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RE: The Daily Bidbot Summary for Yesterday 4/18/18 - Who's paying the most for Bidbots?
I fully agree with you. Tranparencybot does not downvote and never will. I do downvote hate speach, profane, cruel, unproperly tagged or other abuses. This I do manually as you suggest and generally let the authors know why.
Flagging is useful, when used properly. iflagshit would not have been silenced by a mute button.
I'd love to try to persuade you to stop censoring hate speech. Many people have perceived my "street essay" speech to be "hate speech". Hate speech is fully protected in the United States, and for good reason. Were it not so, I would never have been able to speak, and I would be in prison right now and possibly dead. (My speech is not hate speech; it is simply speech expressing prohibited viewpoints on prohibited topics.)
There is absolutely no need to censor hate speech, no matter how vile, even on the street where it cannot be muted. By censoring hate speech, you are expressing your contempt for whatever group you think needs you to protect their "safe space". Here on steemit, anyone who wants to live in a filter bubble can easily do so by muting anyone who says anything unpleasant. They don't need you to censor what is available for others to hear.
@iflagshit was spamming as I define the term (to mean any behavior that silences others by degrading the platform).
It has to very cruel or personal (not against me, I just ignore them), for me to flag hate speech, but I do have a limit. I'm sure you may have seen some of the lewd, distasteful and utterly profane remarks launched at me the first couple of days the bot went online. I don't believe I downvoted any of them (at least not for that reason)-- I simply ignore it.
But again, I have a line and will defend others; more so than myself, when someone crosses it and becomes belligerently intolerable.
One of the problems with muting, for any reason, is that you will begin missing parts of a discussion that may have much importance to you. Muted users do not show up in your replies and are filtered out in the conversation that you may be taking part in with others, so this has to be taken into consideration.
Even if a comment is extremely vile and personal, I urge you to presume that the targeted person is a good, strong man or woman who can handle it without your assistance. Post your own condemnation of the hate speech, in order to rebuke the hater and also express solidarity and moral support for the targeted person.
It might seem insensitive for me to say this, but any person who participates in a speech forum has a duty to be strong enough to handle ANY speech directed against him. Censorship is so dangerous and so harmful to discourse that personal strength is the ante that you must put onto the table in order to sit down and be dealt cards.
Your point about muting is well taken. I really don't see any alternative. I'm probably going to start blogging to develop a consensus document that will state recommended policies for users who, like me, have limited time and are here seeking relationships with others.
You make very valid points and free speech is very dear to me, so I do not dismiss your opinion in the slightest and in-fact probably agree with the bulk of your as stance. I believe my voting record which is of course very visible, more than likely supports your viewpoint more than my words do.
I am very interested in such a document, give me a shout when you get something posted. Not sure how it would be utilized since the consensus is really controlled more by voting power (money) than the number of voters.
Enjoyed the discussion!