PROPOSAL - How to DEFINE and FIGHT the BAD - Create a COMMITTEE with STRONG ARM to Support Creation of a GREAT STEEMIT CULTURE
Summary
We've seen many changes and new behaviours lately on Steemit. While some can be considered as good (eg growth of number of users, growth of number of posts), others can be bad for Steemit to grow and enjoy a long future ahead of us.
In this post, I propose a potential solution to determine what is good but more importantly what is not good behaviour, and how we can take measures against such behaviour. My proposal is based on consensus and collective efforts instead of individual efforts.
Based on one of the potential issues we may have to deal with as a collective - the self-voting and self-curating culture that is being created as we speak - I try and voice my thoughts on what is 'good' and what is 'not so good'.
I like this post to be a starting point for community wide discussions around the topics of:
- what we want to achieve with Steemit;
- how we think we need to progress to achieve what we want and
- what solutions we should implement to address all those things that (we think) will seriously harm whatever we collectively want to achieve.
Introduction
With the rollout of the last hardfork (HF19: software update of Steem and Steemit) all of us got 4 times more voting power. At the same time, we also got more balanced vote contributions into the system by the introduction of an equal valuation of Steem Power wrt post rewards regardless of being a whale or a mini minnow (you can read more about this here).
The question is: Did these changes contribute to a better community or not?
The answer is not simple I think.
What we've seen since the last hardfork is an increase of Self Voting.
Is that Bad? Is that Good?
The following topics I address in the remainder of the post:
- Self Vote Our Own Post - Good or Bad?
- Self Vote Our Own Comment - Good or Bad?
- Self Curation - Good or Bad?
- Disable Self Voting - Good or Bad?
- What Shall be Next?
- Proposal: a Community Controlled Committee & Enforcement Body
- End Words: The Beginning
Self Vote Our Own Posts - Good or Bad?
The Steemit User Interface (UI) provides a checkbox to self-vote a new post; This essentially promotes self-voting of a newly created post. Although I didn't analyse data on this topic, I believe many of us use this checkbox and upvote our own posts automatically.
I do not see any harm in doing so, since most of us produce not that many new posts a day, 1 maybe 2 or maximum 3. When voting for our own posts with 100% power, and publishing 1 post per day, every one of us has 9 100% votes left for curation of posts and comments from other authors. That is 90%; a good value! Even when posting 2 posts a day, this leaves 8 100% votes available to give to others in the community; Not bad at all in my honest opinion!
Self Vote Our Own Comments - Good or Bad?
In principle, everyone can vote for whatever he or she likes, even our own comments. Although there is nothing against upvoting our own comments, it can be argued why such self-voting is not helping the community.
For sure we have users who self-vote their own comments, and at the same time vote also for other authors comments. When things are in balance, I would say: "Why Not", especially when the comment is a quality and relevant comment and may even took quite a bit of time to create.
However, we also have users in our community who upvote their own comments, whilst not upvoting the post and/or comment they generated their comment for. Some of our community members may upvote the parent comment, but with (much) lower vote power than they give their own comment. This is a culture that I do not like and in the longer run will harm the community more than it will do good.
Before someone start screaming at me: Yes, I also upvoted a couple of my own comments with 100% vote power. In my defence - or better said - to explain why I did that: At those times, I was super frustrated about how the community started to act. I discovered some big fish giving themselves 100s of dollars per comment worth of self-votes, with multiple of those comments to a single post, a post they created themselves. That made me angry and resulted in casting some 100% votes to my own posts. As a far as I remember this happened at two occasions since HF19 got into effect. But to be honest; It didn't feel right at all, so I stopped self-voting my own comments after I got my act together.
Self Curation - Good or Bad?
Recent development in our community offers us the ability to self-curate posts and comments and get (seemingly) good rewards in return. With that I don't mean the self-voting for your own posts and comments, but the use of one or multiple of the new services around allowing us to either get their upvotes for free (such as @minnowsupportproject) or paid (such as @randowhale / @randowhale1, @booster and @whaleshares).
I really have nothing against these services. As a matter of fact, I admire those who came up with these ideas, business cases and implementations. It shows good entrepreneurship! Salute to all those who implement and run their own (little) business here at Steemit!
I tested quite a bit with @randowhale and I must say, it seems that most of the time the rewards added to my posts where more than the cost to get the vote. However, it is difficult to judge, since the last HF19, the rewards to our posts and comments are decreasing everyday due to higher drain on the reward pool. The net effect of such an upvote may be close to zero when the post is at payout time.
Last weekend I was trying out the new @booster service, and during the two days I was investigating what was happening with this service, I noticed an increase of use of the service. Such increase in usage will in fact reduce the effectiveness of the service itself since @booster divides is Steem Power over all those who requested the service; The more requests, the lower the value per request. One time I went in with a 5 SDB offer and I got around 8 SBD upvote increasing the post value to more than 15 SBD. However, after 4 days, the total post value decreased to 9,50 SBD and still 3 days to go before payout. Some of the reduction may have to do with Steem having a lower value in Steemit, some of the decrease should be the result of the extensive drain on the reward pool. Sure is that the 3 SBD net gain I had a couple of days ago, is now less than the 3 SBD and it is questionable how much the gain is when the post is paid out.
I also tested quite a bit with the @minnowsupportproject (MSP) service and that one seems to give some interesting rewards (from 1$ to 3$ per request) and it is one of the few services available on Steemit that is free of charge.
Until last weekend, I thought all these services would only vote for Posts, but I noticed these services can also be called in for Comments. I discovered one of my own posts got the support of MSP on a comment published by the user itself to support his/her own comment. The discovery of this event, triggered me to write this post!
Although I have used all the mentioned services on my own posts, I start to think: "What the Hell is this Self-Curation About?" and "Where will this Self-Curation lead to?". I personally think that self curation may harm the community much more than it does good!
I cannot promise I'll never use any of the self-curation services anymore. But I can tell you that the feeling I get using these services is getting worse, the more I use them! But I have my days with negative feeling about what is happening in the community; Those days that you think: "Am I the stupid one in the community with idealistic views and opinions, while everyone else - so it seems - is acting in their own self-interest and don't care how their actions will effect the community on the long term (if any?)?". I'm sure those days I'll still experience and on such days, I may go with the flow and get as much as I can! BUT, I would really love it when I can start controlling myself in such situations, and be more the idealistic community member, rather than the one with the super sort term focus and take whatever I can taken.
Disable Self Voting - Good or Bad?
From different community members, I read the plans for the future to remove the possibility for self-voting posts and comments. While this seems to be a good way to stop self-voting, I am not in favour of this at all.
Not allowing self-voting, will not prevent users from self-curation and using these 3rd party services. And what about those users who have multiple account? And what about all these new agreements - that can be made in or outside Steemit - between community members to vote for each other’s posts? All these arrangement can be supported by all the new services to rent delegation power for a period.
Removing self-voting ability, will for sure increase the number of services and deals to get to indirect self-votes. Therefore, it will not solve the 'problem' of self-voting.
What Shall be Next?
I think we all shall start to think about what we want Steemit to be, how we want to be part of this growing community, if we want the community to survive and stay in the market for a long time to come, how we think a community will work in the longer run!
When we form our own opinions on these matters, I suggest we start communicating this with each other and at the same time we may give our suggestions how we want and/or can control those events that are not in line with our own thoughts.
We have the Flag feature to downvote any post or comment that we may not like. But a lot of 'Time' and 'Steem Power' is required for downvoting to be effective and we do not have that many community members with AND a lot of Steem Power AND a lot of time available. Therefore, we must combine our efforts!
Proposal
Community Controlled Committee & Enforcement Body
I propose we start a collective, community regulated committee with a strong arm to take measures against whatever we as a community decide to be wrong. Such committee and strong arm will be based on what we as a community decide for. Anything that we as the community think is wrong, shall be taken onboard by this committee and they shall lead the process and activities required to come to proper measurements.
I for sure do not have all the answers; However, I try to start a discussion with you all on how we can and shall move forward. Below I list some of the ideas that crossed my mind and may support you in thinking along with me and start discussing the general topic "How Do We Want to Progress our Community?"
- Committee members shall be voted for by the community
- What we think is 'right' or 'wrong', shall be defined and voted for by the community
- What measurements we take shall be voted for by the community
- What processes are put in place shall be voted for by the community
- How these processes are put in place shall be voted for by the community
- Everything done by the Committee and Strong Arm shall be 100% transparent and all actions shall be recorded and published at some place we can access easily
- We may need a notice board in our User Interface (UI), a special channel, a special button that takes us to all relevant information
- We need a 'referendum' system in which we can ask the community for some idea or rule to vote for, including the ability for all of us to cast our votes
- We for sure need support of Whales to give the Strong Arm the power for effective Flagging
- We may need anonymous Flagging
- We for sure need a good number of community members to help uncover anything that we collectively define as "not wanted"
- We for sure need to build in a mechanisms for anybody to have the opportunity to explain him/herself when such member is suspected of some wrong doing - Maybe valid reasons exists for some behaviour that in fact is wrong, but in reality, is right
I'm sure we need more than the above, or less if the community thinks so. I'm really interested in learning from you what your thoughts are!
End Words: The Beginning
For sure I do not have the answers, I only know that when we do want a community that prospers; That has a long time in front of us; We must create a kind of culture that supports such outlook. The culture that we seem to be creating now, does not support a long future for Steemit, I'm afraid. I also know that without collaboration, and consensus, we will continue like we are handling things now and in the end, does more harm than good!
For sure, not everything can be solved by technology. And when something seems to be solved by technology, other forms of abuse are made possible again. Therefore, it is my strong believe we need humans involved to create a culture that will give us good cards to survive as a community in the longer run.
I really would like to read/hear from you what your thoughts are! What your views are to all the things addressed in this post! And in any ideas, you may have how to move forward.
I'm also very much ok when you think my views and ideas are totally rubbish! Please let me know as well!
Also let me know when you are not in favour of or do not want to contribute to a community that will be here for a long time to come; Fair enough if you think like that.
Most important is: Whatever your thoughts are; Whatever ideas you have; Don't keep them for yourself, but share them with the community. That is the only way to figure out collective goals. The only way to create a community. The only way to reach consensus. The only way to implement changes.
You know...there were once protocols that somewhat protected against the spamming and self-voting issue. However, they have been eliminated with the last few hard forks.
These issues of self-voting aren't an issue with the self-vote itself. Users are going to vote for themselves, whether it's with their one account or from a number of alt accounts. There's no way around that. The problem is this:
You can now allocate yourself a relatively fixed and higher amount of rewards from the reward pool with your own votes. They do not require a single corroborating vote, let alone any semblance of consensus over rewards allocation. The concept of "popularity" or "rewarding" good content is gone. It's not necessary in order for any individual to receive high payouts - and the 4x voting power compounds this problem.
What makes this worse is that spamming has become much more lucrative, even for small stakeholders who have no vested interest in Steem/Steemit. And with the 4-post reward limit/penalty already removed, it essentially guarantees that users can spam and earn as much as they possibly can...without a single interaction with another person.
Self-voting isn't the issue. Removing almost all of the abuse-mitigation protocols is. The last hard fork, in my opinion, has made this place a lot less "social" and a lot more scammy. We don't need a new brigade of police and downvoters. What we likely need is a roll back of hard fork 19 (and to revisit the 4-post penalty) and to find better solutions for the stake distribution issues and the reward algorithms. Hard fork 19 was clearly not the right answer.
Yes, it's a lot more scammy and I've noticed also, over the last few days, many of the regular posters in my feed have slowed right down. A few days I almost felt like quiting when a new user flagged a few of my posts, and one that I'd re-steemed!, for pointing out that his posts were composite copy and pastes. But is this such a big issue when the major #rewardpoolrapes go on much as before. I guess it is, because Steemit becomes a less interesting place to hang out.
With regards to specific HF points:
I wonder how much of that has to do with the price drop. We all saw what happened last fall when prices fell too low for users. They simply left...only to return when the price climbed over $1.00, then $2.00 again. I'm not sure that it had much to do with any scammy nature of the platform.
Yes. When you're exposed to scammy shit and #rewardpoolrape for so long, it definitely drains you and makes you wonder why so many people continue to believe that this is some "revolutionary" platform. It certainly has potential, but it seems that STINC doesn't care about the perception of this place and not many of the other larger stakeholders actually care to use their power to address obvious "abuses" and outright garbage content that is showcased on the landing/trending page every single day.
And I made a comment in chat last night about the "community" on Steemit...along the lines of it being mostly fake politeness and interactions for the explicit purpose of simply getting more upvoters. There isn't much "real talk" about the platform because if you step out of the sunshine and rainbows march, you will most likely see an immediate/complete loss of support, especially from those larger stakeholders. It's as if a whisper of criticism would be enough to kill the platform, so few people even want to entertain it for fear of their "investments" taking a dive.
If that's the case, this place is doomed anyway.
Exactly. And this has been pointed out to STINC many times before - to not make more than one major change to the economics/rewards at a time. They never listen. They claim that "It can't be done" or "We don't think it will be an issue to change multiple protocols." Obviously, they've been wrong...almost every time.
Voila!!!! Stay polite and let the friends vote for each other 👻
Yeah, it's a little weird how everybody seems to be on happy pills here. I'm new so it was cool at first. Now it's starting to sink in. But even on the unbearable FB, who is going to 'like' you for bashing someone else? Anyway, the free Steem is cool. Now that I've been here and kinda see how things work there is no way in hell I'd buy Steem on Polo et al.
Happy pills Yap yap! True that:)
You don't need to buy. I never did but I traded and exchanged what I made here through posting articles and curating for over one year.
The whole dynamic on the platform changed too much and it's not pleasant anymore. It's just my feeling. People even holding back voting like myself because I cannot vote as usual, without draining my voting power. I am generous as well as spontanious and don't like to do the math like so many others do. I enjoy to be generous. HF19 is not what it seemed like at first. Let's move on please?
I don't like to pay for whale votes either. It's weird even though it helps me personally to get at least a few powerful votes and all this after 1 year on steemit? Must be a joke or my content is really that bad.
I feel sorry for minnows
How can the platform keep their loyal people here ? I wonder for the first time and I have been through many Hardforks
It's a feeling shared by many other people. You are definitely not alone.
I don't know, but constantly screwing them over with bad hard forks and "experiments" isn't the answer. I can tell you that. It seems to me that each change does more to drive people away and attract spammers/scammers than actually retain the good users. And it seems like the only reason to invest in SP anymore is to upvote yourself and cash out the rewards...because interaction is pretty meaningless/unnecessary and mostly just spam, cheerleading, and fake politeness.
How revolutionary this place is!
I hear you !!!!
I would rather have 20 votes than 10 in a day.
Thank you for your comment with good insights in the matter.
I agree with you on most what you state: self-voting not being an issue, the 4x more power on a vote not what the community needed and increased the self-voting behaviour, the removal of the limit of number of post per day opening the door to lot of spam.
I however disagree with you we do not need a committee. I think we need a team of people that will address the topics that really needs to be addressed.
For instance the debates on what needs to go into the software or taken out are now quite distributed and there is no community voting done to these changes. If we want to survive as a community than at least we shall introduce a mechanism for anybody in our community to vote for the changes or not. This shall not be left to the witnesses, or to STINC, but everyone of us shall have the ability to vote for these changes.
I also think we need more collective approach on fighting the wrong. When done more collectively (through the proposed committee and strong arm) will reduce the time spend by those individuals like yourself, who try and fight the wrong, whilst it'll create more transparency community wide on what is done to fight the wrong. Such committee will have maximum exposure, especially when it gets it places in the Steemit UI.
It sounds to me like your views are quite similar to this! You may consider joining forces. However, they are considered temporary albeit necessary measures.
Thank you for pointing this out. Good to see others are creating something to fight abuse. Although my views are similar, my approach is different though. smackdown-kitty's actions are not based on community voted abuse but determined by the people behind smackdown-kitty. That is something I do not like, since other groups may start fighting against what smackdown-kitty does. We then end up in the community wars that we had to deal with in the past already. But yeh, it is good that we have more members in our community who want to do things!
I think if a large number of users can vote for something such as HF19.1 then these disparate initiative may be put to rest. It is also good to hear from those who have experienced Steemit for much longer than many on here. I wrote an allegorical piece about this process being iterative as a prelude to my longer list of ideas. Subtlety doesn't always work!
Community voting for changes shall be enabled, that is for sure something I truly believe in.
I'll give you my 0.04 for that right there. ;-)
That's a valid point! We don't need more fights like before and for sure no more experiments. I like the idea to become a community where we all have a voice and help together to make important decisions.
Oh and yes I also use @booster and @randowhale. Is this bad but what else to do!? One whole year and still struggling. I said it before that I am sorry for minnows. My only advantage is that I have followers because of more time I had on that platform.
Using these services in itself is not bad, I'm just wondering what it in the end will deliver as a net result. Last couple of days I did not test them, and I generally tested them on a post less than a day old. Indirect, using these services may also limit votes from other community members. I notice that I sometimes do not vote for a post that I kinda like because all these self vote votes where gathered. Wondering how many other Steemians act similarly.
What bothers me that everybody can use those services even for #shitposts so the concept to create quality content will vanish just like my motivation to create more interesting articles. Who cares anyways other than your loyal followers?
For those important decision, we need to get a voting system agreed and implemented. I opt for same vote weight per account regardless of how much SP is behind. When we know the accounts that has same users behind them, block all of these account minus 1 from voting. I'm sure we can think of more stuff to make sure we will not have skewed voting.
Yeah, and it seems that they are only interested in fighting "self-upvoters," but not addressing whether or not the upvoting is actually "abusive." In a recent post, they said that they will tackle the four most "vicious self-upvotes" per day. What is "vicious" and what is the criteria/data used to identify and combat this arbitrary concept?
I think the members behind smackdown-kitty are not bad at all, but indeed, it is not clear what they want to do. Then they also had to post that something went wrong with their bot. And foremost, it is not with the community consent, and that will only start wars again. I opt for community voted fights and then 100% transparency to whatever fights are voted for. So, we shall start with some technology where we enable the community to vote for whatever we want to get a vote for. A central discussion board is required since discussing in posts will get many messages lost, it is too distributed. A central notice board is required as well. A process needs to be put in place to allow anybody who is attacked, to defend him/herself. All of this shall be one click away from the many user interfaces to Steem, starting with Steemit UI since that is the most used interface. The smackdown-kitty guys can be an execution arm flagging those that go against we as the community voted for.
I am still doing 4 post and try not to exceed
Spamming has increased at a terrifying rate, with some spammers simply copy pasting year old posts of other users ON STEEMIT, then self upvoting.
With the rate the reward pool is being lowered surely this will stop being profitable soon?
No - it will just be less profitable. But I'm sure that spammers don't care, as they don't put much time/effort into their "content" anyway and even slightly reduced returns would be good for them.
I agree, the spammers do not care, they will likely spam more. Copy/Paste posts are done less than a minute. I suppose, even bots will be created to do this.
Yes, the game theory analysis shows that such behaviour cannot be eradicated, but it can be minimised - to what extent depends on the encoded rules of the Steemit game.
Thanks, I idn't know about some of those old rules. Indeed my own article on this topic includes similar algorithms.
Popularity is still the main sink of the reward pool. Rewarding good content has gone, unfortunately, and I could be doing more to counter it, but...honestly from the 600 followers I have I think only 1-3% really read my posts. I'm not complaining because I can't read all my following fellows posts either. But it could be minimized if the 4-post penalty was revisited like you said.
@@ -980,8 +980,777 @@
eming...
+%0A%0AAnd something I just want to also add. Yes, sooner or later there is an easy bot to self-vote anyway. But it still raises the cost of doing it in that you have to have a machine running this script, you have to at least know how to install it... This is not difficult, but it also means the system is not directly facilitating it, you have to go find somewhere that is doing it. It is also a detectable behaviour.%0A%0AI am starting to lean towards the idea of simply using analytics to show people what is actually happening, and to be able to construct hypothetical scenarios that model how a parameter would change the system. If bots are involved in this, their deterministic behaviour is in itself easy to spot, and then you can use community outrage as the defence.
That's what you think. Check this profile though for example:
https://steemit.com/@sandrino
Correct, there are abusers in the community who took the opportunity of the removal of the maximum 4 post per day to start spamming the community with 10s of posts per day. I do believe we shall limit the number of posts per day again. We shall also intensive the discovery of plagiary, since more and more posts are created that is a simple copy/paste of mostly other authors posts, from the Internet or even from other Steemians.
a follow-on post wrt Community-Wide Voting you can find here
Very interesting! I also at the beginning of the HF 19 voted many of my comments... I was so amaze to see my votes giving more than just 1 cent :) But I stopped that soon, as you well say it did not felt good. Btw do you know about the new voting Bot in Steemit? @promoted. Really nice idea and have a lot to do with some case you have in your post. You did not mention him so I leave a link. "Don't use vote-selling bots: use @promoted instead. A bot that upvotes you when you burn money!"
Upped and re-steemed
Love this !!!
Not sure if I love all the 3rd party self-curation services.
I wish my sarcasm would be heard !!!! How many more we pay for or will be offered. Who actually cares about content these days?
Still some :)
I count 6 people in this comment string.
I mentioned that my "I love this" needs to be explained more. More like "yeah right, finally we don't have to pay to get votes. My sarcasm doesn't get through and my mistake. I don't like what's happening right now on this platform but I don't know how it can get better to be honest. Too many changes already and this time it's me being frustrated. I remember you had similar feelings before.
As far as I understand, @promoted still needs to be paid to get their upvote, the difference with the other 'whale' vote services is that @promoted does not keep the SBD, but burns them.
I think when we get a community wide system in place were we can vote for what we want to see or what we do not want, and we get a community wide enforcement team in place, we can save the platform and community.
We may all have these days, and I still have them from time to time. I try to turn things into a positive. My secret to that was: stay away from Steemit for a week. I went to visit my parents knowing they did not have Wifi on their boat and the cell phone network was just to expensive to use :)
I burnt 11 SBD ....it felt great !
Thank you for your comment and appreciation of the post. I wasn't aware of @promoted. Will need to check it out in more details, it claims to not make profit, but in the end it is still self-curation. Self-Curation can do more harm to the community then good, in the long run IMHO. BUT, this service may be better than all the commercial services in the sense that it takes the SBD of the market, increasing the value of SBD (but that is pure theoretical, since when the amount of SBD taken of the market is very small, than it may not have substantial impact).
Of course it does :), they say they take the rewards for curation. About the self-promotion, it is discutible but I prefer this way than the other one. As far as I understand human behavior you will need to complete ban self-promotion to take it out of the system but that would be kind of "dictatorial", I do not know how good will be for Steemit and what advocate.
As you well say take money out of the system, now of course, very small quantities but I know the other 2 whales are been used a lot in a daily bases so, imagine the same number of people using @promoted only... how much would be out of the system them?
If it has to exist I prefer it to be like this. :)
I'm not against self voting. I prefer Whales and all the other fishes we have in our community to delegating their SP to good curators. Like @curie project. But we need more than just @curie for the good posts and comments to be noticed. If we have many good curators supported by SP from the community, will give more good rewards to quality posts and that shall drive creation of more quality posts. At the same time, we shall stop delegating our SP to the self curation services. But yeh, everything what is possible, is essentially allowed. But that is what I'm debating, we shall introduce soft rules, rules that are not (possible to) manage by technology.
I was wondering about curations. I have enough free time to be a curator and have some ideas, mostly around the Photography topic (lot of nice and undiscovered photos on Steemit actually). Was looking for a post that explain how it is the question of Delegate SP and who I should ask for it and explain my idea but.. as far as I see you can just rent the SP (you have to pay) or to know someone with a lot of SP (a whale) who give you some for free but it is not my case. There is no way to do it, only paying or if you are "connected" in some way.
Edit: I believe that getting rewards from rewarding others is more gratifying than rewarding yourself ;)
That is how it works in this world. Networking is the key here. But maybe just ask? The other day I was chatting at Steemit.Chat and some whale told me that he would give his SP in delegation for a committee to fight the bad on Steemit when done in a correct way.
To get SP for curating, well you need to establish yourself as a quality curator, than I;m sure you will find members who either delegate SP to you or configure some vote bot to follow your votes with their votes.
I'm of the same opinion!
New found! A bot for comments, up-vote you if you had not up-voted yourself ;)
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@gentlebot/hello-steemit-i-m-the-gentlebot
I found that one as well. There is another one from the same user, check latest post on @gentlebot. I noticed one post, @gentelbot voted for a lot of the comments. Not sure what independent algorithm this bot is running, but that does not seem to independent from account or even post. But this maybe just a glitch and startup problems. I hope so, otherwise this is another scam starting.
@edje to partially answer your question:
You're not the ONLY stupid one, if that helps.
One idea may be to create a forum for users to point out (with some kind of documentation/evidence) abuses in self/circular voting so that the post could then be voted on by the community as to whether or not it was abusive.
Any form of "committee" flagging of posts or comments in order to reduce the payouts would need to be timed properly, otherwise the abusers could just wait until 12:01 before the payout and continue doing what they've been doing.
I've also noted some very prominent members who apparently don't bother to vote for ANY comments on their posts, except for a select group or list of people. I think the ability to nominate (and back up with evidence) someone for a public wall of shame would make that stop almost immediately. Better behavior by these people should also be acknowledged and they should be allowed to petition for removal. This process should also be controlled by community vote.
I think if new people understood right away that these people might be popular, but chasing them with your upvotes is a waste of time, the sycophant pool would dry up quickly.
I like the sound of the Steemit Leper Colony, but I am an asshole.
The problem with "voting circles" is that it's not clear whether these votes are for family/friends of users or not. After all, this is a social media site, so voting for the same people all the time isn't indicative of any "abuse." That's why we can filter content via follows. If I invite 20 of my friends and family members here and they all post twice per day, then my daily voting power can go to just their parent posts.
Someone looking at my votes every day might take issue with what I'd be doing, but what would the actual problem be? That I brought 20 users to the platform and that I happen to know all of them and like their posts? Would that be considered abuse? If so, why?
It's better to handle "abuse" with blockchain protocols...like we had previously. What we shouldn't be doing is changing the code to make it easier to do what we perceive as "abuse." That's what these last few hard forks have done...and it has been pointed out to the dev team before the changes were implemented. They went forward anyway.
I'm not calling for code changes at all.
Abuse may have been too strong but I simply lacked a better word to use.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant and any proposal I make would involve human oversight and contribution. One person's "abuse" may indeed another persons form of community or family. I still upvote based on the quality of the content and I don't expect anyone else to live by my standards.
But if there are others who feel strongly about that, it would certainly be nice for them to have the information to make that decision without having to spend hours and hours digging through curation trails and wallet transfers when their time could be better spent on more productive things.
Absolutely: Public awareness of wrong doing will get most of the abusers stop doing what they do.
I also agree with with ats-david that some things shall be brought back into the code, for instance the limit of 4 posts per day that has been removed. Without a limit a member can now publish 100 posts per day. I've seen users publishing every 15 minute a new posts! That is spam! But when they can get even 10ct per post and can automate the generation of the posts, then 100 post per day times 10ct is worth to abuse the system.
And why do we have the increase of vote power with a factor of 4? This makes our votes 4 times stronger and that makes the self voting on spam posts 4 times more rewarding, meaning it rewards starting to spam the system with at least 10 post per day and 100% self votes.
So, it'll be a combination of things, technology and humans to prevent abuse.
A post every 15 minutes is pretty ridiculous and unless they've got some kind of scheme for getting upvotes, I would think they'd lose interest and move on to something else pretty quickly, it'll probably be spammy comments though so, only a small improvement.
With that said, there are days when I think I could post 5 or 6 times in one day.
I am spending probably 8-10 hours a day here though.
Maybe a nice balance between 10&40 votes/day would help dilute the self voting, or at least make it not such a difficult decision for people to chose between? I'm lucky enough to have some time to grow organically (thanks to an understanding wife), but I can understand that there are a lot of people desperate to find a way out of their financial situations.
And desperate people tend to do desperate things.
That doesn't account for the greedy ones though.
Desperate people I do not like to be part of our community I must say, also the greedy ones.
Why do you think people will stop posting every 15 minutes? It is quite easy (not for me since I'm not a developer), to create a bot that takes your photo catalogue and start posting a couple of photos per post every lets say 15 minutes. Then go out in the street and recruit 20 new members, let them get an account on Steemit and also connect a bot to their accounts and at the same time let all these accounts vote for each other. Even if you can create 10 quality posts a day, why would you publish them every day? In the end no follower will like to see the same author that many times a day, even when the posts are damn good. I would even think 1 or 2 posts a day should be the maximum and that shall be enforced by the system. We had a maximum of 4 posts per day, but that limit is taken away completely.
For sure the increase of vote power has no purpose IMHO, and shall be rolled back for sure.
I'm not well versed on the use of bots. I grasp the concept but not having the money to dump into the system and spam my way to the top, I've more or less ignored them. I'd like to think that I wouldn't do that even if I did have the resources.
I'm intrigued by the chance to earn & keep the fruits of my own labor. I've watched other people reap the lion's share most of my adult life. Those people also determined what I would spend my hours, days, weeks and years working on. It may wear off at some point but sometimes I need to get things out of my head and onto a page so they're not swirling around in there. The noise keeps my wife awake.
And an upvote or a really good comment that sparks a discussion is still exciting for me.
I'm not sure how to keep the platform open enough to allow people to express themselves and still keep the quality high enough to sustain Steemit.
I think your post is a good start on the way to finding a workable solution though.
LOL
I dont think these things are related. Any opinion can be voiced in a quality way, and any discussion can be going in a quality way. I personally like the big differences of opinions members of the community have. In general, that is one of the key things why I like Steemit and want to take extra steps to make sure the community will survive. I can only learn from other opinions.
I'm afraid not every abuse prevention is possible to implement on the blockchain. Indeed some recent changes resulted in increase of abuse.
Nothing against that. But what if these 20 users spam the system with shit posts? This is were humans are needed, to determine if something is abuse or use. In a situation where circle voters are voting for shit posts, I'm not saying that this needs a strong arm intervention immediately, but I also dont think we should just accept such behaviour.
Yeah, I'm not saying that every abuse can be. But the code can certainly mitigate a lot of "abuse" of the rewards allocation system. We've now seen what different protocols can mitigate or exacerbate. I think it's safe to say that some protocols do in fact prevent some undesired behaviors. Those are the protocols that should be retained so that constantly policing the platform wouldn't be as necessary.
The idea for the code is to make things as "fair" and intuitive as possible. Simplify it where it can be simplified. Implement protections and abuse-mitigation where they can be implemented. Lessen the impact of those putting in minimal effort - or doing harmful work - and reaping disproportionate rewards for their "contributions."
Hard fork 19 accomplished the exact opposite. It has created additional incentive to do less work. It has made "abuse" more lucrative. And it has made interaction and any reward allocation "consensus" unnecessary.
Coding can't fix everything. But the wrong coding can certainly make things much worse than they are and require an extraordinary amount of time and effort to combat undesirable behavior.
Again, I agree with what you are stating.
Although I do not think that the complete HF19 was bad. The change to the square root curve for post rewards, I do like. I'm not sure of the linear curve that was the replacement is the best way forward, but this is part of HF19 that was not that bad.
On all other points I agree, lets build (back) into the code those things that will reduce the abuse. Any abuse left that can not be handle by code, let that be handled by a body within the community rather than by individuals or groups of community members, since I believe the best way forward in whatever we do to fight abuse, shall be done with community consensus, so we need a system where the community can vote for what we define as abuse and what not. This can only be done centrally. Then we can have smaller groups supporting the whole thing.
I agree. This site already has rules encoded - without them there would be nothing - and those encourage and discourage certain behaviours. The most efficient way to change behaviour is to change the rules. It is an iterative process to arrive at, hopefully, an optimal environment.
For sure, everything that matters shall be taken onboard and the right way of acting shall be defined. Flagging could be more or less an automated process, initiated by some human effort based on the outcome of the investigation. Maybe we need 2 different flags in our community: 1) reduction of Reputation 2) reduction of post/comment rewards. As a 3rd measurement: blocking of an account could be introduced.
I had this in mind as well, and commented to other post that such social control will for sure help. The analogy I drew was with our strong religious communities in the Netherlands were (almost) all individuals living in such towns and villages go the church and those who do wrong are called out in church so everyone else knows who and what. The result of this is: Everybody can leave their doors to their house and cars unlocked and nothing gets stolen.
Interesting @edje
But...
would such proposal not attempt to implement centralized control on a decentralized platform? Who is to say that such committee could not be overtaken by special interests.
Anon flagging would be a no-go. We should be able to face our accuser.
Self vote? Let them who do it do what they want with their SP. No one needs to follow them/engage with them. If no one else curates them - would the outcome not eventually be a +/- zero for them, bar the interest payment? If they don't contribute to the community - don't engage.
Perhaps I have a simplistic view on the issues - but centralization sounds like the opposite of what Steemians are trying to embrace.
-ch @globocop
You have a couple of good questions that deserve answers. For now I answer in short since I plan to create and publish some post around the various topics.
Counter question: The rules implemented on the blockchain itself, eg the way rewards are distributed, the way vote can be given to posts and comments, the features implemented in the Steemit UI, the features available to 3rd parties to use. Aren't this all centralised rules applicable to all users? Do your realise these rules are defined by a single commercial company, Steemit INC? Do you realise these rules can be influenced by the witnesses of which we have less than 100 individuals? Please realise not all rules can be fitted in technology. Please realise that when anarchy is the leading model, with every individual having rights but 'rules' how to treat each other, no community can be created, especially not one where money is involved. The nature of humans is to think of its own before thinking of others. When more and more individuals in a community think of themselves, will lead to even more people thinking of themselves, even those who want to do good to others, will stop doing this when too many people are only taking care about themselves, leaving only those (small group) of idealist. I've seen various projects with an anarchist philosophy that ended up in total chaos, and ended up bankruptcy, from living communities to music festivals.
That is where community voting comes into play. Anybody in the community is allowed to propose changes to the community, for which the community is requested or even demanded to vote for a proposal. Any 'centralised' institution shall be 100% transparent, and shall be reviewed by the community on everything what they do.
In principle I agree, but what we she at Steemit is that many users do not flag, even if they want to. One of the key reasons: When you flag someone, even when you think it it is for good reasons and you explain this to the author of the post/comment you flag, generally the author gets mad and start flagging the one who flagged. Question: Dont you think that when each individual is judge and executioner, this will in the end lead to chaos and chaos will let everything fall apart? Before we had societies (small or large) we had the concept of anarchy; In those times we also had the concept of no rules and no respect for each other and a human life was worth nothing at all, since everybody had to chance to kill someone without anybody or anything to stop such individual. Civilisation started when we introduced rules to the society. No centralised rules, means no rules, means total chaos, means destruction of societies. There is maybe a level of society rules that we need to have and what we have today in our societies, meaning we may have too many rules today in our societies, but to me it is way too simple to say that we dont need community rules for any community to be able to survive.
The reality shows that individuals still vote for those that abuse the community. It is too simple to say: when nobody votes and engage with those who abuse the community, they will not gain anymore. Why do you think mafia organisations started to rule more and more in the world? Because structure in criminal activities is much more lucrative than no structure! And why do you think more and more criminal organisation are bringing whatever they did in the underworld to the 'real' world, investing in real estate and so on? To be able to move all the money they make in the underworld into the world that provides all the products and services they want to use and consume.
Total Anarchy: No rules, No centralised Institutions, Everybody judge and executioner. I would LOVE to see answers that works in practise on HOW to create and keep a community without any rules, and I mean literally NO RULES whatsoever (and keep in mind, every de-centralised platform has centralised rules, Steemit has many centralised rules either in control by Steemit Inc, or by the witnesses). I've been talking with anarchist throughout my life as well as here in Steemit, and I can tell you, I have never seen practical answers to HOW to keep a community alive when NO RULES applied and everybody is judge and executioner. As a matter of fact; I usually get questions if I like current implemented societies and rules! And when I express that current societies and implementations are not leading in how I look at things, and I again ask the questions how a community can be kinda stable and stay active without any rule, I've not seen an anarchist I spoke with to continue the discussions. To me this is simple due to the fact they cannot come up with any answer that will work in practise. When you have solutions, I would love to hear them!
Hello @edje Thanks for your reply. I posted my answer here:
https://steemit.com/steemitculture/@globocop/steemit-is-anarchy-anarchy-is-a-good-thing
as it was getting a bit lengthy..
-ch @globocop
Thank you for your post in response to my comment. My comment can be found (here).
Thing is who will support such as strong arm for the good content to flourish? We need the whales to sit together and figure this out.
I've seen various whales who state: "I will give my vote power in delegation when good solutions are proposed and implemented". I've seen less whales stating "I will come up with a good solutions and will implement it". I also think that the community at large shall have a say in what shall be rules in the community, and this shall not be left to Steemit Inc, the witnesses nor the Whales alone.
agreed
Hi @edje,
Great post, thank you for sharing!
I was against self voting until now. I guess I just didn't thought trough in depth. My reasoning was that this people deprive that money from the reward pool.
After reading your article I've realized that this isn't the case because if they would vote for others, no matter what so the money would be gone anyway.
The moral aspect of self voting is another question of course. But I can't judge anyone because I don't know the underlying reasons behind their acts.
What I mean, can be explained with my own example: I self-vote my comments too because I'm having trouble with writing valuable posts, but I would love to curate more effectively. And to do that I need more SP! I never withdraw anything from the site In fact I bought 200 Steem on my first week.
So I'm trying to give value to this community. More value in the long run with the help of self voting now. Does that make sense?
Thanks for clearing my mind from the mist:)
Self voting as such I dont find a bad thing, unless it gets out of balance.
That makes sense and nothing wrong about !
This is a lot to chew on all at once. Your thoughts are good, but I think it might help to focus in on a small piece of Steem.
This proposal looks to me like "Let's start a community group that pushes steemit towads the right things and away from the wrong things." - it's a well-intentioned idea, but so vague.
My proposal might be more like this: We should set up a community tribunal to discuss the issue of self-voting. The question is: "What is the maximum % of voting power that a user should be able to allocate to themselves?"
After we can answer that question - whether it's 50%, 30%, whatever - the next step is to set up an enforcement mechanism whereby users who break the community rule are punished with flags.
Of course, this is all very tricky. Just a few rogue whales could tank the thing by flagging all posts that the tribunal members make, for example, which would make it financial suicide to participate. BUT, if done very cautiously, it could be a path forward to collectively disincentivize over-the-top self-voting.
Hmm... I may do a longer post about this later on my blog. It's an interesting idea. For now I am just an interested observer, but I'll keep an eye on this going forward.
I agree that it's quite vague.
In my mind it would help to narrow the focus significantly. There is already something in progress to combat rampant self voters. @smackdown.kitty is one I know of.
Again agree that it may be financial suicide to take art in this, irk a whale and in one fell swoop all your rep is GONE, not to mention post rewards.
[Edited] so that it does not seem as though @smackdown.kitty is the rampant self voter ;)
Not 100% clear what is so vague of what I try to describe. My proposal includes a lot of different things, including committee, notice board, voting system. Soft Rules needs to be defined by the community, I shall not do that, so what is good and what is bad behaviour will follow the establishment of such committee and the enablement of a good voting system for such soft rules. The way enforcement is done, may also be dependent on what the community will vote for. I have several ideas myself, but these should be debated and voted for by the community (eg different type of flags, maybe even account blocking).
I think we mean exactly the same: I propose to establish a committee that leads whatever needs to be done to create a better culture. That gets to power to execute as well. Everything with vote from the community.
We could implement a different vote weight, eg each vote is weighted the same, regardless of being a whale or a mini minnow. Than it is about how many users find something right or wrong, not about how much money someone has, more like a vote how it works in our countries political voting system. I for sure think that we need to create some technology to support the activities of a committee.
Looking forward to any further suggestions and comments, and follow on posts you may create!
Just reaching a consensus on whats 'right' and whats 'wrong' will take some time.
With so many sock puppet accounts, who is to say someone won't be able to influence the choices?
Apologies if I seem negative, just trying to highlight potential snags.
I am interested to see how this idea develops!
Thank you for pointing out the things that we need to take care of when we would get community voting enabled.
This may indeed be an issue, although we know of at least some of the sock puppet accounts, so they can be blocked from voting. Also, I think every account will need to cary the same vote weight, ie not depended on SP. From community members like @profitgenerator we can learn how voting could be done by setting the right levels for a YES/NO vote, eg set vote level at 70% or even 80% instead of relying on 50+% generally sued in countries political voting systems
meep
meep! :)
meep
Meep
meep
Thing that bothers me the most in this community is copy-pasta spam. To get the most of the attention people write one comment and paste it to every new post they see to gain the exposure. It is easy to eliminate though - let the system prevent from writing same words twice in a row and one annoying problem will be eliminated !
Agree with you that the copy/paste of comments is pretty annoying. I generally do not answer and upvote those, ie ignore them.