No, it wouldn’t. In fact, the Steem blockchain would be a worse place without flagging because it would become an eden for plagiarizers, copyright infringements, and imposters banking on the goodwill and welcoming nature of the Steem nature.
A while ago payouts were received after only 1 day rather than the 7 days we know now. That was changed because upvoters often didn’t have the opportunity to timely remove their upvote when an imposter was caught or didn’t confirm their identity and was thus wrongly upvoted.
While whales can downvote other Steemians and even dent their reputation, Steemians should learn that a vote (up- or downvote) is a systemwide free vote. Nothing else. That the upvote may contain rewards is only defined by the price feed but is definitely not a right.
Once understood that upvotes are merely that, a systemwide thumbs up or down, people may hopefully look differently at flags. While flags can “hide” content from sites, that is all they do. The content is still on the blockchain and the blockchain itself is immutable. Thus there is no oppression of free expression when content it flagged. IT is merely a disagreement with the rewards. Whether that disagreement is because of content, content quality, or personal feuds is irrelevant for the blockchain. The blockchain doesn’t hide any content, even not flagged content.
Just like we are free to upvote, everyone is free to flag any post or comment on the Steem blockchain.
Without measures like flags Steem would be the Wild Wild West for copyright infringers. A horrible place to be, a place milked even more by abusers. A place where even @steemcleaners wouldn’t be able to act and where phishing fighters like @arcange couldn’t nuke a confirmed phishing account into oblivion..
No. It will not be a better platform if the flagging feature is removed. Flagging is the only mechanism by which an over-rewarded post can be corrected. If you agree that the ultimate goal is to have a good distribution of the reward pool as to encourage adoption of the token, then you must also recognize that in the absence of flagging, the system boils down to an N-person prisoner's dilemma instance when it comes to voting. The main properties of this are:
A stakeholder will earn more if they use their voting power to solely vote for themselves.
If every stakeholder voted selfishly for themselves, the distribution of the rewards pool becomes flat and it is harmful for the platform, as there is no chance that new players will enter the system.
Some people dispute (1), claiming that actually there are ways to earn much more than self voting, however I believe this to actually be an illusion, involving community groups that give higher than self-voting returns, but this ultimately comes from various community members not maximizing their portion of the community stake.
But the main point of this setup is that in the absence of flagging, stakeholders are incentivized to engage in selfish behavior. In a system in which all participants behave rationally, the ultimate configuration will be that all participants will self vote.
The presence of flagging, or the threat of flagging, introduces an extra element where cooperators can correct the behavior of defectors (self-voters), and indeed there's quite a pressure on large stake-holders not to self vote. The white paper argues that this flag "solves" this problem, and prevents the voting problem from being an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma.
A more realistic look
Where this simplistic view falls short, I suppose, is that even in the absence of flagging, it's possible that a prisoner's dilemma does not exist in other ways. For example, there is a time-dependent element to the evaluation function concerning the output of the game. Many people believe that restricting themselves from self voting, and creating communities that encourage the spreading of votes and rewarding valuable contributions will lead to long term growth of the token, and subsequently act in a way that maximizes the long term value.
We have an interesting set of factions on this platform. There are certainly those trying to milk the platform selfishly as much as possible. Delegating to bid bots is a form of this, though well-hidden. And they turn around and cash it out.
On the other hand, there are those that recognize that there's not enough power to correct for much of this behavior, and the delegations even make it trickier to effectively target the benefactors of this. In certain factions, they are using stake to spread to many people, but they also self-vote to boost the future effectiveness of their stake. In other words, they are rather in the middle: self-vote a little to not lose too much ground to pure self-voters and still spread some of the stake around to the wider community.
And then there'a subset that uses flagging to correct for various abusive behaviors on the platform. There are cases where a whale with a lot of power can get a little too much say here, but in theory as the stake gets distributed further and further, there will be a better ability to counter whale votes. Since stake weighting is linear, multiple smaller parties can combine their stake to counter the actions of a larger party. But in the early stages, with an imbalance of stake the effect of this is rather limited.
In any case, this is all a very interesting experiment to see. Whatever the situation is, it is an instance of a complex multi-person game, and it will need a lot more nuanced analysis to determine how best to make changes to it to encourage a better outcome.
The flagging features was created for a good purpose which is to maintain sanity on the steemit platform so that people can be flagged whenever they post stolen
contents or spam contents but unfortunately many people now abuse the flagging feature and use it as a method of attacking the content of a user and a user’s
reputation even when the user is not guilty or do not deserved to be flagged,some steemit bloggers have personal issue with another blogger and they begin to
flag the contents of the user for no justifiable reasons...but at the same time i still believe that there are some people that still positively and genuinely still use the flag feature and they only flag contents that are
against the posting guidelines on steemit...if we look at the advantage and the disadvantage of the flagging feature then i think that flagging should still be allowed to stay but there should be more strict investigation
done to confirm if a flagged contents is really worthy to be flagged or it was just an intentional act done just to suffer the user who posted the content....
No, it wouldn’t. In fact, the Steem blockchain would be a worse place without flagging because it would become an eden for plagiarizers, copyright infringements, and imposters banking on the goodwill and welcoming nature of the Steem nature.
A while ago payouts were received after only 1 day rather than the 7 days we know now. That was changed because upvoters often didn’t have the opportunity to timely remove their upvote when an imposter was caught or didn’t confirm their identity and was thus wrongly upvoted.
While whales can downvote other Steemians and even dent their reputation, Steemians should learn that a vote (up- or downvote) is a systemwide free vote. Nothing else. That the upvote may contain rewards is only defined by the price feed but is definitely not a right.
Once understood that upvotes are merely that, a systemwide thumbs up or down, people may hopefully look differently at flags. While flags can “hide” content from sites, that is all they do. The content is still on the blockchain and the blockchain itself is immutable. Thus there is no oppression of free expression when content it flagged. IT is merely a disagreement with the rewards. Whether that disagreement is because of content, content quality, or personal feuds is irrelevant for the blockchain. The blockchain doesn’t hide any content, even not flagged content.
Just like we are free to upvote, everyone is free to flag any post or comment on the Steem blockchain.
Without measures like flags Steem would be the Wild Wild West for copyright infringers. A horrible place to be, a place milked even more by abusers. A place where even @steemcleaners wouldn’t be able to act and where phishing fighters like @arcange couldn’t nuke a confirmed phishing account into oblivion..
No. It will not be a better platform if the flagging feature is removed. Flagging is the only mechanism by which an over-rewarded post can be corrected. If you agree that the ultimate goal is to have a good distribution of the reward pool as to encourage adoption of the token, then you must also recognize that in the absence of flagging, the system boils down to an N-person prisoner's dilemma instance when it comes to voting. The main properties of this are:
Some people dispute (1), claiming that actually there are ways to earn much more than self voting, however I believe this to actually be an illusion, involving community groups that give higher than self-voting returns, but this ultimately comes from various community members not maximizing their portion of the community stake.
But the main point of this setup is that in the absence of flagging, stakeholders are incentivized to engage in selfish behavior. In a system in which all participants behave rationally, the ultimate configuration will be that all participants will self vote.
The presence of flagging, or the threat of flagging, introduces an extra element where cooperators can correct the behavior of defectors (self-voters), and indeed there's quite a pressure on large stake-holders not to self vote. The white paper argues that this flag "solves" this problem, and prevents the voting problem from being an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma.
A more realistic look
Where this simplistic view falls short, I suppose, is that even in the absence of flagging, it's possible that a prisoner's dilemma does not exist in other ways. For example, there is a time-dependent element to the evaluation function concerning the output of the game. Many people believe that restricting themselves from self voting, and creating communities that encourage the spreading of votes and rewarding valuable contributions will lead to long term growth of the token, and subsequently act in a way that maximizes the long term value.
We have an interesting set of factions on this platform. There are certainly those trying to milk the platform selfishly as much as possible. Delegating to bid bots is a form of this, though well-hidden. And they turn around and cash it out.
On the other hand, there are those that recognize that there's not enough power to correct for much of this behavior, and the delegations even make it trickier to effectively target the benefactors of this. In certain factions, they are using stake to spread to many people, but they also self-vote to boost the future effectiveness of their stake. In other words, they are rather in the middle: self-vote a little to not lose too much ground to pure self-voters and still spread some of the stake around to the wider community.
And then there'a subset that uses flagging to correct for various abusive behaviors on the platform. There are cases where a whale with a lot of power can get a little too much say here, but in theory as the stake gets distributed further and further, there will be a better ability to counter whale votes. Since stake weighting is linear, multiple smaller parties can combine their stake to counter the actions of a larger party. But in the early stages, with an imbalance of stake the effect of this is rather limited.
In any case, this is all a very interesting experiment to see. Whatever the situation is, it is an instance of a complex multi-person game, and it will need a lot more nuanced analysis to determine how best to make changes to it to encourage a better outcome.
Well i do not think steemit will be a better platform if flagging feature is removed,infact removal of the
flagging feature will do more harm than good because it will make spammers to be comfortable with creating
spam contents since they know that there is no way to get flagged for spamming and it means such
spammers will keep getting encouraged to keep spamming and destroying the purpose of the steemit platform...
The flagging features was created for a good purpose which is to maintain sanity on the steemit platform so that people can be flagged whenever they post stolen
contents or spam contents but unfortunately many people now abuse the flagging feature and use it as a method of attacking the content of a user and a user’s
reputation even when the user is not guilty or do not deserved to be flagged,some steemit bloggers have personal issue with another blogger and they begin to
flag the contents of the user for no justifiable reasons...but at the same time i still believe that there are some people that still positively and genuinely still use the flag feature and they only flag contents that are
against the posting guidelines on steemit...if we look at the advantage and the disadvantage of the flagging feature then i think that flagging should still be allowed to stay but there should be more strict investigation
done to confirm if a flagged contents is really worthy to be flagged or it was just an intentional act done just to suffer the user who posted the content....