RE: The Dwin fallacy(In defense of the flag part II)
A follow up point to this. Dan and his crew didnt prohibit plagarism and copyright infringement on steemit. In fact, the platform functioned for months where it was completely acceptable to post other peoples copyrighted work. I don't know for a fact that dan vote for copyright infringing posts, but they were so common at the time, that it would be surprising if he had not.
@anyx and his crew of cheetahs prohibited copyright infringement and plagarism. But really, it wasnt anyx and his crew of cheetahs, it was the fact that there were more people with more SP backing anyx and the cheetahs than there were people opposing him.
(and btw there are many here, some of them quite respected like @piedpiper, who are philosophically opposed to the notion of copyright, and who did not agree with this)
I actually am philosophically opposed to the idea of copyright myself. The only thing I have a concern with is people legally going after Steem/Steemit the company for facilitating uncensorable copyrighted material. I don't particularly like the idea of copyright or intellectual property. I believe they stifle/slow innovation.
As to @piedpiper... If you speak with him I believe you'll find that I actually defended him in the later attacks. A post that was completely his got gang attacked. I resteemed it, and I spoke in the steemitabuse-classic channel about it.
I am not one of those that acts (or I try not to) like a person cannot change, and learn. I do know @piedpiper agreed he should not be taking credit for someone elses work and getting rewarded for it. He was not even giving them credit. As an artist he knows this is not a good thing. He decided to change, and they were still gunning for him. If not for this then hell I'd be scraping Deviant Art every day and posting stuff that is absolutely amazing and pretending it is mine.
If enough of us did that, then steemit would become a pretty crappy environment and would almost certainly fail.
Now that you mention it, i remember that there was some sort of controversy with piedpiper, but i didn't have it in mind when i wrote that... I just happened to remember seeing him post about copyrights and how "copying isnt stealing", so i thought he was a good example.
My point is that there is nothing inherent about the design of the system that dictates you can't post plagarist or copyrighted materials. The community draws the line itself. If Pied Piper and enough people who agree with him decided to start posting copyrighted material again, and they had enough steem power on board to protect the posts, then it would be OK.
Same with porn. Is porn allowed? Yes, but only because it has a lot of steem power supporting it. If someone decided to flag it, and he could get an amount of SP behind him sufficient to flag it way down, then no, it wouldnt be allowed.
And yeah, its not perfect democracy. Some people have way more influence than others in some ways thats not ideal. But one major stakeholder being able to outvote 200 small stakeholders (but there still being other major stakeholders who can counter him) is still a hundred times more input than those minor stakeholders would have if we were casting our votes according to a TOS that dan or someone wrote and handed down to us.
And yeah, it has a major disadvantage. If youre a little guy and a big guy fucks with you, you can't run to the central authority (because there isnt one).
I pretty much agree with everything you said there. ;) Imagine that