RE: Stopping Downvote Censorship on Steemit: Suggestions For a New Model for Anti-Spam That Prevents Malicious Censorship
Very interesting post and topic you address. Your solution is in line with my thoughts. I actually think we shall have different types of flags, one that only effects rewards and one that only effects reputation. I also think we shall have groups of individuals searching for abuse and flag them with a special account in order not to create personal wars that happens frequently, ie the flagger gets a counter flags. I furthermore think we shall implemented some kind of referendum method and system in Steemit to allow a wider part of the community to vote for changes to Steem and Steemit, this shall not only be the top witnesses as how it is now implemented; I wrote on this in my post here; However, when the majority of the community do not like any kind of referendum, than that is also ok for me :)
I have just created an addon for steemit that mildly improves the situation with downvoted posts being hidden. ;)
Thanks for your comment. My main concern is the removal of personal bias from that any kind of penalisation process - I am very tired of having to deal with that crap online.. So much so that I even created my own social network to facilitate healing, balancing and evolving for Earth.
It's ok to have people actively hunting for breaches of official policy but there must be a transparent way for that power to be held to account in an unbiased way - or the whole system falls apart.
Almost no individual uses the flag because it backfires on them
I have not been able to find any stats for downvoting yet - how do you know that levels of downvotes are low?
I remember reading comments from whales a while ago saying that whales downvote posts as a method of boosting other more important posts and not to take it personally.. At the time I thought that sounded questionable, but was new so thought maybe it was a way of ensuring community cohesion by drawing focus to important steemit related posts. In any case, it was made clear that downvotes were considered a standard tool in the kit of steemit's organisation.
Through talking with the higher SP holders and some whales!
Also through talking I know that quite a few higher SP holders dont use the flag for 2 reasons; Reputation and wasting of upvote.
Also through talking with some whales, I know they dont have the capacity of detecting and downvoting all the abuse ongoing, and seek good initiatives to delegate their SP to.
I see, ok - i would be interested to see the actual stats since it is difficult to know exactly what is occurring based on a few individual cases.
I dont have stats, and I cant create them. I really hope some engineers in the community will do that though.
I think what he might be referring to as "flags backfiring" is that a lot of times it doesn't make sense for individual to flag a post, no matter how valid the reason, because they fear reprisals from the person they are flagging.
It's not worth calling out a purely plagiarized post if it means that person is just going to nuke your posts/rep. That's where something like Steemcleaners comes in handy, you can report something without fear that your personal account will be flagged to death for pointing out abuse.
I have just watched a guy crying his eyes out because of what looks a lot like misbehaviour by the people running the steemcleaners profile. https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@aaronmda/44vqeg-steemcleaners-multiple-accounts-for-only-upvoting-themselves-and-downvoting-others
I've been following that as well. I think the problem with some of what you are suggesting is that there has to be a decision on what people want.
If you want a decentralized platform then that is what you will get. Every person/group of people will be free to vote their stake however they like, for any reason, as there are no official rules on what is or is not allowed. You can upvote what you want or flag what you want, its your stake and your decision how to use it. If what you are doing is incredibly egregious/unpopular/so far outside of the social norms then the community will react accordingly.
If you don't want that, then you are saying you want a more centralized platform where there are people officially in charge who set rules on what content is or is not allowed and then come up with an official way to police it. You can't say its the witnesses job to monitor that, trying to sort through the spam/plagiarism/etc.. takes a lot of time and dedication and you can't just force those people to do it. I think a lot of people are here for the freedom to post whatever they like without some central body saying they cant. If you want to say a flag is censorship well that brings me to my next point-
I don't really believe that flagging a post on Steemit is censorship. If youtube or facebook censors you they remove your content and absolutely nobody has a chance to view it. If someone flags you on steemit the worst case scenario is that your post is greyed out, thus requiring one extra click to make it visible. Is having to click a mouse 1 extra time really censorship? I can still follow any author I like and view all their posts, it just involves marginally more clicking.
Not to mention that only applies to the steemit client, not any of the other ways to view the blockchain like steemd where the content isn't changed at all.
The monetary rewards from a post are something different, the rewards aren't yours until they are payed out so the person hasn't earned anything at that point. Nobody is entitled to rewards for posting, it comes down how the community feels. If more steempower upvotes your post as opposed to flags it, you get paid. If more steempower decides they really disliked your post, you dont. That's sort of the premise of decentralized platform, the community and all its members get to vote with their stake on what gets rewarded or what doesn't.
Just my 2 cents on the matter at least...
Unfortunately special powers, or admin privileges are against the very nature of steem, I doubt that this will get the interest of anyone who's read the whitepaper.