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RE: LOW-LIFE DOWNVOTING MEMBERS
First of all, no honest person or company would ever develop a system like Steemit has done.
What would be your wish-list of key design features if you had the resources to design your own social-network with exchangeable value-tokens?
Build a system where...
Articles cannot be downvoted by others, regardless of reputation. Allow only upvoting of articles and comments. That way the articles with the most votes will truly be the best articles. As it now stands with Steemit, there is no correlation between an article's quality and the net votes it receives since downvoting by high-reputation members carry such a huge weight.
All votes carry equal weight. Votes of a higher-reputation members should not carry more weight than those of lower-reputation, simply because reputations on Steemit are bought rather than earned. That is a major flaw with the Steemit platform.
Curator payouts are equally divided among all curators, and not simply favor those with higher reputations and more steem power.
Porn is completely from the site, as does Google, Facebook, Instagram, Seeking Alpha, and all other reputable platforms. Allowing porn degrades any platform to the point where most members will simply abandon it. It's just a matter of time.
...there are many others I could give, but I think you can get the point form those. Steemit is simply not an enjoyable or desirable place to be, and will likely not survive much longer regardless of the success of the Steem blockchain or Steem coins.
What enforcement mechanism would you propose?
"What enforcement mechanism would you propose?"
The same mechanisms that other platforms use: A combination of bots and member flagging/reporting, and of course the ability to actually remove the post, NOT just hide it.
How is flagging superior to downvoting?
I've had pages get flagged by competitors for the sole purpose of sabotaging me.
Even big yo.utubers complain about getting demonetized (even temporarily can be a big deal if it keeps you off the trending and recommended lists) by bogus flags.
"How is flagging superior to downvoting?"
Downvoting has an effect on member reputations, and can actually cause articles to be semi-hidden.
Flagging on the other hand would have no effect on the member's reputation or the status of the article itself, until such time as a neutral body reviewed the article to see if in fact should be removed. If the post was in fact against stated terms and conditions, then removal of it would take place, and with perhaps a warning sent to the offending member. Perhaps after 3 such warnings, the offending account would be terminated.
There it is. Where can we find one of these mythical "neutral bodies"?
Articles cannot be downvoted by others, regardless of reputation (sounds good but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material).
All votes carry equal weight (this should be a no-brainer, but we would need some sort of automated "proof-of-brain" and protection against people controlling hoards of sock-puppets).
Curator payouts are equally divided among all curators (lowering the minimum payout to 0.001 steem and removing the "timing" bonus would fix this).
Good ideas!
"but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material"
Yes, we would need the ability to actually remove posts, not just hide them.
"but we would need some sort of automated "proof-of-brain" and protection against people controlling hoards of sock-puppets)"
That could be accomplished by limiting the number of votes any member can make within a given time period, and perhaps even start charging steem to menbers who go over a certain limit. It would also be a good idea to limit memberships to only 1 per person. This can be easily accomplished in a number of ways, such as through the tracking of IP addresses, Google 2FA Authentication, and so on.
"but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material"
Who would make such a decision? And how would you mitigate the damage potential of a "rogue mod"?
I heard an interview with a fa.cebuk flag-checker recently, they were paid a fractional wage and worked from the Philippines. They said that they were so overworked and borderline traumatized from viewing all the horrendous flagged content, and under pressure to review 1000 flags a day, that they ended up just clicking "denied" repeatedly on all their cases.
"Who would make such a decision? And how would you mitigate the damage potential of a "rogue mod"?"
Such decisions are easy to make (by anyone) if the parameters for violations are clearly defined. First of all, rogue mods would be quickly terminated once a pattern of abuse becomes evident, then to mitigate the damage from a rogue mod, compensate the victim in some manner, perhaps at the expense of the offending mod. Secondly, if the bots are programmed properly, there would be almost no need for mods in the first place. Both Google and Facebook have incredibly sophisticated systems for identifying and removing posts which violate their terms of service. i.e. When was the last time you saw porn on Google or Facebook? Rarely, if ever does such posts get past their respective bots. Of course, I realize that few if any platforms, can possibly expect to match the sophisticated systems utilized by Google or Facebook, but if the desire is there, it can be vastly improved over what it is now.
Yeah, but that New Zealand shooter, "subscribe to pootiepie" video took them several days to clear out... AND they're literally rollin' in cash-money-dollars.
Yo.utube BY ITSELF is raking in more profit than either VIACOM or COMCAST.
What are your "clearly defined violations"?
4 minute story about fa.cebook moderators
"What are your "clearly defined violations"?"
Virtually anything that you want to include in your terms of service, provided that it does not violate some existing law. i.e. You can't set up a public forum, and restrict members from certain ethnic or religious backgrounds from participating. That being said however, I think it's rather clear that many of the forums do that exact thing, but of course, you will not find it in their terms of service.
You're going to need to be slightly more specific.
Are you familiar with the difficulty of defining pr0n?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus
This is a non-trivial problem.
Many users have access to hundreds of machines with unique ips and have the scripting resources to automate nearly undetectable sock-puppets.
The one thing they can't fake is steem. So, under the current system, they can't amplify their vote with multiple accounts (well, except for the free steem delegation and (25) rep that each new account automatically gets, which is sort of a problem of its own).
"Many users have access to hundreds of machines with unique ips and have the scripting resources to automate nearly undetectable sock-puppets."
Nothing is "undetectable" if you have the right software and skilled programmers to do the job. Take cellphones for example. They all have not only unique phone numbers but also unique IMEI numbers. It is therefore near impossible to setup multiple accounts using a single SIM phone, and even less so, if you were to require 2FA such as Google Authenticator.
The same can be done with desktop PCs or laptops. All you would need is software which detected both the user's IP address and the computer's hard-drive's serial number, and then match those to the member's account. Any attempt to login without this match, would be denied until such time as the user could show that he either changed computers or service providers. Once he did that, the new matching info would be recorded in his account, and the old info deleted.
Some people have access to hundreds of computers with unique ips and unique hard-drive serial numbers.
Yes, you can reduce the number of accounts operating from one computer (hypothetically anyway), but that's not what I'm talking about.
"Some people have access to hundreds of computers with unique ips and unique hard-drive serial numbers."
While that may be true, I'm not sure that such people would waste their time on Steemit (or any other forum for that matter), especially for the very small gains they would realize from their investment and effort.
I'm pretty sure they're not using their massive army of zombie machines EXCLUSIVELY for steem farming. They could probably do any number of things simultaneously while maintaining reasonable efficiency.