RE: PROPOSAL - How to DEFINE and FIGHT the BAD - Create a COMMITTEE with STRONG ARM to Support Creation of a GREAT STEEMIT CULTURE
@edje to partially answer your question:
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?)
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.
Me too.
And my wife has turned to me when we got into bed and said, "You're thinking about Steemit aren't you?"
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.