@steemflagrewards - Bringing Balance to the Steem Blockchain
The Steem Blockchain needs balance. For too long, getting upvotes, buying upvotes and voting was the main focus of the blockchain. We seem to have forgotten that all forms of consensus need balance, a counteracting force to keep it in check so it does not go too much in one direction. The ability to flag (downvote) is part of the protocol but is normally not used and when it is used, it is done maliciosly in many cases to punish a user, rather than contribute towards finding the "Proof of Brain" value of content.
Bitcoin protects it's blockchain via it's "Proof of Work" which requires users who want to decide where the block rewards go to spend some energy in mining. The Steem Blockchain gives that role to it's users who "mine" content by creating posts, upvoting and flagging.
Upvoters Get Rewards, Flaggers Make Sacrifices
The Steem Blockhains consensus protocol was skewed from day one towards upvoting while, those that saw content reach far above it's subjective value, could do very little.
Let's work through an example. Imagine a user that has a $1.00 upvote, if they vote on any content that is not their own after 30 minutes, they will earn $0.25 in curation as a minimum. If that user votes on their own content, they would earn $1.00 in rewards.
If that same user sees a post that has a $10 payout pending, which has been copied and pasted from the internet, or something that is just one line of text. They may reasonably believe that that post doesn't deserve the $10 payout and flag it. For doing so, the user uses up their voting power and in return earns nil / zero / nothing
In essence, the users who flag and reduce rewards for bad actors, leaving more rewards in the reward pool for other users are at a disadvantage.
To summarise, users have 3 choices
Self vote: 100% of vote as reward
Curate: 25% of vote as reward (with the potential of earning more if they vote early on a high payout post)
Flag: 0% as reward while using up their voting power
Bringing Balance
What if those users who went through the effort of identifying and flagging poor content got rewards?
That is what @steemflagrewards does. It crowd sources moderation of content on the blockchain and rewards those users who make a valid contribution.
Currently, each user who flags a valid post gets rewarded by way of an upvote on their comment.
So now our hypothetical user who had a $1.00 vote value can use that steem power to flag a post and earn $1.00 for using up their steem power on flags.
It is early days at the moment, but this project looks really promising. If you keep seeing lots of spam, plagiarism or other forms of abuse that are designed to increase rewards for the post creator while adding no value to anyone else, you can flag that post and earn rewards!
Give it a go today, lookup @steemflagrewards latest posts for details.
If you think more people should be aware of this great project, please resteem and spread the word!
Thank you for taking interest in promoting @steemflagrewards!
Our goal is to normalize flags and encourage people to disagree with ill-obtained rewards. Incentivizing flags is one way we approach this mission.
Again, thanks @kabir88, you are the man!
In the process, we hope the partakers also expose themselves to new content and participate in consumption of other Steemians' works, which is currently grossly lacking based on @crokkon's recent report on vote numbers.
Thanks @enforcer48!
This project passed a number of basic tests which makes me want to recommend it to others:
Keep up the great work and let's clean this place up for all the new users we will get after hard fork 20
@kabir88
"Clean this place up for all the new users"....what a farce!
@kabir88, why don't you first quit your own 100% self upvotes, apologize to the community for your past incessant self upvoting activities....THEN, come to me and we'll talk.
agreed..balance is needed..resteemed
otherwise
How do you find all those gifs so quick!
Thanks for the resteem! @itstime
It's a little something we call in our industry - keyword searching...
100% on point.
Making me feel old!
Hi @kabir88!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation! Your UA account score is currently 3.026 which ranks you at #9722 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 1836 places in the last three days (Your UA has decreased by 0.000).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 161 contributions, your post is ranked at #71.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server