If you could change one thing about STEEM/Steemit, what would it be?

in #steemit7 years ago

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I'm sure everyone has a lot of ideas, I don't want them, I want one idea you would change if you could.

If you had the power to implement a change to the STEEM platform today, what would it be?
Why?

If I had that power, I would empower an organization like @steemcleaners with more resources, both man power and STEEM power to effectively disincentivize spam and stolen and low effort content.

If cleaning STEEM/Steemit is left to the community it won't get done for fear of retribution and sacrificing their own potential rewards. Steemit Inc has a lot of stake, and some is used to empower @steemcleaners but there is still so much to be done. STEEM power is not the only resource, why not hire two, three, or even ten people that are dedicated to finding, identifying, and punishing spam.

Create artificial intelligence systems that can make their job easier and identify content on it's own. This is done on most social media platforms, STEEM should be no different.

Plagiarized and stolen content littering the platform discourages new users and investors from taking the place serious and putting their time and money into it. Everyone I introduce to the platform mentions how it looks spammy af.

Steemit Inc has the resources and power to change that, if we made it so spammers lose money they would eventually stop. I'm not an idiot, I know there will always be spam, but we can do so much better than we do.

Hit me up in the comments with what you think the number one thing you would change. I don't want a list, I don't want a word or two, tell me why and let's get a #discussion going. That is the idea behind @timcliff's discussion tag in the first place.

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Most days the biggest problem we have is manpower and funding. While @anyx & myself started out with @steemcleaners just looking to avoid personal flags,reward the community for their efforts, and coordinate abuse fighting efforts to be more effective @steemcleaners has evolved into a full time job for myself. I spend 40 to 60 hours a week here working on both @steemcleaners and the sister project I started @spaminator.

@steemcleaners has invested STEEM in developing a new site that will allow us to process reports faster and allow us to have more individuals working at the same time.

With the decline in the price of STEEM/SBD we always see a decline in those participating within the @steemcleaners group and those reporting from the community. No to mention the quality of the reports. We now get large amounts of spam reports that really aren't worth the time or effort and reduces the amount of time we have to find real abuse.

While a lot of us love steemit.com and do this out of our belief in STEEM and Steemit.com everyone has bills to pay or needs to be met.

Since @steemcleaners has had to keep their reports off trending to avoid being flagged the number of organic votes from the community has dwindled and funding outside of our supporters has dwindled. Not only that, the lack of awareness that there is an anti-abuse group has increased the amount of Spam & Scam that is happening by individuals.

hire two, three, or even ten people that are dedicated to finding, identifying, and punishing spam.

Current man hours by the steemcleaners team is between 150 - 300 hours a week depending on availability. That's almost 4 -8 full time workers. I'd love to have 10 every week. Unfortunately not many are willing to work for a few dollars an hour. The more we add to our group the less everyone gets rewarded. Same goes for those that report abuse. The more abuse reported the less SP distributed to the community.

I have processes in place to proactively identify spam and low quality content. The problem is time... I don't have enough of it right now. Heck, I rarely post or respond to comments like this because it takes time away from work.

If I had that power, I would empower an organization like @steemcleaners

Everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap instead of asking how they can help @steemcleaners & @spaminator clean up steemit.com. Users or groups come in, get some attention, then find out it isn't as easy as it looks and definitely not rewarding and quit.

There is a lot more that can be done. Unfortunately without volunteers to work for free or funding to do it - it's not going to get done. Whether your talking about @steemcleaenrs, individuals, or other groups.

When I said "hire two, three, or even ten people that are dedicated to finding, identifying, and punishing spam." I meant employed by Steemit Inc and funded. They have the funds and resources to make this happen. $500K/year should be enough to fund a good size team dedicated to the task.

When you require volunteers to do it, they will get burnt out and demotivated. When you add rewards and incentives, it gets gamed. Having employees with a fixed salary and job description would produce consistent results. Once a dent is made and it is clear spam will be punished, it will be far easier to maintain it than to initially change it.

Everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap instead of asking how they can help @steemcleaners & @spaminator clean up steemit.com.

Same as my other response, my point is we need a strong anti-spam group with the man power and funding to accomplish what needs to be done. If that means @steemcleaners 2.0 or outfitting @steemcleaners with the resources needed. My choice would be empowering @steemcleaners so you have the tools to change the status quo.

I agree with you. I just don't think Steemit, Inc will get involved outside the support they are already giving in the form of delegations to flag. We're left to look for support elsewhere.

burnt out and demotivated

I face this a lot personally. It's the support of the community and appreciation for what I do that keeps me going.

@patrice Check out your downvotes on each of your posts in this thread. In our local vernacular, I'd say that these guys are now just "taking the piss". ninjapiraterobot, banjokid, somenick, roccofalcone, heather2000 and thinkingtime appear to be linked to galactic123, who also supposedly runs the service echowizard

Thank you for all the work you and the rest of @steemcleaners put into making this platform better for all the rest of us, @patrice! I for one am very grateful for everything you guys are doing for the community.

We now get large amounts of spam reports that really aren't worth the time or effort and reduces the amount of time we have to find real abuse.

Could you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by this? I sometimes report, but now I'm starting to wonder if those reports have even been worth your time, since it's been pretty small-scale copy+paste spam that I have been reporting.

Stop by our Discord if you have time and check out #community-notices as well as asking questions of team members. We also have a couple volunteers there that are happy to help if they can.

Right now because we are backlogged (because of the latest phishing attack) copy/paste unless it has payouts or multi-account abuse with volume are low priority.

Cool, I'll make sure to stop by and check out the community notices :)

Ok. If i could change one thing about steen then I'll change its claim rewards like it if we get any SBD today it will payout after 7 days, what i will do is to combine the total SBD Steem power and Steem to be collected after 7 days what we earn in these 7 days. Not after like that if I have 0.003 SBD on tuesday and 0.789 on friday and it is to be collected after 7 days each. It should be collected on one day. Hope my point is clear @ipromote

I want to add the delete Post option. because you cannot delete your​ post. thats not good.

Uhm, you know you're on a blockchain-based social media platform, right? Not being able to delete posts is kind of a main feature of a platform like that.

Hehe, that's true. But it would be nice if we could still edit posts after the 7 days have passed here on Steemit. The original post would still be available to searching the blockchain itself, but it would very so very convenient for those of us who link to older posts, to be able to update them with new information when needed.

That is what I want to say. agree with you.

You can delete a post, but only if there are no votes or comments.

It's pretty ironic that if someone comments that they want you to delete a post it can no longer be deleted:p

I would add language support and filtering. I feel sorry for people that are having to post in a non-native language.

If i could change something that would be to forbid users to have bit bots .Instead i would make a Steemit bot with lots of SP.I would make it vote only people with less than 5000SP.And with a good ROI.Plus all earning from the bot would be used to upgrade and grow the platform.An account such as @ned would be more than enough...

So you would ban upvote bots in order to create a new upvote bot that guarantees profit? I for one think this new bot would create a lot more trouble than it would solve.

No.You missed the greater idea.Bid bots atm are almost 100% loss for users. But if there were lets say 10 Steemit bots that would help minnows only which the could guarantee a non loss transaction at least that would be great.and every penny from the earnings would go back in the platform and not in a pocket. Just remember that if a minnow has loss on a bot he needs so much time to recover financially. But a “dolphin” or whale are willing to throw away 100 sbd even if they get a vote of 130 in return just to enter the hot or trending page and earn in different way. Popularity and followers...

If I had the power or the technology to change anything on steemit, I would create a direct message chat board amongst our followers, something like a private chat/direct contact, that way we could be in better contact with every follower and help him/her!

I will love to see my quality post get seen, rather than paying huge sbd for post promotion, moreover you need to put in to get back on Steemit,

I sent 0.500 sbd for my post promotion which is yet to be upvote since yesterday the link is,
https://steemit.com/story/@naijatimez/short-stories-the-blindspot

Thank you for alle the informations :) i would change that the registartion process is during so long for new users.

Its my first day on steemit and i like that users can earn a fair share.

Best regards from germany :) Will you share more of this interesting articles in the future?

Filter the content by language

Notifications are something i really miss in steemit
I want to know about comments to my posts, to know when i was mentioned and etc

Also better control on the feed indclude favorites

There is Gina for that

I approve this message!

@ginabot is a great tool, but I also really miss the notification service Steemit had a year or so ago. It was nice to get real-time notifications without having to use a third-party application.

Sure brother but until we get there again you can use Busy.org which at the moment has everything you might seek
There are always solutions in blockchain

Yeah, good point! The notification system on busy.org is actually very good :)

no longer hide posts due to low votes, i know you can click the button to read them if thier hidden, but isnt hiding the low vote post a form of censorship correct me if im wrong

You call it censorship I call it community policing the platform. The content isn't gone an if the community thinks it is worth something, they can un-hide it and even bring it to the top.

STEEM would be an absolute disaster if there was no way to hide and discourage bad content. I remember I flagged a spammer a few months ago, so he started spamming porn images to all my posts and user comments.

What if someone posts child porn, hate speech, threats, personal information, stolen content, spam, do you still stand behind your censorship stance?

thank you for your clarification, ive just seen posts where no hate etc was involved and couldnt understand why they were hidden, they were hidden due to low ratings, censorship is an interesting debate topic ( i dont condone any hate viloence etc)

then we get into who decides what is hate and what is not
for example : some one says i dont believe in a man with man relationship i think its wrong, however i will still serve them in a restaurant etc.

do they have a right to thier opinion, just not a right to post thier opnion

also we have laws where its illegal to post child porn etc (thank god)
Yes we have to censor this its common sense, its disgusting evil etc.

its the argument does a censorship free site post everything?no matter how revolting disgusting , does a censorship free site post illegal material.
we could say steemit is a censorhip free site up to the point of posting illegal material( again which i would never condone.)

so i guess i dont belive in censorship up to point where it becomes illegal to post something.

when does the above statement become hate speech.

however i do understand what your saying,

again i do not condone hate speech etc,child porn etc.

What gets rewarded, unrewarded, and hidden is a community effort. That's not censorship.

My experience is that 99 % of all the hidden content is either spam, scams or other harmful content. Censorship is not really a bad thing by itself, as long as it is reasonable. Here on Steemit the community decides what should be hidden by default, which is a huge improvement over how it is on centralized websites.

One of the reasons phishing spreads is the fact that other sites like busy.org do not hide or indicate a post has been flagged. There is no way to remove posts or comments from the site currently and it has increased the rate of infection.

Unfortunately, when you have a platform like this that isn't moderated and is indeed censorship resistant you have to take the good with the bad. We can either have the ability to flag and hide things (good and bad) and give individuals the options of revealing the hidden content or we can have everything in plain site.

i like your terminology censorship resistant

I would like to see reputation score playing a greater part in rewards and influence on the platform...

This would give new users at least one thing to focus on in terms of growing in influence...As the platform can be a minefield for understanding exactly where rewards are coming from.

I constantly see people who have been here for 3-6 months posting things that are untrue or saying that they had it all wrong and are just learning how things work correctly.

If as I stated reputation played a greater part, everyone would build a stronger foundation for their time here...

which would make for a stronger community for all of us.


Images courtesy of the AWESOMETASTICAL Pixabay.

Reputation needs to be fixed before it can play a bigger part. It is far too easy to game in either direction to be used for anything serious.

Theres a certain moody feline who could attest to that for sure.

And I did foresee that as a potential comeback, however, the same could be said for gaming curation and authoring rewards, which was almost my first suggestion...

I think the decentralised Utopia that many of us, perhaps, naively envisioned isn't quite a reality at the current stage of its evolution, but BETA is still with us, and I think we will get closer to where we need to be in good time...

...and considering the Orwellian alternatives of Fakebook and MeTube we are still a part of a far greater future!

MORE EXPOSURE FOR INNOVATIVE CONTENT ! THIS FUCKING SHOWS THAT YOU HAVE A VALUE INTEREST IN THIS PLATFORM ! Yet we get SHOVED-IN-YOUR-FACE-ADS-ABOUT-BITCOIN-AND-CRYPTO-CURRENCY ! THE MEANS IN WHICH YOU VALUE CURRENT MINERALS TO PERSONALLY MINTED COIN ! THERE IS NO INVESTMENT EXPOSURE BUT HOW TO BS ! This feels like a fixed version of yt? and FYI MY KEY AND BUTTON FUNCTION KEEPS BEING HACKED !

There are a lot of capital letters there.

If you could change one thing about Steemit, it would be introduction of user ID verification. By dedicated team working directly as Steemit employees or by Steemit project as Steemcleaners.

The information about user's personal IDs would not be public, of course. It would be kept secret in database after verification.

Users who are not verified could have their reward limited to having only 5% of of total payout from the post.
While verified user could have full rewards.

Steemit is very much revolving around capitalistic concepts regardless of it's use of cryptocurrency, and capitalism cannot work with anonymity (cryptocurrency earned on Steemit is converted to fiat currency). It's impossible.
Right now, Steemit has become scam haven because there are no consequences for scamming or any abhorrent behaviour. Majority of new posts being posted right now are either spam or some attempt to cheat or scam (plagiarism, comment farming, identity theft, etc).

I am not a fan of requiring and storing user ID data. At that point you become another Facebook. I think the majority of people here feel the same way.

I'm not a fan of storing this information either. That's why I am in favor of our current method of "trust" with posting to an existing social media site or blog. However, we do need a dedicated person to do the job and I am hoping after the new site is up in a couple weeks we have one on board already to do it a bit more proactively with a personable approach.

There is no other way to avoid scamming without identity check. What scammers fer the most is others finding out who they are. If there are no social consequences for scamming behaviour, then scamming with flourish.
The option would be to copy all such data to cold storage and keep non of it online.

remove steem or steem dollars one needs to go. I have no idea why they have 3 currencies ,just confuses new uses

Have a look at this post which explains why they are important and why STEEM Power doesn't even exist.

Get rid of the scam artist promoters...they give me a bad taste in my mouth.

I would extend the window for payout on a post.

Back in the days it used to be 30 days, but was changed because no one really upvoted after the 1-week mark. Why would you want to extend it though? How do you think it would change the platform?

I have no idea how it would change the platform.

It's great that you are getting the discussion going, @ipromote! I've already replied to a few of the idea below, and there are certainly many interesting opinions about what we should change here.

My one (reasonable) thing I would change about Steemit is to have a community manager. We sorely need one person who regularly spends time on the blockchain to answer questions about the future of Steem, and help out where it's needed. Right now we only have a few announcements every once in a while, which is creating FUD for some investors. I think it would be very beneficial for the entire blockchain if Steemit Inc. hired a person to keep in touch with the investors, authors, witnesses, community leaders etc. who needs to know what happens next on the blockchain.

Way to get good dialogue started! Resteemed and followed!

I'm going to add one more thing - As @smooth has said to me on many occasions we need to incentivize downvoting for those who have the reputation and SP to do it and also do it responsibly. I would also include in that incentivizing helping new users to the platform that are misguided without creating a spam bot.

When I started with @steemcleaners we gave incentives with upvotes to do just this in addition to SP rewards. Since our delegation we can no longer upvote.

I don't think effective solutions here would be 100% automated.

good idea , i prefer human narration over computer narration