A partial response to @dwinblood post on flagging and a suggestion, a formal apology to @pfunk and an update request for cheetah

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

Flagging, getting the flag, being hit by the unholy abormination that is a downvote, can be a very terrible experience.

But of cause except you're a spammer, an ID-thief, or an annoying piece of cake, your likelihood of getting a downvote is quite low

(there are some crazy cookies who will downvote for just mentioning their names, but they are rare.)

This post doesn't go into what downvoting is, or how to avoid it, as I believe there are a lot great guide that talks about those specific details. If you need a guide to understanding downvotes, you could come here, a post by @cyrano.witness

There are a few things I would like to take from dwinblood post however;

  • First if you are flagged (aka down voted). Don't panic.

The down vote is intended to fight plagiarism, spam, abuse, and they added for reward pool issues (wish they hadn't as that opened the flood gates).

This is currently necessary to fight spam, plagiarism, and abuse. Without these tools there is no clear way to stop such things.

dwinblood post is the source, click here

dont worry.png

Greetings and salutations steemians!

Without a doubt, being downvoted could come off as one of the worse thing to happen to anyone trying to build a rep on steemit. It not only makes your work seem bad, but people become apprehensive to your moniker as its starts getting associated with bad news and all such things.

Who holds sway with (down)voting power?

Without a doubt, those at the top of the ladder have neigh omnipotent power to downvote any work they deem fit, and should a top steemian go on a downvoting spree, there is little that can be done to stop such person, except for say a ban via the cheetah robot, and Im not even sure thats possible.

Screenshot (158).png
no matter your upvotes, all it takes is a well placed downvote by a dolphin or higher to ruin your day, . . . . .dont be a d_ck!

I do understand this system is one way to prevent revenge downvoting.

To those who are new, simply put, someone higher than you in SP(steem power) and rep would do quite some damage to your post, and there is little that can be done about that.

  • However, it may have cancelled out the reward other people wanted to give you for that topic because maybe they really liked it. It could be viewed as restricting the right of people to support the people that share their interests.

an extract taken from @dwinblood post here

Unsupervised downvoting

Mistakes can be made of cause, and mistakes have been made, but when your work has been downvoted, the rewards go away and don't exactly come back as quickly as you might hope.

So in this case where costly mistakes can be made what could be the solution?

The holy few. Give the power to downvote to a select few.

I dont know if this idea has berngiven before, but eitherway, I state my case. I believe the power to downvote should be given to a select few. It should be removed from the hands of everyone, and only entrusted to those worthy and human enough to use it with discretion.

Now I know giving the power to a select few could lead to high abuse of power, but people like @steemcleaners and @pfunk already sort of do this. They dedicate their time and energy on steemit to help sort out those who may try to scam, and with the help of the cheetah bot, the search field need not be scanned by humans alone.

cheetah ban pfunk.jpg
spammers, scammers, beware

From my perspective, this could stop the cross downvoting fights or rather whale wars occurring at the top of the steemit food-chain.

Monitor the select few

With the power to downvote being in the hands of a few, they would be easy to monitor and a channel opened up to receive complaints of abuse of power. With enough complaints, proper punishment could be meted out on the abuser, which could range from suspension to outright banning of the account. No one wants to lose all their investments on steemit, so that should keep them in line.

Plus

A dvote-moderator who steps out of line would himself be downvoted by his fellow moderators

Speaking of @pfunk;

An apology to @pfunk

Im not one to shy away from any challenge, and I did stand my ground at the time, but when I was proping up this account, I set my sights on pfunk and what I though was incessant flagging and abuse of power from him. I had isolated cases and evidence against him, but it turned out these were part of a larger whole. I stood down, and decided to monitor the events leading up to the big bust on a bernie, and also exposure on a certain noga..... as a fraud (im so not mentioning the full names )
im sorry pfunk.jpg

Cheetah update request

guitar fro lucypher.png
this is a pic from @lucypher open mic program, if cheetah is able to recognise this, ill edit

It seems cheetah can be exploited in several ways and @steemcleaners cant possibly be everywhere at once. The picture above is from the may edition of open mic hosted by @lucypher. I didnt credit the owner, nor did I put a reference or source because im testing a theory out.

The hypothesis before the theory- update request for detection system.

It seems @cheetah isn't able to recognise a picture once it has been edited by an app, be it photoshop, or paint, all it takes is a little editing and the photo is unique, different(at least in the mind of the machine) from all other pictures on the internet.
If an algorithm could be written or a solution found, then i believe cheetah could potentially fish out all plagarized photos from steemit. In the case of this, I simply cropped the photo. If cheetah does recognise the photo, then ill edit.

Sort:  

Nice work, i hope you grow fast on steemit :)

@davidthelad

cool, you too, though I would suggest you slow down on the spamming, i viewed your comments and I can see why your on 10 in rep.

I also need help so that i try to help everyone i know!

@davidthelad

nice to know, everyone doesnt really need your help, post your stuffs, post useful and interesting topics that you know about, and soon youll be helping alot more people by giving them curation reward from your hitting posts!.

your likelihood of getting a downvote is quite low

I have to disagree with you here. One of my posts got downvoted even though as far as know I did not break any of the rules mentioned in the Steemit Etiquette Guide 2.0. BTW, as they state in the guide:

these ARE guidelines not RULES.

I have no problem being corrected when I do something wrong. However I do have problem with the current downvote system, which immediately effects your rep and revenue.

But my biggest gripe is the use of bots to do this downvoting. One of the bots that downvoted me states that because of their downvote other upvoting bots will not work for me anymore. I have to better my life for some time (don't know how since they never told me what I did wrong), but than they expect me to transfer some Steem to them and they will investigate and MAYBE remove me from their blacklist.
This sounds like extortion to me, a much bigger problem if we allow this to continue.

I must say your suggestion to have a few selected powerusers that can downvote appeals to me. Better still would be to give everyone the same power to downvote. If enough people think a post breaks the rules than the community will take care of it.

Considering the amount of posts placed here daily most of the annoying posts will disappear after a few seconds anyway.

I fear if we don't react now Steem(it) will run the risc of having its reputation destroyed very rapidly.

bro slow down, your post probably got downvoted for another issue. If you would talk to steemcleaners or cheetah, something should be worked out. Although if its a vengeful downvote from a jealous user, all you have to do is report to the right authorities.


Steemit's reputation isnt going down the drain so soon. Its been too helpful for that to happen, although I do see the prevalence of shitposts becoming an issue soon.


If everyone in here had the same mind as us relating to the select few downvoting, then the problem of vengeful downvoting could become a thing of the past.

No worries, I don't hold grudges. I'm just seeing that someone created a bot which has a adverse effect on the Steemit experience.
With over 30 year experience in IT and one of the first adopters of Internet I know about the pitfalls en problems when creating something like Steemit. I just find it hard to get my input at the right people because of the decentralized setup.

And I think I know why my post got downvoted, most likely because of referral links in the post. Problem here is that nowhere in the TOS or the Etiquette guide is mentioned that that is not allowed.

It was not @steemcleaners or @cheetah I was talking about. I found out that SC are individuals, and even though they do great work there's still some room for improvement.

Although if its a vengeful downvote from a jealous user, all you have to do is report to the right authorities.

That is part of the problem, what are the right authorities? As far as I could find there is no body that can be contacted when you don't agree with an action from a user or bot.

And let us not be to easy about the reputation of a new network like Steemit. I have enough experience to get to the heart of the matter, a user without my technical en organisation background could be driven away because of something that could be easiliy resolve.
Enough stories like this IRL will send Steemit down the drain quickly. Wouldn't be the first site/solution to experience this.

I agree that some types of posts must be prevented/stopped, and I see bots appearing giving bogus replies to any post they see. For that reason I also understand the reasoning of @steemcleaners and @cheetah. However like I said, we're not out of the woods yet.

well, i came back here because i found two people you could potentially report to @pfunk and @predetor,though i dont think they would appreciate me dropping their names here, im already obsessed with one of them as it is.

Do you have T.P. for my bunghole? I would hate for my bungholio to get polio.

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