Thanks for taking the time to write this up and express your thoughts.
How about an even simpler solution?
Set a max number of flags per day - to say... 4.
And... here's the tricky part.... set things up so you can't downvote more than you upvote. So before you can downvote something you have to upvote something. That should even out the trolling process a bit.
I'm not really in favour of shifting the problem of one idiot onto the rest of the community to manage - just stop the idiot from being an idiot.
My personal preference would be for all the voting / flagging bots to be gone. I write content for people to read, not for bots to read - no offence intended to any bots reading this.
I would rather get less votes (and yes less money) and know that the vote I got were from people who actually read what I wrote.
It is the bot capability that is the enabler of this behavior on the scale that it is, so remove that and you remove a bunch of the issues.
Set the requirement that they have to manually upvote content before they can downvote content, and it stops being so much fun for them.
For the rest of us, nothing much changes.
I agree with you that something needs to be done. But i think there are much simpler methods of dealing with this guy than requiring the whole community to vote on stuff. Especially if there are 100 or so of these bots running, and I have to vote on every one of them before I can post, why would I bother coming back? I'd spend all my time voting on what to do about bots, and then have to do the same thing again tomorrow because the guy we voted on yesterday created a new bot today.
Another more slightly draconian approach would be for Steemit.com - which is a website built on a blockchain not the blockchain itself so it can have centralized management, to delete the accounts of anyone trolling / flagging / bullying / abusing and put their money back into the resource pool.
It would be pretty simple to automate - if you flag more than 10 times in a row - you get automatically deleted. Simple.
Btw the comments here and the content of the article, it is not about THIS one account.
But this one account has exposed the issues, like I have been saying here and thus precedent has been set. Now we have to deal with it and look long term with internal set up/changes like we are saying here.
Nice to hear from you, thanks a lot for your time and ideas.
I understand what you are saying - that this account is one example of bad behavior. I think something along the lines i pointed out would work for other forms of bad behavior as well.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who think freedom of speech means they can say or do whatever they want. But I disagree.
This is not their sandpit - it belongs to Dan and Ned. If you want to come and play, you have to play nicely and by their rules, or you can bugger off and make your own sandpit.
The freedom you have is the freedom to engage with others respectfully, and the freedom to leave if you can't do that.
It's also worth pointing out that I / we also have rights - the right to not be bullied online. This is codified into laws around the world. just because Steemit lives on a blockchain doesn't mean the law doesn't apply.
And that's something the people behind these bots might want to think about.
Well said. Thank you.