Some thoughts on the culture of Steem in the future
This is a response for @stellabelle's recent post where she was worried about misogynists taking over Steem.
Steem is something totally different than other media platforms. I predict that it will take some time until people will understand how this system really works. There will be growing pains but after a while everything will be just fine.
Uniqueness of Steem comes from uncensorableness. When something is posted on Steem, it will stay there forever. Users can edit their posts, but basically it just means that a new post is created and the original is hided. But if needed, the original can be dug up afterwards.
This means that users have to think carefully what they are going to post. If they start to bully somebody, everybody will see that. It can't be undone.
Only way to make posts forgotten is to create new account. This has three problems:
Currently new accounts can be made for free, but that's not necessarily option in the future anymore. New account costs money and Steemit.com may someday run out of steem that they have allocated for free account creations. After that, new users have to pay for accounts with their own money. So if somebody wants to continue trolling or hatespeeching, they have to pay for it. Even now it's difficult because you can get a free account only if you use Facebook or Reddit account. After you have created two accounts, it will be difficult to get more free ones.
Steem Power is not liquid currency. It means that user can't just make a new account and move their wealth to it. Steem and Steem dollar can be transferred instantly, but Steem Power will take two years to fully transfer it (transfers can be made once a week for 104 times). It's not economically reasonable to create new accounts just for fun, because user can't transfer their Steem Power to new account. This holds especially for old accounts that have been used to earn more Steem Power.
If you somehow connected your original account to your real name, that won't be forgotten. You have to create totally new identity without any connection to your past identities. You might have to even learn to write in different style so that nobody recognizes you.
This will make people to think a lot more what they will post in Steem. In other platforms they can just post and delete whatever they want, or create new accounts, but in Steem it's much more difficult. You have to really think about your reputation.
But on the other hand, not everybody is going to care a great deal about their reputation. Or some might intentionally create reputation of them being honest and straight about their opinions, even when they are politically incorrect. These kind of people will probably feel like home in Steem because this is, after all, an uncensorable medium.
I consider myself being in that camp. As a libertarian living in Finland, a country full of welfare state fanatics, I'm used to being despised and ridiculed. That has made me to grow thick skin against personal attacks. I just don't give a fuck about what others think about me. That has made me quite resilient against harassment.
Despite being quite open about my opinions, only once I've been in a situation which might have been seriously threatening. Some guy dug up my home address and send intimidating email, asking "I know where you live, how would you like if I'd come to visit you?". My reaction was of course to invite him. I wrote back that he's welcome, let's drink a cup of tea and discuss so that we could hopefully reach mutual understanding on the topic we disagreed.
Never heard from him again.
Most of bullies in the internet are doing it just for fun without any serious purpose to cause meaningful harm. If you have a thick skin and don't give a fuck about the intimidation, they'll leave you alone and find somebody else.
Most of the misogyny in the internet isn't real hatred against women. It's just trolling for the fun. If the fun is taken away, it will stop. But feminists and social justice warriors are really bad at that. They are getting very often bullied because they are so easy target for trolls. They lose their shit every time when a troll writes something. That is exactly what trolls are looking for, so that's why trolls target feminists.
If you want to get rid of the problem, situation must be analyzed correctly.
I agree that the situation is bad, but that's not because there is so much hatred against women. In western countries the real hatred is very rare so it's not a real problem. Bigger problem is that our culture has declined into a situation where lot of individuals don't have anything better to do with their lives than harass other people in the internet just for fun.
Steem will be also balancing between nice proper discussion and trolling, just like other platforms. But I think that the quality of discussion in Steem will be better because straight bullying and pure hatespeech will be much more difficult and economically unreasonable.
I think that in the future Steem is probably going to be place for open and occasionally very heated discussion. But because of reputation is going to be so important, pure hate speech and active trolling just for fun are not going to be so common as they are on other platforms.
In an environment that can't be censored it's best to adapt by learning to tolerate rather than try to police the tone of discussion. Overall that strategy has worked for me quite well. It's always better option to choose empowerment through mental resilience.
I consider all that safespace and trigger warning stuff that social justice warriors are demanding to be very harmful for society. It teaches to vulnerable individuals to be more vulnerable rather than cultivates their resilience and independence.
But of course there is still possible to make safespaces in Steem if that is what users want. Steem is just a platform which can have several different user interfaces. Steemit.com is just the first one, I'm sure that there will be many more. If feminists want to make a UI for Steem that censors all content that they think is not appropriate, they are free to do so.
Finally, a tip for individuals who are seriously bullied:
Publish everything on Steem!
For example, if a woman gets harassed by ex-husband/boyfriend, she can publish all messages on Steem and show to the world what kind of asshole that man is.
The internet never forgets. With Steem blockchain this especially holds true. When something is in the blockchain, it will stay there forever.
I predict that this will be a significant force in the future that makes people behave better.
I was considering writing something like this after reading stellabella blogpost and I agree with you.
I hope steemit doesnt turn into a twitter full of crybully, SJW and radical 3rd wave feminist. Im just so tired of cultural marxism. I, personally, in 30 years never met a mysogin in person. (Unless someone decide to redefine the word to anything that feminist doesnt like). I cannot call for censoring of pornography since it is still legal but what I am worried about is how to deal with illegal stuff like child pornography or terrorist group buying large stakes of SP and funding their operation that way.
That's the threshold for me. Who will moderate illegal stuff out of the steemit website?
SJW people seem to thrive only in environments where they can pressure moderators to censor the discussion. That's why I don't think they will get much traction in here.
Terrorists will be downvoted very fast if they ever find their way to Steem. I don't think it will make any sense for them to buy so much Steem Power that they would be able to get any meaningful visibility.
Childporn might be a problem, but that's quite easy to spot and report to police. Steemit will take it off from the website very fast. And of course we have to remember that Steem doesn't save any pictures or videos, they are hosted on other websites/servers. It will be only a link that is on Steem. Everybody can easily follow where the link leads to and authorities can take the content down. It doesn't make much sense for CP distributors to publish it in here, they will only draw attention to themselves and that's pretty much the last thing they want.
all valid points. I would rather the platform to self police itself rather than going with mods.
Most of your post I can agree with, but you are are generalizing about a couple of groups and points. I can assure you, feminists and sjw's are as diverse in their level of severity as any group of people. I'll agree straight away that these groups contain bigots, but that's just the same for any group, just like there are more reasonable people. on the other side of the spectrum, or rather, the midst.
So my advice to you is to not generalize. If it wasn't for feminists, the world would be less free. If it wasn't for the so called social justice warrior group of people, many social injustices wouldn't have been addressed yet. Talk about trigger warnings. You call them harmful to society. I would agree with you on that point, if they were everywhere. But that's not the point of a trigger warning. Steemit is completely open I'd say, so most trigger warnings aren't necessary, because it's simply impractical. There are exceptions however and you should be able to recognize them straight away from the news for instance. They'll warn you when images contain gore or lots of violence and I assume you can see why one would want to be warned about that. It's to be considerate of other people's struggles, ptsd for instance. Myself, I've had mental health issues and I'm still dealing with some of them and for a significant amount of time I couldn't take much violence. Not because I had a fragile skin, but because I was sick. Anyway, I hope you understand now why trigger warnings are good, if applied in the right environment.
I see which way you're going here and I'd agree mostly. Currently, if you're not rich, you either have enough and you're in a magical fairy limbo land of not giving a fuck about the world, because, you have enough, or you have enough or you don't have enough and you're probably very divided about what should be done about it. Divide and rule, I don't have to explain this further I think. So yeah, I think lots of problems, like sexism or radicalisation, are strengthened by the fact that we're all pretty divided and unfocused, but it's not the cause. Issues have individual causes, just like sexism does. The main reason you think it's not really much of an issues here, is because on the one hand you hear how difficult life is for women and girls in developing countries, while on the other hand, you're not a woman and thus you have to rely on other sources of information to understand whether or not women have struggles in our society. I can assure you that they still do and lots of them are empirically provable. Take for instance the wage gap. Lots of people like to claim it doesn't exist, but when they do the math and look at the statistics, it's hard to deny it.
Or take a look at the amount of harassment they experience. This one isn't explainable by math, you'll just have to trust that the millions of women that have been surveyed over the years aren't in some kind of conspiracy. Now if you think it's a conspiracy against men, then I'll just have to stop right here and give up, because there's no fighting that amount of ignorance. But I'll assume you understand that the amount of evidence there is for the fact that lots of women (if not most) in our Western and developed society are still very much being harassed and discriminated against.
With all that said, I don't disagree with you, this place is as open as the wilderness and if you want to survive, you'll have to adapt. I say this especially with @stellabelle's post in mind: this place isn't for anyone to take. The 'horrific men' won't take it and you won't take it either. In stead, we'll all participate in it and as long as you are willing to support your opinions by reasonable arguments, you'll fit right in. The only way this place will be 'doomed' is when ignorance takes over. And with that I rest my case.
Yeah, I know that but lately the more reasonable feminists have done basically nothing to cool down the most craziest. Bigots can do whatever they want and nobody is fighting back inside the movement. That's why I think that feminism is lost in it's current form. Reasonable people should just quit being feminists.
If you look how many hours and what jobs people are doing, the gap disappears mostly. Men just do more hours in jobs that pay better.
First, I don't deny that there are lots of men who are dickheads and harass women all the time. There are a lot of them. But usually it's possible to avoid them. When male shows signs of being evil, don't hang out with him anymore. Dont' go to places where violence is possible. I've seen and heard about numerous cases where women have been beaten and/or raped because they didn't believe that there is a real risk even when it was obvious.
Second, lately I've become quite sceptical about how real the harassment is. Tim Hunt case was the last drop for me. It was horrible mob lynching for nothing. Feminists around the world went along without checking if the accusations were true or not. That really made me question everything that feminists say. Most of them don't seem to care about truth, they just want a reason to show their hatred against men.
:D
I loved your post, i have no words , keep on it.
Spot on.
It's not though. If you're grandfather doesn't want you to talk about a war he has fought in, do you tell him to fuck off with his sjw bullshit? It's more nuanced than that, isn't it? Of course steemit isn't a place for these things, as it's public. You don't see trigger warnings on the streets either. But claiming they're bullshit all together is simply short-sighted.
I need to read the white paper again, I think I might understand it a bit more now!