Steemit is implementing a reputation system that will evolve over time. The system will start out simple and get more advanced as things progress.
Here is what you need to know:
- If you constantly get downvoted your posts will be marked as spam and hidden unless a user clicks to reveal all spam.
- If you do not earn any positive reputation by contributing to the discussion then your votes will be ignored in our ranking algorithm.
- If you do not have positive reputation then you will not be able to impact the reputation of others.
- If you have a negative reputation then your posts will be excluded from the global index pages
None of these changes require hardforks, but all of them will impact the user experience on Steemit.com
But what about Censorship?
You have a right to say what you want, but users have the right to plug their ears. All of your content will be available on the blockchain and will be visible to those who want to see it (unless we are required by law to take it down).
We will not hide / filter any content that has greater than $0.02 pending payout. If something is deemed valuable enough to be paid, then it will be displayed.
All of your comments, blogs, etc will remain visible on your own profile page.
Use the Mute Button
If you are tired of seeing posts by people, use the mute button. We will gradually incorporate the mute / follow information to better filter / sort content for users. The mute button will not hide posts with pending payouts. If you see someone you have muted with a pending payout then flag it.
Conclusion
The abuse you see today will not last long term and is an artifact of rapid growth. We fully believe that our stake-weighted reputation system will ultimately be more powerful than those available on other platforms.
In my opinion this doesn't sound like a good suggestion. Simply because someone mutes another person does not necessarily mean they need to flag any of their post that have a payout.
People may mute other accounts for various reasons, not always due to abuse. Someone may not like a certain topic and they may mute those who tend to post only on that topic. This does not mean those people deserve to have their content flagged, which will diminish their payout and apparently hurt their reputation under the new system.
I agree with you, but I don't think that @dantheman was referring to this type of muting. I believe he was thinking in terms of spammers getting upvoted by other bots or newbies who don't recognize a bot. Sometimes, when writing, we think within a larger context (ie, notice-to-bot-spammers) and it doesn't occur to us that statements need to be explicitly limited for clarity's sake.
Exactly. Bots are a different breed. Certain bots provide no value to the system and are in fact malicious. Such bots must be flagged. In fact, I would even want a way to flag accounts instead of posts, so they never even appear on my stream, not even hidden. Muting serves a different purpose.
@liberosist so you flag cheetah when he lets you know about plagiarism? Interesting. If it seems trite keep in mind that every bot has an owner somewhere. It's the owner who is providing or removing value. Discuss the problem with them otherwise you flag an account and the owner will just create a new one. A better option would be just a defacto standard that tells bots to stay completely out, upvotes and all. Which is what #STEEMBOTSTAY is all about, treating bots as pets and talking to the owner not abusing the pet when you have a problem with the pet. We're also working on a registry for bots and their owners right now too and also to improve the quality of AI in general, so you don't get plagued with spam. Because spam whether it's one liners from people or meme posting bots, is just annoying.
I am not talking about @cheetah. I was very clear when I said "certain bots provide no value to the system and are in fact malicious". I would never flag @cheetah.
Totally agree
@dantheman I support this part, but I think this issue does not only happen to steemit.com, I also see the same thing in other major sites, just give me a little advice if needed why not use capthca for everyone to do post a reply, at least this really works :)
Captcha doesn't work with bots who don't post via the web page.
okay thanks @abit, I think if it does not work maybe I will support the advice of others here, but I also agree with @tuck-fheman . yeah I think whatever I know it's best for the future steemit and just gave a little advice to respect the decision of @dantheman
@abit : Captcha only in the Reply Post not on a web page like done by #blogger
Wouldn't this be a CATCHCA? /rawr
How do you make non-steemit.com Steem clients use the captcha? Besides captchas are super-annoying.
Agree with @tuck-fheman
This ! Upvoted
i AGREE, JUST BECAUSE YOU MUTE SOMEONE DOES NOT MEAN IT SHOULD BE FLAGGED. i LIKE TO LEARN AND READ A WHOLE LOT SO I MAY MUTE SOMEONE JUST SO I CAN SEE MORE POST FROM OTHER USERS.
这是大佬吧！
Alot of does shitty boots at the moment. I posted a post, and get 43 votes in 2-3 minutes. No way that isnt boot since i dont get anny cent from does.
And it is crapy with does, who down vote for no reson also.
I actualy think we would se much sick in steemit future. I dont think, this stopp here.
Would also think, all the spam and spammers would keep going on as far as nobody stopps it.
Should have did somethink about it. Foreksample you could not downvote beafore you have 100 dollar value forexample. And you could not post more than 1 post per 6 hour in the start. It is alot of thing, to do. But i dont know wath would bee the best solution. I feel steemit is a play ground right now. High class against Low class
@dantheman
Thanks for bringing this up .
What do we do with people like @laloi2016 that running loose downvotes people all the times??
Do we kick this sort of people out???
Don't think it a bot?
i don't understod......because i knew here...
@ dantheman just 9 hour,,have $4.173..fantastic post & my post 6 day ago just have $2,,,,oooo god maybe you can help me so that my articles you rich :D
What a user name? Gettin upvotes! https://steemit.com/steemit/@izzy/why-steem-is-the-real-libertarian-platform
Fully agree. Flag is for moderation actions, not feelings
agree
Being able to visualize your reputation would be awesome. (Earn badges,etc) Kind of like hubpages and squidoo were doing.
I agree with the opinion @cryptoctopus
I really like this idea - it would be really cool to see someone's SP level at a glance.
cryptoctopus (81466)
dantheman (1460496)
trending (255)
This will make the vote brigading trend even worse.
I love anything badgey
Definite agreement here.
I haven't used hub pages or squidoo in ages, but definitely liked them. My favorite badge system out there to date (along with favorite voting system) has to be stack overflow.
Dan,
When will the follow capability allow me to see one articles quickly?
It is 99% implemented/tested on the backend. We will probably roll it out next week.
@dantheman thats great to hear! ThAnks for all the hard work that goes into it! I see improvements on #steemit almost daily. Awesome!
Agreed, I've been here 5 days and the number of changes I've seen in that time is absolutely nuts.
Loving how active the development is, moving in lightning speed compared to bitcoin.... How long until the follow button will do something?
"We will probably roll it out next week."
Thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to this feature keep up with my favorite authors.
Btw, have you all thought about using Steemit for other uses like cash back site for shopping? I'd like to hear your thoughts.
by this, do you mean how the old "blog" page used to be setup, where it showed JUST a person's original stories, and not all their replies too?
Not sure if this is what you're working on, as replied to @dantheman - though that'd be something great to execute too. Was great when we could see the body of a person's work on the blog page, without having to sift through all their replies / posts on others' pages too.
Good job on the reputation algorithm updates!
How will abuse be prevented from malicious automatic downvoting?
Down votes from those with bad rep will be ignored.
How can this be done without hard fork? Can't accounts with high SP have bad rep as well? So accounts with bad rep will still get curation rewards?
also would like to know where is this reputation stored? is it on the blockchain or website. I am assuming all this will only influence the website display ranking algo and not do anything on the blockchain level. I would like to see more info on how bad or good rep is gained.
Awesome!
Bots and botnets can be used to upvote comments and posts and inflate rep to allow for malicious flagging, which is what has been occurring for some time.
So they admit the whales (which includes Steemit Inc.) control the Steem blockchain and thus it is not a decentralized, permissionless, resilient database.
No. We only control steemit, not steem.
The blockchain Steem is controlled by proof-of-stake which elects the delegates (aka witnesses) in your DPoS consensus algorithm which decides which content is validated. Afaik, you (Daniel Larimer aka @dan), Ned Scott (@ned), and Steemit Inc (of which Ned is the CEO) control more than 50% of the stake. Thus you three can be sued to demand you use your stake to censor content. I have downvoted your reply both for censoring my comment with an erroneous downvote (given your whale sized voting power) and also for writing an erroneous reply.
The sentence as written could be interpreted in two ways, you chose to take the cynical interpretation when you could have just asked.
Rather I think I chose to take the only factual interpretation.
I agree that the way he said it sounded like it could mean removing content from the Steem blockchain, but I don't think that will happen. With a blockchain, an entirely new chain would have to be started to censor old content.
Does this mean that I have to actually write a "reply" to the post for my vote to be given a Curation reward?
@dantheman, And just to make things clear, this "notice" is for "bots spammers", right? Not the actual person? Or this notice applies to both?
What if your a spammer thats not a bot? I spend most of my time trying to recruit for the MinnowsUnite cause. I hope I will not be punished.
Consider checking it out sometime were over 120+ Steemers Strong now!
https://gli.ph/g/mT205P/CbFybHevfa12pvgQqtZgt50coGG6ZTyxDzDyWSXQJ7s=
If people upvote your posts more than they downvote then you will be fine.
Maybe users trying and keeping links relevant to the post atleast? So we don't see these campaigns/charity comments in every thread.
hooray!
I do get alot of upvotes it seems :]
why not just use the slack?
Because slack doesn't line up with the values of the community.
Flagged for outsize payout on platform updates. Voters, please consider that your votes allocate money and do not merely signify approval or agreement. If you wish to do the later, consider commenting instead.
You are respectful. Voters, bots, old whales and new whales, and the author, voting/voted for something. The ones (or most) who have big impacts know what they're doing indeed. Just a game, participate or not.
The bigger problem you have right now is making sure the quality content gets surfaced imho and spam bots aren't preventing that. Engineers generally aren't great content editors and community builders and the fact that a small group of engineers has all of the STEEM Power and the ability to determine which content gets surfaced is concerning.
I really look forward to see the results of such new developments... thanks for the information, hard work, dedication to this phenomenal project and sure hope this works well for us all. All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
I was wondering how you were going to address spam. The obvious solution is having to burn a fee to post and I think you will eventually be forced to use it. This proposed solution seems like it can be gamed to hurt innocent users or suppress speech. There doesn't seem to be a real good solution either way from the pros and cons, though.
I would donate a steem per week to an effort to track, find, and castrate spammers but I agree that the "solutions" mentioned above will likely end up being censorship tools.
Note paying to post won't solve the problem if the spammer or content thief can earn more from the activity than they must pay. Already the system charges in some sense because the poster need to hold sufficient stake in order to have the bandwidth allowance to post.
I'm thinking to make this thing workable, actual main topic posts would require a fee to post, while comments would not, but comments would also be culled off the chain eventually.
Increasing the number of clicks required to access content is not censorship!
Anybody who has truly been censored realizes this.
Nice post Dan...
Beyond the STEEM Whitepaper –2. Where the money come from; New Users DO NOT Increase the Value of Steem (yet)
Beyond the STEEM Whitepaper – 1. Blogging and Curation Rewards Fund; Steem Backed Dollars Creation
Beyond Trading – The Medium Term Fundamentals. 1. – 7.29.2016
Or
Steem – The Solution to Curation Rewards
WANG IS ON HIGH ALERT
This sounds like a superb feature. I like the reputation idea and hopefully this will prevent spam and be as good as it sounds. Great work!
@dantheman, I had written today on the possibility of "ransomware bots" rising in the future, do you think the steps you mentioned above could thwart those kinds of bots ?
reference
This is much needed and will hopefully raise the quality of discussion on here. Well done!
Seems like you are working on a solution for the bot problem. You guys should check out my experiment that shows prove of bot spammers as soon as you put steemit as your first tag:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@vapekings14/experiment-1
@dantheman I have a detailed response for you that I hope you and the rest of the community will read and chew over. After posting it here I realize it was way too long for a comment so I moved it over to my blog.
I would appreciate you giving it some thought because I genuinely believe these changes you are about to implement are not going to produce the results you hope they will.
This is the best advice I have to offer.
Please realize that I took over 5 hours to compose it, there is a lot of thought put into it because complex problems require deep thought, insight and consideration of all angles.
Thank you.
Perhaps that sounds dumb. But where can i see my reputation ?
Good post @dantheman
I've posted something along those lines a few days back, might be worth reading
https://steemit.com/steem/@steve-walschot/why-issue-177-will-attrack-more-fake-fraudulent-accounts-then-ever-before-and-it-might-kill-steemit
Cheers
Interesting, thanks!!
It is of course true that this is part and parcel with a nascent platform. In time, the humans behind the bots will give up, while the truly useful bots will thrive. I haven't really been flagging bots unless they are really useless and malicious.
Would love to see the upvoting bots addressed.
Your conclusion is right on the mark. Any growing platform will suffer from a very sudden jolt of expanded growth. It's in the nature of things. Just have to step back in order to move forward.
Thanks @dantheman for taking the right approach
Great news! I look forward to getting all the spam, plaigarisers, abusers and other riff-raff sent back to either their respective holes or wither under their own inertia.
Hey dantheman thanks for considering my ideas! I don't know if you decided after reading my post about it, but I'm glad you added it. Just to show you I'm not kidding I wrote this one way before this post :P https://steemit.com/steemit/@wisehammer/features-we-deserve-in-steemit I putted this link as a reference, no need to upvote
@dantheman appreciate all your hardwork. I think what you have proposed is a good idea and will keep the integrity of Steemit in place. Thank you.
Great stuff! thank you dan
These bots are made for voting
And that's just what they'll do
One of these days
These bots are gonna vote down all over you )
Great changes coming up, this is excellent news @dantheman, you guys are awesome <3
after being on steem before the rise of the bots, the platform feels tarnished by there presence. Not the way for long term success im afraid . Feels like a very crude method of governing the system.
If people, notice I said people, not bots, are so terrible with their voting practices now, what makes you think that they won't abuse the reputation system? I've already seen users censored by cheetah just for asking hard questions. This just smells like more censorship/brigading/clique building.
Won't it require verifying accounts? How do these guys with bots that have 20 accounts each get so many accounts?
I'm hoping that all of these problems work themselves out as this place grows but there's so much wrong already, I won't be recommending the site to anyone.
I'm pretty sure that the rep tracking system as you've described will further concentrate the power in this place, which is sad.
You're on the cutting edge here and I have tons of respect for what you're attempting. I'm just not quite convinced that the social model combined with money will ever create any kind of a just system.
I am tired of seeing bots everywhere. Make more money than real people.
What if you are not spam though? What if you just like posting on Steemit?
We should bend all bots.
I love futurama too!
All the more reason for people to be pleasent on here.
thanks for the improvements @dantheman
don't let bots spoil the party 8]
It was about time that these Bot stir our feelings.
So happy to see this update coming. Seems like it will address every concern I raised here.
https://steemit.com/steem/@sndphoenix/the-bot-legions-reigns-or-why-steemit-desperately-needs-honest-human-content-curation
This sounds like a bit of confirmation of my 'awkward stage' post from yesterday. #awkward
It is vital for Steemit's future to follow a more "fair" distribution system. If it is to survive the social media wars it needs to offer incentives others can't. Great post.
Definitely watching the evolution of bots, I'm seeing them comment on posts then bots downvote them.
BTW, when I upvoted your post I saw your rewards got from $5,434.79 down to 5,306.86! Sorry for whatever made that happen, yikes!!!
My voting usually makes rewards go up, sometimes down (which has been puzzling me), this was the most dramatic change I've seen.
Any ideas on why this happens would be most enlightening, as I don't want to be put off upvoting articles I find worthy when my vote is decreasing the rewards (this was my first vote of the day). Otherwise I'll just let the bots roam free while us humans remain bewildered by it all :)
This is the first that I have heard upvoting reduces rewards. Is this really true?
I love this idea to reduce clutter from spam. It also will provide a chance for holders of smaller amounts of $STEEM with high reputation to get noticed by the community.
Thanks you are moving quickly and doing a great job i my opinion. I didnt mind the bots at 1st but starting to get a little out of hand.I like your solution.
Funny how that works. On your first post or two, you think they are real and you get excited. After your 3rd post, you catch on that nothing is what it appears to be. By your 4th, you start getting irritated. The platform encourages participation and transparency, so it makes sense that comment spam just enrages and provides nothing of value, even if it does say "This post opened up my eyes..."
Although I assume the entire process with "bots" etc will continue to evolve, just like steem is evolving, we mustn't loose track of the integrity of this platform. I agree that somethings need to change and other elements must be reassessed, but who ultimately decides on these issues?
@dantheman thanks for keeping us posted of all the changes going on. Its great to see how #steemit is evolving.
That is a great news for Steemit community. I am tired of seeing bots on my posts :)
"All of your content will be available on the blockchain and will be visible to those who want to see it (unless we are required by law to take it down)."
I thought this was censorship resistant? Could you clarify?