New people if you see a down vote flag, don't immediately have fear... it is likely not as bad as you may think
My daughter was really depressed the other day, because she got down voted. She was pretty sure it took all of her potential earnings. The person that down voted her was @asshole.
I wanted to write this post to help some of you like I hopefully helped her.
First you need to understand what the down vote can do to you.
In this example I show my reputation 70 at the time of this writing and the account that was formerly asshole that is 25. A down vote from someone with a lesser reputation that yours has ZERO impact on your reputation.
A down vote can reduce your potential earnings based upon the steem power of the down voter and what they had their slider set at.
This my current steem power.
If I were to down vote you the most I could take from you at this time would be $0.01. So anyone with power similar to mine or lower will be able to take no more than that, and it likely will be $0.00.
This means unless they are higher reputation than you, they cannot damage your reputation. Unless they are very powerful they cannot really impact your earnings either. There are exceptions.
This post is mainly about teaching you what to look for so you don't panic, and hopefully you can avoid depression from an attacking down vote.
This is at the bottom of my daughter's post that was down voted...
If you click the down arrow/menu next to the votes (in this case 11) it will expand as follows:
This list is sorted by the impact the voting account had on your post. As you can see Asshole is second from the bottom. It would not have done hardly anything to this post. It would have done not even $0.01 in financial loss.
My daughter did not know this stuff so she was depressed that someone attacked her. She has been using Steemit since August, and did not know this. Thus, why I decided to write this post.
Maybe it wasn't personal
I showed her that if you go to the URL which in her case said https://steemit.com/poetry/@kellywin21/campfire-coffee
and you simply change the portion of that that says steemit.com to steemd.com you can get different information like this...
Doing this is useful if you have enough votes that the drop down menu is not helpful. You can then click on asshole who is the single down vote and see his steemd profile.
It quickly becomes apparent that the down vote was not personal. This obviously was either a bot or someone meticulously down voting anything and everything they could. It was not a personal attack on my daughter.
So if you do get down voted, I hope this information at least in most cases will offer you some comfort and put that down vote into perspective.
If you are fond of using the flag for opinion, subjective reasons, disagreement, etc perhaps the fact I had to write this will be another chance for you to realize that many people perceive such actions as you attacking them. Is that truly your intention? Is attacking people on the platform, or giving them that perception good for the platform? Do you want more people to come to steemit/busy and use it and thus increase the value of steem?
Steem On!
Good to learn more about how down voting works. Having acquired my first troll (only a matter of time I suppose) who has a slightly higher reputation than I do, I was interested to see what effect his down votes had.
Really not much, but then our reps only differ by about 5 points.
If you're interested in another user interface that doesn't hide messages until the time comes when Steemit itself changes this, you can go on Busy.org and access the same blockchain (posts, data etc) from there.
I'll have to check it out. Still delving into the block chain here between everything else I'm juggling.
On Steemstats you can follow who voted and how...He hasn't hit me since yesterday. Tell the daughter all is fine! I followed you on Twitter today, I reactivated my account.
Hahah... if you followed me... I don't even remember my password. I am far too verbose for the character limit on Twitter. :)
I hear ya...I have the same problem on Gab.ai too and they have a 200 or 250 chatacter limit.
TIL...
Is asshole a bit? What do you think?
I think it was a bot, and a person. As he would sometimes up vote things. It was someone trying to make a statement.
Likely someone had their post subjectively down voted by a whale one too many times, or saw it done to others and saw a post dropped to $0.00 for purely subjective reasons.
Likely saw how these same powerful people get outraged ONLY when someone more powerful than them suddenly does the same thing to them.
So what does someone without power do? They create a bot to abuse the flag by flagging everything. IT could have actually harmed reputation of people with lower rep than it.
They also revealed an exploit.
We can down vote posts, replies, and comments. So when we saw these abusive flaggings there was NOTHING for the rest of us to down vote of asshole's to reduce his reputation and thus reduce his potential to harm ANYONE.
He only voted. He never posted, commented, or replied.
There is no mechanism in place CURRENTLY to address such people. I suspect that will change.
I wis he owner of asshole could drop a couple mill into the sp of the bot so it would effect the whales.
like you said
till then they don't care, just try to hide the problem from the new people.
Had they done that it would have impacted ALL of us not just the whales. Stuff like that could kill the entire steemit project at this early stage. You'd have a lot of attrition... and it'd likely not be the whales. They could still power down and walk away with their cash. It might be less cash.... but I don't believe "collateral damage" should be EVER acceptable. It should be accidental.
if it is considered abuse because there is a downvote for subjetiove reasons not one of the could not vague reasons to use the flag then it would be in the wrong and hopefully the other whales would hold them accountable. same as the misuse of upvote bots
its all up to the whales just like right now.
it would just draw a line of whats correct usage of the flag and what is abuse.
having the vague reasons they give now are the same as saying use it for anything because it will fall under one of the vague terms that could be anything.
also of the whales made that change and didn't enforce the abuse of the flags just like the buse of sockpuppet bots all fait in steemit would be lost and everyone would leave just like they are doing now.
easily 90% of accounts are alts/bots or users that quit because of this flag problem.
everyone ended up at minds and sealion and stuff. that was thousnds and thousands of users a day that didn't care about the money just wanted a free speech no censorship platform. then they realized steemit is run by the sjw's and left. now we lose members faster then they join because word is spreadingabout this site and how it works.
50whales, 100 dolphins and 150 minnows under the costume of 30 thousand bots.
lol
when was the last time steem value went up that didn't have to do with a hard fork?
at th point the hard forkes are only there so they can squeeze as much out of it as they can before its to late.
sell durning hard fork, buy back couple days before next fork and repete, or invst and watch your value on a never ending downward spiral while everyone tells you it wil go up and how great it is.
The reason they changed it to a vague reason was that many whales and even Dan downvoted that way even when the guidelines didn't mention it. They are now working on separating the flag from regular downvotes, so that anyone can downvote anything and it won't have to hurt the user posting.
If you want to check out a platform that already does something similar, Busy.org doesn't display flags but uses a thumbs down and doesn't hide posts or messages.'
my god I wish some whale would go on a rampage flagging veryone like asshole did.
no pay outs till the problem is fixed!
better then how it is now where is only the people the whales pick on that get no pay outs.
they all upvote each other anyways and so thruth is they dnt even need us here, just the illusion that a lot of people are using steemit to keep the investors buying. if everyone but the whales did leave they wouldn't care unless the investors realized it.
like wizard of oz sitting behind the currtan running thousands of bots with only 100 actual users.
do not pay attention to the man behind the currtin, it is nothing mve along.
lol
xD
dan has flagged and censored me in the past for pointing out him saying he wants to bully everyone to do what he thinks is right and that he wants everyone to think the same things as him so he can do anything he wants and not worry about anything.
the solution is simple but if you look at the new reason to flag stuff you will see it is not what they want.
give a down vote that does not effect pay out or visibility or rep. leave the flag for copy pasta and child porn.
but then the whales couldn't steal peoples pay outs and count silence people so they just wont do it.
I have been saying it from the beginning but everyone alreay left from twexit and people seem to ignore the simple soltion or avoid it.
oh so pretend im dan or ned?
sounds like there is a major flaw then if sock puppets are the reason for the mainfaulght in steemit and why everyone is leaving.
don't the sock puppets ad blocks to he chain to and also add value/work done?
I understand if the flag was to be used correctly. but it isn and it is abused by power trippin assholes. instead the sock puppets are celibrated and defended while the flag gets used to punish those who do not have the same opinions as the whales.
don't say something that might offend the preshious whale snowflakes or they will rob you of your pay outs and flag you till you are silenced, then they will go back to their bot circle jerk gang bang rape of some minnows to feel tuff as they live out of a back pack moving from couch to couch bragging about all the steem power they have.
all they ha to do is seperate the downvote from the flag. then people could show their dislike for a post without effecting pay out, rep or visibility and still have the flag for child porn, bot upote abuse and copy pasta.
then fals flags could be held accountable byhe whales and so would bot upvote abuse.
if someone was flagging someone for any other reasons besides the correct use of the flag a whale could flag them and it would actually have a positive effect and be in the right. also all the haters could use their bots to go on a down vote sree and all it would do is show the bots dislike it. censoring stealing the pay out for anyother reason then how the flag should be used should be punished and a separation like that would make it possible.
I have been saying it for so long over and over. is it not the solution? is the simpleist solution getting avoided because it would make it so whales cant abuse their power?
idk seems so simple to me but convincing the people in power to give others the same power rarely listened too.
Just think if people had to justify the flag the placed by all of steemit or get fagged by a bigger whale for abusing the flag.
sry for the rant.
In your scenario... your solution. What is to stop Bernie and his many accounts from whole heartedly up voting new sock puppets. Other whales couldn't even down vote those puppets to reduce pay anymore.
It is not as simple as that...
Remember I'm the guy that didn't want the down vote to even exist.
I don't see a purpose for it other than for reporting spam, plagiarism, abuse.
I think people disliking things irrelevant. Any other place you go to acquire content (not in the digital world) like a music store, book store, grocery store, etc you don't give a shit about pulling the stuff off of the shelf you don't like, or walking over with a red marker and putting a big X on something that does not interest you. You simply go buy the things you like.
What you dislike is irrelevant.
I believe that is how it should be.
Yet the sock puppets could operate without challenge then. They would quickly gain more and more power and be able to further amplify the process.
So it is not SIMPLE.
Bernie and Nextgencrypto and many others could up vote new account A big chunk of the reward pool. They could create more accounts. Do the same. Soon new account A is a new whale and just joins in on it.
Pretty soon the reward pool is consolidated more and more into that network.
they would flag him just like now. nothing would change to the flag. would only make it so it cant be abused.
and that is what would happen iwe were given a downvote that didn't effect payout, visibility or rep. only a flag would.
I agree and that is what a downvote buton that effects nothing would accomplish. they could show their dislike but that's it.
no because the flag would still be an option for sockpuppet upvote. the whales would be enforcing it the same as now. with flags.
the same as now. the flag would still be an option for sockpuppet upvote abuse. nothing would change to the flag just the reasons to use it.
my solution would not change anything about the current flag. it would just give a pointless downvote counter that people could see. so it would not change anything about protecting steemt from abuse of bots, it would only protect users for misuse of the flagg by someone as they would hopefully be held accountable by a whale for abusing the flag. just like its up to the whales to hold sock puppet bots accountable. a minnow flaggin a berrniesanders boy or account is points. only the whales can try to hold other whales accountable.
I think its so simple that its hard to understand, like fractional reserve banking.
What is to stop the whales that are abusing the flag now from abusing it even if there is a separate down vote button?
I see. But what the purpose of the bot?
Though I don't like the current downvoting system on Steemit, I'm very pro downvoting content that you personally don't like for whatever reason. I just don't want downvotes to hurt the actual users. Flags can be used for this, but should be a separate feature.
If you want to test out a new website that displays the Steem network differently, you can test out Busy.org. They don't hide posts that get downvoted and display a thumb down rather than a flag.
Can I use the same account in busy.org?
Yes, Busy and eSteem both access the same blockchain as Steemit.
No clue. I didn't make it.
EDIT: If I gave you the impression I did. Hell no. I am very anti-downvote. I also am not the type of person that will go around beating people up to illustrate that violence is bad. Everything I said about asshole's motivations was purely me guessing at possible motivations.
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Feb 02. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $7.54 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Feb 02 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Nice, I always find good info on your posts. Didn't know about the order of votes..