You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Corbett Report is here. Here's how I introduced Steemit to my 150,000 YouTube subscribers
I'm going to say something that may be controversial.
Wouldn't it be easy to censor things here? After all, if a whale downvotes a post, said post will sink and the poster's reputation will go down. Whales control what shows up on the front page; they control what the userbase sees. Honestly, I think this platform has as much potential for shady business as the rest of the web.
Steemit developers will solve the problem of whales being able to censor, and steemit.com is only the first application to view the steem blockchain, there will be many others
You can't censor the Steem blockchain.
The content cannot be taken down.
blockchain is immutable
Like my spermz lolol
It can't be taken down but it can be suppressed so that it goes unnoticed if you have enough money in steem power.
Are down voting and flagging the same thing on Steemit? While that isn't exactly the same as censorship, it's not entirely unlike censorship either... Censorship free by 2100?
Unfortunately there is no clear distinction between flagging and downvoting or a "thumbs down".
The idea of flagging would seem to be from reading the rollover tooltip to be used for abuse in content, such as plagiarism and spam, but because it is tied to rewards there is no way to voice disagreement simply like with a separate downvote button.
A lot of people would like to have the option of just a downvote that doesn't penalize the rewards. And the opposite as well. There are a lot of posts I would like to give a thumbs up to without using my "valuable" upvote. Also for a whale that doesn't want to give a lot of reward to a post but wants to show that they agree or like the post have to spend their time with a comment saying "Good post" because they have no other option. I think that many whales would be using a thumbs up button if there was one, not to mention all the users that are "curating" with their votes and are trying to keep them close to 100%. Votes are valuable, and so is recognition of someones post and comments.
Steemit can pay people in Steem and in "karma" and the "karma" is free and easy to implement in the Steemit.com site. All you need is a thumbs up button.
Agreed, I've had similar thoughts, and if I were a big corporation or a government, this type of platform would be a dream come true as it makes it easier to control the narrative when you have deep enough pockets.
You are right, of course, and the comments responding to you are ignoring the empirical evidence. It won't be censored as in burning every book and deleting it's very existence, but it is de facto censorship when the voting system can reduce the visibility and the incentive of a users comments.
On the other hand, at least it does have permanence even if it isn't promoted and seen or even flagged, so I'm still very very bullish on Steemit over the long term and the idea of social media on a blockchain even if there were no absurdly high rewards.
If I had my druthers I would tweak the system so that a post starts to enter diminishing returns after a certain point. I am unable to fathom what makes any of the 10k rewarded posts worth that much. Just because the posts can make that much doesn't mean they should make that much. Many users think these rewards are coming out of thin air, but giving a highly rewarded post even more upvotes takes away from the pool of rewards for the day. So if a post makes 5k and you think that is about what it should be paid, hold off on your vote. Don't just click because you like it or think you will make 0.002 steem from it. You and voters like you will be essentially downvoting and lowering the reward for every other post on the platform. Those rewards have to come from somewhere. This is essentially a zero sum game and we are divvying up the slices of pie.
Please stop feeding a user that is already full in the hopes you will get a crumb that falls from their mouth.
If I'm off in my assessment, please correct me where I am in error.