Steemit Voting Timer: Likely has been discussed before... I'm fairly certain it has
There are new discussions about powerful people self voting their own sub-accounts and thus taking up chunks of the reward pool. This then lead to the not unusual topic of powerful people up voting everything certain people post without actually reading it. Those of us that have been here for awhile know that this is a tricky situation and discussions, anger, and then eventually peace tend to eventually happen. This appears to be a current steemit, busy.org, esteem, etc type of cycle.
We haven't come up with a way to address this. I was discussing this today and @fibra59 was discussing the need for a bot like @cheetah that could detect collusive voting like this. I told him that doing so would be tricky and would likely get a lot of false positives that could impact people who were not doing this. He proposed having it alert a human to make the final decision rather than being fully automated.
At this point I told him there is one thing that might DECREASE some of this activity, but it would not completely eliminate it (I don't know that complete elimination is possible). This idea was to have a timer. Have a timer that does not permit voting UP or DOWN until an amount of time has passed. This should not be too long, maybe 30 seconds or something like that. Yet that might be long enough to discourage up voting / down voting without actually reading the post.
This could be done on the steemit and websites like busy.org fairly easily. The problem is many of the people doing this do so with bots, or by command line, or at steemd.com and doing such at those places may not be as straightforward. It also means there is a back door that the most powerful people doing this behavior likely would use and keep doing the same.
Now there is the AGE OLD statement of "It's my steem power, I can vote how I want." This is true. That does not make it a good thing or morally right. These terms can be subjective though so people can convince themselves over time that virtually any activity is RIGHT. This is how we manage to end up with a lot of evil in the world. Evil again is a subjective term. Some people (especially religious) can make that term be anyone or anything that disagrees with them. This doesn't happen with just the religious, but it is rather common there. There are also religious people that do not do this.
So I make this post to share this timer idea, but also as a good example illustration of why ideas that sound like they can FIX THINGS often do not. This is a truly knew adventure we are on. It has some new never before encountered problems that we haven't quite come up with a good way to solve. We have a lot of ideas for solutions. The problem is that often the solution can open the door to something worse.
I do not think a timer would necessarily make things worse, but if it were done at the CLI and low level versions it might. A lot of the beauty of the steem blockchain is its speed and extensibility. People can build a lot of things on top of it beyond simply steemit.com (just a website looking at the chain). The chain itself is very fast. Depending upon hosting the websites and apps people choose to make might appear slow due to the resources they've dedicated to their website. So when you see steemit.com lurch or act slow for a minute, this isn't the blockchain. This is the hosting and/or internet for the host running the steemit.com, or the busy.org, or the esteem websites. The blockchain is still blazing along.
So what happens if you add a timer at the low level? Well some apps may do communication via voting and if there is a 30 second delay before they can vote then some of those apps might become incredibly slow and even unworkable. This is an example of a potential unforeseen side effect of pushing a solution.
Furthermore, while the bots like @cheetah could likely be tweaked to compensate for the 30 second delay, so too could bots designed to auto-vote people. So it might reduce these instances for the average person, which might still be a positive thing. It could possibly increase engagement in posts, but this is speculation on my part. Yet, the people that typically inspire people to call for something like this in the first place likely would not be impacted in the slightest.
Now rather than completely shoot this idea down I do want to mention something I've said several times in other places. You can MIGHT HAPPEN, WHAT IF virtually any idea to death. Sometimes those things are worth risking.
My stance for awhile has been that steemit is still in beta. Let's experiment. If it works great. If it doesn't we take a step back. Instead of stopping even trying new things because of our fear of the WHAT IFs, let's try them. See what happens, and move forward, backwards, or sideways as needed.
There is vindictive abuse of the flag going on right now, like someone going through every single post in a feed and flagging it.
I wonder if setting the flag timer to something big like 10 minutes might not help.
The same account(s) who has been flagging, also sometimes votes up a bunch of a person's posts (making them think a nice reward is coming) and then unvotes them days later. They might end up flagging everything on the 7th day (we shall see) creating a double-whammy for the poster.
So maybe a 5-minute timer on "unvoting" would help too.
It wouldn't stop a determined flagger/unvoter ... but it might be enough of a frustration that they wouldn't continue such childish behaviour as often.
Thanks for giving us improvements to think about in this post!
I think 10 minutes is too high. It would kill some types of posts.
This is why I thought 30 seconds. I was thinking of MEMES and such. You also wouldn't be able to vote this way from the feed. You'd have to open up the post and sit on it at least 30 seconds.
Also you can't really do it based upon length of post, as some people read far faster than others.
30 seconds may even be too high, but I thought it likely was not. It's a guess of course.
No -- I was talking about only flags being 10 minutes.
Sorry, but your discussion of setting the timers made me think of a possible solution to flagging abuse.
I would imagine that upvotes/downvotes/flags could all be set at different timers.
Does not work. You can easily program that.
And if you don't want to take my word for it, just look at the adblocker-blocker-blocker thing.
Read what I wrote. I already said the same.
In my opinion the powerfull people spent a lot of time creating huge amounts of value on steemit. If they then decide to use that power for their own gain then that's their prerogative. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, just that it's their earned right.
There is creating "value on steemit", but they can also take it away. We've actually seen a bit of this happening. There is a limited pot of steem that is distributed among posts. If you can keep creating more accounts of your own, or bring friends/family on and ONLY up vote those to high values then the amount of that POT available becomes increasingly funneled into these side deals. It may seem WORTH the risk, but the issue is that if someone doesn't point it out it gets worse and worse and worse. Fortunately, the benefit of a fully transparent blockchain is so far someone notices, says something and it either slows down or STOPS for awhile.
So you think they are creating value, but they also have the potential to take far more value away than they provided.
The experiment where the powerful did not vote showed that the value actually is there regardless of them. A number of them were simply in the right place at the right time and mined a lot of steem (when there was mining) before the steemit.com website came live.
This gave them VAST power. This is especially true with the n^2 curve. However, if the curve is change to linear as seems to be the indication they will still be powerful, but not exponentially so.
The case that inspired this discussion and eventually my post was a whale @berniesanders who has been called out for activities like this in the past asking why no one was calling out @gavvet for similar activities.
@gavvet did not get his power by mining, he got it by posting. He is also nowhere near the power level of Bernie. Bernie shifts his power around alot across multiple accounts and he is truly one of the most powerful accounts on steemit. There are some others, but he is up there. He'll power down an account and move his power around, but he is massive. His power is substantially higher than Gavvet's. (EDIT: I reread this and this can sound like I am giving Gavvet and excuse... this was not my intent, merely to point out the power difference)
@gavvet posting under his shill account @steve-walschot to increase #rewardpoolrape - that is Bernie's post that inspired the discussion I had there with some people that lead to this timer post.
As to value. Some of them have also ran off and oppressed people on steemit. Not so much lately, which is a vast improvement. Spiderman "With great power comes great responsibility" is a nice platitude. Yet, the fact of the matter is we are all human. How much power we have does not translate to how decent, wise, etc we are. It is just power.
How it is used matters. It is their choice how they use it.
All we can do is try to sway them with thoughtful dialog. If they are willing to listen.
My goal is 100% retention on steemit. I want Bernie, Gavvet, and everyone else here once they come here. I may not get along with all of them but that is how the world works. When we finally have communities I believe that will help a lot.
Oh never looked at it in that way. I just thought they upvoted themselves as well, not of creating a "hive like structure". Thanks for the info :)
Yeah the hive like structure is what we see doing the most draining of the pool.
Their right?
Where in the declaration of human rights does this stand?
No declaration i know of. But in my opinion: "if you work for it, you earn it, you decide what happens to it" is the way things work and should work. But as @dwinblood explained to me this should not result in leeching of the total gains for everyone.
I am very new to Steemit, so thank you for this very informative write-up.
My personal feelings as a new user, I think that 30 seconds of waiting for voting would really not feel great. The 3 second limit does not encourage reading individual stories, but many users just read headlines anyway without further reading on similar websites. I don't think Steemit will change this aspect of the way people indulge in social media worldwide.
You really covered a lot of angles here, so I don't have much to add other than my opinion. If I could ask - what incentive do high steem power users have to only upvote a select group of people? Is it simply that having a small group which doesn't get a lot of attention then gets less votes which increases curation rewards?
I care more about the views you speek about .......... .It is sad to see 250 upvote and 20 views ..... Maybe the linear curve of upvoting in fork 19 will change this :)
to be honest, for the longest time i did not recognize the "beta" until a friend pointed it out. Are there any important implications with Steemit being a beta?
I really don't know anything about the technical foundation on Steemit, so I am far from qualified to actually comment.
Your approach feels really strange. You are talking about policing someone for doing a non-violant crime. I know generalisations are not good, everything should be judged on a case-by-case basis. It just felt strange because punishment was such a recent topic for us.
I had an encounter with @cheetah as well , but @anyx solved it. So I am cool with bots as long as there is a human controling them properly.
I hear you, but we don't want to get too far into regulating or laying out rules on this platform, that's one of the things that makes it so great.
If powerful people upvote others so quickly without reading their content, of course this is a problem, but it kind of reminds me of a business with a great connection. A business with a friend who pledges often and brings up their value.
It's still free market demand.
Just a thought. I hear where you're coming from though and I for the most part agree.
I agree. Yet like you I've been around on this platform. I've seen the abuse that can occur, the gaming the system, etc.
Yet what I am proposing does not STOP anyone from doing it. It simply means they have to at least look at what they are voting on (up or down). The flagging wars and blanket flagging of certain accounts that can occur can be a pretty negative selling point for steemit. If you've been active here since August then you've seen what I am talking about. If you took a break and recently came back you may or may not have witnessed some of the rather unpleasant periods related to these types of activities.
So in spirit... I agree with you. It would work great had we all started on an equal playing field and built up our power the same way. Most of the most powerful accounts simply mined steem prior to steemit existing and they burst into the economy a huge force of nature.
That is a lot different from the ideals of a free market. It is more like creating a big monopoly of power and giving them command over what happens in the so-called free market.
You see this is something I realized. I too looked at steemit like a market. This is why I saw no need to down vote someones post. If you walk into a market you BUY the things you are interested in. You do not have the ability to walk around and put big marks on things you don't like. You simply don't buy them. Other people might be interested in those things and buy them... so what?
However, steemit is also shares in a company and some people see it from that perspective. With the down vote and up vote being more like votes in a boardroom.
In reality it is something new and trying to be both. This is why solving these problems is not as easy as looking to the past. Nothing like this has ever existed so we need to try new things.
Also as I stated in my post. Experiment. Instead of WHAT IF and FEAR controlling any attempt to try things. Try things. If they don't work take a step back, learn from successes and failures.
The conflict often comes when people that view this as a SHAREHOLDERS MEETING try to debate with those that view it like a MARKET. The perspectives are very different. How a vote should be perceived is very different. As I said it really is both, and as far as I know there is no precedent. That means we have new problems to try to overcome. We may find some answers in the past, but many we likely will not because these problems have not existed before. A lot of these are truly hard problems, and we continue to do some things simply because we don't know a solution.
I agree it would be best if people had to actually open the post and scroll down at the very least to upvote something, that certainly makes sense. Perhaps the upvoting without looking takes down your curation reward revenue based on spamming the system?
I hear you and I agree that it would be good to see. It's just a slippery slope, that's why I'm skeptic. :)
Everything is a slippery slope at the moment. :)
Try. Learn. Fail. Succeed.
All things we must do.
Agreed! :)
You have a strong case in trying to provide more value with steemit community. Ideally, our engagement should be as organic as possible,any system that tries to circumvent that process only degenerates the value of the platform...
I double checked the time of your post to make sure you hadn't just posted it. It looks like it was posted 2 hours ago, I should be safe! ;)
Heheh... I also am not demanding votes one way or the other. Thanks for the humor though.
Nice post my friend ! I have extension of that idea:
Steemit users above ~700 SP gets slider for percentage of vote.. Maybe Steemit needs new SP level so people with higher SP volume needs to have quality upvotes. Maybe it is good idea that people with for example 3000 SP gets Seen timer of around 30 sec like you said ..That would be cool I think :D
This actually already exists. I believe it is actually lower than 700SP that you get it though.
I wanted to say.. As users above 700 SP can't control vote percentage on the same way we need that new rule(level) for higher SP ranking
I am confused. I don't think I understand as I believe the slider unlocks below that and is the same. So I am not sure what you are talking about.
Sorry for bad english..
I wanted to say that steemit needs new rule... Like the rule that don't allow new users to control vote percentage ... So for users that have huge impact with upvote we should create new rule -> view before upvote.
Yeah, that was the purpose of the timer as well. To make sure someone at least LOOKED at the post before they voted on it.
Yes, but just for users with (for example) +3000 SP
You don't think EVERYONE should need to read or look at something before they voted on it?
I disagree that evil is subjective. I think it can be objectively defined within a coherent moral philosophy. That said, I don't think these problems with Steemit and the unfortunate behavior of certain actors within it are necessarily evil. I think they highlight issues with Steemit that can be programmed out. The real evil would be to build the system, see the problems develop, then either do nothing about it or use it to your unfair advantage. As you said, we're in beta, so I think some creative bot programming could be the solution.
For example, I don't think people are wise to be involved in upvoting pools, in which they upvote automatically along with some leader. This defeats the purpose of having a decentralized system and recreates the problem it's trying to solve. I think a bot that flags posts automatically that exhibit these kinds of activity would fix a lot of the issues we see with the voting pool and who it rightly goes to. It should happen organically or you're just another central planner in my opinion. We don't need some guy going around making sure we redistribute wealth here.
Do you understand the term subjective? I mean really understand it. If one person believes action X is evil and another does not it can often be a cultural or religious related thing. This clearly makes the term subjective.
In which culture? That's the problem. It is the upbringing and beliefs that make it subjective. Forcing your upbringing and belief on another does not make it objective.
What if your moral philosophy doesn't allow for the initiation of force? You suggest moral objectivity is forcing something on someone, but your accepted definition of evil is the thing that determines whether it is objective or subjective. If you take a morally relativist position, of course your concept of evil is going to be subjective and ambiguous. A moral objectivist simply doesn't accept the concept of moral relativism. This is not the initiation of force, nor even the use of it. I don't know of any major culture that accepts the concept of moral objectivity by the way. There are some small minority cultures out there though.
My point is this. You are proving it is subjective.
If it is not something that everyone understands on the same level then it becomes subjective. The definition of EVIL will be defined within the mind of the person based upon what they know.
You are choosing ONE view of it and casting it as the absolute truth. Yet that is simply what some people that UNDERSTAND that choose to believe. To other people they will not understand this concept. Evil will mean something very different.
Thus, it is subjective.
In reality most things that are purely conceptual are subjective as they are limited by what each of us know, or think we know. ;)
Some things such as if "I jump, I will come back down" tend to be known equally by everyone. If some of us were born in Zero G and never had lived with gravity that might not be the case. Yet, for people on earth this is not subjective.
"You need to eat to survive", "you need oxygen", etc these things are all absolutes that everyone knows. We've learned these things REGARDLESS of where you are and how you are raised. They therefore are not subjective.
The concepts of Good, Evil, etc though are very subjective. They are not innate.
We could even go so far as right and wrong. We have what we would like people to believe those things should be. Yet that does not change what is going on inside of the persons mind. Thus, even those can be subjective.
There can be a more popular view that MOST people believe, yet even that does not make it not SUBJECTIVE.
Let me ask you this. Is it possible for murder to not be evil?
In my mind no. Understanding the difference between MURDER and KILLING. That however is ME. There are other people historically that have thought MURDER was fine. They did it to "witches", "Jews", "Their own people", "slaves", etc.
Do I think that is Evil? Yes. Yet that is my subjective view of it. They did not see it as evil. Thus, the concept is subjective. It's definition is given shape by the mind that thinks upon the concept.
Because you our I view it as one thing does not magically make other people view it that way as well. Thus, it is subjective.
Sorry about the delayed response, didn't get a chance to read your comment with full attention on the day of. Anyway, I think you may be conflating the acceptance of murder within a moral framework, and certain people's definition of what or who can be murdered.
For example, those people may have seen their victims (witches, jews and slaves) as less than human. "You can't murder a non-human, so therefore, no murder took place," I imagine their twisted internal dialogue would go. But I think none of them would disagree with you on the point that "murder is evil." It's because such an assertion would be morally incoherent and inconsistent.
You can't at the same time say "I don't morally accept people trying to murder me" and have that jibe with "it's morally acceptable for me to murder other people." You could however coherently say "in certain circumstances, it's morally acceptable for someone to kill me, and for me to kill them," but then those circumstances would be by definition not murder. In my estimation, it's an objective truth that murder is morally reprehensible, and therefore evil, with no exceptions. It's true that murder is evil by definition.