STEEMIT: Rethinking the Flagging System
Yesterday I wrote a text on flagging abuse problem, in hope of starting discussion on resolution. Unfortunately, after the first 24 hours, the conclusion is rather bleak — under the current conditions, nothing really can be done against the bullies with a significant steem power. How about changing the rules then?
We now have a flagging system where those who have enormous steem power practically can censor any minnow, with or without a reason. That is a loophole, almost an invitation to the sociopaths for extensive abuse. I am still learning about the Steemit ecosystem, but a guy who knows much more than me, @arcange, has confirmed my fears.
There are people who are working on certain creative solutions (look at @duplibot, @littleboy's Steem moderation project, @steemflagrewards and @flagawhale…), but the development can be long, and with every HF rules can change…
@herrleeb has offered a “freedom” solution:
But personally I'd rather get rid of the whole flagging thing all-together. I'd rather live with spam and opinions I don't agree with…
I would agree with this opinion in case there is no other choice.
Proposed Change of Flagging System
On the other hand, I think flag system could be improved. Some time ago, I suggested that flag does not follow the SP pattern — i.e. that every flag has the same weight no matter how much SP a member has. Post would be hidden if there is more downvotes than upvotes (or at 40% of downvotes, we can find a consensus). If everyone has the same flagging power, that would prevent abuse and make flag wars completely senseless, but still would allow wider community to weed out inappropriate posts.
My visibility is still not great, and at that time it was even worse, so that proposal probably haven't been seen at all. I would like to repeat it here and ask experienced developers — is it technically possible?
If it is not possible, then it means we just can choose a type of abuse. In that case, would you rather:
a) Have abuse from a minority of sociopaths that can drive you out of the platform
or
b) Have abuse of spam, adds, flatearthers, conspiracists and other unwanted posts, but without fear of loosing your place at the platform
I would be delighted if someone could come up with a better proposal.
If you consider what is currently going on with youtube and FB, I believe the biggest threat we are facing now is the silencing of dissent. Free speech is already pretty much destroyed on most platforms.
Once steemit is big enough to pose a threat to the mainstream narrative, actions will be taken to silence us here as well. Already now it is advisable to avoid certain subjects if you don't want to get your reputation destroyed. By professional downvoters and misguided do-gooders alike.
Flagging will be used to shut people up and also discourage people to say what they think. I am certainly very careful (most of the time) and do not even comment on certain topics out of fear to get attacked again.
My main reason to join steemit was the hope to be able to exercise free speech. Flagging will be used to destroy it.
Well, that should be a motive to change such flagging system and improve the platform, @herrleeb. I like your way of thinking. Thanks for your feedback and support.
Freedom of speech is the most basic and most important right of a free society.
If one generation cannot SAY it, the next generation cannot THINK it, because it never learned the (forbidden) words or got exposed to opposing opinions or facts.
Once free speech is gone, the minds of a society will be enslaved as well.
I suppose this is why it is also the FIRST amendment.
Currently freedom of speech is under attack on all fronts, worldwide.
Freedom of speech is very fragile. It is either absolute or does not exist.
If one single person is not allowed to speak freely, freedom of speech is dead.
This includes also "Hate Speech".
The definitions of it become increasingly restrictive and are already being abused.
A platform like steemit could be an opportunity to create a last bastion before it's gone...
Hello @HerrLeeb and @Lighteye
Interesting conversation you have here. The answers that makes Steemit even better are very hard to find in my opinion. You can make a part of it better but at the same time something else get hazardously worse.
a. SPAM - People that do not see where that ends. SPAM can kill everything. It almost killed internet at one time, because it was being too slow and took too much resources. That will happen to Steemit too if it is not controlled in some way.
b. Plagiarism - Here we have people who steal. Any community can not have to much of that. Our modern world could have open cities when the police became a fact. Too much police is of course a community killer.
c. NSFW - Not Safe For Work. It is porn and things alike. It must exist, but not in the face of everybody all the time. So just mark the first tag NSFW. That way people can look at it when it is safe to do so.
You can not take away these 3 things and think that Steemit will survive. 10 000 years of history tells us that it is not possible. It is like the traffic, if we drop very simple rules accidents becomes a big danger to all of us all the time.
IT IS LIKE A GAME: If you have no rules there is no game or freedom if you like. Too many rules and it becomes like a machine and we are all tired of that.
So what do we do? In my opinion people will always bend the rules and that will cause problems. We must help each other with the problems that comes along. That is challenging and very very fun if one succeeds - YOU WIN THE GAME.
THE STEEMIT GAME is ours to play the best we can and win - Do we want it any other way? No, of course not. Not me anyway, that is why I play it 10 ours every day. Are there losers in Steemit? In every game there are losers, if you can not lose it is not a game - In good games there are many winners.
WE do not want the big guy's in Steemit to fix everything. That is called lazy or just give me the prize.
Hope I did not bore you with my thinking, it was fun thanks to you who started all this.
Regards
@Ramta Reddington
Hi @Ramta, you did not bore me at all, I enjoy communicating with people, that's why I am here :)
I personally would only flag bots - and only if I can verify that this actually is one. Or in other words, anything which is not HUMAN. I have noticed that people are very quick in judging others to be spammers or trolls and it turned out that the person in question was just an innocent but clumsy moron.
And NSFW ? Are you not supposed to WORK at work and not surf the web? (I am kidding)
In general I'd say any human spammer or moron will give eventually up if he does not receive upvotes.
If people are really dumb enough to give spammers a reason to continue by upvoting them, then don't we deserve to be spammed?
But it's just my opinion. I am afraid that most people are not on steemit to exercise free speech like us handful misfit truthers but for OTHER reasons. Like making money. They will be hard to convince that free speech is about to get erased from our society. Cheers!
The solution is simple: don't call Curation Censorship and clear that confusing notion. Censorship and Suppression cannot be synonymous to Curation, and it isn't. Furthermore bring awareness that the Premise of Steem (not steemit) is for Freedom of Speech, much more than anything and that its technology allows for it, with the only chance of censorship happening through a conspiracy by the top 19 witnesses. Miscommunication and confusion are the ills of Truth and Harmony.
Of course you didn't bore anyone with your thinking, @ramta, you are welcome to share your thoughts, and I thank you for that.
That's the idea, but the execution of it is far from ideal. The question is — what is to be done when abuse threats to completely destroys the noble intentions of the original idea? Are we going to try to change and improve the rules, or are we going to play along calling for an ineffective solidarity that can drove many new users out of the platform and create a basis for an anti-Steemit propaganda?
When abuse is Rampant then we will reach the bridge, until then it's probably wise not to confuse Censorship with Curation or worry about propaganda that may arise from detractors, much of that is a direct attribute to disregarding fact for interpretations (curation is censorship) anyway.
As if you cannot say anything because someone downvotes you.
People who don't care about being mystified with an intriguingly interesting button that reveals the mystery won't shut up, those dumb ass idiots that place their faith in people only to extend: my post is hidden ergo why even speak my mind because people cannot see or click it (which isn't true), they can mozy off to where they won't be hurt by people's opinions.
So what's your advice for people who have their reputation destroyed and rewards taken away by someone who does NOT curate but is actually stalking them because of opposing political views and downvotes perfectly proper posts?
Steem On, let them dawn onto you the level 10 mystified spell and chant to how unique and worthy you are, with their lack of worthy curation. What you eat I don't shit.
Plus Let them curate me as No Value, it only says something about them and not me.
That is an admirable attitude. Turning the other cheek is a superior, peaceful and maybe even elightened way to cope with injustice.
Personally however, I don't like it very much if my stuff is taken or if someone besmeares my reputation for nefarious reasons.
I'd say the ability to curate your own blog is fine and could be useful.
Flag, downvote as much as you like on your own blog.
That way you can keep it "clean" and if the majority agrees, spammers will get enough flags to render them useless.
But I do not see the necessety to curate someone else's blog.
The idea of a self-proclaimed police based on superior power is not very pleasant.
I never said turn the other cheek, and I doubt white jebuz lived to utter such absurdity.
It's not your stuff,
If you think that the score next to your name is a measure of who you are I have no pity on all the suffering and emotional distress involved.
If you consider what someone does with their vote as a sign of who you are then I offer the same advice again: Don't.
Except that isn't what curation is, that's self promotion.
Then don't you think that the benefit of upvoting should equally be reserved?
If spammers will flag themselves..
It's not "police" and it's a very good idea actually, but you cannot appreciate it.
The biggest problem is these folks think that flagging is a "I disagree with you" button but that is not its function. It's about rewards, quality control and abuse fighting. It's sorely needed at this time.
The more imminent threat is not the stifling of speech but rather rampant abuse on the platform a lot of which is facilitated by paid votes / bid bots, collusive voting (circle jerking) and self voting of subpar content (one word comments ie "Nice Post")
We need to rally against these things first and foremost unabashedly using flags for the purpose they are intended. As for flagging abuse like revenge flags for instance, these should be brought to the communities attention and efforts made to help the victim if the case is of substance.
Bad idea, because it will make the multiple accounts per user problem even worse by making new accounts creation all the more favorable.
It will also devalue STEEM, which benefits from an arms-race.
This is one of the things that give STEEM its real value beyond being a method of fast payment.
I guess you are visible if I saw you.
However I saw you because someone resteemed this thread.
I choose option a) without a doubt, partially because despite being a victim of it more than once, it did not will not drive me out of this platform.
What almost does drive me out of here is steemit.com's dysfunctionality
partially caused by these POS spammers which must be flagged, and I want a hard fork to delete them altogether.
I still have no better idea, but I will keep thinking.
You got a 5.54% upvote from @minnowvotes courtesy of @stimialiti!
You got upvoted from @adriatik bot! Thank you to you for using our service. We really hope this will hope to promote your quality content!
Da budem sasvim iskrena, steemit je postao gori nego facebook...barem meni. Iz dana u dan sve je besmislenije truditi se postovati nešto što zahtijeva malo veći trud. Ljudska pohlepa i ego pomama nema granica. Ja zaista razmišljam da dignem sidro jer ne vidim smisao u usiljenom komentarisanju, i ne znam ko ima vremena za danonoćno čitanje svega i svačega ne bi li pronašao post koji nešto vrijedi. Nažalost mnogi dobri autori potonu u sekundi u moru samo-finansiranog smeća. A flagovanje je samo zadnja kap u čaši...kao ljudi se bore protiv cenzure - cenzurom!
Далеко је Стимит од савршенства, @dijana969, то је проста истина, али са овим не могу да се сложим никако:
Ни у својој најгорој могућој варијанти, Стимит не може бити ни близу тако лош као Ф*бук. Није ово први пут да сам без разлога нападнут. Чињеница да постоје агресивне будале на овом систему, није разлог за обесхрабривање и напуштање, већ обрнуто — треба да буде мотив за размишљање о усавршавању система. На децентрализованим блокчеин системима усавршавање није једноставно јер захтева консенсус. И увек се може јавити неко „креативан“ ко може да обезвреди добру идеју. Али на Стимиту се против силеџија може иступити, може се организовати отпор, као што то раде @the-resistance, @littleboy (пројекат @duplibot), @steemflagrewards или @flagawhale . Може се учинити поприлично тога и допринети бољем раду читавог система.
На Ф*буку се не може учинити ништа…
У сваком случају хвала за реакцију @dijana969. Дала си ми идеју за још један текст :)
I think flagging MUST remain an option!
It is a neccessary tool to protect the platform from abuse, like all tools it can be abused in itself, too.
We certainly need to look into ways of holding large stakeholders more responsible for how they use their voting power, but we should not abolish stake driven flagging under any circumstance!
Yes, there are destructive figures who abuse their power, but changing the flagging system in a way as proposed by yourself here does only give the playing field to multi-account farmers (some of tens of thousands of low SP accounts) and would be abused even worse.
No flagging option at all, just as bad, imagine what a self-voting high-SP farmer would do to the reward pool, without ANY option to put the breaks on him!
As a matter of fact, I would hope flagging to get more incentivised. I believe there's too little flagging and too many whales son't flag because they lose the profit they can generate with their voting power.
A separate VP-pool draining independently from the upvote-VP for downvotes has been proposed and I am a big supporter of that idea!
wow so nice post i like very much up vote please thanks.
Someone with multiple accounts worth zero SP could upvote their child porn and invalidate the flags. What do you do with someone that has 1000's of accounts?
If only you could censor something by replacing it with a button and text that reveals whatever was censored exactly as it was when clicked. Which isn't very much censorship or the loose definition of Suppressive, I should know as I've been in a few flag wars with whales.
It is very hard to open 1000's of accounts. And all with a child porn? Be realistic.
Why you could vest 1000000 if you had some pocket change and do it automatically over a couple days. @Noganoo has been a nuisance you can read about, not child porn worthy but definitely has some quals. Spam is spam, but then it's abusive even more if it's porn.
I think that is a great idea because there is a guy who has been hitting my posts with $1+ down votes and that is a lot to me, just because he disagrees, I assume he disagrees, he never leaves a comment.
I wrote about an alternative to flagging for people who are more enlightened.