these, at least. You are being played for fools.

It quickly becomes clear why these "champions" of voting abuse want to control the actions of others - that way, they can do it a lot more themselves. It's called barriers to entry, and I covered it in Code Is Law.

Barrier To Entry.png

To properly justify taking an actual action (flagging) one must make this argument about reward vs quality, in a capitalistic fashion, or essentially render oneself a communist Comrade who assigns resources "to each according to their needs." If one fails to do this, one creates a result where all top talent will go elsewhere, and you will be left with the mediocre dregs without ambition.

It's called brain-drain, and it happened to every single Communist country. Ever. It's fucking obvious to all but the most idiotic. Einstein don't work for Gomer Pyle pay.

Transisto Sucks.png

I took my brain elsewhere for 3 weeks after this. It was too good for Steemit.

In the most recent, highest-profile disagreement currently still underway, not only has lip service not been paid to an argument against quality, but the actual rewards being earned by a certain individual (Haejin) have been (deliberately or accidentally) overstated by a factor of 10x, which "coincidentally" serves the purposes of the "attackers" just perfectly, since logic, reason, and due process appear to be the furthest thing from their minds.

The closest anyone has come to an actual analysis of the quality of the content in question is mocking charts and TA, but no argument analyzing numbers and results has been proferred. I know, because I looked into it myself, and the facts would lay waste to the attackers arguments. (Note that I do not have a large enough sample size to prove statistical validity.)

Haejin ROI Calls 12-20.png

Actual ROI of ~25 previous calls from "the Flagee".

The result is that both sides of this argument are now off the rails, and the followers of the "attacked" are now lashing out at random targets without doing their due diligence or proving their points. This is no surprise, as their "man" was subjected to this treatment first.

Now, witnesses are losing support because they are afraid to come out on either side. They are held captive by large votes from these same "anti-abuse abusers," in a sort of soft-terrorism.

These "anti-abusers" cloak themselves in "doing good for the reward pool" while offering no logical argument supported with evidence, just base appeals to emotion. This conceals what they do in the appearance of support of the masses, who are mostly idiots and lacking any knowledge of the facts anyway.

Antifa.jpg

They should join these guys; they will fit right in.

They knows this will work because almost everyone on the platform thinks they aren't getting the rewards they deserve, so if a "bogeyman" can be constructed they can blame for it, populist political tactics can be simply applied.

Had evidence been produced that showing Haejin's calls were no better than picking at random, I'd likely support such "anti-abuse" work, as a lack of objective quality would have been established.

Regardless of who is right in this debate, I can tell you exactly what it looks like to an investor.

Any investor that looks at Steem sees almost nothing but negativity towards them. If they choose to sell their vote, self-vote, or run a bot for profit, they receive plenty of crap from various members of the community, including those who flag solely for bot use.

In other words, the main thing that ANY INVESTOR WILL LOOK AT, POTENTIAL ROI, is shut-down by Steemit's Social Justice Warriors at every turn.

Now, they can't even expect to vote on content they like and support an author without being subject to witch-hunting and massive drama, actually hurting the author they initially hoped to support.

Why the hell would you invest here if you weren't an author, instead of one of the (literal hundreds) of other coins that have next to no drama and are performing massively better?

The market is wondering that too, as Steem is outperformed by nearly every coin on the Coinmarketcap list this last 6 months.

Investors pay the rewards. This toxic culture must end, or Steem will.

Try SteemFollower today and get rewarded for every vote!

See my explanation of SteemFollower here.

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This is your best piece yet. Well done.

For me there is a single word that describes what is lacking on STEEM - Integrity

I've now been here long enough to be able to identify that a lot of the "upstanding" members here are really just using a facade to serve their own interest. No different from the mainstream I guess.

Yes, I am an investor. Yes, I am powering down. I am also an aspiring author, which is the only reason I'm still here.

Words. From my mouth. You stole them.

Except maybe this part:

"This is your best piece yet."

I hope I produce/have produced something better at some point!

Well, some of your posts certainly have more humour and I have perhaps enjoyed those ones more. But for hard hitting substance this is perhaps your high water mark ;)

I guess it's good that I took the opportunity to mostly go out on a high note, then.

Notice that my "best piece" got flagged into almost providing me a loss, after I account for the bids on bots. I would have actually made more posting a blank blog and just getting my autovotes.

Which is, ironically, why this post needed to exist in the first place. However, I'm done taking any for the "team" (aka Steemit).

Man this is so spot on, this little war has been so toxic to the platform. Its at the top of trending everyday. People really love control and right now it's easy to have control if you have a lot of SP. I'm not sure what could be done to alleviate the issues, but I think some action needs to be taken to squash this kind of useless behavior. We need to brainstorm possible solutions! This platform needs to stay alive, it has so much potential

This is the only solution I know of, short of the extreme that some other users are attempting of starting their own fork of Steem:

https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/279

The flaggers oppose this solution, as it would allow their power to be neutered.

As Dan said:

bytemaster commented on Dec 27, 2016
"I still think that the first principles are right on this concept. Unfortunately, having logical first principles and appealing to the masses are two entirely different things."

Of course they do... they want that power to control

That was a great read, looks like Dan has already put some thought into this haha, hopefully this can be implemented and function well. I'm not sure I followed all of his logic, seemed like he was saying one user could cancel another user out, but what if one user was more active than another.

I read quick, but I'll take another look later, tanks for the reply

Yes, precisely. This would even work to help the flaggers in their stated goal, but of course, if their stated goal was their true goal they would not act the way they do.

With vote cancellation, they could simply neutralize the stake of the voter they feel is over-rewarding content, rather than attacking an author with flags simply for receiving votes, then falling back on a Marxist cry of "he's getting too much!" when confronted.

These damn haijins are trying to take our jobs!

Ahh I see, so a whale could cancel a whale on single posts and comments, that sounds really doable actually.

I wish you massive suckouts in this here poker game

disclaimer: there were jokes in this comment, bad jokes, but jokes

"I wish you massive suckouts in this here poker game"

I've been getting my fair share of those lately!

Ah, they weren't so bad...I just didn't come back and see the comment until now.

Why should it stay alive, it's not even technically a good platform, and the content is mediocre - well guess why. I would expect that steemit will serve as an example for better future platforms I'm eagerly awaiting. They will have to be moderated ones as the human primate is clearly incapable of self-regulation without pre-established hierarchy - as an anarchic sort of hierarchy will then establish itself instead. This is all so dreary...
What would I want to stay on steemit for except just to see posts from about five people, which is exctly why I came here ? Ah wait, to earn money - that exactly is the one and only reason and it will stay this way.
So steemit is stuck with the hopeful money-earners, and you can see how that works out. Circle closed.
Hell, I would even have to PAY to post here if I just wanted to take part in any sensible discussion, they only allow tow or three comments a day ?
I can do that way better on other platforms, and steemit won't see a single penny from me.

"They will have to be moderated ones as the human primate is clearly incapable of self-regulation without pre-established hierarchy "

It's funny that we continue to need examples of this, despite all of human history clearly implying that some degree of rule of law is almost always preferable.

Anarchists just can't give up trying to go Galt.

"Hell, I would even have to PAY to post here if I just wanted to take part in any sensible discussion, they only allow tow or three comments a day ?"

If you're referring to bandwidth restrictions, you don't need hardly any SP to get enough bandwidth to post pretty much all day. Point well taken, however.

Double-standard at its best. The same whales pretending to defend the system are abusing it themselves to prove their point ?

P.S. I'm giving my comment 100% self-upvote because it's super important and it's above everyone else. I encourage you to upvote it with hundreds of dollars because I'm worthy. I also want to prove my point.

Don't worry, it will all "go to funding Steemit development".

You know, after it hangs out in Transisto's wallet first. For a period of time he deems fit. Which is not open to debate.

Interesting seeing transisto calling for more steemit development when his tool steemittools, or whatever the fuck it is called, is unsupported (the link to contact transisto leads to a dead end) and non-functional (you are required to upload images via a single image host, WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS! Doh!). And what's worse is that it's in the steemit.com menu. Why the hell is an unsupported and broken website in the fucking official steemit.com links??

I found this comment very interesting. Methinks Transisto has some connections to Sting/the Dev team.

That would certainly explain a lot.

Thank you for your investigative work!

Gonna make you're head better off with bread than red we aint no Communist!!

It's terrible how many ruley rodrigos are on here trying to invent bullshit rules that only help them and hurt the community. Hopefully the culture soon takes a stand for the community. Thanks for your leadership lex!!

Thanks, fatkat. I always appreciate your liberty-based perspective and your content is relievingly (sic) unique.

Like nothing I've ever seen before!

The one guitarist looked a bit like Ned to me at first!

I feel you've hit the nail on this one. I do feel however that Haejin has been wrongly accused of sucking the rewards dry, his was not of the best content (in sole written format) but it doesnt lack utility. I wish they could come to terms as we are one big community. The thing with being decentralized is that there is no one clear leader. I'm not pushing the responsibility on anyone, but I feel these are are one the few times that the Witnesses should come fort and make the most rational decision.

"I do feel however that Haejin has been wrongly accused of sucking the rewards dry, his was not of the best content (in sole written format) but it doesnt lack utility."

I agree with you here. I am of the opinion one needs a rather high bar to call abuse and flag. Haejin doesn't meet it for me, unless a statistical regression of his past calls proves that his results are as bad, or worse, than throwing darts at CoinMarketCap. Even then, I would need to see a significant sample size to make such a judgment.

I've seen some very mild commentaries get flagged in the crossfire, even posts that I totally did not see it coming for... So it will be interesting to see how this develops on your post. Hope you don't get hit, but kind of expect you might be (as you are too like you wrote above). The proof will be in the pudding, I guess.

I am starting to wonder why we need a flag/downvote option at all. Isn't the whole purpose of upvoting to be a 'filter' for good content to float to the top? Why then do we also need to downvote content to the bottom? Shouldn't they naturally appear there? This goes for spam as well of course.

It does take away any way to deal with abuse... but, if the cure is just as worse as the illness then maybe it's no cure at all. A different approach may be needed. Since Steemit operates on DPoS and we have Witnesses, I propose that we alter the system in such a way to increase the powers of Witnesses to include moderation abilities. If they abuse or screw up, we vote them out of business. In the meantime, they could be our 'elected government' to keep some level of order on the platform. It sounds a lot like our current political system, I know, but I feel like DPoS is that anyway so why not take one step further as well?

"I've seen some very mild commentaries get flagged in the crossfire, even posts that I totally did not see it coming for..."

Yes, often from very diplomatic and friendly posters with no axe to grind. Pure bollocks, as they might say across the pond.

I've given up any hope of mediating the dispute.

I like the idea of no downvotes. Crap comments and posts disappear.

If a post starts conversation, regardless if I agree with the OP, I usually give that post an upvote. For the sparking of discussion. Or you can walk away from a post if you disagree with it.

What drew me Steemit in the first place was that it wasn't "fair".

I agree with this, and I think Dan did too. The removal of the exponential voting power curve made this difficult to implement without widespread abuse.

Same here.. I pretty much upvote everybody with whom I interact on Steemit. It's my way of saying 'Hey, thanks for giving me your attention!' I guess? :)

And yes, stuff that you disagree with.. just walk the other way? it's what I do.. no sense in picking a fight

I almost wrote an entire post entitled "the value of upvoting opposition viewpoints during debate". I never got around to it before I gave up the battle around here.

Excellent commentary. I wrote yesterday a similar comment with respect to why down flagging is even necessary. It seems like a lethal weapon in the hands of those whose DNA was build to control other people while at the same time making it a cover while they get some kind of advantage. This is really not so different than the kind of people who are drawn to the power of the government and in being an elected official.

If we can't use something like steemit and all of its potential for good to create something of value without all of this down flagging crap, then there is no hope for this platform.

"It seems like a lethal weapon in the hands of those whose DNA was build to control other people"

Such as certain socialist politicians that may or may not have been screwed out of a recent political nomination...

^^

Thanks!
I am not sure if Steem always had flagging, or if this feature was introduced later to combat abuse. However I've always felt that it contradicts the whole 'We're leaving Youtube because of censorship' argument that's going around here. There's arguably more censorship and demonetization on Steemit than on Youtube.

"There's arguably more censorship and demonetization on Steemit than on Youtube."

Funny how around here demonetization and hiding your content aren't considered "censorship" by a large portion of the "in-crowd".

Thanks for always being one of the best commenters.

As a novice author, I'm sad to hear that the idea of decentralization does not work in STEEMIT (

p.s. I noticed that you have not written in your blog for a long time.

Yeah, it's really funny how that works! But not much to do about it.. half-truths and public opinion is more important than real truths, on Steemit :)

Thanks for your compliment on my comments, I really appreciate it! It's good to know that I stand out a little bit from the other posters out there :)

P.S. check out my profile! I know you've been away, or not as active on here lately and you may have missed it but I vastly improved my blog with branding, layout, etc.! Kind of proud of my blog at the moment! It's gaining some traction finally! :)

I second the idea of no downvote. Its being abused by childish whales

I would like to see this option tried as well.

You might be interested to learn that the exponential voting curve was designed to render downvotes not necessary for controlling abuse, which tends to be the main argument for keeping them around these days.

I think what will happen is that Steemit and its community will increasingly splinter into different groups of interest and for users it will be normal to have different accounts to "diversify" their risk (at least that is what I am planning since bernies last visit on my account..).

In the long-run, I see a cold peace-like scenario. Bernie and his Stalinist friends can't do much more than burning through their voting power. They surely won't win and without @ned or the developers as a whole changing anything, they have no chance but to intimidate everyone by occasionally giving a user the torches and pitchforks treatment... which actually would be more in line with Mao: Punish one, discipline 100.

At one point, the SJW crew will be ignored and everyone will have a 2nd or 3rd account for both controversial content and self-upvotes if necessary. Nobody can do anything against that, except for the developers.

This would imply that bernie et al have to give up at one point, but since Steem Dollar is lifting off right now, the $$ loss for them would be too significant, which is why I believe they won't go anywhere soon. This again brings in @ned and the developers, who - in the name of the platforms existence and attraction to investors - will have to do something against this SWJ/antifa behavior.

Bottom line: You are 100% right by arguing from the economic/financial angle for Steemit, because that's the only level on which it is rational and dominant to change the platform conceptually (or even exclude users) if necessary.

"They surely won't win"

They appear to want only to destroy Steemit and anyone who is successful on it. At this, they can succeed by continuing to push their toxic attitudes across Steemit until user retention numbers are even worse than they already have been.

My gut feeling tells me that they getting thrown out can happen very quickly. All it need is enough witnesses getting complaints about them and then it will be on the to do list of the developers if they like it or not.

edit

A possible solution could be to make upvote bots transparent and force their owners into the light with name and face since for example @randowale seems to be one of bernies tools. He really built himself a WMD with that and it would only be fair for the users if they knew who they are feeding when requesting an upvote.

I agree completely. And I am a whale.

I appreciate your vote on this post. Thank you for chiming in.

As I always reiterate, Steem first and most important priority on-boarding new users and retaining old... We have a circulating supply of 246,165,195 STEEM, lets focus on getting active daily users to that number and create a platform that is inviting and user friendly... I have been here since April and I know all the drama of last year and it often spills, I have over 100 dead followers, some of which have been flag out of the platform....
We have a beautiful platform, if we can epitomize the theme of this platform, we would be within the TOP10 in less than no time....

I had to go back in time to find you being this positive on Steem...bummer.

Hope is a mess up thing, if you hold on to it, it can either kill you or give you the strength to fight another day.... With Steem its an interesting experiment, driven by emotion and rationalize by those who think they understand those emotion

I agree with so many points in here. But...I don't want to say anything specific since I can't afford to get flagged.

Touche, my good man! I'm eagerly awaiting the first flag, myself.

lol.. and I would upvote you if I just had the courage to step out of line.

Sad state of affairs, isn't it.

It's fun to think of times when we were still at the "comma" stage, and not at the "sending the FBI to each other's houses" phase.

trippin' down memory lane eh?

You're not the only one.

Gotta protect that rep...you almost made it to 70!

Note: not mocking, I know it's tough to get past the 60s.

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