I find it extremely hard to believe you hadn't thought about this kinda thing when Steemit was being developed.
A quick look shows everyone it's all about selling steem. You want to avoid being flagged, buy more steem. You get attacked, buy more steem and flag back.
Perhaps you shouldn't have sold so much steem yourself. I hear there is still some for sale though.
Seriously, do away with the damn flag system and put fourth a group of admins, paid admins; to deal with the garbage...
I did see this problem coming and when I suggested a proposed solution (vote negation) it was rejected by the very whale(s) who are acting out today. With vote negation it is possible to let the two disagreeing parties "stand down" and leave the voting to everyone else.
People were concerned that this would lead to "hard feelings" and a new kind of "abuse". I still stand by vote negation, but obviously it takes a vote war to get some people to see the problems I saw 6 months ago.
I think vote negation is better handled at a post-level than an account level. For instance if you negated @berniesanders' votes you would be crippling the Curie curation guild.
The veil of "good" that those who do wrong hide behind.
The person who owns @berniesanders is not some evil cartoon character bad guy. And Dan's disagreements with him doesn't make it so.
He sure types like one. Please go review his comments. (on the block chain)
Doing wrong isn't a permanent state. Indeed.
I'm stealing that quote and tattooing it on my first born child.
Know what's ironic about that? I wrote a post supporting vote negation that @berniesanders upvoted for a tick due to a curation guild. He realized it later and removed his upvote.
Yeah, that's a fair point. Maybe after some time has passed, we can now revisit some of the arguments about negation, but on a post-level, rather than an account-level. I would entertain such arguments.
The argument is here, in this post. Dan's downvoted posts that others have upvoted. That's the negation.
You're such a smarty-pants!
Link: https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/negative-voting-and-steem
How would it cripple curie? I noticed they don't have bernie or nextgens votes on almost any of their supported posts. He only upvotes the curie post which should really be declining payout too imo.
Most of Curie's stake comes from the @berniesanders and related accounts. Without them, the votes would not be as high powered. It was his stake that founded Curie.
and wht does he get in return? I don't think its fair to represent this as pure charity
Then why does his vote not appear on steemd?
I could be missing how curie works
(nest reply)
Curie is not upvoting their own posts with their full available stake right now. But some posts that are voted by Curie get a berniesanders upvote.
So I'm not wrong. He's not even part of the guild, he just does what any of us could do, go through the curie promoted links and select the ones he wants to upvote. From what I checked it wasn't a lot of them! Just some as you say. And this is the good deed everybody jumps to in his defence? That he sometimes upvotes curie promoted posts?? And his charge is to be the first to upvote curie posts every single day for curation reward.
Nice. Sure Ned votes for those posts as often if not more often than him!
That too. In that case at least things are more on the surface and visible.
@dantheman Negation would be promise breaking for this platform. It's literally blocking a person from excerising the only promise made by this platform, i.e. you can buy and exercise influence.
A much simpler solution would be split out downvoting and flagging and make both require a comment explaining why.
If you did this there would be no problem here.
"I'm downvoting this because it is redundant, low quality and does not deserve the fraction of the limited reward pool it has earned. By downvoting this I am redistributing the pool to others."
That's all flaggin is in this case right? A redistribution of someone else's earnings to those who may be more deserving, needy or whatever but lower profile?
I mean seriously, would @ozchartart forgo payment for a day if he knew it would help @deviedev get her little sister out of jail?
https://steemit.com/life/@deviedev/jenny-jump-up-is-in-trouble
I know I would.
Point is, keep doing what you're doing but take a second to explain why, each time.
You can always go into the chamber and change the "N SQUARED" curve to not approach infinity so fast
to bring a little mortality to the current STEEM god population.
This would be the single thing that would drastically improve steemit.
Fair enough.
Now the problem is going to be even harder to deal with. You have accounts powering up that never intend to make a post or comment in an attempt to shield themselves. Everyday steemians have no defense against this and seeing it happen is a strong deterrent to investing .
Once content is here that "powers that be" want silenced it will be no problem at all to power up the largest whale ever known. Remember, the Clinton's have over 7000 youtube accounts backed by Soros money.
This ain't the BBS days of trolling Dan, these people are well paid and far beyond petty whale wars we see today..
Steem on..
I have also been making the case of the need to counterbalance voting power. There is some very sound game theory regrading the need for tit-for-tat reward/punishment.
Well, I feel confident you can find a solution. I am just not as confident it will be accepted by the community.
We're all in this together now, but some are way deeper than others :)
Thanks for your attention.
we don't have any mechanism to deal with conflicts that cannot be resolved via a computer screen.
Talking with each other is essential to deal with irreconcilable differences.
@the-ego-is-you Nest limit reached.
have you ever considered the need for a conflict resolution specialist?
No offence, but don't we already have that "in theory", with whales, flag back at yous, trails, guilds, specially made bots and a crowd of people who end up saying the same thing over and over again?
It doesn't seem to be working so well for the moment and I'm very hesitant to add further centralization to that mix...
Much rather, I would like to see a sensible change to how downvotes are displayed and what effect they have.
There could be a community service sort of thing, where users can vote on disputed flags for very small STEEM rewards. Once a certain amount of people have reviewed the decision and found a 75% favour in one way or another, then the damages(payout and rep deduction) could be applied--if the flag was agreed upon that is. If a flag is overturned, there could also be some sort of penalty, applied to the one who produced the flag-- for example, the weight of the flag is reversed and applied to them. This would discourage people from flagging for insignificant reasons.
There would be no way to abuse this because the whales could not use bots to manipulate the results.
There may have to be a lot more users before that could be implemented however.
Thats not a solution. The solution is what youre doing right now -- downvoting crap sockpuppet accounts when they make crap, overrewarded posts. IMO, its long overdue.
The system already provides a means to negate a vote that you disagree with. Casting a vote in the opposite direction.The vote negation thing, IMO, was a cop out. It was a way to downvote bad content without having to sign your name to a downvote.
It was also potentially hugely abusable. What happens when the guy you describe as prone to tantrums decides he doesnt like someone so he's going to take away their vote (which he can do, if theyre a non-ninja, with just a small sub account that he doesnt use anyway)
part of being a leader is coming to terms with the notion that sometimes, maybe even often, youre going to make a call that some people don't like. And youre going to get called a shithead.
This would completely undermine the whole concept of a decentralised blockchain as well as stakeholder governance. I would be completely out, as (I imagine) would many others who support Steem for the philosophical ideals it represents.
Yes, that would be a complete disaster.
Disagree.
Can you elaborate on that?
I'd rather not ;)
...but here it goes, I don't think that it would be a complete disaster.
Your comment didn't elaborate on how it would be a complete disaster, so I really have no basis for counter-argument.
I simply fail to see how it would be a disaster and, as you offered up nothing as an example of how/why it would be, I see no reason to build up a case, so to speak.
So what?
We're after the masses, not you and the few others whom share your ideals.
If we lose one for every 100 that we gain, it's a win.
You're in the wrong project if you think Steem is just about mass appeal. It is about reshaping the world.
You may wish that it is so, but I don't buy it.
Money is almost always the root motivator and I wouldn't bet against it here, regardless of what various people claim to be the true motivator.
Without decentralization there is no money. Might as well invest in liberty dollars.
[nested reply]
I don't care about ideals or definitions of "money" versus "currencies".
All I care about is keeping the wealth that I've accrued and these "liberty dollars" have done a fine job of holding their value long enough for me to do just that. Furthermore, I see no law of physics that states decentralization of X as a necessary mainstay. As, during every period of man, the best bet is to diversify investments, because there's no knowing what the collective greed of humanity and its systems will allow to transpire.
If, for example, all the world's governments were to decide to make investing in crypto-currencies illegal, then I, personally, wouldn't want to be one to challenge their authority - call me a coward, if you want, but I value my life outside of bars.
I'd rather have the current system than some committee of administrators. One of Steem's strengths and most interesting features is its decentralization not only of the network, but in stake-based voting and reward influence.
I'd rather the flag be done away with. A flag is supposed to mark something so that someone can later come and review it, that doesn't happen.
Rather than flags, it should be the community that decide whether a post is valuable. If the accumulative weight of downvotes outweighs that of the upvotes, then the post should be made invisible. But, no payout or reputation should be effected until the payout cycle ends and some sort of calculation is done based on the communities upvotes/downvotes.
I also feel that while payout should be tied to STEEM Power, this particular sort of thing should be tied to Reputation.
The problem or lack thereof (with the system), IMO, is one of whether it can or can't be "gamified".
Currently, the system is set up where, if a single user has enough SP, he/she can essentially shut down Steemit. Imagine if Bill Gates were to drop 0.1% of his wealth (somewhere around $50 million) into SP, what he could do (censor) with that amount of power. He could essentially quiet the voice of all the Steemit community by voting down posts with several 10 million+ SP sock puppet accounts, or by simply down-voting at X% voting weight with a single account.
All it currently takes to kill Steemit's chance of success is a single, wealthy, "mal-intent". I can just see Mark Zuckerberg waiting to time his entrance. With just a drop in the bucket for Mr. Zuckerberg (a few tens of millions of dollars), he can almost guarantee the failure of one of his potential, up-and-comer, competitors.
Ok, but that's speculation. Let's deal with reality until it changes.
Why not calibrate the system to negate that possibility before it ever becomes a real problem?
Because the current system works with the current environment. If the environment changes the system can choose to adapt. That may sound reactionary rather than proactive but it's better to be so when proactively changing for something that may never come would reduce the utility and openness of the blockchain.
[nested reply]
Hmm.
Still speculation, but what if the future environment doesn't allow for the necessary adaptions?
I say make it code that no dictators can come into existence, before it's too late, but perhaps I'm too myopic regarding how the system really works and what kind of power SP really provides. I'm envisioning a total take-over of witness positions through sock puppet accounts and, therefore, total control over if/ how the platform adapts.
Am I way out in left field?
I see your point of view a little better now but I still maintain that the way upvoting and downvoting works now is preferable to compromising it for a far-off potential scenario.
As an investor this doesn't sound bad to me.
Maybe not for the small few, certainly not good for the masses.
It's like being sued by Bill Gates, do you A. Run out and hire a good lawyer? or B settle ASAP ?
No one in their right mind wants to jump in a whale war from scratch, you wouldn't either if you had to buy steem @ $.015
It would lead to large demand and price increases for STEEM. Even as a small investor you would enormously benefit from the resulting price increases.
This is not entirely hypothetical; apparently similar things have happened in games where spending money gives you an advantage leading to an "arms race" and very large revenues for the game.
Socially it may not be the best thing for the site but as an investor (of any size) that kind of demand would be nothing short of wonderful.
I think the true purpose of this site is an advanced war game. Time for me to get a day job so I can buy my way into being the whale that I already am in spirit.
In a sense, I personally think so. Not a violent or even malicious one really at most times, but a strategic melting pot for different ideas.
However, this is why I probably have to disagree with smooth, as he seemingly suggests that buying flag power . . .
. . . would necessarily be a good thing. If this is all this "war game" will be about, then it will be more boring than Risk and ultimately collapse.
...until it starts to effect (affect?) you directly.
Having a whale "follow-flag" (I love to coin terms) you, as a dolphin (or less) is analogous to a strongman competitor, or professional MMA fighter, bullying your average man, of average build/ fighting ability. True, these "victims" have the choice to train and/or hit the weight rooms to place themselves closer to par, but everyone and their mothers know that there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that equality (of competition) will ever be achieved, regardless of his/her motivations or efforts.
But we're missing something here on Steemit, which the "real-world" analogy has - the victim can call the police to handle the bullying. Follow-flag dolphin, on the other hand, is shit out of luck.
Apparently this precedent exists and has led to high demand in some MMOGs. So I simply do not rule out the possibility it could lead to high demand and large price increases here, and if so that is definitely something that investors would like. Remember investors are not necessarily posting on the site at all, so need not be combatants in the flag fight you describe. The role of investing is distinct from the role of social platform user (though of course there is overlap as well). I'm not claiming necessarily that it would happen.
Hmm.
Well, if most of the social platform users tag out from Steemit, due to these (hypothetical) malicious flaggings, then there's nothing to invest in other than what essentially amounts to "vaporware" (no real value).
I think it's clearly a key to keep the majority of the social user-base happy, no?
EDIT addition:
Also, I'm not convinced that what works in MMOGs will correspond one to one with what people will support when they have thousands of dollars at stake and real flesh to protect.
I'm not even claiming that it works in MMOGs (consistently at least). It was pointed out to me that it does happen in some cases, so I commented that if it did happen here it would be good for investors.
I'd also note that it is very speculative at this point what will build a user base that is significantly above zero (on the scale of successful online social platforms) as well as what would keep such a user base happy. This has not been demonstrated at all.
Competing with established platforms that are more specialized to the task of focusing strictly on user experience is not an easy task. Steem/it needs to focus on and somehow exploit its unique advantages. In a big way.