RE: "Central Premise & Proposals" - A Series About Fixing Steemit - Part 4
I must say I like the proposals.
Just as a quick aside, the fishing scenario you describe is essentially what the European Union have done which is sensible as you cannot 'grow' new fish once they've all been eaten.
Anyway I digress, I'm not sure how easy it would be to ban bidbots but I agree. However if they can't be banned, then at least reconfigure the trending page so that people who constantly use them do not appear on it.
As far as self upvoting is concerned I don't think you can limit, it's either you can do it or you can't. The problem is, as you allude to above, anyone can make any number of anonymous accounts, so they would get around the self upvoting that way.
I could make account no.2 fill it with Steem that I have sold from account no.1 and vote to my heart's content.
I like the foundation fund and also the goods4Steem idea, the latter though will take cooperation from vendors, and I guess that's the hardest to get.
If SBD works in the future, then it would definitely chill vendors out about potential losses. However I'm not so sure we can guarantee that $1 peg. It's working now, but for how long?
@cryptogee,
A brilliant idea.
Bidbots are rarely directly profitable anymore. At least not reliably so. The motivation for their use is to get a post into Hot and Trending where it will get more exposure, and upvotes, while attracting curation-bots for the same purpose. If you negate their ability to get into Hot or Trending, you negate the motivation for their use. And, auto-detecting their use is quite simple. Nice.
You see folks, this is what INTELLIGENT discourse looks like. No ranting or raving ... just the application of intelligence in a thoughtful and methodical manner.
So here's my thoughts:
For the Curation System to function properly as a quality filtering system, as was the original intent, the blockchain's limited upvoting capital has to be focused on that purpose. At present, huge amounts of such upvoting capital is misallocated, diverted into bidbots and multiple-account-self-upvoting schemes. These schemes have no quality criteria ... and hence, the whole curation of, and by, quality concept is negated.
We can handle the bidbots by banning them and then enforcing via the Sheriff & Jury System, or, as you propose, banning posts that use them from the Hot and Trending Pages, largely negating the motivation for their use.
Effectively ridding the blockchain of multiple-account-self-upvoting is a lot harder ... but no less necessary. The only way I see to do that is attach every account, new and existing, to a real world person. Give all accounts 30 days to complete the identification process and then freeze posting activities until the non-compliers have complied. People could have as many accounts as they want ... but the blockchain would treat them as one with respect to the daily self-upvoting limit. Data analysis software would be able to flag suspicious patterns very quickly and the Sheriffs would soon catch on to every new innovation in cheating techniques.
I have recently joined several crypto-backed social media platforms. Each one required disclosure of a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ identity to join. As it turns out, this requirement does not cripple their ability to function or attract new users. All were recommended to me by Steemians who similarly disclosed their real world identities to join.
As you and I have discussed before, all this secrecy stuff that crypto purists insist must be preserved, won't be. Real World Governments Possess the Power to Compel. Any crypto that insists on complete secrecy will not have access to exchanges, ICO's, institutional service providers or institutional investors. And that will cause them to quickly die off. The world of cryptocurrencies is growing up and they'll have to start playing by the rules whether they like it or not. All this ideological stuff will be very dangerous to one's financial health, a lesson a great many are about to learn in the not-distant future.
Quill
I think the problem with this is it is pretty easy to have multiple Twitter and Google+ accounts and seeing as Facebook only requires an email, ditto with them as well.
Unfortunately until we have 'anonymous identifiers' like a number on the blockchain that is issued to you alone. Which is impossible to have more than one of, this idea won't work.
I think you're just a bit ahead of your time Quill :-)
I'm curious, which ones? Do they work as well as Steemit; or even on the same premise?
Cg
@cryptogee,
My Comment:
Cryptogee's Reply:
My comment was made as a passing remark about joining other social media platforms, not as the verification system for my Steemit proposal. There are numerous ways that Real World ID could be confirmed. With only one minute's worth of research, here's how one company does it:
https://help.thelott.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002563694-How-do-I-confirm-my-Debit-or-Credit-Card-
Undoubtedly there are many others.
With respect to the other social media's, I'll shoot you a DM.
Quill
Still haven't explained how you propose to ban accounts, other than to say "real world ID", which doesn't actually answer the question.
Atta boy, those are facts.