Retaliatory Flagging, Apathy, Fear, and Determining Community Trust
There are plenty of good reasons not to flag other people on the platform even if they might deserve being flagged. One of those reasons is the possibility of retaliation. While this is often not really a problem when dealing with smaller users, when the user has significant firepower, lesser users are discouraged from making their disagreements heard in fear of having their reputation annihilated and having their meager rewards erased.
Nobody should swim this digital ocean in fear
Another issue that we have to deal with is the apathy of other users toward such disagreements and fights. Perhaps the user would rather ignore the problem altogether in order to avoid the toxicity and fighting that are involved with taking sides in such disputes.
But we shouldn't be apathetic toward those users that signal their disagreement respectfully and then are punished for steping out of line of a whale's desired behavior of the population. Especially when their desired position is to protect their entitled rewards and raze those that seek a fairer distribution.
Clearly the current system leaves a lot to be desired. It is easy for the larger and more established users to say things are working fine as intended when they are not affected by such disagreements and already have stake to work with. But it is that stake that gives them the power to actually do something and protect the weak and innocent who seek positive change.
But rather than argue that one has a moral obligation to flag bad actors (they don't), I instead argue for a mechanism that reduces the impact of bad actors through establishing a measure of community trust. Rather than having to flag users, users just have to once declare distrust of bad actors similar to how they elect witnesses.
Each user would start with 100% trust from the community and then lose trust if they piss off certain users. This trust factor would be stake-weighted, and thus people would only lose real support if a bunch of whales or a massive number of minnows decided to declare their distrust of a user. Let's say 4% of the total stake distrusts a certain user. Then the trust factor is 96% or .96.
One's voting power would be multiplied by this trust factor and those heavily distrusted by the community would have their flags and upvotes minimized the most. Those who act selfishly and contribute nothing can have their stake reduced without any cost of voting power or any flags thrown.
While this mechanism can be used in a retaliatory way, it hurts the smaller users significantly less and larger whales that may have not wanted to get involved in a flag war can now remove power from other large abusive users of the platform. Another added benefit is that this gives minnows more power and helps to decentralize rewards better as there is little a user can do if they are suddenly distrusted by a bunch of users.
And let's say a whale flags people for distrusting them. Then such abuse can easily be solved by the community displaying united distrust of that user. This gives the community a greater ability to combat large abuse and is much harder to circumnavigate by simply creating more accounts as you could simply continue to distrust those new users. No flags required.
That way those minnows that disagree can feel that to some degree they are protected by the community. Retaliation becomes something we as a community can move beyond and we can simply distrust each other as a means of reaching consensus on how representative users is trusted by the community.
Or we could keep fighting. I would rather not waste my time and energy flagging and simply declare distrust of these people that act like children and retaliate when people disagree with them. They do little to support the community and only seek to serve themselves and advance their egocentric agenda. Shouldn't we distrust that?
No discussion questions for this one, but keeping my earlier promise: the comment that contributes the most to this post (as subjectively judged by me) will receive 100% of the SBD of this post.
If the trust level is just linked to an account then people can hop to new ones to restore their voting power pretty easily. Especially since the vesting schedule is so short now (I think that's one of the bigger mistakes that's been made).
There's a reason voting power should be tied to stake in the network rather than to some other property of the account. We need more people voting in support of long term value rather than just voting themselves and their cronies payouts for today.
Full vesting is 13 weeks and that is quite a lot of time to spend in order to cheat the system. People can also track transfers through the blockchain. Voting power would still be tied to stake in the network, but would only be penalized for a lack of trust from the network.
There are also penalties to switching accounts, you lose branding potential and a portion of your audience. If you are raking in the cash on one account and move to another, you will lose a lot of voting support unless you tell your fans to move to that account in that case, relevant parties can assign distrust to that new party.
We could also start in the opposite direction and have everyone distrusting each other to begin with. Then alternate accounts would start at 0. The only issue here is that we would disadvantage the smaller users and create an even steeper learning curve. Large users could gather trust relatively quickly and the smaller users would struggle to gain any. That's why I like starting at full trust and going backwards.
I don't really see a way to force people into long-term investing outside of increasing the vesting schedule, which locks up Steem for longer which may ward off new users. But maybe we don't want users that aren't committed to the health of the network.
People won't vote in a long-term way since it is more profitable to vote in the short term. There's a reason that most people struggle in debt and live in general mediocrity. They lack long term perspective and do not plan nor take the time to invest in the future. People are hardwired into instant gratification and instant rewards. They will vote for shit over quality every day of the week if the shit is more profitable. In order to fix that, we would need to completely revamp the curation system to realign profitability and desirable behavior.
In the original design the vesting schedule was 2 years and the rewards were nonlinear, so there was more incentive for consensus. I also think downvotes should be included in curation rewards.
The whole system depends on getting SP into the hands of people who vote with long term vision rather than for short term payouts. It's like a corporation with perpetual shareholder votes on whether to liquidate to pay dividends, or reinvest in the business. Control by those who just want the money now means death for the community.
The key point of your proposal seems to be giving people something to lose, but I'm not sure adding additional values to every account is necessary for that. What do you think of having SP permanently at risk with every vote, so some of your SP can be burned if the final consensus is strongly counter to your position?
People would be fearful when voting but that may be a good thing. They would be careful on what they voted on. The big question is how do we implement such a system and how do we determine consensus? I do like the burning aspect of the idea, however.
Hell, what the consensus even really mean on Steemit? The current system lacks any consensus. The current flag wars and voting abuse issues are indicative of that.
The more and more I think about it, the more and more I start to agree with those that argue for returning to r^2 rewards. They encourage users to put their money into a single account and hold it there. There are probably better solutions to dealing with the inequitable distribution but linear rewards have shown that they are a poor solution and cause a whole new set of problems with being able to subvert consensus by spreading votes out through lots of phony accounts.
A bit of caution and awareness would certainly be healthy, if not outright fear. Consensus is established through the voting process, but with linear rewards it's pretty meaningless. The change to linear rewards was implemented to satisfy populist demand, but I think it was misguided. R^2 may be beyond what's necessary, but to reward consensus R^1 is unhelpful.
I'd like to see a return to R^2 (or maybe R^1.5?), symmetrical rewards for downvotes as for upvotes on the same curve, and negative SP curation penalties for voting in opposition to the final consensus. Since it would all be on the same curve, the penalties would scale with the amount of voting power used and the strength/weight of the consensus opposed.
This conversation chain contained some good comments, so you win some SBD.
Thanks!
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