So I wrote a post that made it to the top of Steemit. Then it got downvoted by trolls. That sucked and here's how to stop it.
My game face.
Downvoting is a necessary evil that a social media economy cannot function without. There must be a means to police behavior that is backed with a direct and meaningful penalty.
There's this guy named Plato who wrote a fun story called the Ring of Gyges. The ring made the wearer turn into Kevin Bacon and do naughty things. Social media is the Ring of Gyges, minus the Bacon but with the naughty. People are gonna hate cause they've got nothing better to do. Using your manners and asking them politely to stop trolling is like trying to put out a blowtorch by peeing on it. So you need a big stick with a few well placed nails to keep the trolls in line.
Or this guy. I'll bet he could keep the trolls in line using the tattoo on his left pec.
The problem with using downvotes to police trolls is that trolls are jerks and will use downvotes to police the police.
There's a reason you need a driver's license to operate a motor vehicle. For the same reason, trolls shouldn't get licenses to operate social media accounts. Unfortunately, unless we want to hand our freedom to a "government" and let them decide who gets to say what to who "for our safety" we cannot rely on any centralized authority to decide who gets to downvote who under what circumstance while wearing what color of underwear. So we're stuck. We need downvotes to keep things civil, but if everyone gets a license to down vote because we're decentralized, trolls can down vote nice people and be jerks for no other reason than that's what makes them feel good on Saturday mornings. What to do?
I think she/he is confused. Or maybe I'm projecting.
Lay it on me.
It's like this: if you want to downvote someone you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so. And because we're all decentralized, you don't get to be the US Government of your downvote and ram it down the throats of the world just because you're Big, Mean and have Bad Breath. You have to make a case and have your case ratified by fellow citizens. If the courts decide your case is just, the downvote stands. If not, you go back to your cave to grow some more back hair.
How do we give the decentralized citizenry the opportunity to ratify a downvote? It's easy (said the guy that types with two fingers): downvotes don't count unless they are accompanied by a comment explaining the downvote and that comment has been upvoted by someone that is not the down voter. See?
Mind... blown?
Downvotes don't count unless they are accompanied by a comment explaining the downvote and that comment has been upvoted by someone that is not the downvoter.
So simple, so direct and so effective. Yes, I know trolls have friends. Yes, I know trolls are probably smart enough to have more than one account and could upvote their downvote. But! Trolls don't have many friends and trolls are lazy. Plus it's pretty easy for the community to pick up on this behavior and police it. I am convinced that this mechanism would greatly, massively reduce the amount of downvote trolling and other bullying that is currently underway.
Edit - for extra points, the weight of the downvote could be correlated to the number of upvotes the downvote comment receives. 10 upvotes = 100%, 5 upvotes = 50% etc.
That's it. I'm spent. Thank you.
I'll probably never down vote anyone unless it's very harmful or something serious 😀
Yes, I've never downvoted either. Nice to know you can, keeps people in line. :)
That's true... but most people are abusing it 😂
You're cool...
Id downvote you as well!
If I could downvote this comment, I would, you sunofabitch!
Yeah, many accounts are abusing it... I got downvoted once from a whale because I had a referral code/discount code in my post (which I explicitly explained in the post), bringing my post rewards from ~$5 to $0.00 and decreasing my reputation as well. Good post!
Well, here is most of it back! Yea, I got downvoted to oblivion a few times, not fun...
Thank you so much! Yeah, the whales need to be mature and use their downvoting power to reduce serious violations and spam, not downvote anything that displeases them. I think you are an example of a great whale, as you bring lots of contribution to the Steemit community and help out all the little guys as well :) Keep up the great work (following you!)
I am in quite a dilemma right now.. I went ahead and decided that enough was enough with plagiarising posts, so I took the liberty to downvote/report/flag two posts that were legit copy/paste. Minutes later I find myself being downvoted on all my posts.. Which are not only original, but also very time consuming to write since I'm writing educational posts about artificial intelligence for the most part. Any idea how I can stop the person who got mad from ruining my account?
Sounds like a great idea!
as of the time of my commenting... no flags yet!
Lets hope it stays that way? please
I agree, good article up-voted. However, I wrote a blog on here explaining why we need a "down vote" button and not just a "flag" button. The flag should be used for stuff like spam, and plagiarized material and should be reviewed because the flags can censor images and content. The non existent "down vote button" could allow someone to be voted down without censoring the content. The problem is a "whale" could flag and censor a bunch of minnows just because they disagree philosophically on some issue. I explain this idea in my full article: https://steemit.com/steemit/@titusfrost/false-flagging-need-a-down-vote-button-stop-censorship
This exact scenario happened to me a little while back. It's very disheartening to write a reply to someone after they ask for it, then downvote/flag the content cause it doesn't "fit" their narrative.
Nice post! But what if someone said something controversial and there was a mob outrage (happens alot) and hundeds of people report you on simply because the disagree. I caught myself disliking because I disagreed on youtube so whats to stop others doing it here - in masses?
I think this idea has merit. Though I have two accounts, and many people have more than that. I am also @chaospoet. So I could use @chaospoet to ratify my down vote. What then?
You'd get away with it... for a while. Then the community would down vote everything you do to oblivion, which would be the social media version of running you out of town.
I'm not sure there is a perfect solution to policing imperfect actors, but I think this is a big step in the right direction and would substantially reduce or perhaps altogether stop malicious down votes.
Yeah that could work. We'd likely end up with factions, but I'm not sure that is avoidable.
Yes, if there's more than two humans involved there will be always be sides/groups/factions. Steem Power, and the influence it begets, is a resource and it's inevitable that there is going to be competition to control as much of it as possible. Down voting is a powerful weapon in that war. All this does is take the keys to the nukes away from one lone actor and force another to be involved in the decision to nuke someone.
We could require 3, 5, 10 upvotes to ratify, or have the weight of the down vote correlated to the number of upvotes.
I think I was down voted by a whale because I comented on someones post of their son. I think I put "kids are a blessing". Lol Idk why someone would downvote me for that but ok. Lol. People can be kinda crazy. It seems to have affected me pretty negatively because I'm very new...growing pains I guess.
This is a good article! thank you for the info. I do have a question though. There is a guy downvoting my friend because he is Jewish-- he posts happy Hanukkah and gets penalized. I of course retaliated and downvoted all of his stuff but in reality it's hard to prove he is what he is. What do you think the best course of action is in this instance?
@johnsmith, great appreciation, like always.
I think than also may be a good idea, some button like "report", after you press it, the system will froze the payment for the revisation in the content... I´m no sure if this may be anothe solution, but I think that it may work.
Nice to post you again bro!
Thank you for your comment and your kind words! A reporting mechanism has been suggested as well but comes with some tough questions: To whom are we reporting? And how do we vest them with what level of authority to dole out what type of punishment? This would be a model similar to Reddit moderators, which can be great or terrible depending on the mod.
Have been having so much fun commenting and curating that I've not had time to post... Steemit does strange things!
You´re right! is great can follow you, your posts are simples but really completes.
I hope that some whale find this problem, they have to fix it asap.
Regards.
Yes, the following feature is fantastic! For example... I just followed you!
Yes, I saw it!!! thanks for that!!! I´m felling great for that!
Upvoting just for the original thought and the entertaining article.
I truly doubt it would have an effect, though. Have you seen the jerks lately advertising to upvote/downvote anything you want with their 800 (their claim, not my exaggerating) accounts?
Thank you for your vote, greatly appreciated!
I'm sure the upvoting/downvoting markets are just getting started and we will see it heavily commercialized in short order - this is probably why @dan has been ruminating on the voting process recently.
If someone controls 800 accounts it is akin to having an army! The scheme suggested in this article will deal with individual and small groups of trolls quite nicely, but a mercenary army is another beast altogether. I wonder how they maintain the SP of those accounts? Without constant addition of SP, either through curation or outright purchase, the influence of those 800 accounts will diminish fairly rapidly. It's expensive to feed an army!
It's not the ability to downvote that has be concerned about this platform, its more of the whales that like an article, and they push it to the top so everyone will read it...
I just joined last week, but saw a whale push up a welcome from a guy in Brazil growing his own weed... So his 'welcome' was a lot more 'welcomed'...
The theory here is that as stakeholders have an economic incentive for the network to succeed, and as the largest stakeholders, have the most to lose. However, this is under the assumption that the stakeholders have the network's needs at heart, and not their own.
I've recently encountered a sociopath on Steemit who has only earned maybe 1% of his power, and bought the rest. He seems to have some kind of anti-social behavioral disorder and we got in a disagreement about precision of language, and unfortunately he managed to get under my skin. In the end, he down-voted, and buried, every single response removing my ability to have a say. My reputation is higher, but his capital is higher, he wins. Considering the majority of billionaires are verifiable sociopaths, when a network is controlled by money, then the network has a high probability of being controlled by sociopaths
This is interesting and kinda scary. I may have ran into one.
Well, I haven't seen a downvote yet. I guess I'll have to go looking so I can see the whole 'comment to approve the downvote' thing.
This is a great idea! I'm just wondering why something like this hasn't been implemented yet...
informative and also nice picture selection welxome to my blog @farhannaqvi7
johnsmith why you are not online now a days
He's online; I think he's focusing on curating/commenting now, rather than posting.
oh ok
:)
Steemit needs to add a bot that can detect if you're abusing the down voting system. The down vote tool is for spam, copy/paste stuff, plagiarism etc or at least give authors a tool to have the post reviewed, and if nothing is wrong with your post, they take the downvote away and it goes against the person who flagged you.
@aaliyahholt Can you recall the name of this bot?
Hi @johnsmith. I am relatively new to the platform. I've been around for few weeks. Write from the beginning I saw that censorship was taking place, and that is of great concern for the value embedded in this platform. I wrote a post about it -as a fresh user- trying to get comments that would guide me to a better understanding.
The main point is that writer are getting flagged not because of abuse (like sexism, xenophobia, racism etc...) but simple because some whale (with lots of SteemPower) decided " I don't like this post " Then "BOOM!"
(using the same words of the down-voter, who left a trolling comment, just make things worst)
Another example, here we have the link to a writer who is discussing about the down-voting issue . He makes no abusive comment. He is just discussing an idea. But still, abusive flags made his post desapear.
This is censorship, and can not go that way. This platform is clearly loosing potential if this keeps going that way.
Good idea. I guess it's too late to upvote, so I thought I'd at least leave a comment.