Proposal: Drastically improve steemit quality control with incentives
Hello steemit!
I must not be alone seeing a lot of low quality posts and comments taking up space on this platform. It really detracts from this otherwise ingenious platform.
Here's my idea:
Reward the first ten people who accurately flag spam or otherwise low quality posts and comments with steem.
This will gamify quality control.
How does one measure a flag's accuracy?
I propose the following:
The first 10 flags are accurate if 100 flags occur within a 15 minute window. If first 10 flaggers are not followed by 90 flags within 15 minutes then stop the first 10 flaggers' voting privileges for 1 hour.
These numbers would need to be adjusted to fit the behaviour of bots
Potential problems and solutions
Bot influence
If a bot programmer programs his or her bot to report every post/comment just nanoseconds after seeing it and several other bots do the same, then they will flag valuable content. A bot programmer that flags everything hoping to profit would need to consider the opportunity cost of reporting a good quality post that they could have earned steem by up-voting it first.
A solution would be to have the steem reward for reporting be lower than the reward for curating good content. This way, bot programmers will be competing and adjusting their algorithms competitively for the betterment of automatic curation.
Censorship is not an issue because all posts continue to exist through the blockchain and will still be browsable by people who really want to see them. The steemit website could even have an option in the settings: Show low quality posts (with the default set to 'off').
Community feedback
I suggested this in the #proposals Slack channel and @samupaha disagreed, opting instead that people should comment explaining why a post should be flagged.
I think the most valuable thing is to leave a comment that explains why the post deserves a downvote. if it's plagiarized, there is a link to the original
The important question is: "what should Steem pay for?"
explaining why some post is worth of a downvote is really valuable for everybody. that's why it should be rewarded the most
My concern is that humans doing quality control takes up too much of our valuable time for filtering out spam - it involves reading, assessing, writing then waiting for other humans to agree and respond.
Bots can easily pump out garbage faster than us mere mortals can respond to. I think an automated solution could make steemit a lot cleaner, attractive and save us a lot of time in the process.
What do you think?
(Edit made 2 minutes after post to the numbers)
"The first 10 flags are accurate if 100 flags occur within a 15 minute window. If first 10 flaggers are not followed by 90 flags within 15 minutes then stop the first 10 flaggers' voting privileges for 1 hour."
I like your idea, but these numbers seem so arbitrary. I think the parameters need to be discussed and analyzed further. Since Steem is still small, I think it is impossible for any post to get 100 flags period, much less in 15 seconds.
I also think that your idea to combat bots flagging everything is not ideal. I think that flagging should be worth less than curating, but I would suggest adding something along the lines of enforcing negative rewards for false flaggings. For example, if any certain post does not receive a minimum number of flags, then the user(s) that flagged would not receive any reward AND it will generate negative rewards (IE. instead of being rewarded SD/SP, they would owe SD/SP from future content creation/curation/flagging). I think this would certainly deter bot flag spamming, and also make real people think twice to make sure a post actually deserves a flag.