How my best intentions almost lead to a flagged account by @smooth
And what i've learned from it.
Yesterday, in between many chats regarding my projects for improving Steem, i've had a great eureka moment!
Noble as I am, I wanted to create some fair lottery where anyone could win all the SBD rewards for that specific post, regardless of reputation score or account balance. Simple, fair, and provable. After all, i'm all about sharing and giving - That's just who I am.
A post including a simple yet effective provable fair system was setup, all in the heat of my glory moment on sharing and giving to others. About 50 votes came in quickly, together with motivating comments. Suddenly, i've seen the SBD rewards skyrocket. What happened? It turns out @smooth and @smooth-witness upvoted the post! Yay! This means my concept works!
I felt proud for a brief moment about creating a simple, fun sideproject in a moment of happiness. And then all the sudden...
Flagged for vote buying.
Nothing more in the comment. Only one sentence. Wait? What? @smooth and @smooth-witness flagged my post? Why!!!! Vote buying? I'm not trying to buy votes, i'm trying to share! Smoooooth... NOOOOOOO !!!
Back to reality, snapping out of my glory moment i started thinking about these words. Flagged for vote buying. But why did he upvoted me first? I'm sure @smooth knows i'm not trying to harm anyone right? I wanted to do something good! After smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee, i started thinking and came to a conclusion: @smooth is 100% right.
Other users could see this potentially as a malicious attempt. Or even worse; People with less good intentions could start running those kind of posts with harmfull consequences for our users. Giving rewards of any kind in return for an upvote, no matter how good the intention behind, is vote buying. I've decided to edit my post with this public apology:
After receiving a flag for vote buying, we want to offer our public apologies towards people who believed or assumed there was any malicious attempt attached to our Bloggery.
We planned this concept in a brainstorming moment without thinking further than our good intentions reached.
The bloggery will be suspended as we speak - And we do not advice other people attempting the same concept since the downvoters are right; It can be considered as vote buying, no matter how good the intentions or people behind it are.
Please remove your votes and let's forget about this whole thing.
@steve-walschot
But what did i learned from it?
- Always think twice before acting
- @smooth uses his whale powers to keep us safe from being harmed
This is an interesting fact. @smooth upvoted me first to bring it to attention using his allmighty powers, with the sole intention of flagging the post back down to 0, hidding potentially harmfull links and images.
Now that's a good play! I'm thankfull to @smooth to using his powers in the right way and saving us all from potential malicious attempts. He might as well be on some island drinking a cocktail :)
Time to wrap up, i've learned a valuable lesson yesterday and would like to apologize myself a final time towards anyone who might considered it something harmfull - It was made with the best intentions behind it.
Steemit ethics are a new and evolving thing. In my opening week here, I would pay people a percentage of the total money brought in by a post to have thriving discussions in my blogs. While this wasn't directly vote buying, as I was upvoting their comments and paying people to participate in intelligent discourse, it was close enough that I decided to stop.
The trickier situation is crossposting: when someone posts old or underappreciated content from another user and keeps the value of the steem power while paying out only the SBD. I'm not sure how I feel about it, and I'm not calling any of the people who do it out, but it's certainly worth discussing whether that's at minimum an ethical gray area.
But it's big of you to change your post and apologize for something that wasn't really all that terrible to begin with. Cheers
Thanks @daut44
I agree with @daut44. Live, learn, and accept that standards are evolving.
Exactly. Sharing what i've learned and where my mistake is could help others
what about what @stellabelle does Smooth ?
vote buying is bad but selling positions on bot vote lists ala secretwriter is just fine right?
come on!!
In a way, Steemit is already a lottery system where your odds of winning are increased by the quality and mass appeal of your post.
Whaddya gonna do... Live and Learn is what Mom always said... :)) Cheers, @steve-walschot
maybe this is what ayn rand meant with her: selfishness is a virtue.
what about what @stellabelle does? vote buying is bad
but selling positions on bot vote lists is just fine.
evolving standards my ass
There are definitely some great whales here and they 'take one for the team' when they reduce their vote to a flag. I have found some of their actions questionable in the past (because of my lack of education on this complex ecosystem), but ultimately it has always been for the safe progression of steemit, and this gives me great hope and confidence in the platform and our steem allies.