[Proposal] A New Efficient Way to Cope with Abusers
Intro
Steemians long have been fighting against abuses. Although we have a useful tool the so called downvoting, it is tiring to monitoring all potential abusive cases and downvote them everyday. In this proposal, I suggest a new systemic design which can reduce negative impacts from abusing, especially reward exploits, while minimizing cognitive burdens on genuine users.
Current design
The current design of Steem against abuse is "decentralized moderation". All contents are located in a global pool where everyone can post and get rewarded. Also, everyone can moderate posts in the global poiol using upvote or downvote. So if there are any abusive behaviors like self-vote for rewards, users can downvote these posts and punish abusers.
However, this system has some problems. First, entrance costs is very low. This means, if an abuser got caught, he/she can create another account cheaply and do abuse again. Second, it requires continuous downvoting (moderation) if abusers keep doing. Therefore, reacting against abusive behaviors costs lot of attentions and voting power.
New system
In the new system, a new namespace "village" is added. To create a village, one should pay significant amount of fee in order to prevent village-squatting. Every posts should be included a village, and every village has at least one moderator (default is the owner).
Moderators of a village can whitelist or blacklist users. That means, if a user commits abusing, he/she can be blocked by mods to post in the village. Additionally, like witness votes, users can vote for village. But unlike witness vote, villages can be upvoted or downvoted. If a village has negative voting score, all posts in that village cannot be rewarded (i.e. rshares under that village is assumed as zero). Downvote on post is obsoleted and replaced by downvote on village, which is a group of posts managed by a set of mods.
In this figure, abusers posted in Village B, but due to negative score of the village, they cannot be rewarded. The abusers tried to post in Village A that has positive score, but they soon get expelled since the mods of Village A recognized they are abusers. The goal of mods will be managing the village socially desirable to attract more people by rewards. Users will have less cognitive burdens to cope with all abusive posts. Instead, they just need to vote once if they think a village is abuser's realm. There still can exist areas of "freedom of speech" but it doesn't always mean "freedom for reward".
In short,
- Users create villages
- Users post in villages
- Village mods moderate users (not posts)
- Users moderate villages instead of posts
Thanks for reading and looking forward to active discussions.
Great contribution to the discussion. Generally, I think having strong moderators in each community sub who work together cooperatively is preferable to having a global police force.
I agree. Global police force cannot know every contexts and situations of each community, especially as Steem is growing rapidly.
Could it be possible that the villages will be the geographical location of the poster?
No. It is just a namespace like subreddits
The communities, or villages, would be based upon common interests, so it would be possible to have one for a person's country or region, but that would be more as a matter of identity, so actual location of the users could be anywhere.
A sort of mayor in a small/huge community. Interesting
This is a good post and I am happy that you thought about a way to fight abuse.
From my understanding the concept of villages is similar to what Steemit.inc is working on, communities. Even though I am looking very much forward to the implementation of this I am not sure it can address the in my view most damaging abuse which are bot self upvotes.
Checking the content of either village or community still remains a manual task by humans and therefore has only minimal effect in fighting bot votes.
To effectively change this kind of abuse I think a code change to comment rewards is required that either
Communities are off chain but villages are on-chain that can influence rewards. Bot self voting can be addressed by 1) mods blacklist bots in the village, and 2) users downvote villages (so no reward) those mods allow bot self-voting.
Thank you for clarifying. The solution sounds good.
Then why should you @clayop have freedom of award? We all have "freedom of award" and Steemit doesn't need y robocops taking it away from us. You flagged my post for using the #kr tag when it was Korean related. It's a Korean game show from your country so why would you flag that? Are you a hater?
PLease read the FAQ section where is says "there are no official Steemit rules".
Hopefully you can find something else better to do with your time.
Speaking of abuse @clayop, you abuse the flag and flag Americans and other westerners for using the #kr tag. Like this post here:
https://steemit.com/education/@randompic/north-korea-stored-1-million-tons-of-petroleum-before-sanctions
The above post is all about Korea, yet you flagged it. So, you are also an abuser.
While there are no official Steemit rules, as you can see in the FAQ section, there is an etiquette guide. No one has to follow the etiquette guide and you, @clayop, do not follow it. If you did, you would not flag members for these kind of silly , little reason.
So, you do not follow the Steemit Etiquette Guide but you want everyone to follow your made up rules or guides, whatever they are. You are a complete fool. You are becoming one of the big fools of Steemit.
Hey @clayop that's an interesting proposal. I have one question and one observation -
Would abusers be given a chance to reform? Or abuser just be moved from "village" to village without ever having another chance to be rewarded for good behavior?
You have to take into consideration that there loads of articles online (some even here at Steemit) which 'teach' new users to essentially 'game' the system.
Chances are that many new users wont even know that they are doing anything wrong.
So would there be a chance for reform?
Lastly, I don't know that downvoting a village (rather than the individual) would be very fair to the residents. Furthermore, it may stifle free thought and expression. I don't really want my neighbors in the "village" becoming the #Thought-Police.
Just imagine if some the neighborhood starts posting about politics... somebody (or several people) is about to get kicked out of the village and labeled an abuser.
I commend you for your creative proposal but it may need some amount of amendment to make things more practical and to keep free thought alive here at Steemit.
Village is not a group of users but just a space to post (like a local market). An abuser in bad town can do good behaviors in a good village.
Hi @clayop thanks for replying and helping me understand a bit more regarding your proposal.
Thanks!
nonetheless, according to your proposal, it would seem that one abuser in the village could draw the 'sin city' flag, and no one in the village would be able to gain rewards.
That's like 51% attack. We surely have more stake held by good users than abusers.
The top two authors on Steemit are scammers, @mindhunter and @tamim. Your assumption is not proved.
Also, most of the Steem that exists was mined before Steemit even was created. Again, the assumption is invalid.
Who gets the $5k buyin when one enters a village?
IMO, your argument is less relevant to my statement.
And you might misunderstand. No-one pays for entering village. Fees are paid when villages are created.
So, when a village, composed of 100 Steemers who have each paid 5000 Steem, gets blacklisted, and those 100 people give up on the village, what happens to the 500,000 Steem they paid to join it when it disbands?
If one Steemer wants out, what happens to their 5k investment?
Users dont pay for the village fee. It is paid by the creator once and the village is opened to everyone.
Do you envision the creator of the village then having veto power over who to accept into the village? If not, no one will do it.
Whitelisting or blacklisting. It should be possible.
This is amazing idea. We still have to discuss how much one (or a group of people?) should pay for the village, or according to which standard we should devide villages, or how do we establish each village(by tag maybe? or other technical way?), etc. But I think this is a firm step toward the "spam-free, abusing-free Steemit." Thank you for the wonderful idea. :)
In my idea, one should pay quite lot as a fee (e.g. 5000 Steem).
Great article! your idea can really help steemit become more friendly and free from abusers
I think this is too complicated.
And too expensive. I suspect that ~90+% of current Steemers couldn't join a village today. I couldn't.
You may misunderstand. Users can freely use any village unless they are blacklisted.
I would never plunk down $5k to create a village that just anyone could join, particularly if that new account could cause the entire village to lose the ability to earn rewards.
Very interesting idea. I think as it stands right now that Steemit is still going to leave things in the hands of the people to control and direct so downvoting is our only option for the time being. However I do think they will need to address these issues as Steemit grows or it will just implode on itself and self destruct into a common Porn and filth site along with every other scam and sin out there. There is a fine line and we as users need to address, report and downvote anything that doesn't fit in within the Steemit community. If people would come together on this more we could keep the Steemit community more in control by the users and not by Steemit.